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
