The “Bold Hypothesis” That Inspired Inevitable Foundation’s Visionary Fellowship
President Richie Siegel discusses the fellowship’s origins, teaming with Netflix to support disabled filmmakers, and why the new program is an important part of how the nonprofit plans to address Hollywood’s representation gaps.
Filmmaker Ashley Eakin (left) on a film set. (Credit: Courtesy of Ashley Eakin)
By Abbey White
In May, Inevitable Foundation announced its latest program and its first step into the directing space. Supported exclusively by Netflix's Fund for Creative Equity, the Visionary Fellowship is a year-long career building opportunity that invests in one of film’s most underrepresented groups, disabled filmmakers.
Five separate writer-directors will each receive their own $55,000 funding grant in order to complete production of a short film and prepare a feature. Like the foundation’s existing pipeline programs for writers — Accelerate Fellowship and Elevate Collective — Visionary fellows will have access to mentorship support and workshops from industry experts.
They will also have the opportunity to collaborate directly with their fellow cohort members on-set, helping them build a peer support network and wider understanding of production accessibility. At its conclusion, Visionary’s five disabled filmmakers will walk away with a completed short film — which will screen as part of a showcase attended by creative executives, agents, and managers — as well as a packaged feature to set them up for their next step: their feature debut.
Alongside newer endeavors also launched this year, such as the Young Adult Relief Fund, the Visionary Fellowship is expanding Inevitable Foundation’s mission to support more disabled creatives and disability narratives in Hollywood. Below, Richie Siegel, president and co-founder, discusses what inspired the Visionary Fellowship, how it will help deliver more authentic storytelling in film, and why it’s an important part of how Inevitable Foundation plans to solve Hollywood’s disability representation gaps.
Since the organization’s launch, the foundation has maintained that writers were the key to shifting Hollywood towards greater inclusion and equity around disability. When did you realize that directors were also part of the equation for doing that?
Filmmaker Sheridan O’Donnell filming on location. (Credit: Ryle Yazzie)
We became more television-writer heavy in the early years because television is a writer's medium. The director is there coming in and out, but the showrunner has the power. The power in film is in some ways the opposite. It's a filmmakers’ medium. What would start to become clearer coming out of the 2023 writers strike is that TV was going from its "peak" to a downward spiral. The feeling was that this is going to mean a lot of attention back on the film side, specifically smaller, more independent, mid-sized films. Go back to Cord Jefferson's Oscars speech and it is clear this had to happen.
So we began to think about where the pipeline is for disabled filmmakers. When we did the math, the number of disabled filmmakers we knew who made a feature film is four. If it's disabled people who made at least one professional short film that had over $5,000 behind it, it was just a few dozen more. So the question for us became, what are we gonna do about it, and how are we going to solve that programmatically.
Another impetus was that every two years Netflix publishes a report with Stacy L. Smith and USC Annenberg. There's been a lot in there confirming that the more diverse the creative lead is, the more their stories will incorporate other people and themes. We were encouraged by that data point, and knew that disability was a growth opportunity for Netflix. So we used it to show how the story-creator connection really matters. We didn't survey 100 disabled aspiring filmmakers and ask what their needs were. This was a bold hypothesis.
Marisa Torelli-Pedevska, Inevitable Foundation’s co-founder, was already in the writing community when you launched Inevitable, which helped guide you in identifying what barriers program participants might be facing and where they’d need support. How did you uncover what disabled directors were missing or needed in terms of career support and growth?
We had conversations informed by where we sit in the industry, so part of it was a core group of us talking about, “What does this look like?” Part of it was talking with and witnessing some of the challenges directors who we have some proximity to were facing. Some of it was talking to execs and other producers on the other side of the table about what they perceive as valuable. Some of it was just talking to agents and managers. It was an immersive set of conversations and learning.
What support did you find is out there presently for disabled directors and how did you see this fellowship as an answer to gaps in it?
There are a number of disability-specific spaces where recreational filmmaking is really encouraged, rewarded and prioritized. It's a super important part of the ecosystem, which is giving people the place to get their hands dirty and work with peers. An opportunity we saw was to help make stuff at the level that can get into top festivals, that would come from someone who went to a prestigious production graduate or undergraduate program, who had tons of financing to throw at it.
The bar that we wanted to work at was high, and through that we saw a specific opportunity. There are disabled people that are going to film school and graduating, but from what we've heard and from Marisa’s own experience, accessibility within that school environment is a challenge, and is not at all a given. Once you’re on set, there’s a huge uphill battle to make them accessible, especially when you're the lowest person on the ladder. That goes back to where these opportunities are coming from.
Filmmaker Ashley Eakin (right) directing on a set. (Credit: Courtesy of Ashley Eakin)
This is an opportunity to be in charge of the set, and set the priorities and standards. There also often can be good attendance from disabled people at certain film festivals, but generally speaking, the more prestigious it becomes, the less accessible it becomes. You can look at past incidents at Sundance and so forth. The landscape felt like there were a lot of gaps with some existing pockets of progress.
