The Industry Doesn’t Owe You a Career

Editor’s note: This is the fifth chapter of “A Producer’s Path,” an ongoing column for IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking from independent producer Daren Smith. Read the first chapter here.

For four columns, I’ve been making the case that independent film has an architecture problem. We’ve talked about the investors who keep losing money. The distributors who keep quietly burying movies that deserved a fighting chance. The audience that’s been written off as fragmented when really it’s just been ignored.

This column is for the filmmakers – and I’m going to be more direct here than I have been anywhere else in this series, because I know who’s still reading this far in. You’re the writer-director who left a stable job to chase this dream. You’re the producer who’s been six months from “the yes” for the last three years. You’re the cinematographer with two festival shorts and a half-finished feature. You’re the film-school grad who can’t figure out why no one’s calling.

The Slap

A few years ago, an email circulated through the Utah film community. A recent grad of a local film school had sent it to the working filmmaker directory. The note opened, more or less, with: I am a recent graduate, and I expect a $40,000-a-year minimum salary directing films and television.

People forwarded it for weeks. Not out of cruelty but out of bewilderment. The kid wasn’t wrong to want a career. They were wrong about who owed it to them.

The industry doesn’t owe you a career.

It doesn’t owe you one because you graduated. It doesn’t owe you one because you bought a camera, wrote a script, made a short, took out a loan, sold your couch, posted a behind-the-scenes reel, or sacrificed your twenties. The market is the market is the market — it’s supply and demand, all the way down — and we’ve already covered the math in this series. You know the funnel. Every script in it has a person behind it who feels exactly as called as you do.

The market doesn’t reward calling or passion or even hustle. It rewards results.

When a filmmaker tells me they can’t raise money, my first question is how many investors they’ve talked to. The answer is almost always under five. I tell them it will likely take 100 or more, and their eyes get big. But that’s the number. The 10,000-hour idea gets dismissed now, but the underlying math is right: competence lives in repetitions, not realizations. I was guest-teaching at a film program last year and one of the students had directed thirty-two short films before graduation. That’s the volume the market quietly assumes you’re operating at. The reason I could jump over from running a production company straight into senior-producing a network show wasn’t talent. It was that I had hundreds of projects already behind me.

The Shift

I had just left a production company I had co-founded and produced at for the better part of a decade. I went out into the world calling myself an independent producer with the explicit goal of making movies. 

That year I made about $35,000 — as a husband, the father of three, with a house, two cars, and a dog. I went another $15,000 personally into debt that year trying to keep the business above water. Bridge loans. Invoice factoring. The whole financial gymnastics routine of someone refusing to admit that this isn’t working. For two months after I left I did construction with a generous friend who threw me work because I needed it.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I picked up a book I’d read once before in 2015 and shelved without really applying. Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” This time it hit differently. The first time I read it, I admired the argument. The second time, I needed it.

The premise is simple and unfashionable: stop pursuing your passion. Pursue the craftsman mindset instead — an outcome-focused approach to creative work where you don’t expect a career because you love something, you earn a career by becoming so good at producing valuable results that the people who need those results can’t afford to ignore you.

Steve Martin gave Charlie Rose the cleanest version of this on television years ago, and is what the title of the book is referencing. Rose asked him what he tells young people trying to make it in this business. Martin’s answer was simply: be so good they can’t ignore you. Not be more passionate. Not be more visible. Not be in the right room. Be so good.

What Happened After

In 2018, I was hired as a senior producer on “Relative Race.” I worked on four seasons through 2020 and did some of the most rewarding television work I’ve ever done. While I was producing it, I was also building a body of work in plain sight, daily, for an audience that didn’t exist yet.

By 2021, a director who’d been watching asked me to produce her first narrative feature – Amy Redford’s “What Comes Around“. It went to the Toronto International Film Festival and was bought by IFC Films. The next year I produced two more; one became a hit on Amazon Prime in Latin America. By 2024, we self-distributed two of the films I’d produced into 400+ screens.

The first time I sat in a theater and watched a movie I’d produced come up on the screen, I’d been calling myself a producer for twelve years. The audience in that room didn’t know about any of those thirteen years and didn’t need to. The work was the work. They just cared whether it was good.

The difference between those twelve years and those three years was not luck. It was not a deal. It was not a phone call. It was a mindset shift, applied with discipline, every day, in public, before any of it began to compound.

The Practice

The principle is be so good they can’t ignore you. The practice is making what you’re good at visible enough that the right “they” can find it.

On the second movie I produced, I posted a single black-and-white still from set every day of the shoot. I had less than a thousand followers at the time. But reach was not the point. Reps in public was the point — building a body of evidence, in real time, that this was what kind of value I can provide to people in this industry.

By the end of that shoot, a director I’d known but never worked with reached out. He’d been watching the daily posts, and wanted to know if I would produce his next movie. The next gig came to me because I was so good he couldn’t ignore me.

That’s how the principle compounds. You produce a result, then you make the result visible. Someone who wants that result for themselves recognizes you. They reach out. You produce another. Soon ten people have seen it, then 100, then thousands.

The “they” in be so good they can’t ignore you keeps getting bigger.

What’s Coming

I’ve spent the last five years building what I call my movie framework — the day-to-day operating system of how a sustainable indie producer actually works. Development. Validation. Capital. Crew. Distribution. Audience. The architecture, viewed from the inside, by a producer doing the work.

As this column goes up, I’m in the final week of production on “Brotherhood – A Cinematic Musical.” None of this would be happening if I hadn’t started showing up nine years ago, when nobody was watching, on a project nobody asked me to make.

The next producer whose career compounds the way mine has won’t be discovered, they’ll just become so good that the right people can’t afford not to find them.

Daren Smith is a Utah-based indie film producer and founder of Craftsman Films, an independent studio established last year to finance, develop, produce, market, and distribute values-based, family-friendly indie films that spark conversation and change people for the better. The first film he helped produce premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired by IFC Films. His next film, “Brotherhood – A Cinematic Musical” films in April and is targeting an October release.

All artwork for the Producer’s Path series is created by Steven de Groot.