Remember 2012? The U.S. box office hit nearly $11 billion, Netflix became a streaming service, and Emily Best launched Seed&Spark with what seemed like a radical mission: Build your audience, control your financing, own your distribution.
“The amount of time in my life I was dismissed for that shit,” she said.
Cut to June 2025 and Vulture publishes “Mark Duplass Has a Plan to Save Television.” The interview detailed self-distribution of his limited series “The Long Long Night,” but here’s the thing: The plan wasn’t his. It was Emily’s, the same one she’s pushed for 13 years.
The Breakthrough Moment
It took over a decade, but Emily’s vision — now partnered with Christie Marchese’s distribution platform Kinema — finally looks less like wishful thinking and more like a lifeline.
“I wrote ‘Netflix is bad for the film business’ in 2018,” Best said. “Lots of people whispered to me, ‘I totally agree, but I can’t bite the hand that feeds me.’”
While Netflix reshaped viewing habits and algorithms fragmented audiences, Emily quietly built an alternative: crowdfunding → community building → filmmaker-controlled distribution. Her model isn’t just having a moment; it’s a viable path for anyone wanting to tell stories outside the Marvel universe.
And to be clear, Duplass wasn’t stealing credit; the article’s framing was strategic. As Emily’s longtime supporter, he brought the perfect combo: respected filmmaker, successful producer, and crucially, famous actor. (Think Kristen Bell legitimizing crowdfunding with “Veronica Mars.”)
The plan came together at a 2024 SeriesFest party. Emily recalled: “We were sitting in this backyard with a pile of appetizers and Mark was like, ‘What are we missing in the independent television space?’ And I said, look, all the tools are here. We need the social innovation of a legitimizing force. We need a person with the indie cred and the chutzpah and the risk appetite to show that there’s another way.”
The Floodgates Open
Response was immediate. Seed&Spark and Kinema were flooded with calls from creators wanting to understand what filmmaking looked like when you handled everything yourself.
“I’ve never talked to so many famous people in my life,” Best said (though she won’t publicly name names for unfinalized deals). Six weeks after the Vulture piece: 90 new films and TV shows signed up.
Beyond the gravitational pull of star power, the real driver was pain finally reaching the top of the food chain.
Independent filmmaking is practically a synonym for struggle, but not long-ago studios gave celebrities production deals in hopes that they might make a movie with them. Now YouTube is America’s most-watched platform, built on creators with passionate communities.
As Best puts it, “Celebrity is not community.”
How It Works
- Bring your community to Seed&Spark for crowdfunding
- Keep them engaged through production
- Launch on Kinema with a built-in audience
- Access your own data, get paid quickly, keep your rights
The cost: $270 annual subscription plus revenue sharing.
That’s the simplified version and it’s a lot to manage if you grew up thinking “film launch” meant “Sundance premiere and pray.” Success, Marchese said, comes when filmmakers “know how to run their film like a business.”
The Uncomfortable Truth
Making movies is brutal work; so is building an audience. “There has to be a big shift,” Best said, particularly for established creators who “are going to have to become beginners again in order to access this system.”
Best said some high-profile creators are “still really uncomfortable” with the hands-on engagement that goes way beyond Instagram posts with “personal” messages.
But here’s the thing: fame is not required. “The things that move the needles for us are the entrepreneurial filmmakers,” said Marchese. “The films that have performed best on our platform are not going to be the names that you recognize the most.”
Case study: “Show Her the Money,” Ky Dickens’ 2023 documentary about female investors, has run on Kinema for nearly two years. “That’s all she’s doing,” Marchese said. “[She’s] making money doing it, and she knows she’s creating artificial scarcity and keeping the price high.”
What’s Next
The approach is still young. Best tested it with her own 2024 documentary about the Equal Rights Amendment, “Ratify,” and she’s using what she learned, plus that audience, to launch her next project, short film “Mr. Jesus.” Its crowdfunding campaign began today.
“Mr. Jesus”
Best’s vision hits different now that establishment models are crumbling. Suddenly, her “idealistic” pitch sounds more like a survival manual.
“We are trying to hand agency to the creators to remake this industry into what they need it to be,” she said.
Anyone taking that agency must develop new skills, but it might mean the difference between sustainable careers and algorithmic lottery tickets.
As Best puts it: “The only thing that has ever future-proofed us against the next technology innovation is a direct connection with your audience.”
What do you think? Is this the future of independent filmmaking, or just a passing trend? Email or text me — I’d love to hear your thoughts.
✉️ Have an idea, compliment, or complaint?
dana@indiewire.com; (323) 435-7690.
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