We also felt the dichotomy between the indie space and the core industry. We're very interested in scrappiness and resourcefulness — to invest in a generation of filmmakers who know how to stretch $1 because unfortunately, it can take a long time for these artists to get access to bigger budgets than their nondisabled peers, some of whom are arguably less qualified.
Why did you want to go with writer-directors instead of just directors for hire, and what might a disabled director bring that a disabled writer wouldn’t in filmmaking?
We're trying to build on the writer network that we have, and if we did a program just for feature screenwriters, it wouldn't have as much impact because the director is eventually going to take over. In an ideal world, for us, there's films where there's a disabled writer and a disabled filmmaker. Maybe it's even the same person, but it felt like this was really responding to the medium.
If someone is telling a story that has anything to do with disability — theme, character, plot line — there is huge value in investing in the person writing the script; trying to really get it on paper in a way that can be entertaining, can be accessible, inclusive. From there, this becomes a filmmaker's medium, and so there's value in having someone who is effectively the head of that project spending “x” dollars to make the thing.
Change all starts at the top, where the tone and the culture is set, so any environment where the director’s very plugged in with the community is going to be a radically different one than someone who isn't, or is pushing against the community. Disabled creatives understand what their needs are, and what other people's needs are.
Ramps help the wheelchair user and the grip lugging the 1,000 pounds of equipment. With a disabled director, instead of individuals wasting all this energy, time and money to fight for the things they need, or explaining why they should be able to use a bathroom onset, disabled team members can spend so much more time on the actual creative process.
Why did Inevitable choose to fund a short film with the added support of packaging a feature versus just focusing on either?
We saw a bit of a bifurcation between the two types of filmmaking programs. There were ones that only help people make short films. Then we saw programs that helped people with features, either on the filmmaking or the writing side. Given where the pipeline was in terms of disabled filmmakers, which is you had some people that had shorts and very few people that had features, we asked what would happen if we built a program that filled the gap instead of creating it.
What if we went from not just helping with the short and ending with a calling card, but putting momentum behind their first or next project? Thinking about the person and their career — not the project, as much — how do we really invest in someone at this very critical stage? We love having finished scripts at the conclusion of the Accelerate Fellowship, but at the end of the day, it's a thing for someone to read, not something for someone to see, and film is such a live, dynamic medium.
Yet, a short film alone also can only do so much. It frequently can't be monetized, so it's part of a resume or portfolio, but you still want to be able to give someone that calling card. So we’re doing the short-plus-the-next-thing — helping to move people towards the feature, which can become commercialized. It feels like a turbo charge opportunity, versus them working in isolation.
From left: Sheridan O’Donnell, Daniel Diemer, Philip Ettinger on set. (Credit: Ryle Yazzie)
How did you determine what was needed in terms of the scale and scope of this fellowship?
This is a year-long program, so you need money to fund a short film; money to “buy” the creatives time to work on this and not have to focus as much on surviving; then you want to help them package, rewrite and get a feature into good shape. Just looking at those things, the final grant came to $55,000 a person, and we're giving out $250,000 total among the five fellows. It's the biggest program we've ever done. We also wanted to have a cohort, so there's all the peer-to-peer benefits that happen, like people learning from each other. We had an idea early on, which is, if we're helping people make shorts, how do we encourage everyone to be on set so they're getting to see multiple sets and environments.
This is also the first time Inevitable has directly built in healthcare support for a fellowship. How did that come about, both in terms of seeing a necessity and then getting a funder to support it?
It became clear in early- to mid-2022 that there was a need for health care for our Accelerate fellows. The Writers Guild is known for having great health insurance, but has pretty stringent rules around who is eligible. So in six months, we figured out how to facilitate a fund to provide a form of non-employer-based insurance. With Visionary, we wanted to try and build it in. It costs thousands of dollars a year, per person, to do this.
Like with the Accelerate Fellowship, it was a question of whether we can be a safety net for someone who's not yet in the guild, or someone who's in the guild but has fallen off the insurance. When we looked at the pipeline for disabled filmmakers — for example, the Disability Committee is very new at the DGA, a guild that is early in its process on some of these issues — there, by nature, were going to be way fewer people who would potentially be in this program on DGA health insurance already. They haven't had a credit to join the DGA, work on a feature, and qualify, so we put it in our budget.
This fellowship is funded exclusively by Netflix. Why were they ultimately the right partner for the Visionary Fellowship?
Given the pullback from the strikes and DEI investment, Netflix is in a league of their own right now in terms of funding programs at scale — the scale that you need to do these things well. They had also seen some success in terms of funding other short film programs, but saw the opportunity to adapt the model for disabled filmmakers. There was really one place that we thought we could call that would see the opportunity as we were trying to carve something new out, and it was something that they got really excited about.
