, takes the spotlight again after several hearings were rescheduled this summer. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Carolyn Maloney , senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, will host a public discussion Thursday flanked by stakeholders including the Independent Film & Television Alliance . Maloney has been having “substantive conversations” across the aisle, a staffer familiar with the legislation said, anticipating some movement on the bill by year end.
Elite Risk, meanwhile, has placed coverage on 12 smaller TV and film projects, from movies of the week to series and two features, with budgets of around $3 million. Elite offers offers pandemic coverage — including COVID-19 relapse — for cast, civil authority and imminent peril. It costs 8%-12% of a production’s budget. “I acknowledge it is really expensive,” Elite founder and CEO Jeff Kleid said.
In both cases, premiums are due almost immediately — within two or three days of signing, before most productions have money in the bank. That’s an accelerated timetable compared with traditional insurance and can be an obstacle for smaller independent producers that don’t have lines of credit. Spotted Risk’s current policies are with entities that do, but Comenos said the firm is trying to develop an adjustment that would solve the immediate payment issues for indies.
The industry is a web of big and small insurers, brokers, completion bond specialists and various intermediaries with shifting alliances that even insiders call confusing, competitive and territorial. Players interviewed had a wide range of opinions of both firms, ranging from supportive to skeptical.Production has been cautiously ramping up since the coronavirus shuttered sets in mid-March even as financing slowed, hitting independent producers the hardest.
“There is too big an appetite for content,” said Mickey Mayerson, a Los Angeles entertainment attorney who has worked with SpottedRisk on developing several products. He and others hope private equity in particular will agree to backstop COVID insurance.Big PE players are said to be eyeing the space. They have also stepped up occasionally to finance production directly.
“The exciting thing in this space is that outside money can fix this problem. And there is a lot of it,” said Elite Risk’s Kleid. “What happened in March won’t happen again. You will not have the whole world literally leaving sets, in the middle of nowhere.”