by Arlene Goldbard and Don Adams
The Independent Film & Video Monthly, May, 1996

The Independent is available from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF), 304 Hudson Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10013; 212/807-1400; info@aivf.org

As a kid in school, did you ever participate in one of those junior-government projects--a model UN, a mock U.S. Congress, Girls' State--designed to teach you how to grapple with the problems of democratic governance? Our teachers weren't kidding all those years ago when they told us that government was complicated. In many ways, New Day Films, a distribution co-operative of independent documentary filmmakers, is like a small government, with its own constitution, customs, and culture. It's also one of the most interesting and successful of self-made media organizations formed over the past 25 years.

Founded in 1971, New Day has enabled its members to reach targeted audiences that larger or commercial distributors would not bother pursuing. In essence, each New Day member is an individual self-distributor. Outside of New Day, they handle sales of their social-issue documentaries to television, foreign markets, and home video markets. But in the educational market--schools, libraries, community groups--they pool their resources and work together to help the whole collection reach audiences. New Day publishes an annual catalog, conducts promotional mailings, purchases centralized booking and tape-duplication services, and its members share skills and information in production and distribution. Most active members (currently numbering 36, plus 19 others with older titles in a special membership category called "Classics") come together each June for several days of presentations, business decisions, screenings of prospective members' titles, and socializing. A smaller Steering Committee, New Day's elected governing group, meets mid-year to take care of business between the annual get-togethers.

The Annual Members' Meeting is the highlight and centerpiece of New Day's year: members analyze market trends and make plans for the several joint promotional mailings they'll carry out during the coming year. They review their working relationships with vendors (such as the co-op's booking and shipping service) and make adjustments as needed. They listen to presentations about topics of interest; last year's highlighted the World Wide Web, CD-ROM publishing, and Hi-8 production.

One of the most important responsibilities is choosing new co-op members. Any independent maker with a social-issue documentary and a willingness to work on distribution may apply to New Day. Although applications can be sent anytime, most arrive in the late spring, after New Day members have scouted the National Educational Media Network market, held in May, and other likely sources of new recruits. Admission is a two-part process; because accepting a new title almost always means accepting a new member, the person is considered as important as the film. Applicants' tapes are screened by the membership, then discussed. The maker of a work that seems promising is interviewed by a few New Day members to make sure that person really understands what's involved in self-distributing and to gauge how well he or she might work with the group.

We know a lot about New Day because we have facilitated all its meetings since 1984. It's been a fascinating experience: having no stake in the decisions being made, we've been able to observe and understand all that goes into them--and to folow the organization's learning curve over the past dozen years.

That learning curve has sometimes been bumpy. According to founding member and recent Steering Committee Chair Jim Klein (coproducer with Julia Reichert of New Day titles Growing Up Female, Union Maids, and Seeing Red, and producer of Letter to the Next Generation), New Day's founders started off trying to operate on absolute consensus: every mailing list, promotional piece, and new member had to have unanimous approval.

"We used to meet in a member's house for four or five straight days and decide everything together," Klein recalls. "By the time we had half a dozen members, it took hours of pleading, tearing our hair out, to get one holdout to say, 'Well, I disagree, but I guess I'll go along with all the rest of you.'

"You get close when you're dealing on that level, but when we grew to a dozen members, we found ourselves at a total impasse. Decisions took forever, and sometimes it was just impossible to make one. We started out agreeing to allow decisions even though one person took exception. Then we moved to needing a two-thirds majority for decisions. But always with the caveat that we would seek consensus first, and only vote when we couldn't reach a consensus."

Today, all of the co-op's decisions are democratic, the product of 25 years of trying to balance feminist values of equality, participation, and sharing with the considerations of market and technology that affect all distributors. The principle of full disclosure still obtains: every member knows where every dollar goes and where each buck stops. Jenny Cool, one of New Day's newest members, whose Home Economics was one of three New Day titles on P.O.V. last year, says, "I'm amazed that forty people have a meeting in which democracy actually occurs and organization happens. I used to ask myself if this was possible. But New Day has helped me to see what you can do. Given the way Congress is behaving, they should try it."

New Day is not a nonprofit, so, with the exception of a couple of small grants from National Video Resources for special marketing studies, it has received no contributed income from foundations or public arts agencies, like the National Endowment for the Arts. It has always been supported entirely by its members, which brings an instructive gravity to its economic deliberations. Rather than operating on a straight royalty basis, with makers receiving the typical 20 to 25 percent of their gross receipts, New Day's Active Members pay a monthly share of the co-op's expenses, then receive the entire balance of their receipts as royalties. ("Classics" members pay 20 percent of any income when their titles do business.) People pay their share according to a sliding scale, which changes every half-year as members' fortunes change; but right now, the member whose titles are grossing the most pays about 7 percent of the co-op's overhead--$384 a month--and gets to keep 80.5 percent of those titles' gross receipts. At the bottom of the share ladder are new members whose titles haven't earned any income yet, each paying a minimum share of $55 per month. On average (not counting those new members) New Day's Active Members retain a royalty of 67 percent of their titles' grosses, upending the usual distribution arrangement. Not all this money goes directly into the producer's pocket: most members do some extra individual promotion--usually mailing inexpensive brochures to targeted lists of media buyers--and many have offices or part-time staff to support.

