A word about the films themselves
The films are already gifts. This needs saying once, clearly, so nothing that follows is mistaken for an argument against the art. Casablanca gave the world something real simply by being made well and loved widely. So did Singin’ in the Rain, and Star Wars, and ten thousand others whose fundamental gift was to be wonderful, and for whom that was more than enough. A film that moves millions of strangers to laugh in the same dark room, or to forgive someone, or to imagine a life they had not imagined, has given a gift that needs no further justification. That is the oldest generosity of cinema, and the largest, and this record takes it entirely as given. Our subject lies alongside it: the giving that happens in and around the making, the part that touches the people and places a production reaches and never appears on the screen at all. The art is one kind of gift. This is the record of the other kinds.
The hundred years between
It began not with a grand gesture but with a practical one.
Mutual aid
Pickford’s relief fund, incorporated in 1921, was mutual aid, not charity in the soft sense: built by the people of an industry for the people of that industry, in an era with no other safety net. It began, by the Fund’s own account, with a simple coin box on the studio floors. By 1932, in the worst of the Depression, it had become a payroll pledge: a half of one percent of the studio paychecks of those who could spare it, set aside for those who could not. A private social security for film workers, invented by film workers, a decade before the public one existed.
Three years after Pickford’s first bucket, the same instinct surfaced an ocean away, with no coordination at all. British film people founded the Cinematograph Trade Benevolent Fund in London in 1924, for exactly the same reason, to care for the workers of their own young industry when hard luck took the work away. It still exists, a century on, under a newer name, and it still runs a care home. Since 1946 a single glittering night, the Royal Film Performance, has paid for it, turning the premiere of a major film into an act of giving to the people behind the scenes. Nobody in London was copying Los Angeles. The need was universal, and so was the response.
Then came the war. In October 1942, the actor John Garfield sat down beside Bette Davis in the Warner Bros. commissary and said something ought to be done for the servicemen pouring through Los Angeles on their way to the Pacific. Davis agreed, and the two of them built it: the Hollywood Canteen, in a converted stable on Cahuenga Boulevard, where any serviceman or woman in uniform got in free, ate for free, and might be served a sandwich by a movie star and pulled onto the dance floor by another. No officers, Garfield insisted, and no segregation by rank or race. Nearly four million came through the doors in three years. The stars washed dishes and bused tables, and the profits of two films made about the place were poured back into running it. When the Canteen closed on Thanksgiving Day of 1945, the half a million dollars left in the bank was given to the relief of the men and women it had served. It was the gift economy of the film set, opened up and pointed outward.
The film becomes the gift
Then the instinct learned the trick that would matter most: a film could be made into the gift itself, not merely the thing that paid for one. In 1954, at the height of his fame, the comedian Danny Kaye became the first Goodwill Ambassador for the young United Nations children’s fund, a role he held for thirty-three years, until he died. He made a film, Assignment: Children, underwritten by Paramount, every dollar of profit given to the fund, and it reached more than a hundred million people. Kaye put the spirit of it better than any definition could. Politics don’t count where children are concerned, he said. How can you love an Israeli child and not an Arab child, a North Korean child and not a South Korean child. It’s impossible.
What Kaye began, others took up, and the taking-up is the thread itself, because each was handed the impulse by the one before. Audrey Hepburn had been a half-starved child in occupied Holland, kept alive in part by international relief; she became the fund’s ambassador in 1988 and gave the last five years of her life to it, saying plainly that the aid she once received was why she went. And when Roger Moore, who had played James Bond, was asked what moved him to the same work, he did not reach for a grand reason. His curiosity got the better of him, he said, after his friend Audrey Hepburn introduced him to it. He went to a meeting with her and stayed for the rest of his life. Kaye to Hepburn to Moore: three actors, three decades, one thread, each pulled in by the hand of the one before. The impulse was never an abstraction. It traveled person to person, the way most true things do.
