Filmmaking’s Middle Class is Dying… Here’s How to Survive

You can make $800 or even $1,000 a day and still have no idea where your next job is coming from. That's what I mean when I say filmmaking's middle class is dying. I've hired thousands of crew members across hundreds of projects coast to coast, and over the last 25 years, I've watched that stability get harder and harder to hold onto. Because film crews aren't disappearing and filmmaking isn't dying. What's changing is the kind of life you can build in this business. But first, let's define exactly who I mean. When I talk about filmmaking's middle class, I mean the people behind the scenes who make the whole thing work. Camera, grip, electricians, art, wardrobe, all the crew positions actually. If that's you, you're the working professional in the middle rather than the famous name or the person at the very top making the biggest decisions. You get hired project by project and you can make pretty good money when you're working, but that could be misleading. You're not working 5 days a week or 52 weeks a year. You might work nonstop for a month and barely work the next. In a lot of ways, you're running like your own little business. You have to make that income stretch between jobs while constantly looking for the next one. That's the middle class I'm talking about. People like you who have built their careers in this industry. And the thing that's getting harder to hold onto is the life that used to come with being a solid working professional. You can have a good rate, years of experience, and plenty of credits and still have very little predictability. The math of freelance work looks fine on paper. And then real life happens. Your day rate may be $850, but then a producer calls with $650 and you haven't worked in weeks and the mortgage is due. So you take it. Your bank account made the decision before you even opened your mouth. I've watched crew members with years of experience and real credit say yes to jobs they knew were gonna be miserable because the alternative was sitting at home wondering when the phone was gonna ring again. And that's the trap. The gaps between jobs are where you start giving away your leverage. When you're busy, you can afford to be selective. When things go quiet, you, You get a lot less picky because you don't know when the next call is coming. Eventually I realized I couldn't make freelance predictable. What I could do was make my life less dependent on every single job. The answer comes in 2 parts. First, you need a system for creating more work instead of waiting for the phone to ring. And second, when you make money, you need a system for what you do with it. Let's start with the work. Here's what actually happens. You get busy and you go dark. You're on set, you're grinding, and staying in touch with the people who hire you feels unnecessary because, hey, you're already working. Then the job ends and suddenly you're staring at your phone trying to figure out who you can text without sounding like you're panicking. I've done this. You wait until you need something and then reaching out feels awkward because you've been invisible for months. I don't really even like calling it networking. I say don't network, connect. The fix is simpler than networking advice usually makes it sound. For me, that means staying visible while the work is good. Stay in touch when you don't need anything from them. A quick message when you wrap a good job or a response when somebody posts something. Small things that keep you in someone's mind so that when they're crewing up their next project, your name comes up naturally instead of being somebody they have to dig for. Getting more work only solves half the problem. Let's say you get a bunch of shoot days in a row and you're feeling rich. Yeah, but here's where things get dicey. You don't know what the next days, weeks, or months have in store for you. If you don't get another gig right away, that money can just disappear. I've had months where I've made great money and somehow it disappeared Almost immediately. So at some point I had to learn that all that money cannot be for right now. Part of it has to survive the next slow stretch, and eventually part of it has to work in my future. I knew I didn't wanna spend my entire life earning every dollar from scratch over and over again, so I had to stop looking at each day rate on its own and start thinking about what all of those days added up to over the month and the year. I started treating it less like a series of individual checks and more like a salary I was managing With the bigger picture in mind. You still get paid job by job, but you stop letting each payment feel like new spending money. That's where the work system and the money system start feeding each other. Think of it like a flywheel. You get more work, so you make more money. You manage that money better, so when you go back to work, you're not completely freaked out by all your bills. It's easy to underestimate what that kind of money stress can do to you. I know what it feels like to be on a job while part of my brain is still thinking about bills or the next check or how long this money will last. And when I'm carrying that around, it can affect how I show up at work. I get more irritated and have less patience, and I start saying yes to jobs I probably shouldn't be taking because I feel like I have to. When I manage my money better, I carry less of that stress. I can concentrate on doing a good job. I feel lighter and I'm easier to work with. And when you're easier to work with, you get called back again. That's the flywheel. Every time it goes around, ideally you're in a better situation than you were before. I learned the money part of this much later than I should have. I made good money for years, And I misspent some of it. I had a nice car, a great apartment, and I was using some of that money to be impressive rather than planning for my future. At one point, I had $300,000 in savings. That may sound fantastic until I tell you I left most of it sitting in a regular bank account earning practically nothing. It was earning 0.01% on $300 grand. That's about $30 a year. You know, I know production. And I know how to put a crew together and I know how to get through a shoot. I even know how to save my clients tens of thousands of dollars on a shoot, but I didn't really understand what to do with my own money after I made it. I didn't start taking investing seriously until just a few years ago. Before that, security basically meant I had to keep working. I needed another job, then another, then another. The money from the jobs I already did should be helping me in my future too. Then there was one particular job. Where I really felt the difference. I was offered $17,500. Now that's a lot of money, but I knew the director and I knew I did not want to take that job. I also didn't want to put the crew I hire, the crew that trusts me through that type of project. Years earlier, I probably would've taken it because $17,500 would've been sitting in my head the entire time. But I looked at where I was financially and I realized I didn't have to do it. So I said no. And that was huge for me. That was when I realized I wanted the ability to make decisions without money making the decision for me. I love working and I still want plenty of jobs. I just don't need every job anymore. For me, survival means becoming harder to knock over. I want you in a position where the phone can go quiet without panicking and where you can turn down a job you know you don't want. And there are things you can do to build that stability, even in an industry that doesn't offer much of it. That gives you something this business doesn't hand out very easily. But there's a bigger question. Why is it that stability is getting harder to find in the first place? That's what I'm breaking down in the next video. What's changing in the film industry, why it's happening, and what it means for you. You can watch that here.