Biography

Louise Levison has a 30-year track record for creating business plans for films (both single and slates) and other entertainment companies. Her clients have raised money for low-budget films such as The Blair Witch Project, the most profitable independent film in history, and for slates with budgets totaling up to $300 million. She is publisher and editor of The Film Entrepreneur: A Newsletter for Independent Filmmakers and Investors, which is available for free downloading at moviemoney.com. This book is the inspiration for the feature documentary Movie Money CONFIDENTIAL, in which Levison is interviewed and for which she was the technical advisor. She taught at UCLA for 22 years and has been a Visiting Professor at the Taipei (Taiwan) National University of the Arts and the University of Montana (Missoula). Levison holds an MA in Asian Area Studies and an MBA in finance.
- IMDb mini biography by: Business Strategies

Levison attended Simmons University, studying to become a nurse. Changing her mind, she graduated with a BA in psychological measurements. Then she obtained an MA in Asian Area Studies from NYU. Over the next 20 years, she had jobs in corporate planning at both for-profit and not-for-profit companies ending with 10 years in the hospital business.

In 1988, she made the first of 28 trips to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It was the third edition of what became the biggest festival focusing on independent film. Wanting to be independent herself, she finally formed her own company, Business Strategies, and also earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA).

While writing the first edition of her book, "Filmmakers & Financing: Business Plans for Independents", Levison also began teaching a course on film business plans in the Extension Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she remained for 22 years until moving to Florida.

If an investor asks a simple question, give a simple answer.

If you care about the film you are making, it is a passion project. It does not matter if it is low-budget, experimental or a high-budget action adventure.

The investor needs to know all the plot points of the film from start to finish in one page.

No matter their personal reasons for investing, there are two things all film investors want to know: how much money am I going to make and when am I going to make it?

Avoid foolish forecasting. If I had told potential investors that The Blair Witch Project, a very low-budget film, was going to earn $352 million dollars worldwide, which it did, no one would ever hire me.