Stephen Follows

All right, I have a happier one cool thing for us to get into now.

This is a blog post by a data scientist named Stephen Follows.

He's been on the podcast before.

In this blog post, he's trying to answer a question.

Yep.

As you said, we had, we had, uh, Stephen Follows on talking about What happened with the numbers? So from the per-from the perspective of a data provider and a webmaster, I know Antonio's taken us through like a really, a, a really good deep dive into actually what's going on, what's the state of the art, and what you should do.

So Antonio, in the, in the scenario of the numbers, just to pull threads together, what would you advise websites to do to sort of ensure that, you know, when this inevitable amount of crawling is going to happen, that they're controlling that appropriately?

Yeah.

Um, we've been talking a lot lately about, you know, development and getting financing and finding the right business partners and putting those kind of pieces together.

But what does your film do when you're m- when you've made it? Like, what is basically the goal of, of your, of your film? And what, what I wanted to get back to here was the idea that, and this is kind of the hook of the episode is, there's actually a study out there by Stephen Follows, and if you want to, you can follow him on Substack.

He's got a lot of really good data-driven articles on independent film business and independent f- film producing.

And his study, the study that he did, came out, basically said that picture four filmmakers at a festival party, um, all having, you know, made their first feature and celebrating the fact that they've made their first feature.

In plain terms, most first features are also a filmmaker's last features.

Um, the second one either comes quickly or not at all, and that line has actually gotten much s- more spread out in the last few decades.

[lip smack] Um, and according to Stephen Follows, every director whose feature came out between 1990 and 2018, their first features, there were 146,000 first features.

And then Stephen Follows tracked who made a second one, and that's where we get this statistic, which is basically the number is, like, 25%, um, three out of every four that don't.

It's literally destroying the sites themselves.

The writer Stephen Follows recently covered what happened at the site thenumbers.com, and this story is terrifying.

The Numbers is a site that has tracked and reported on film industry box office receipts for 30 years.

Even if you've never used it, you've definitely been impacted by their work.

In a way, last year with an activist like Maison Zaid talking about the importance of films also to save lives.

And this year with Stephen Follows, it was a very thoughtful, at times funny, but also at times disparaging introduction in which we talk about the hard truth of where we are at.

And for us, it's important to keep asking the uncomfortable questions.

So at the end of each episode, I try to, you know, like tease a little bit the next one.

Yeah.

Stephen Follows, by the way, has got a great horror name and obviously just makes me think of that movie It Follows.

But yeah, I've spoken to him as well.

He's really interesting guy.