Fame as an instrument
It traveled into other rooms and changed shape as it went. In 1982 Paul Newman began bottling his own salad dressing as a joke and a dare, gave every cent of the profit away, and kept giving until it passed six hundred million dollars. A movie star’s hobby had become one of the quietly radical ideas in American business: a company that exists only to give itself away. He was embarrassed, he said, that the dressing was outgrossing his films. The model was good enough that more than two dozen other companies copied it outright, and a generation of his peers pointed to him as the reason they gave at all. Elizabeth Taylor took the idea somewhere harder. In 1985, watching a plague move through her own community while the country looked away, she decided her fame was the only tool equal to the silence and became the first major star to stand up for people dying of AIDS, raising money and breaking the shame around the disease at a moment when almost no one of her stature would say its name aloud. I resented my fame, she said, until I realized I could use it.
Never only American
In India, the actor Aamir Khan turned a television program about his country’s miseries into the Paani Foundation and sent thousands of villages into a competition to build their own watersheds, helping turn drought-cracked land green again across Maharashtra. In China, the martial-arts star Jet Li nearly drowned with his small daughters in the 2004 tsunami and came out of the water changed, building what became one of the first private charitable foundations his country had ever allowed, on the arithmetic that one person and one dollar and one month could add up to one enormous family. Jackie Chan, who had wanted only to be famous and rich, said his friends taught him to give and now he could not stop; he built schools across the remote interior of China. In Britain, a screenwriter came home from the 1985 Ethiopian famine and founded Comic Relief, and over forty years the comedians and filmmakers of one country made the public laugh into giving more than a billion and a half pounds. The thread ran through every film culture on earth, under a hundred flags, almost never under a shared name.
When it did not work
It did not always work, and the honest record says so.
Brad Pitt set out after Hurricane Katrina to rebuild the homes of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. He meant it with his whole heart, and he hired great architects, and the houses began to rot and leak and fail, and the families he meant to help ended up in court, and a promised settlement collapsed when the money behind it proved not to be there. We went into it incredibly naive, he said, years later. He had asked the right question and gotten the answer terribly wrong.
When the Brazilian film City of God cast the real young people of a real Rio favela and made them stars for a season, it changed some of their lives and left others almost exactly where it found them. One of them said plainly that the film had brought the favela no good at all.
These are not failures of instinct. They are failures of execution, and they belong here as surely as the triumphs, because a field that cannot look honestly at its near misses and its collapses is not a field. It is a brochure. The problem is never the wanting. It is the design.
None of this was a gap. A relief fund in 1921, a benevolent fund in 1924, a wartime canteen in 1942, a film made to give in 1954 and the long human chain that followed it, a company built to give itself away in 1982, a star who broke a silence in 1985: a whole world of givers, real and continuous, reaching across the century. The thread was there the whole time. What it never had was a name to make it legible as one thing, so each generation built from instinct rather than from the one before, and began again where someone else had already arrived.
The modern renaissance
By the end of the twentieth century the scattered instinct began to organize into something more deliberate, a renaissance of about thirty years in which people began not only to do this work but to build it into the machinery of production, to study it as a subject, and at last to give a piece of it a name. Three things were happening at once, and Social Effects exists to celebrate all three and to build on them.
The operators
The first was a new kind of operator, who looked at the sheer physical wreckage of a production, the tons of material and food and the built worlds struck and dumped the moment the camera stopped, and asked whether the making itself could be turned toward good. They worked out the answers with their own hands, and they are the forerunners of this whole field.
In 1991, Syd Mandelbaum, the son of Holocaust survivors, stood backstage at a concert and watched untouched food thrown away by the ton while people went hungry a few miles down the road. He had come home from the first World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors with something burning in him that would not go out, a sense that he had to do something to change the world. His answer was Rock and Wrap It Up. It began with concert food and grew into a discipline: the contractual rider that says prepared food which was never served does not go to the landfill, it goes to people. He took it to film and television sets, to sports arenas, to hotels and schools. Over the decades his model has recovered, by the organization's own count, the equivalent of more than a billion meals, and the language he drafted became the basis of a 2008 federal law encouraging the government to donate its own surplus food rather than throw it away.