Membership in the co-op wasn't always so affordable. At its height, before the VHS "revolution" completely changed the economics of educational distribution, New Day's Manhattan office employed an operations manager, a booker, and a shipper, and one point on the share ladder--1 percent of the co-op's overhead--equalled $117. New Day has pared its overhead by well over half in the past few years, replacing its own administrative offices and fulfillment operation with services purchased from Transit Media, a family-run operation in Hohokus, New Jersey.

The economic shakedown of the independent media world in the past decade supplies the reasons behind this budget-cutting. Until about 10 years ago, schools and libraries around the country routinely spent hundreds of dollars to purchase a 16mm film, some only vaguely curriculum-related. Many independent filmmakers could support themselves on distribution income alone. For instance, long-time New Day member Debra Franco (now head of Copperfield Associates, a media consulting company) and her partner Skip Shepherd made two films on adolescent sexuality, Dear Diary and Am I Normal?, which together grossed hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1980s. In New Day's 1987 catalog, 16mm copies of these 25-minute films were priced at $425 (VHS at $395). Still in active distribution today, almost all sales of these titles are on VHS, advertised in the catalog at $189 and often discounted as part of special promotions. Multiply this story by a few dozen New Day members, and the economic shift in distribution is abundantly clear.

There was a period during the Eighties when New Day's membership was split: some wanted to focus on money-making and opposed accepting new titles without promising markets. Others emphasized the co-op's value as a network and support group and wanted to bring in titles with small but socially significant markets. A few new members joined expecting to equal the grosses of the pre-VHS period and were bitterly disappointed. Members grew reluctant to bring in any new titles at all, not wanting to repeat that experience. But in the end, everyone agreed that the co-op's value went far beyond grosses and royalties, and membership began growing again.

"The days are gone," says Ralph Arlyck (An Acquired Taste, Godzilla Meets Mona Lisa, Current Events), "when you can really make a lot of money with educational distribution. The best thing about being in New Day is the wonderful group of people. The things you learn from them! I'm sometimes not aware of things I've learned from New Day until I catch myself telling them to other people--how to work with people, how to hire someone; it's not restricted to distribution. They've been so valuable."

Camaraderie and support are vital, but so is affordability. The share system became the object of intense scrutiny early in our experience with New Day, bringing two different truths into collision. People at the top of those days' larger share ladder complained, "I pay thousands of dollars each year, and I have to spend a lot of other money to bring in all this sale and rental income. The people at the bottom of the share ladder ar getting a free ride at my expense." But those at the bottom argued back: "You may be paying out thousands, but you're still earning thousands. It's only costing you 20 percent of your gross to be in the co-op, and you're the ones that use all the services. My share equals 80 percent of my gross, and by the time you add in my other expenses, it's costing me money. Percentage-wise, I'm carrying you."

On this and two subsequent occasions in the past decade, New Day members undertook meticulous studies of the economic impact of various alternatives the their share system--switching to a fee-for-service basis, for instance, or charging members an equal straight percentage of gross incomes as other distributors do. Some minor adjustments were made, but over and over again, a conscientious examination of the facts and a recognition that it was important to keep certain titles in distribution whether or not they succeeded in earning money brought the group to reaffirm the system that had evolved over 20 or so years of practical application.

People without a taste for group process might find this trying, but for Arlyck, it's one of New Day's advantages: "New Day offers a filtering process: a bunch of smart people who can figure things out, talk about them, bring in outside expertise when it's needed. There's no guarantee. You can still make a wrong decision. But it's a lot less likely to happen when you have twenty people thinking and talking about it. And when a group's been doing that for twenty-five years."

Today, budget cuts have eliminated most controversy about the share system. Individual members' shares of the stripped-down operation have become so much smaller that almost everyone finds them affordable; thus, there's no pressing need to change the system. And no one in New Day or elsewhere in the indie distribution field can make it on distribution proceeds alone. Some teach, some make media for hire, some have secured production grants that underwrite part of their time and overhead, and some have day jobs in other fields. When asked why they belong to the co-op now, New Day members mentioned fair accounting, prompt payment, and other advantages of owning your own distribution company. But they talked mostly about non-monetary compensations.

"Connection with other makers is the primary reason to be in New Day," says J Clements (Dear Lisa and Man Oh Man). "New Day really taught me about dealing with people. It also gave me a sense that I could be a leader, and I never thought of myself like that before."

