common good
film in focus
A man with blonde hair and a white shirt looks directly at the viewer.
courtesy ian bricke ’98
“I’m excited about the range of filmmakers telling stories centered on characters that didn’t used to be featured across genres,” says Ian Bricke ’98, vice president, original independent film at Netflix. “That’s how you really push the culture forward.”

perfect pitch

A non-linear path to film production
by Ryan Dougherty
Ian bricke ’98
Creative Executive
A

movie buff’s movie buff, Ian Bricke ’98 relishes every step of the filmmaking journey. But the real thrills lie in late-stage editing.

“When you really figure out the shape of the movie and get to the point of tweaking a line here or trimming a scene there, you can see and feel the transformation,” says Bricke, vice president, original independent film, at Netflix, who leads a team through every stage of a film’s production, from pitch to publicity.

It’s a fitting role for Bricke. He grew up watching (if not quite grasping) Truffaut and Antonioni at the behest of his parents and frequenting Blockbuster Video.

But it wasn’t until Swarthmore that a film career came into focus.

Bricke seized the opportunity to experiment, writing movie reviews for the Phoenix, DJing for WSRN-FM, assisting productions in LPAC, and running a film society “for a general audience of three,” he says.

Through Professor of Film & Media Studies PatriciaWhite, he met members of the film industry in New York and filmmaker Todd Haynes. “There are people making the stuff we’re talking about in classes, and not that far away,” Bricke recalls realizing. “It was kind of that penny-drop moment.”

With help from Swarthmore alumni, he found work reading scripts and assisting producers in New York. Bricke then shifted focus to the business side, doing licensing and acquisitions for Sundance TV and earning an MBA with concentrations in entertainment and media at NYU.

After a similar position with Epix, Bricke moved on to Netflix in 2011, when the now-behemoth was very much still in upstart mode. He started out licensing all categories of content, from anime to kids fare to documentaries to stand-up comedy to film, before shifting to the creative side, pitching a slate of low-budget independent productions, and eventually growing a division. Recent and upcoming projects include Best Picture nominee The Power of the Dog, Luckiest Girl Alive, Spaceman, and They Cloned Tyrone.

“I wound up exactly where I wanted to be,” says Bricke. “It just took a kind of non-linear 20-year timeline to get there.” A highlight was Bricke’s 2017 visit to the Sundance Film Festival, which he had been attending for nearly 20 years, for the screening of an indie he helped make, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.

He was pleasantly surprised when the film was slated for opening night, then elated when it shook the packed house en route to a Grand Jury Prize. “I remember walking out of the theater and just being like, ‘Wow … OK. That was different.’”

“There are definitely moments along the way of ‘Oh, wait. I get to do this?!’” he adds. “And yet there’s still that feeling of waiting to be found out. But so far, so good.”