Making a living v. making art

In reading Kevin Obstatz’s recent article “Imagining Sustainable Independent Cinema,”one section gave me a sense of déjà vu: “…in my 10 years of experience in the local film community, I've seen incredibly talented friends and colleagues bounce back and forth between unpaid projects, corporate freelancing, and short-term day jobs, until they're emotionally exhausted by the cycle of long days of hard work followed by long weeks of unemployment, never knowing when the next call for a paying gig will come, and sick of not being able to afford health insurance. As we get older, our willingness to work on any paying gig grows stronger, and creative expression and even self-respect become unaffordable luxuries.” This sounds a lot like the situation that theater artists face as well. And musicians, and painters and poets and comic book artists and dancers and every other kind of artist I can think of. And you can add organic farmers to that list as well. It seems like that’s the economy of every job that people like to do for its own sake, that people will make sacrifices for the prospect of possibly being able to do it full time. A few become life-long pros and the rest move on to something else as they get older. I am reminded of what famed indie music producer Steve Albini said in 2007: In the age of digital media, music will become more like tennis. It will be widely available, a lot of people will do it for fun, and a very small number of people will be able to make a living at it. I was also reminded of what indie producer and new-world-of-film guru Ted Hope called "The Glut": “For the last decade and a half, we have been myopically focused on production. Using Sundance submissions as a barometer, our production ability has increased eight and half times over—850%—from 400 to 3600 films in fifteen years.” Kevin’s frustration is echoed by Hope: “C’mon! What are we doing? Wasting a tremendous amount of energy, talent, and brainpower—that much is clear. If the average budget of Sundance submissions is $500K, that means the aggregate production costs are $1.8 billion dollars a year. That’s a hell of a lot of money to lose annually.” Along with many other excellent suggestions about how to create a better, freer cinema, Hope also thinks we simply need to make fewer films. Supply and demand applies to film as it does to everything else, after all. Now I’ll leave that to other people, as I still want to make films. So are there people out there practicing an artistically experimental, completely outside-the-system, yet sustainable form of film (or theater)? Director Matthew Porterfield recently wrote about his film Putty Hill(which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival) as a regional (to Baltimore), collaborative, completely independent model for filmmaking. Hopefully, it’s better than it’s initial reviews. One artist who excites me from an artistic and business perspective is New York-by-way-of-San Francisco writer/director/actor/musician/painter Cory McAbee. His black-and-white, sci-fi, cowboy musicals The American Astronaut and Stingray Sam are as innovative, bizarre, and personal as films get. He distributes through festivals, theatrical showings set up by his fans and digital downloads, and gives his fans many ways to purchase his work, up to the “Deluxe Package.” A local theater model that inspires me is Jeremy Catterton and Peter Wolf Crier’s collaboration This Is Not For You, described on this site as “an odd mix of cd release event, play, dance, storytelling, and multi-media mash-up” that took place in an old house. Not only was it completely unique artistically, but they used differing levels of tickets to give some audience members a more in-depth experience, maximizing revenue within the confines of their small location (and I write “maximizing revenue” with the relish that only comes with having been responsible for a theater with a payroll). But will these innovators become financially sustainable? Will they no longer have to hustle for free stuff? Somehow I doubt it. But maybe some amazing art will happen anyway.