Case: The Creative Imprint of Bigfoot

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Case: The Creative Imprint of Bigfoot 
Source: Griffin, R. (2016). Fundamentals of management, 8th edition, Cengage Learning, p. 155-157. 
Have you seen 
Midnight Movie
? You wouldn’t 
have caught it in a theater because it went 
straight to DVD, 
but that doesn’t prevent 
hardcore horror-film fans from tracking it down
—
after all, it was selected as the Best Feature Film 
at the 10th Annual Chicago Horror Film Festival. It 
also found an audience outside the United States, 
with producer Bigfoot selling distribution rights in 
such countries as Germany, Greece, Thailand, and 
Japan. How about 
3 Needles
, a Canadian-made 
movie about the worldwide AIDS crisis? It was no 
blockbuster, but it was endorsed by the United 
Nations and did well enough at international film 
festivals to find distributors in such countries as 
Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil. 
Bigfoot CEO Kacy Andrews was pleased with the 
film’s
reception: “The positive response from 
critics and audiences,”
she said, “…once again 
affirms our conviction to promote independent 
filmmakers.”
Bigfoot Entertainment is responsible for a host of 
independently produced films, many of which 
follow similar distribution paths to venues and 
audiences around the world. The company, says 
Andrews, “is
dedicated to the community of 
filmmakers who possess the vision and passion to 
create critically acclaimed 
independent films.” It was founded in 2004 by a 
German serial entrepreneur named Michael 
Gleissner, who is in some ways a model for the 
sort of creative people that Bigfoot likes to back. 
He was certainly the model for the hero of 
Hui Lu
, 
a 2007 Bigfoot film that Gleissner wrote and 
directed about a highly successful young 
entrepreneur who sells his company but finds 
himself pushed to the edge despite his millions. 
“What was I
going to do,” Gleissner replied when 
asked about his 
unusual career move, “buy more 
boats, buy more 
houses? I discovered there’s a 
creative side in me.”
Gleissner was an e-commerce pioneer in 
Germany, 
where 
he 
founded 
Telebook, 
Germany’s number
-one online bookstore, and 
WWW-Service GmbH, the 
country’s first, and one 
of its most successful, webhosting companies. In 
1998, he sold Telebook to Amazon.com, where he 
served two years as a vice president before 
cashing in and, in 2001, moving to Asia to make it 
a base for a new round of entrepreneurial 
activities. When he bought Bigfoot, it was an e-
mail management firm, but Gleissner quickly re-
created it as an international entertainment 
company whose main business, according to its 
mission statement, is producing and financing 
“innovative entertainment content,
including 
independent feature films, television series, and 
reality shows.” As head of Bigfoot, Gleissner 
served as executive producer on 
Midnight Movie
and 
3 Needles
, as well as on 
Irreversi
, his second 
effort at writing and directing, and on 
Shanghai 
Kiss
, in which he also tried his hand at acting. 
Bigfoot maintains offices in Los Angeles and a 
small production facility in Venice, California, but 
the centerpiece of its operations is Bigfoot 
Studios, which opened in 2004 on the island of 
Mactan, in Cebu, home to the second-largest city 
in the Philippines. The state-of-the-art facility 
features six large soundstages, fully equipped 
editing suites and sound-mixing studios, and the 
latest in high-tech cameras and other equipment. 
In 2007, under the auspices of Bigfoot Properties, 
Gleissner expanded Bigfoot Studios as the first 
phase of 
Bigfoot Center, a complex that will eventually 
house not only film and TV production facilities 
but also Bigfoot Executive Hotel, an array of 
restaurants, boutiques, and sidewalk shops, and 
an 11-story office building (home to Bigfoot 
Outsourcing, which specializes in business-
process services). The Bigfoot Center in the 
Philippines, by the way, should not be confused 
with the 26-story Bigfoot Centre in Hong Kong, 
where Bigfoot Properties is headquartered. 
Gleissner’s goal is to turn Cebu into a destination 
of choice for filmmakers who want to cut costs by 
shooting and finishing movies outside the United 
States, and when Bigfoot Entertainment finds a 
film suitable for financing and development, the 
deal usually requires the director to do some 
production work at the Cebu facility. By the time 
the studio opened in 2004, the Philippines were 
already an attractive location for animators 
looking for inexpensive post-production help, but 
the pool of talent available for work on live-action 
films was quite limited. Gleissner’s 
solution? He 
founded the International Academy of Film and 
Television (IAFT), not only to staff Bigfoot Studios 
but also to train what executive director Keith 
Sensing calls “the next
generation of global 
filmmakers.” IAFT, says Sensing,
looks for creative 
people who “have a desire for adventure”
and 
“an education that will set them apart from 
people who have a strictly Hollywood 
background.”
IAFT enrollment is currently 60 

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