The Cowboys, Pirates, and Misfits Phase

You know, I was thinking… John Malone said the beginning of every industry is filled with cowboys, pirates, and misfits, and more than eleven years in, I’m pretty sure Heritage Films is still in that phase.

Malone was talking about cable television. Back in the early days, the cable industry was a mess. No regulation, no playbook, no established players. Just a bunch of wildcatters stringing coaxial cable across rural America because they saw an opportunity nobody else did. They were cowboys. Literally building infrastructure in open territory with more guts than sense. They were the original “If you build it, they will come” people.

Then came the pirates. The ones who bent every rule, exploited every loophole, and operated in the gray space between “technically legal” and “definitely going to get regulated eventually.” Mavericks like Ted Turner. People who didn’t ask permission because there was nobody to ask.

And then the misfits. The weirdos who didn’t fit in any existing industry, so they built a new one. The people too creative for corporate America, too stubborn for academia, too restless for a normal job.

That’s Heritage Films right now.

Legacy documentary filmmaking is not an established industry. There’s no trade association. There’s no annual conference (yet). There’s no licensing board, no certification program, no Fortune 500 company doing what we do at scale. In fact, there are no companies doing what we do at our scale. The space is wide open, and the people in it are, to put it politely, a colorful bunch. On one hand, there are artsy fartsy people with no business sense who can’t put the family first because they are an artiste. On the other side are business people who see opportunity but don’t know which end of the camera to point at the person. So what do they do? They hire the artsy fartsy folks and run into the aforementioned problem.

I’m a veteran who spent years in a completely different career before picking up a camera. My team is a mix of filmmakers, tech people, and one person whose previous job I’m still not entirely clear on. We figure things out as we go. We build the plane while we’re flying it. We break stuff, fix stuff, and occasionally set stuff on fire.

That’s the cowboy-pirate-misfit phase. And I love it.

Every mature industry was once this chaotic. Cable was. The internet was. Social media was. The early days are always ugly, always messy, always a little embarrassing when you look back on them. But they’re also the most exciting, the most creative, and the most alive.

I’m in the process of polishing Heritage Films into something more special. We put experience and quality on an even plane and bust our asses to overachieve on both.

Giddy up, matey!

Heritage Films produces personal documentary films for families across the United States and the world. We’re cowboys, not corporate. If that sounds like your kind of people, get in touch.