In a recent interview with the small UK based LGBT blog, Vada Magazine, the creator of the web series Freefall, Lamont Pierre, opened up with interesting details about the show that may give hope to new content creators.
For those unaware, Freefall is a black gay web series popular amongst the BGClive crowd of young, sex starved gay men. It features melodramatic stories of sexy young black gay men who date, work, rob, commit crimes, kidnap, murder, have sex with and rape each other.
It’s also the most successful black gay web series currently dropping new episodes.
Having said that, success is relative in the wild west world of the web. There are many gay men with thousands of Twitter followers, hundreds of Instagram Likes and tons of YouTube views who still can’t pay their rent on time every month.
Be that as it may, Freefall is very popular amongst a select group of people. This is not in question.
It’s no secret that we here at Cypher Avenue (and many of our readers) don’t like this series. Nothing personal, we just don’t critically find the story, writing, acting, directing, lighting, photography or audio quality to be very good at all. To be honest, we haven’t even seen the new episodes of the show since its muddled second season featuring a bareback anal male rape scene between two main characters that was never acknowledged or resolved.
This article is not meant to (once again) disparage the overall low quality of the show. We genuinely do appreciate creator Lamont Pierre’s stylized marketing and his desire to at least attempt to add something different to the limited realm of black gay cinema.
As black gay content creators ourselves, Ocky Williams and I often have conversations on the lucrativeness of developing non-porn related media for gay men. Especially film and video content, one of the most expensive art forms in existence.
Seems like every week a new black gay web series, reality show or YouTube Blog series is popping up on the Internet. Unfortunately, 100% of the time these projects are either self-financed for peanuts or dependent on donations from fans via crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, IndieGogo or GoFundMe. Even established filmmakers such as Patrick Ian Polk (Noah’s Arc) and The Gossfields (The D.L. Chronicles) have resorted to virtual panhandling to finance their works.
Even still, many of these fundraisers have failed to meet their projected goals. Even in a world where a guy can raise over $55,000 in donations to make a pot of potato salad.
This leads to a chicken and the egg scenerio. You can’t create quality content to profit from without the resources and you can’t get the resources without first having the money to create quality content. There appears to be no real profit to be made in creating black gay media content that entails quitting your day job and paying people who work for you (unless you are making sex/porn related content).
The main explanation for this seems to be the “fans” themselves. Will black gay supporters actually pull out their wallets for anything other than admission and drinks at the club?
At the start of their third season (aka what they call the official second season), the Freefall team premiered a Vimeo On Demand page where exclusive content and extended episodes would be available for rent for a fee. This is the same method we saw employed by the creators of The D.L. Chronicles for their amazing short film Episode Thomas.
This month old interview with Lamont Pierre seems to offer some insight on if and how he’s managed to make Freefall profitable through this rental method for himself and the people who work on the show.
Excerpt From Vada Magazine:
Now, let’s talk about Mission Mainstream, an initiative you put in place around the time Season 2 started. Can you tell me a little more about that?
When we started Mission Mainstream, the goal was to get a bigger audience. When we did Season 1, we impacted many area that have a large black gay population demographic. Freefall is well known in these places. However, there are still a lot of places where Freefall isn’t really known that has a large black gay population. We also wanted to start gaining viewers outside of that immediate demographic as well. That’s why I told my whole team and all of my actors that I wanted everyone’s mindset to be on making it mainstream when we started filming Season 2. We wanted to expand past our direct audience demographic. We also created Mission Mainstream, because our ultimate goal was to get the attention of a network. In order to do that, we needed to show them that we were more than just a black gay show. We can appeal to more than just the black gay demographic. That’s why we made a bigger attempt to bring in more diverse characters and enhance the story.
Mission Mainstream also has a GoFundMe page. Why did you want to focus on crowdfunding rather than finding investors?
There were no investors originally, and we had to find a way to continue making the show. To be honest, even though we still have the crowdfunding campaign up, we don’t really use it. That’s because we’ve found a way to monetize our show. We’ve gotten to the point where fans are willing to buy our episodes, and we’re one of the first web series to be able to do this. We make a nice amount of money on our shows every month. We’re able to make sure all of the actors get paid, and we are proud of that fact.
And now that we’ve found a successful way to monetize the series, we plan to use that same model with future series.
