April 15, 2021

Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw Back Jewish Story Partners Amid Time of Racial Reckoning

(hollywoodreporter.com)

“There is nothing like storytelling to foster connections,” the iconic Hollywood filmmaker says of expanding the range of stories around Jewish lives with the new film foundation.
Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw want to tell more Jewish stories on the screen, but not for entertainment or escapism.

The Hollywood filmmaker and humanitarians offered seed financing through their Righteous Persons Foundation for Jewish Story Partners, a new film foundation unveiled Thursday, to be led by filmmaker Roberta Grossman and former Sundance senior programmer Caroline Libresco.

The goal is to tell more social justice stories and expand the range of stories reflecting Jewish lives. “There is nothing like storytelling to foster connections and help us understand life’s deepest truths. We are especially proud to help establish this initiative — which will make visible a fuller range of Jewish voices, identities, experiences and perspectives — at a time when social divisions run painfully deep and mainstream depictions too often fail to reflect the Jewish community in all its complexity,” Spielberg and Capshaw said in a joint statement as the new film foundation, headquartered in Los Angeles, was unveiled.

Jewish Story Partners has $2 million in launch financing also from the Maimonides Fund and the Jim Joseph Foundation. Grossman will serve as producing director and Libresco becomes artistic director to support Jewish stories that challenge established positions and confront difficult realities.

By: Etan Vlessing

Continue Reading at hollywoodreporter.com

Could Mogul Productions Become the Bitcoin of Film Financing?

(backstage.com)

As we close the book on this film awards season and look ahead to the next, Mogul Productions (from Emmy-nominated producer David Cormican) is looking way beyond that. The platform, which just officially launched in March, began with the impetus to decentralize both film financing and power from Hollywood’s long-standing gatekeepers. Cindy Cowan, head of project procurement, spoke with Backstage about how early career filmmakers can take advantage of Mogul’s game-changing support and why she isn’t scared of the old guard’s resistance: “People are just not in the capacity to be ripped off anymore.”

For those who don’t know, what is Mogul Productions?

Mogul is a decentralized film financing platform, which means that it basically uses blockchain to finance films and engage fans [with] all the screenplays that we ultimately pick, and the way that financers can get their money back. If somebody doesn’t understand blockchain, it’s a way to actually protect financers in a way that they haven’t been protected before. Any dollar amount is put into a chain—imagine a gold chain—and whether you put in $20, $200, $2 million, your money comes out at the same time along the chain. So there’s no possibility of doing what the old studio systems used to do: kind of hiding money or ripping people off or saying, “Sorry, all this money went into marketing. There’s nothing left.” Because even the marketing money—any money whatsoever—has to go into the chain.

By: Casey Mink

Continue Reading at backstage.com