Eva Radke took up the next part of the problem in a Brooklyn warehouse in 2008. She had worked in the art departments of productions and could not stop seeing what got thrown away when a set came down, the lumber and the furniture and the paint, whole rooms of usable material dumped because no one had made the place that would catch it. So she made it. Film Biz Recycling, eleven thousand square feet, where productions could send their struck sets instead of the dump, and most of what came in went back out to charities, schools, and theater companies. She diverted six hundred tons over seven years and won an Environmental Protection Agency award for it. Then, in 2015, the Brooklyn warehouse closed, because the retail floor could not cover the last hundred thousand a year and the foundation world did not yet know how to fund a thing that looked like a thrift store and acted like a public utility. She called that closing watching a unicorn die. But the work did not die with the warehouse. The name reopened in Savannah and still does its job, and the deeper engine she had been building alongside it, ArtCube Nation, a worldwide network of the makers and art-department crews who catch what productions discard, is still going strong two decades on. Obi-Wan and Dumbledore, she said, were stronger in death, and maybe her impact would be felt more once the thing itself was gone. She was right, and then some: the people who came after learned from what she made and from what it cost her, while she simply kept building. Learn more about Eva’s experience here at the Case Study in the Ledger.
Others turned the same instinct into something that could last. In 2009, out of a film shoot in Minnesota where she and a colleague diverted eleven tons of waste in ten weeks, Shannon Schaefer Bart founded EcoSet and created the on-set role that had never quite existed, the person whose whole job is to make sure the production gives back what it cannot use. With Kris Barberg, who now runs it, EcoSet turned set surplus into a standing operation: a Los Angeles warehouse where nonprofits and families take what they need for free, diversion rates that reach into the high nineties, and millions of dollars of reusable goods moved out of the waste stream and back into the community. Bart’s work was so thoroughly the future that the future hired her; she is now at Netflix, helping make production sustainability the default across one of the largest content engines on earth. On the East Coast, beginning in 2013, Emellie O’Brien and Earth Angel made the same case in the same years, turning the greening of a film set from a footnote into a profession. Their full records open this Ledger’s entries below.
The scholars
The second thing was that serious people began to study film-for-good as a field rather than a scatter of one-off projects. The most careful of that work came out of UCLA, at the Skoll Center, endowed in 2014 by a ten-million-dollar gift from Jeff Skoll, who had founded Participant Media on the conviction that a well-told story could be a force in the world. In 2019 the Center published The State of Social Impact Entertainment, a rigorous attempt to map the narrative film, documentary, television, and theater that engage audiences in the world’s problems, and to give that work a history and a set of best practices. It called itself the field’s first such report and promised others; none has yet followed, which leaves it standing, years on, as the one serious map of its kind. It charts that ground with care, the ground of what a finished film says to the people who watch it. This Ledger travels a second axis.
The word
The third thing was that a piece of the field finally got a name. The word is Filmanthropy, film and philanthropy joined on purpose. As far as the public record shows, it was introduced around 2007 and 2008 by Ted Leonsis, the media entrepreneur behind the documentary platform SnagFilms, who used it for films aimed at the causes the world most needs to face. He built the word, and the credit is his. Others picked it up and carried it, each in a different place and for a different reason: a festival in Los Angeles that took the name in 2009 to honor filmmakers working for a better world, a producer in Dallas who used it for films made to raise money for a cause, a social enterprise in London that took it in 2017 for its work teaching participatory filmmaking, a foundation in Burbank that took it in 2020 to support people in the industry. Each was a real effort by real people, and each gave the word meaning long before the field these pages describe had been seen whole.
These are the shoulders this Ledger stands on: the operators who built the infrastructure, the scholars who studied the work, the namers who gave a piece of it a word. The renaissance was real. It happened across decades and across very different kinds of work, and it was not yet understood as one coherent and various tradition.
The thing no one named
Stand back far enough and the pattern is undeniable. A relief fund in 1921 and a skatepark in 2018 are the same gesture, made a century and an ocean apart. And yet no account had ever drawn the full line between them, because the people best placed to draw it were each looking at a different part.
The scholars charted what a finished film says to its audience: the documentary that changes a law, the drama that shifts a public mood. The word, in nearly every hand that held it, meant the same thing, film as advocacy, the finished film pointed at a cause. That is a true and valuable axis, and it names one real strand of everything in these pages. But it does not reach the bucket on Pickford’s set, or the half a million dollars left in the Canteen’s bank, or the six hundred tons Eva Radke kept out of the landfill, or the skatepark left standing in the desert. None of those is a message. They are gifts the making left behind, in the people and the places a production touches, whether or not the finished film ever says a word. That is the second axis, and it had no map.
