Louise Levison, Film Financial Consultant
Louise Levison, President of Business President of Business Strategies, has been a highly respected financial consultant in the entertainment industry for 30 years specializing in the creation of film business plans. Her clients have raised money for low-budget films such as The Blair Witch Project, the most profitable independent film in history, and for companies raising money slates of films. She is the author of Filmmakers & Financing: Business Plans for Independents (9th Edition, 2022, A Routledge/Taylor&Francis book.). The book is the inspiration for the feature documentary Movie Money CONFIDENTIAL in which Levison is interviewed and appears on panels. She also was the technical advisor, also. In addition, Levison is editor of the monthly online newsletter The Film Entrepreneur: A Newsletter for the Independent Filmmaker and Investor which is available for free downloading at moviemoney.com
Levison’s corporate clients have included The Pamplin Film Company (Movie Money Confidential), Danny Glover’s Louverture Films (2008 nominee for Best Documentary Academy Award Trouble the Water),), Creative Projects Group (Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet), Hurricane Film Partners , LLC (The Red Tide Massacre), International Tokuma International Ltd (Shall We Dance, Princess Mononoke), Simka Entertainment (The Giant King) and Gundersen Entertainment (The Redemption of Henry Myers). Among other clients’ projects are The First of May, Michael Winslow Live, The Open Road, Greater, Burning Bodhi, Moving Midway, and Visual and Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman
Levison was an Instructor in the Extension Program at UCLA for 22 years before moving to Florida. She also has been a Visiting Professor at the Taipei (Taiwan) National University of the Arts, Chapman University (Orange County, CA) and the University of Montana (Missoula). Levison has presented seminars and/or been on panels at the Sundance Film Festival, Brazil Expo Ciné, Film Independent (FIND), Galway (Ireland) Film Fleadh, Women in Film, Producer’s Guild of America, National Association of Broadcasters, National Association Of Latino Independent Producers, Hollywood Black Film Festival, Texas Accountants and Lawyers for the Arts, Austin Film Festival, Florida Motion Picture and Television Association, Cincinnati Film Commission, Independent Cinema Expo, California Lawyers for the Arts, Nashville Film Festival, The Learning Annex (New York and Los Angeles), and many others.
Prior to working in the entertainment industry, Levison spent ten years in the highly regulated health care industry as Director of Corporate Strategy for both the City Of Hope, where she initiated planning for its five corporations, and Torrance Memorial Medical Center. She began her finance career as a Market Analyst at the American Iron and Steel Institute in New York and then moved to California to work as an Economist at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute). Moving to Los Angeles, she was a corporate planner at Hehr International while earning an MBA. Levison also has worked as a part-time stockbroker. She has an MA in Asian Area Studies from New York University, an MBA in Finance from California State University (Dominguez Hills) and a BA from Simmons University (Boston).