The PR Degree Was the Best Film School Decision I Ever Made

I was 19 years old, sitting in my department chair’s office at Georgia Southern University, crying. I was in the wrong major. There was no film degree to transfer into, because Georgia Southern didn’t have one yet. I was about to walk away from school.

Dr. Pam Bourland-Davis didn’t blink.

“How about a degree in Public Relations?” she said. “You’re already making your first films. With some training in pitching, target markets, and marketing, you’ll have a much better understanding of not just how to publicize your projects, but also how to know who you’re making them for.”

I have been running that play for twenty years. I want to talk about why every filmmaker should consider doing the same thing.

The Reflexive Embarrassment

There is a kind of embarrassment in our industry about the marketing side of the work. We have inherited a romantic notion that a real artist focuses on the craft and lets somebody else worry about how it gets out into the world. We treat positioning, audience, and discovery as if they happen to the work after it’s finished, by people who are not us, in a phase of the project that has nothing to do with the actual making.

This is wrong, and it has always been wrong. But I want to be specific about why it is fatally wrong right now.

Every minute you spend learning your audience compounds for the rest of your career. Every cold email you write is craft. Every pitch deck is craft. Every cover letter is craft. The way you describe your film to a stranger in an elevator is craft. The metadata on your project page is craft. The thumbnail you choose for a YouTube interview is craft. The font on your business card is craft.

These are not separate from the work. These are the work, on a different surface.

What PR School Actually Taught Me

Three things I would not have learned in any film program.

One. How to identify a target audience before you’ve started the project, not after. This shapes everything. Desires of the Heart was not a film for everyone. It was a film for cross-cultural romance audiences and the Indian diaspora. The American Question was not for everyone. It was for civically engaged adults across the political spectrum who were tired of cable news. Knowing this in advance affected casting, festival strategy, distribution, even the cinematography. This is not a marketing question. This is a directing question.

Two. How to write a pitch. A pitch has a structure, a rhythm, a hook, a stakes paragraph, and a close. The same skills that get you a publicity hit get you a meeting with a financier, an actor, a sales agent, a journalist, a studio executive. If you cannot pitch your own film in three sentences, that is not a personality flaw. That is a skill gap. Skill gaps are closable.

Three. How to think about narrative as a transmission system. PR teaches you that a story is a vehicle for a message into a specific audience’s head. Filmmaking teaches you the same thing, at higher resolution. Studying both made me a better director, not a worse one.

What I Want You To Take From This

If you are a film student reading this: please, for your own sake, take a marketing class, a PR class, a copywriting class. Or read the textbooks on your own. Influence by Cialdini. Made to Stick by the Heath brothers. Anything by Mark Schaefer. You will not regret it.

If you are a working filmmaker reading this: stop outsourcing the question of how your work gets found. You don’t have to do all of it yourself. You do have to know what you want it to do.

The career I have was built on Pam’s advice at 19. The new website I just launched is built on the same principle. Discovery is craft. Audience is craft. Positioning is craft.

The story is the engine. The transmission is what gets it to the road.

— James