That is not a small oversight. A practice that cannot see itself cannot teach itself to the next generation, cannot become a discipline with standards and a memory. The thread existed. What it still needed was to be seen whole, and named, so it could become a tradition someone could build on.
What this record sets out to do is modest and specific, and worth stating without inflation. Not to invent a word, because the word already exists and is good, and inventing a replacement would only hide the debt owed to everyone who carried it first. The work is to take the existing word and widen it to fit the whole field at last, to say that Filmanthropy is not only film as advocacy but every way the love of film and the love of humanity meet, whether proceeds, materials, presence, equity, the change a story works in the people who watch it, or something permanent left behind. And then to name the cutting edge the word had never reached, the part the rest of these pages are really about: not the giving a production remembers on its way out, but the giving it is built around from the start.
Why now
This Ledger arrives now, and not ten years ago or ten years from now, for two reasons. The first is that the founding era of the field is ending in plain sight, just as it becomes visible. The second is harder to see, and it changes everything.
An era closing
Participant, which carried Filmanthropy in its advocacy sense further than any company before it, and proved along the way that conscience and a balance sheet could coexist, closed in 2024 after twenty years and a wall of Academy Awards. Some of the founding generation of practitioners, the people who built the first recycling warehouses and the first on-set sustainability crews, are still alive and still working, and have never once been interviewed as part of a connected story, because the connected story did not exist to interview them for. The institution that grew from Pickford’s bucket has just passed its hundredth birthday. The founding chapter is closing at the very moment the book about it can finally be written. That window is open now, and it will not stay open.
The artifact and the event
For the entire century this record describes, one thing was always true and never had to be said: to get the film, you had to make it. You had to go somewhere real, with real people, and do the thing. The finished film was the visible part, the artifact that streamed and was reviewed and won or lost a weekend. But the artifact was never the whole of it. The work was also the months an actor spent becoming someone else, the town that hosted the shoot, the village a crew built on location, the people changed by having been in the room. The film was the artifact. The making was the event. And you could not have the first without the second.
That assumption is now coming loose. Artificial intelligence has begun to produce the artifact without the event. A feature-length film generated almost entirely by AI, with no cast and no crew and no cameras, has been accepted into a major festival for the first time. Synthetic performers are being built and marketed as the next generation of movie stars. Some of the most serious filmmakers alive are split clean down the middle over what to make of it, one of them answering that he would rather die than use the tools, another, who has chased every new technology to its edge, calling a performance conjured from a prompt horrifying and predicting in the same breath that live human work will only become more sacred for the contrast.
The question the next century of filmmaking has to answer, then, is no longer how to make the artifact. The machine can produce the artifact. The question is what, in the making of films, cannot be generated, and the honest answer runs in two directions at once.
Outward, toward the world the film passes through. A model can produce a convincing image of a place, but it cannot give anything back to one, because it was never in one. It cannot employ a town, or spend an afternoon with a community, or leave a skatepark behind. Everything this record has gathered lives in that direction, and none of it can be simulated, because all of it depends on having actually happened, somewhere, to someone.
Inward, toward the people who do the making. A model can produce a performance, but it cannot undergo one. It was never on the set before dawn, never afraid, never changed by the months of work alongside other people. You do not simply make a film, you go through one, and the people who go through it come out altered. That, too, is a kind of giving, the kind a production makes to its own, and it is as far beyond a prompt as the skatepark is, for the same reason. The model has no afternoon to spend and no self to transform.
As the artifact becomes abundant and instant, then, the worth of a film does not vanish. It moves toward the event the artifact was only ever the trace of, toward everything that had to actually happen, to real people in a real place, before there was anything to watch at all.
The next hundred years
The future of this field is not a defense against the machine. It is something more hopeful, a clarification, forced into the open by the very technology that seemed to threaten it.
Regenerative
There is a word, borrowed from agriculture and design and economics, that names the shape of the hope. Regenerative. It was coined by people who found sustainable too small for what they meant. To sustain is to maintain, to do less harm, to leave a system no worse than you found it. To regenerate is to leave it actively better, more alive than before. One of the farmers who helped coin the term put it plainly: people do not want a world that is merely sustained, they want one that is getting better.