What do you think the future holds for Freefall? Where do you see the series in one year? What about five years?
I think we still have so much ground to cover. We have a lot of places in the United States and internationally to expose to Freefall, but we still have so many places that don’t know about the show. Right now, we are going to continue that we keep working on improving the show. We are growing at a satisfying rate, so even if we never get picked up by a network, we can still be successful on the web and make money from that. That’s where we see Freefall. Freefall is considered a success for us, and we want to ride that for as long as we can.
[Editor: Fans, take note. He said they don’t need your donations…so use that information as you will. Cypher Avenue, on the other hand, welcomes your donations!]
Granted, this was a promotional interview, not a hard hitting industry-insider journalistic piece featured in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. So who knows how much of Pierre’s statements were accurate confessions of a winning entrepreneurial enterprise or just grandstanding for positive perception from the media and fans.
Also, who knows exactly how much his actors are being paid. Even just giving actors $25 per filming day (far below a standard actor’s rate), would technically be enough to say that you paid your talent for their work.
Forget all that.
These are black gay brothers doing the damn thing by working hard to create content.
Let’s give #TeamFreefall the benefit of the doubt and say that not only are they pulling in mad guap from renting content through their Vimeo page, they also pay their actors a rate worth taking the time to film a full season of 15-minute webisodes.
Is this a method that more black gay content creators could and should employ?
Should No Shade creator Sean Anthony make season two of his series available for rental only?
Back in August of 2013, Ocky Williams wrote an excellent (and popular) Cypher Avenue article titled, “WTF Is Up With Black Gay Content Creators?” In the piece, he proposed that black gay content creators follow the lead of their Caucasian counterparts and start charging rental fees for their work.
Freefall creator Lamont Pierre even joined us in the long comments section on that article, adding his opinions to the discussion on the topic. Soon after, he appeared to take Ocky’s advice by renting out his popular content…and he claims to be making a killing.
Does this mean that Cypher Avenue was once again inspirational to Pierre in some small way when it comes to Freefall?
Chest-Thumping aside, maybe Ocky was on to something with his idea.
Does Lamont Pierre’s Freefall interview prove that there’s hope for black gay content creators to make money from their work?
Or is the monetary success of Freefall an outlier? An anomaly? Or just plain old fiction?
I used to buy into the notion that black gays don’t financially support content. After working with a rather successful youtube channel for nearly 2 years now I can say that’s simply not true. They will pay for good content and the channel I work for doesn’t even have any gay characters but we have a large gay following. If you build it, and it’s good, they will pay for it.
While this is valuable input, I don’t think anyone ever said the black gays don’t spend money on content. We know they spend tons of money on movies, music, concerts, netflix, etc. The problem we’ve always pointed out is that black gays seem to not financially support black GAY content. Even you said there are no gay characters on those shows you work on which means our theory still holds up for the most part.
Yea, that’s the main issue I observed. Black gay content just gets much less financial support from the community, for a number of reasons. White content (gay and straight) will get more support from both blacks and whites.
Youve already said black gay content in general isnt that good.. so why would tge burden be on the black gay audience to finance stuff that isnt good
So by that rationale, does that mean Freefall is actually “good content” since Lamont says they’re making major bank from gay viewers?
You need do no more than go to their youtube channel which is free and see that they are getting barely 17K subscribers. The studies show that if you have X amount of subscribers to your free site, roughly 10% of that is likely to PAY for your subscription site. You do the math and realize there’s no way in gay hades that Free Fall is making “good money.”
I think the founders of Freefall should invest time and money into customer service. Many of their fans are confused about their “schedule” for when new shows premier. They promised a new show every Thursday at 8:00 and for most of the season, they’ve skipped whole weeks with no new show and no explanation for why. Even when paying fans voice their displeasure in the Freefall twitter feed, they are attacked and disrespected simply because they voice their displeasure at the disorganization. Any business that doesn’t deliver on its promises to its customer base can forget repeat visitors/donors/viewers. Doing the best you can has absolutely nothing to do with following through on promises.
Well now we know the real over there on the set of “free fall” – they’re slowly, but surely “free fallin’.” Now there name will be mud. And nothing can wash it off. I always suspected they were “dirt bags.”
