The Beta Test: Bypassing the Studio Guillotine
The modern filmmaker is obsessed with begging. They beg the studios for development money. They beg the streamers for acquisition. They beg the gatekeepers for permission to exist. Bref, it is exhausting to watch artists prostrate themselves before a machine designed to grind them into dust. Jim Cummings, however, decided to simply bypass the guillotine entirely. For his feature The Beta Test, Cummings rejected traditional studio financing and refused the charity model of Kickstarter. Instead, he treated his audience as genuine financial partners. ...