Read as a brief for a film shoot, that becomes a definition worth keeping: a regenerative production is one that leaves the people and the place that hosted it better off than if the film had never come. A traditional production arrives, takes what it needs, and leaves, and what it leaves behind is an afterthought at best, a row of full dumpsters at worst. A regenerative production designs the giving in from the first day, before a frame is shot. Surplus is rehomed, skills are shared, the young people of the place are brought onto a real set, and the cast and crew are given a real stake in the thing they made. The material that would have been wasted becomes something the community keeps. At its furthest reach, the production leaves something permanent. The giving is built into the making, with intention, from the start.
This is why the arrival of AI, which frightens so many, may be the moment the field comes into its own. When the artifact is free, the event is everything. When anyone can generate the image of a town, the production that actually employed one, fed one, and built something lasting in one becomes not the old way of doing things but the valuable way, the human way, rooted in the physical and social world and impossible to copy out of it. The tools will keep getting better, and they should. The work of making a film with other people, in a real place, for the lasting good of that place and the people in it, will keep being something only people can do.
There is an older idea underneath all of this. You do not change the world by fighting the thing you want to replace. You change it by building a new model that makes the old one obsolete. This record is not an argument against the way films have always been made. It is the account of a better way that has been building itself for a hundred years, in scattered pieces, under no single name, and an invitation to see those pieces as one thing at last, and to build the next hundred years of it on purpose.
New Jersey, and the open hand
A field has to take root somewhere first, in some actual place, with people willing to go before the rest.
Where American film began
American film did not begin in Hollywood. It began in New Jersey, in Thomas Edison’s studios just west of New York and then on the cliffs of Fort Lee, the country’s first film town, where the studios clustered before the industry chased the sun west and forgot the place it came from. A hundred years later the cameras are coming back, drawn by new studios and soundstages and incentives into towns that have not hosted a production in generations. The industry is returning to its birthplace with a chance to decide, this time, at the beginning, what kind of industry to build.
That opportunity is not only New Jersey’s. The cases in these pages were built in Los Angeles and London, in Rajasthan and New Zealand, in a Brooklyn warehouse and a Minnesota winter, in Mumbai and Rio and the interior of China. Each time, the work was done and then forgotten, and had to be done again elsewhere by someone who did not know it had a lineage. The task now is to stop the forgetting: to gather the lineage, name it, and hand it to whoever comes next. And then to plant a flag somewhere willing to be first.
The open hand
New Jersey can be the place that goes first. A production arriving in a New Jersey town is a temporary institution of real wealth and real power, landing in a community, employing it, using its spaces, and then leaving. The only question, the one this whole record has circled, is what it leaves, and whether the leaving was designed or left to chance. It can leave the town as it found it. It can leave it a little worse. Or it can be built so that the making itself is a gift, the town left more whole than the production found it, and the people who made the film left changed by having made it that way. That choice is in front of New Jersey now, and in front of every place the cameras go.
What it could look like
So picture the largest version of it, because the largest version is the one that makes the case.
A major film comes to New Jersey. Not a modest independent feature but a tentpole, the kind of production that costs as much as a small city’s annual budget, half a billion dollars, with the spectacle and the stars and the opening weekend that a number like that demands. By any ordinary measure it is one of the largest economic events the region will host that year. The ordinary measure is also the whole problem. A production that size moves through a place like weather: it rents what it needs, hires for the duration, spends enormous sums in a few months, and then the trucks pull away and the place settles back to what it was, a little richer for a season and otherwise unchanged. The money was real. It simply passed through.
Now imagine the same half a billion dollars, the same movie, every spectacular frame of it intact, with one decision made before the first day of construction: that the budget would be routed, wherever it could be, so that spending it built something that stayed. This is not a smaller film or a worthier one. It is the same blockbuster, run through a different plumbing.
