Choosing Your First Industry Job

Charles and Kath are back to chat about big news in mergers and acquisitions, HD in television, and their thoughts on the smartest first film industry job you could take.

In this episode, we talk about…

• HBO Max is getting merged with Discovery—which is exciting for filmmakers, because whatever name it ends up with, it will have a much bigger documentary platform.
• The nature of mergers and acquisitions and how some film studios and platforms “marry” and “divorce” partners quite frequently.
• Lessons for filmmakers in the story of how the HBO Max merger happened and why friendships are complicated in this industry.
• How Amazon is in talks to buy MGM.
• The lessons filmmakers can take about their relationships to intellectual property from Amazon potentially buying MGM.
• No one starts out in their dream job, but you can be strategic about your early career jobs. 
• Both Kath and Charles’s early-career jobs and how they got where they are today, plus things they wish they had done differently in retrospect.
• How networking has evolved from the days when Charles cold-faxed hundreds of companies to today, where social media lets you gently remind people that you exist.
• Pros and cons of being a script reader as an early career job.
• Resources for finding jobs so you know where to apply.
• How broadcast television moves much slower than other technologies, because moving to film in HD is a huge infrastructural change.
• Why TV companies have little incentive to make that big of an investment unless there's a huge push from consumers.
• Various factors that can affect the appearance of resolution of 4k and 8k streaming.

Links to Resources:

• Women of Color Unite 
• Production Weekly
• Charles Haine: https://www.charleshaine.com/ 
• Charles’ Webseries: Salty Pirate
• Kath Tolentino: https://katherinetolentino.com/ 
• Kath’s production company: https://www.borderwoman.pictures/ 

You can find everything we spoke about today and more here: https://nofilmschool.com/. Please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and check us out on Instagram!

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This episode of The No Film School Podcast was produced by George Edelman and Charles Haine.