How the Ford Foundation Changed Entertainment: The Ford Foundation

How the Ford Foundation Changed the Entertainment Industry (full series)
The Ford Foundation | Direct Film Funding | Film Festivals
Outreach, Networks, and Education | Why Ford’s Strategy Works

Media and entertainment are a rapidly growing sector of the global economy, as money flows in to fuel the world’s seemingly endless appetite for movies and television. These films and shows do more than just entertain. Their content is injected into the culture, and they affect the way people think and feel. Wise funders know that supporting the entertainment industry can yield more than just a financial return on investment: shaping Hollywood shapes the world.

Often underappreciated within this multi-billion-dollar Hollywood spending craze is the impact of charitable giving. While Hollywood films are often seen as high-risk, high-reward investment opportunities, much of the independent film ecosystem consists of unprofitable passion projects. Documentaries in particular—with a few notable exceptions—tend to be unprofitable and usually fundraise on the promise of a cultural impact, rather than financial returns.

While discerning viewers may certainly come to their own conclusions about the motives of major funders, creators, and distributors in the entertainment industry, analyzing the ideological motivations behind Hollywood investments is often difficult. However, because of the transparency required of 501(c)(3) nonprofits and foundations, meaningful data are available to reveal how and why films are receiving charitable funds. An examination of this data can provide insights into how major philanthropic film funders view the relationship between entertainment and ideology.

This article focuses on one of the largest of these funders: the Ford Foundation. It will primarily use public information provided on the foundation’s website. Ford is proud of its grantmaking, and with good reason: It represents many millions of dollars over years of dedicated media and entertainment strategy. In analyzing this strategy, we can reveal how a well-funded and ideologically driven film apparatus can support the production of the stories that shape our culture.

Ford is not a primarily film-oriented foundation, though such funding does constitute a meaningful part of its total grantmaking strategy. Crucially, Ford has a holistic attitude toward film funding, and analyzing its entire film program—not just the direct funding for individual films—reveals how the foundation maximizes its effect on the culture.

Accordingly, Ford’s left-of-center grantmaking bias is also examined. It is certainly no surprise that a left-progressive foundation would focus on backing left-progressive artistic endeavors. Ford is transparent about its mission and even more transparent about its grantmaking than is legally required. It provides detailed grant information in a searchable database directly on its website. Support for the arts is also a widely accepted purpose for philanthropy, and Ford has made an impressive show of support for art that aligns with its ideology and goals. For those interested in how money can help one ideology prevail over another in media and pop culture, the Ford Foundation provides a blueprint.

The Ford Foundation

Founded almost 90 years ago and endowed with the vast mid-20th century wealth of the founder of Ford Motor Company, the Ford Foundation is one of just a handful of private foundations in the United States that can claim to be something approaching a household name. With total net assets of nearly $14 billion at the end of 2022, it is one of the largest grantmaking foundations in the world.

Ford is also a pillar of the philanthropic Left, with a well-earned reputation as one of the country’s most overtly ideological institutional grantmakers—even among a peerage in Big Philanthropy that already leans decidedly in that direction. Ford describes its history as one of “social justice” and considers efforts to combat various forms of inequality to be its core purpose. To Ford, the root causes of this inequality are things such as “patriarchy” and “an economic system that exploits some and advantages others.” In a 2020 Capital Research Center study analyzing 501(c)(3) public policy spending on both the right and left, Ford was selected as one of the five nationally representative left-of-center grantmakers used in the analysis.

Against this backdrop, it is notable that the Ford Foundation places a heavy emphasis on supporting the documentary film industry. According to the foundation, its film-related grantmaking constitutes “one of the largest documentary funds in the world.” Films are a powerful medium for telling stories and affecting culture, and Ford has emphasized the importance of storytelling in advancing its mission, noting that filmmaking plays “a powerful role in building a more equitable, democratic, and joyful world.”

Size, Scope, and Strategy

The Ford Foundation is far from the only foundation that supports filmmaking, though it’s probably the most important. A 2022 report from Inside Philanthropy lists 10 “film funders to know,” which it says give the most money for filmmaking. According to the report, while Ford is “clearly the biggest foundation funder of film in the country,” other important grantmakers include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hobson Lucas Family Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Wyncote Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, the Dalio Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation. Some of these—such as MacArthur and Open Society—rank alongside Ford as among the most prominent left-of-center private foundations in the United States.

According to that Inside Philanthropy report, Ford gave over $321 million total for filmmaking from 2014 to 2018. Based on its annual tax filings, this would represent approximately 12.5 percent of the foundation’s total grantmaking over that five-year period—a substantial investment.

One way to zoom in on the details of Ford’s film grantmaking is to use its online grant database, which provides transparency into the foundation’s giving. As of July 2024, it contained 28,211 grants to 8,056 grantees from 2006 through 2023, though grants for 2006 appear to be incomplete. A search for the word “film” in that database returns 909 grants made to 523 grantees over that period, for a total of approximately $161 million. This means that over 3 percent of grants and 6 percent of grantees in Ford’s database are returned by a search for “film.”

Clearly, this method is far from exhaustive—it results in a substantially lower total than what is given in the Inside Philanthropy report, for instance. Ford has certainly made many relevant grants that don’t include the specific word “film.” Still, it is probably sufficiently representative of Ford’s film funding during these years to provide a sense of the types of film programs that the foundation is funding.

Not every Ford Foundation film grant furtheris a left-progressive ideological agenda. In fact, and in full disclosure, one of the authors of this article works for a family film business that has received Ford funding for a decidedly un-woke and not-at-all progressive film. Ford would say that all the money they spend advances their mission, but their mission isn’t exclusively ideological. That said, the vast majority of Ford’s total film spending appears to go directly toward advancing an identifiably left-wing worldview.

One key aspect of the Ford Foundation’s film funding strategy appears to be longevity. Ford is massive, and its endowment ensures that it can exist indefinitely. Indeed, its lofty goals for the future of society necessitate a long-term vision. Ford adheres to many of the same axioms common to forward-thinking Hollywood investors: try lots of different things, fund many projects, don’t be afraid to fund flops, and don’t be discouraged if success isn’t immediate. Ford has funded many successful, high-impact films, but for each of those there are scores of projects that founder in obscurity. Such patience is key to a film funding strategy, something that Ford seems to keenly appreciate. By contrast, donors who are unaccustomed to long-term film funding and instead fund the occasional film project on an ad hoc basis are often disappointed when they don’t see an immediate impact.

Also crucial is that Ford’s vision is much more expansive than film production alone. There appear to be at least three important prongs to its film funding strategy: direct support for films, an appreciation for the importance of film festivals, and fostering a broader filmmaking infrastructure—such as through education, outreach, and networking. These pillars all serve to augment the successes and ultimate impact of Ford’s favored filmmakers, who benefit from an entire ecosystem that is designed to cultivate effective left-progressive storytelling.

In the next installment, the Ford Foundation has supported filmmaking for decades through the JustFilms initiative, its major film grants program.