'The Last Showgirl' Backer Pinky Promise on Building a “New and ...
When Kara Durrett and Jesse Burgum, the duo behind the production-finance company Pinky Promise, first met, it was 104 degrees. They were filming in the attic of a church in Decatur, Georgia, working on Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, the first movie Burgum financed where Durrett was working as an independent producer.
“A lot of people were focusing on where they were going to sit in relationship to the monitor. Kara was finding fans and the AC guy. I was like, ‘OK, this girl’s the real deal,’ ” recalls Burgum. The film went on to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, selling to Focus Features. And Durrett and Burgum went on to form a partnership that has encompassed title’s like Andrea Arnold’s Cannes entry Bird, Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut (upcoming via Sony) and Gia Coppola’s Pamela Anderson starrer The Last Showgirl, which premiered at TIFF on Sept. 6.
Ahead of touching down in Canada, Pinky Promise met up with THR to talk about the state of indie financing and dancing at Cannes with Arnold.
How did Jesse approach you, Kara, on the set of Honk for Jesus?
KARA DURRETT Most financiers come and they’re just bringing their friends or trying to pretend they know so much. Jesse would just come and be like, “I don’t know, I’ve never been on a set before.” Around the end of the movie, Jesse was like, ‘Hey, I’m actually going to go out and raise a bunch of money for women and POC filmmakers, LGBT filmmakers, and I’m going to start a company. Do you want to come on board?’ I remember at the time thinking that I’ve met so many financiers who say that. I very much underestimated her. I left and I went away, and I did a different movie, where I was in a swamp. The whole time, Jesse was building and fundraising and hiring and she was calling me, keeping me updated. Over 18 months, she raised $26.5 million. That’s when we started our producing partnership and thought, “How do we find these filmmakers who are not getting their movies made and how do we make those?” We will always finance the Andrea Arnolds of the world. We will always kind of take risks on those kinds of movies because we don’t know who else is going to keep making them when it’s such a bad time. And then we will always produce things that feel like new and exciting [projects].
Jesse, your family has a background in business and investing. [Burgum’s father is North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a tech developer and investor.] How did that influence the business behind Pinky Promise?
JESSE BURGUM I always say that Pinky Promise is the result of what happens when an actress grows up in a household full of businesspeople because it really is the intersection of those things. There’s a lot of stuff that you just pick up around the dinner table that I think you wouldn’t necessarily know based on my résumé or schooling, which is a degree in classical acting. So I’ve certainly learned a lot from them — and definitely through relationships and their past experience I was able to get an email address. But then it was like, “OK, good luck.” [I started] cold emailing people.
DURRETT There was a rumor for five seconds in the industry when we first started four or five years ago, where people would think it’s Jesse’s dad’s money or it’s Jesse’s family’s money. Her dad is not an investor in the company. The money is fully raised outside of her family, and Jesse spent months building a business plan and building an actual structure and a model that makes sense. In the beginning, I used to get very protective as a friend, like, “How dare you doubt what she did.” Now it’s actually quite fun for me to see other people realize that they just fully underestimated a woman who went out and raised this much money on her own.
How do you decide on projects to finance versus ones you want to produce as well?
BURGUM Because we’re functionally a VC on the financing side; we have a very disciplined selection process that we approach in the traditional way that any VC investing in a startup would. We’ve got due diligence sheets. We have a process called the four Ps, which are kind of the four factors that go into whether or not Pinky Promise will do something. Progress, because we’re a mission-based company. Profit, because we’re not a nonprofit — we want to make money and continue for as long as we can. Prestige: We want to make work that feels like it can hold its own in the zeitgeist. And then partners: You’re essentially getting married to somebody for several years. If there’s one thing that I would say that we are completely uncompromising about is just the character of the folks that we work with, because life is just too short.
DURRETT We went to Cannes, and we had a party for Bird, Andrea’s movie. There were 300 people, and they’re all standing outside of the building looking at us [on the dance floor] — the three Pinky Promise girls are dancing like no one is watching. Then Andrea comes in a full jumpsuit. And the four of us just danced for an hour. It’s one thing to make a movie right now, it’s another to get it distributed. How do you navigate the current distribution landscape?
DURRETT Jesse and I both made a decision about a year ago. We want to know more about distribution. We want to know more about how the landscape from their side looks. We now have decided that every movie we go into, the best thing for the movie is actually figuring out how to get them to be seen, first. In the last year, we’ve almost reversed thinking. It’s not anymore, “How do we make a movie?” It’s now, “How do we get this movie seen?” And then once we know that, then it’s “How do we make the movie?” Even if that means having a preliminary conversation with a distributor, asking, “Is there a way for us to share on the risk? Can we prepare marketing materials better? Can we put more money into certain aspects of the film that will make it feel bigger for you?” Even for Scarlett’s movie, when we built that movie and Scarlett attached, we all took it to Sony and TriStar first. Not to just pay for it but truly to plan distribution. Also, [Sony] Classics jumped in, and now we’re making it with all of them, along with Wayfair [Justin Baldoni’s company, which worked with Sony on It Ends With Us] as a financier.
You have talked about Pinky Promise being nimble, and that having helped you all ride the waves of the past couple of years in Hollywood. What do you think about scaling?
DURRETT I will say Jesse’s super strength is hiring and growth. This is where I believe the business background of her family is just in her blood. Because I am someone who, like, every six months is like, “Buy! Buy! Buy!” I just want to grow all the time. Jesse will say, “Let’s talk about what we need for six months, and then if we still need it, let’s hire.”
BURGUM Any company that’s aspirational, you have to make plans for what you can do right now. I’m not the first person to say this, nor will I be the last, but you have to have a higher tolerance for uncertainty for a startup but also in this industry. So you also have to pick people that are down to be in that boat with you. We’re now at a time where it’s like we need to look at what we can do and also like where we want to be. We don’t want to start a distribution company, but we definitely want to be a part of the solution to a problem that we’re seeing where right now there is this glut of product, there is a ton of beautiful movies that aren’t being seen. There is a much smaller amount of people who are able to get those movies to their audience. The industry is obviously ripe for disruption. Entertainment is such an industry rooted in tradition, which can be great, but maybe we are not as quick to change, especially when people have been burned by [other] industry disruptions like the economics of streaming just changing overnight. So many conversations around the issues that the industry are facing right now are framed around, “How do we get back to these good old days?” I think that that is a really dangerous mode of thinking because it also wasn’t perfect then