To keep New Day's overhead cost low and participation high, members share the work of operating the co-op and promoting its collection. Essential skills are passed down through the "generations," so that as older members go on to new productions, newer members can carry forward their tasks. People tend to cycle through New Day, alternating periods of active participation with times of pulling back: a member may perform a fairly taxing task for a few years, then teach it to a newer member and take on something relatively light for a while. A few years down the line, when the older member has a new title to distribute, the process will be reversed. Next to money, the task-performance requirement has been one of the touchiest of New Day's policies. It's a human problem: some people are ardent task performers, ready to take on such time-consuming tasks as producing the annual catalog, heading the recruitment team, acting as budget director or task coordinator, or chairing the Steering Committee. Others follow the time-honored strategy for escaping responsibility: accept it reluctantly, fulfill it inadequately, and stonewall any criticism. The vast majority fall somewhere in between. The group is more inclined to wire around members who are poor task performers than to invest a lot of time riding herd on them. But conscientious task performers resent it when others let the co-op down, feeling penalized for their good behavior. Governments the world over exercise their authority through a combination of coercion and consent; in theory, democracy emphasizes the consent half of the equation, but in the real world, coercion counts. How many of us would pay income taxes if there were no penalty for not doing so? So part of New Day's "constitution," enshrined in a document called "General Policies," is a system of fines levied against those who fail to keep their commitments. Fines aren't used very often, but they are a clear deterrent.

Some of the most important issues facing New Day are common to all independent distributors: technological, economic, and political change. New Day has had as much trouble as any other distributor in anticipating the next move. But because there's no conflict between the economic interests of the company as a whole and that of the members, New Day's approach has been marked by a real willingness to experiment and take risks: computerized mailing lists when others were still using addressographs; computerized ordering and fulfillment when others were still doing their business manually. Missteps have almost always involved contracting with someone's family member to perform a service that could have been provided more effectively--and with less emotional turmoil--by a professional. As Jim Klein says, "New Day had the advantage of experimenting at a fat time for the independent field, so we could afford to make mistakes."

Today, the emphasis on experimentation continues, but always with an eye to the bottom line. At the 1995 Annual Meeting, the co-op decided to require all members to have e-mail, making communication easier and more efficient. Ellen Frankenstein (Miles from the Border and A Matter of Respect) says, "New Day gave me permission as a filmmaker not to be in the city. It's such a strong network, especially now that we're all on e-mail, it works for me to be in Alaska." To celebrate its 25th anniversary, New Day inaugurated a Web site this month, putting its catalog online and giving media users and prospective co-op members instant access to reviews, study guides and other information and a way to communicate directly with makers. The Web site is the brainchild of New Day member Jenny Cool, whose day job has been in computer multimedia.

For many New Day members, the deciding factor in joining New Day rather than going to a conventional distributor was the reason that inspired the co-op's founding: making sure their work reached its intended audiences. As Jim Klein tells it, "When (Julia Reichert and I) started out, we didn't intend to be distributors." After the two made Growing Up Female and brought it to New York, they found it a hard sell: no one was interested in social-issue films, particularly about women. The few people that were interested couldn't - or wouldn't - reach the audiences Klein and Reichert had in mind, like women's groups.

"Grove Press had a distribution division, and took us to lunch in the Village--the guy was charming as hell. But when we said it was important to reach the women's movement, he said political movements don't have money to rent films. He said 'We're a business. We don't give things away.' So we had no choice: to reach audiences, we had to get involved in distribution. People told us 'You're crazy, you don't know anything about business,' and we just said 'To hell with that, we'll do it anyway,'" and New Day was born as a team, if not a full-fledged organization.

In 1971, Klein and Reichert met Amalie Rothschild (It Happens To Us) at a Robert Flaherty Film Seminar where some early feminist films were screened, and found they had a lot in common. The following year, at the First International Festival of Women's Films, Klein, Reichert, and Rothschild saw a film by Liane Brandon (Anything You Want To Be) that made them rush right out and call her. These four pioneering makers are recognized as New Day's official founders.

More than 20 years later, Jenny Cool found herself thinking along the same "I'll do it anyway" lines: "I came into New Day with my thesis film in visual anthropology from the University of Southern California . I found out about New Day at the National Educational Film and Video Festival (now called the National Educational Media Network). I was nervous at first. Self-distribution seemed like a lot of work: would I have the time? But then I realized I'm the only one who can really rep and handle my film."

Debra Franco, whose consulting career has given her an impressive overview of educational distribution, agrees: "From my perspective today as a consultant and analyst in the field of noncommercial media, fewer distributors are going to put out the time and effort necessary to strategize and target the marketing of a film that doesn't have a huge market. Markets are so much more niched and fragmented now, each film needs its own strategy. Most films won't find anyone to do that for them because the monetary rewards are so slim. For a young person today who wants to be an independent filmmaker and wants that kind of support and connection, New Day would be a great place."

Is New Day replicable? "I don't know," says Jim Klein, "there's a similar climate now to when New Day started, an exciting explosion of affordable new media. New Day could be a model: it's efficient, low-cost, has developed a workable structure and governance. But this is a troubling time to rebuild. The business environment is hostile. I don't know if I'd start all over again." Jenny Cool thinks it's worth considering. "I don't know how translatable it is," she says, "because it takes a hell of a lot of work, but it would behoove people in any medium to look at the model and learn from it. It's a model of having a small central office and having most stuff diffused through people as their individual responsibilities. More and more, people have to piece together their livings on their own. How can you nurture the creative side and pay the bills, work at home? You need a support organization to help you get your work out."