Transcript
Narrator/Advertiser (0:02)
Tetragrammaton.
Neal Harmon (0:23)
The entire premise of angel is that Hollywood is in a bubble and they're out of touch, and they don't understand what regular people want, and they're making what they want. And the artist class is the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of filmmakers are the children of very wealthy families. And so they go into filmmaking and they're just a little out of touch with mainstream families. And so they create stuff that mainstream America doesn't want and a mainstream worldwide doesn't want. And so the premise is, is that we use the audience to decide what type of films we're going to produce. And as founders, we're trying to build a community where we have what's called the Angel Guild. And the Angel Guild is made up of 2 million people, just regular, everyday people that are voting on to decide which movies will come into angel studios. And nothing can go into angel Studios unless they vote first. And this community is paying a monthly fee as a member that funds the filmmakers. So it's the largest filmmaking crowdfunding project in the history of film.
Interviewer (1:42)
Wow.
Neal Harmon (1:43)
So you've got 2 million people, all paying between 12 and $20 a month, and their money is going in to fund filmmakers and help them make money on their projects as long as they're making the projects that our community wants.
Interviewer (1:59)
That's amazing. Now, how did the Guild come to exist?
Neal Harmon (2:03)
Have you heard the book the User Method? It's by Jeff Schwarting. And in the User Method, he goes through and he does research on all the different unicorn companies. And I don't remember the number. I think it's like three out of five companies. Their unicorns were just made by somebody who was solving a problem for themselves. So Steve Wozniak just didn't. He was fed up with the computers that existed, and he made the computer he liked. And now we have Apple. You've got Airbnb. Founders were just trying to pay their rent in San Francisco. One of them was a graphic designer, and there's a graphic design convention. And he said, why don't we just rent our floor with an air mattress to the convention, help them pay their rent that month. And then they thought, what if we create Airbnb as an air mattress? B and B. And so they built something to solve their problem.
Interviewer (2:55)
Yes.
Neal Harmon (2:56)
And then it morphed into what it is today. And if you look at all these different companies where they're solving a problem for themselves, they end up making a solution that resonates with way more than themselves, because people are like people we're like other people. And so I come from a family. There's four brothers and a cousin who helped found Angel Studios. And in our family of six brothers, we have three sisters, so nine kids. I'm the middle of nine. And we come from a family that didn't get served by Hollywood. And as we got older and we have our own kids, I've got six kids and one on the way, a seventh kid. And each one of us have a lot of kids. And we're looking at what Hollywood is producing for our kids. And I know a lot of people say like, everything's going to short form social media, but I think that that causes a lot of brain rot. But for the long form content, which even Jonathan Haidt, who did the Anxious Generation, he's saying long form is where the safer content is, meaning it's better for the brain. And so for long form content, how do we get the type of content we want for our families? That's how this started. We grew up on potato farms in Idaho. Our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away. We had three TV stations and we watched almost no movies. I could count the number of times I went to the theater Till I was 18, probably on two hands.