The sets are the clearest case. A production of this scale builds whole worlds and, by long habit, sends them to the landfill at wrap. Designed the other way, the structures go up to last, engineered from the first blueprint to become buildings the place will keep, on land held by a community land trust so the value cannot be quietly bought out from under it a decade later, the way value usually is. What the production needed anyway, walls and roofs and power and people who know how to use them, is simply built to code instead of built to be thrown away.
The crew follows the same logic. A film this size employs thousands, and staffed the ordinary way the skilled people are flown in and flown out and the town waves at the lights. Staffed the other way, much of the crew is hired local and trained on the job, so the shoot doubles as the largest vocational program the county has run, and the week the film wraps there is a trained workforce standing in a place that did not have one before.
None of this is visible from a seat in the theater, and that is the part worth saying plainly, because it is the part that makes the whole thing work. The audience sees a great movie, the same great movie they would have seen anyway, with no idea that the building in the establishing shot is now in use or that the extras in the crowd scene now hold the jobs the production trained them for. The regeneration takes nothing from the screen. A film can be pure entertainment to the person watching and pure infrastructure to the place that made it, at the same time, with no contradiction between the two, because they happen in different places: one on the screen, one on the ground.
Now point that whole engine at a single problem, because a vague gift to a town is weaker than a real one aimed at something specific. Take the film’s subject and let it choose the target. Say the story concerns mental health, a subject nearly every family touches and the screen has always done well by. New Jersey already spends enormous public sums on its mental health crisis, much of it on the most expensive and least healing parts of the system: emergency rooms, repeat hospitalizations, the revolving door that holds people without ever leaving them better. That money is mostly rented. It buys a bed for a night and the night ends.
A film budget is spent once, and it can buy rather than rent. For four million dollars a New Jersey hospital builds an EmPATH unit, a calm, living-room-style space where a person in crisis is met by clinicians instead of waiting on a gurney in a hallway; the first ones in the state are opening now. A statewide network of mobile crisis teams, the peers and counselors who come to a person rather than waiting for the police to, runs the state about sixteen million dollars a year. Against numbers like these, a single half-billion-dollar production reads differently. The same sum that buys one weekend of spectacle could, routed the regenerative way, stand up a dozen of those crisis units across the state, fund years of mobile teams, and buy outright, into a land trust, a network of ordinary houses turned into respite homes, places to stay and steady rather than be committed, owned free and clear so no landlord and no budget cut can take them back. And then the film opens. The thing that makes this more than a one-time grant is that the production is also a product: the ticket sales, the streaming, the long tail of a movie that millions watch, flowing back to keep the houses open and the teams on the road, so the gift sustains itself instead of running out the way a warehouse dependent on year-to-year fundraising eventually does. Culture pays for care, and the care, captured on film, pays for more culture.
What it asks in return is the hard part, and the honest record has to say so. It costs more at the front, before a frame is shot, when a production is least inclined to spend on anything but the picture. It asks a studio to decide a year early what most studios decide late or never, and a state to treat its film incentives as an investment in what gets left behind rather than a discount on what passes through. The first production to try it at this scale will get pieces of it wrong, the way Pitt got the houses wrong and the first reuse warehouses ran out of runway, because first attempts at hard things miss. But the miss is in the execution, never in the idea, and the idea is simply this: a sum of money that large, spent in one place over one year, is going to change that place either way. The only question is whether anyone designed the change.
That is the moonshot. Not only a film about a better world, though it can be that too, but a film whose own making leaves a measurably better place behind it, on purpose, at the largest scale the industry is capable of. New Jersey, where the cameras first turned and are turning again, is as good a place as any to find out whether it can be done, and a better place than most, because it is where the story started.
The full argument, with the New Jersey numbers, is laid out in the Moonshot companion.
Author’s note
A note on how I came to this. I did not find this pattern in an archive. I found it because I was trying to build it, and discovered that others had been building pieces of it for a hundred years before me. I am forming a company in New Jersey whose whole purpose is to make this kind of giving a designed part of how films get made, and the more of the work I did, the more I saw that I was not first, and that the people who were first had never been gathered into a single story or even told they belonged to one. This Ledger is my attempt to gather them. It is history and reportage and argument at once, and unapologetically hopeful, because the work itself has made me so. I offer it not as the last word but as the first draft of a record that I hope a great many other people will spend the next hundred years correcting and continuing.