About the author

Louise Levison, Film Financial Consultant


Louise Levison, President of Business Strategies, is a highly respected financial consultant in the entertainment industry and has specialized in the creation of film business plans for 27 years. 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 as much as $300 million. She is the author of Filmmakers & Financing: Business Plans for Independents currently in its revised and expanded Eighth Edition (A Focal Press Book, 2016). Levison also is editor of the online newsletter The Film Entrepreneur: A Newsletter for the Independent Filmmaker and Investor. Among other clients’ projects are Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, The Open Road, Aluna, Yak: The Giant King, UnAlive, Moving Midway, A War of Their Own, Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, Hoover (starring Ernest Borgnine), Michael Winslow Live, Greater, Redemption Road, Haunted (2012), The Harvest of Empire, Burning Bodhi, The First of May, My Father and the Man in Black, and High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story. Her corporate clients include Danny Glover’s Louverture Films (2008 nominee for Best Documentary Academy Award Trouble the Water) and his Louverture Film Fund I, The Pamplin Film Company (Hoover), Hurricane Film Partners, LLC, Majestic World Entertainment, Kicked to the Curb (13 Reasons Why), and Tokuma International Ltd (Shall We Dance, Princess Mononoke).

Louise Levison

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). Levison also has worked as a stockbroker and co-hosted a call-in radio show heard on 100 stations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico on the Business Radio Network. She is a member of Film Independent (Los Angeles), Women in Film, and the International Documentary Association. Levison has an M.A. in Asian Area Studies from New York University, an M.B.A. in Finance from California State University (Dominguez Hills), and a B.A. from Simmons College (Boston).