The whole tone of this commentary is very shady. I did not read that they “did not need donations”. He said they could still produce the show and make “some money” if they are never picked up by a network. I agree that there are things that can be enhanced on the show. I too have issues with an unresolved or acknowledged rape of your best friend who you then have a three way with, with your current lover! However it appears your dislike for the show is clear as you pepper the entire article with unnecessary and shady asides. It is obviously popular for a reason. The vast majority of the viewers do not have the same issues you do. That is the measuring stick for success on the web or the network.
No, my dislike for the show is clear because in the article I literally said “we don’t like this show.” Having said that, I admit that the softcore porn nature of the show makes it popular..plus the fact that there isn’t much more black gay content shows out there. Popularity doesn’t equate to quality. Transformers 4 was popular, and even it sucked.
You are correct. A popular show is not necessarily a quality show. Also there is no doubt that the very attractive and diverse looking cast does enhance the show’s popularity. Certainly you can have a popular show that also offers a quality product. I just do not think that every viewer of the show shares your disdain for the quality of the show. I wish the show much success and I hope it continues to grow into a profitable vehicle for all concerned. It offers a very different and novel prospective of Black Gay men. While it sometimes goes off the rail,it is still entertaining to many of us.
Great, you like the show and I don’t. Both subjective opinions are valid. No arguments here. The quality level and future success of Freefall was not the topic of discussion posed in the article. Why most black gay content creators don’t have financial backers and/or profitable ventures was the topic.
I was thinkin about this as I was checkin out DL Chronicles website yesterday. It looks like they only filmed one episode of season 2 and need donations…so I clicked on the gofundme link. Saw that their goal is 250k to complete the season and they’ve only raised $965 over the last 17 months. A whopping 13 people have donated. Decided to keep my lil $20 bucks. As a viewer I saw those stats and it killed any hope I had that they will be able to complete the project.
Yeah they seem to be trying to create their series more in line with how its supposed to be done: Paying people who are actually skilled at acting, camera work, lighting, audio recording, etc…That’s why Episode Thomas looked so professionally made.
The smaller web series like Freefall and No Shade are lower budgeted and it shows in comparison.
My thing is, I wonder why its hard to just get investors instead of getting donations from fans. I keep reading about how many wealth there is in the gay community, yet no one can just write a check to these guys?
I think you’ve already answered your own question @Nick. These programs are struggling because of perceived value. Neither blacks nor whites see value in them. Blacks don’t see the value because we’ve been programmed to embrace negativity and to overwhelmingly support efforts that lead to our mental/physical/spiritual demises (See: most reality tv shows with a black cast for illustration) and whites aren’t supporting because they don’t value black anything, period.
To keep it brief: Freefall is struggling because there isn’t enough buffoonery and negativity (unfortunately). Even Lamont Pierre recognized this as he changed his original angle for the show to incorporate some dark, murdering/drug dealing story-line that he KNOWS black people are so drawn to (again, negativity).
DL Chronicles is struggling because for much of the same reason, and because whites will NEVER support programming that focuses on strong, masculine BLACK MEN coupled with each other. That’s right fellas, I said NEVER. The thought of any form of black male unity is too frightening for the white male psyche, so they will not support it. I bet if Gossett/Lenear feminized the black male characters and paired them with white men, then they’d see their support go through the roof. You guys can bet your 401k on that.
I’m surprised you haven’t suggested this to them @Nick seeing is how you know them personally and are a die-hard advocate of interracial arrangements for black gay men.
WOW Man you said a mouthful. I’ve never heard anyone on this website be as forthcoming and politically astute as you. You have won my award for the “Perfect Black Male Mindset.” Now if I could just duplicate you about 4 million times we’d see some real changes across the board. Please accept my friendship as it is an honor knowing someone like you. Being in your company lifts my spirit on high.
Typically like this site. Came across this article tonight while browsing.
Very disappointed. Valid points, yes, but so much unwarranted, unapologetic, hate and negativity. As a man of a certain who fought through prejudice and hate, it bothers my soul to see “us” pick apart and tear each other down instead of extending words of love and positivity and truth in an effort to promote change.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I watched season one and two. Interesting. I’m not the movie critique at all. So I will leave it at I really liked Xavier. I know the detective (with dreads) personally in season two and he’s an amazing guy. Quality wasn’t bad and I can see why it was picked up. The tone definitely changed dramatically in the second season.