Our Take
Skater Girl built permanent physical infrastructure for the community its story was about. Sing Sing built permanent equity infrastructure for the people its story was about. Both asked the same question in different registers. Skater Girl: what does this community need that we could also use? Sing Sing: what do these men need, after a lifetime of being taken from, that we could also use? The answer in both cases was ownership. Not gratitude. Not charity. Ownership, designed in from day one. In a film about men whom every system had stripped of agency, the cast did not merely appear in the story. They were paid as equals in it, held equity in it, and in two cases were nominated for an Academy Award for writing it.
The record
- Director
- Greg Kwedar
- Screenplay
- Kwedar & Clint Bentley; story also by Clarence Maclin & John Whitfield
- Lead actor
- Colman Domingo
- Pay structure
- Same SAG scale rate for all cast and crew, star included
- Equity structure
- Pro-rata profit participation for entire cast and crew (80+ people)
- The waterfall
- 60/40 cast-crew split from first dollar; 50/50 after investors recoup 120%
- Cast
- Formerly incarcerated alumni of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), as themselves
- Prison release
- First film released to theaters and prisons at once (A24/RTA/Edovo, Jan 17, 2025)
What makes Sing Sing belong in the Regenerative category of the Ledger is not why Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley made the film. The question is why they structured it the way they did. The film, which premiered at Toronto in 2023 and reached theaters through A24 in 2024, is built around the real Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, and its cast is almost entirely formerly incarcerated alumni of that program, playing versions of themselves alongside Colman Domingo in the lead.
Years of development produced a film with a specific, unusual deal structure. Everyone on set, from the lead actor to the production assistants, was paid the same SAG scale day rate. And everyone, cast and crew, received a pro-rata share of the producers' equity. Not a charitable gesture, not a nominal points deal, but a real ownership pool: more than eighty people with a stake in the outcome. The mechanics were deliberate. Bentley has described a waterfall in which cast and crew share from the first dollar, and once investors recoup their capital and then some, the split moves to fifty-fifty in perpetuity. Ownership, structured to last beyond the box office.
The structure only held because the top of the call sheet agreed to it. Domingo, an Academy Award nominee, took the same rate as a first-day production assistant. Kwedar was blunt about why that mattered: the model does not function unless the number one on the call sheet buys in. He did. And the deeper point was never only about money. Clarence Maclin and John Whitfield, two of the formerly incarcerated men the film is about, share its story credit, and when Sing Sing was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, they became the first RTA alumni ever nominated for an Academy Award. The men were not subjects of the story. They were authors of it, and owners of it.
Kwedar said as much to Variety at the Brooklyn Academy of Music premiere in June 2024: in a story built around people who had had ownership stripped from them, the whole cast and crew would have literal ownership of their own story. The commitment extended past the deal memo. On January 17, 2025, A24 and Rehabilitation Through the Arts, working with the prison-education platform Edovo, made Sing Sing the first film released to theaters and to prisons at the same time, so that men currently incarcerated could see the work that men formerly incarcerated had made.
"We have over 80 profit participants in our half of the business. That's our whole cast and crew. In a story like this, which centers formerly incarcerated men who have been taken advantage of by systems, they have literal ownership over their own story."
Greg Kwedar, Director, Sing Sing, Variety, June 30, 2024