last gasp of the never-will-be?
A little over a decade ago, I worked at a P&A fund in New York. P&A stands for “prints & advertising.” Essentially it’s a fund that invests in the marketing of feature films. Perhaps the unsexiest aspect of the film business. Well, not really. If you’ve got money to spend, you’re going to be sexy to someone. And films need to be marketed in order to find an audience, so a number of producers and film distributors found us plenty sexy.
I came upon this line of work by happenstance. I’d always wanted to make movies - feature films - but had pretty much gotten nowhere after about a decade of trying. I could blame it on unfortunate circumstances or the vagaries of an unfair system or some other woe-is-me story, but the truth is that I was a knucklehead. No need to get into the details, but suffice it to say that a too cool for school attitude paired with a strong self-sabotage gene are not a good combination for success (not to mention horrible cliches).
Anyway. A friend of mine - someone not in the film business - mentioned to me over drinks one day that an ex-banker friend of hers was launching some sort of film venture and that we should meet. I soon found out that this film venture was an investment fund, and yada, yada, yada, I somehow bullshitted my way into a job there.
I’m probably giving myself the short shrift here. Around that time I’d written a screenplay that had garnered some interest from some of the talent agencies but ultimately went nowhere. My friend - the one I was having drinks with - thought I should meet her ex-banker buddy because it seemed to her that I was on my way to a successful film career (lol). And when I met the ex-banker, I gave the impression that I knew what I was talking about (I didn't), and before you know it I had a job.
At that point in time I didn’t know anything about the film business. I was the sort of jamoke that thought I’d succeed based solely on my own brilliance (see, I told you I was a knucklehead). But after years of futility, it now dawned on me that I could actually benefit from learning how the business worked! And working at the fund indeed turned out to be the education I’d needed.
It was fun too. I got to fly to Los Angeles all the time and stay in fancy hotels. I got to meet - and often dine and drink with - people whose work I respected and admired. And I learned how movies were made. Not in the sense of how the ideas and stories were conceived and developed, but in the sense of how the money for them to become films came together and how the films made their way to the marketplace (like I said, an education). And at the end of the day, I ended up liking my job very much. I’d always fancied myself more the artist type, but if being a suit was going to finally get me into the film business, well, who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Even though we dealt solely in P&A, I began to get approached by people with film projects of their own. People with dreams of making their own movies. Oftentimes these were very young and green filmmakers who’d heard through a mutual friend or acquaintance that I “worked in movies,” and were eager to find out if I could be that one connection who would take their project to the next level (nope). More often than not, however, these would-be producers were not wet-behind-the-ears dreamers. Rather, they were middle-aged men in their forties and fifties holding on to a dream that - presumably decades into their careers - still eluded them. Men who knew better than to pitch their movies to a junior employee at a P&A fund, but “hey what do I have to lose, right?” Balding, paunchy, tired men who put on a happy face and a zippy sales pitch for my benefit, but whom I suspected went to bed each night buckling under the weight of their own unfulfilled ambitions.
I was always uncomfortable around these types. Partly because they made me sad. But partly because I feared I could one day be one of those guys.
Well, guess what?
I am now one of those guys.
Eventually the job at the P&A fund went away. I won’t get into the details of how because that’s not the point of this post, though it’s a bizarre and funny story that culminates with people angrily screaming at each other on a Friday night at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in Manhattan (I was not one of the screamers). So I went back to trying to make movies, my movies - this time armed with the experience and knowledge of having worked in the film business, though. This time, things would be different!
That’s not exactly how it’s turned out. At least so far.
This isn’t to say I haven’t worked hard or produced good work. A script I wrote is currently under option by a somewhat respectable international studio (fingers crossed!), and I’ve also produced a couple of short films that I’m immensely proud of that have been seen in a number of film festivals (I even directed one of them). And I’ve worked on a number of other people’s films. But the holy grail - the feature film, my feature film - still eludes me.
I’m on the back half of my forties. An age at which a lot of my artistically-minded friends and peers who haven’t “made it” have given up and become real estate brokers and insurance adjustors. And I don’t blame them. I’ve considered it too. But man, I just can’t. Ever since I first discovered the films of Spike Lee1 and David Lynch2 as a kid in the summer of 1989, I’ve wanted to make movies. And that light still shines.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that the light hasn’t dimmed a little bit. But then I came upon the story of Joe.
Specifically, Do the Right Thing, which I learned about in a Rolling Stone interview with Spike Lee (whom I’d never heard of before) upon the film’s initial theatrical release, and whose passion for his movie was eye-opening. Until then I had no idea one could express their views about politics or society in a film (hey, I was a dumb kid back then), and this profoundly changed how I looked at movies. I still remember dragging my buddies to the only screen that was showing the film in our suburban Flyover city (to an almost-empty house), and leaving the theater electrified.
It was Blue Velvet, which had come out three years earlier, but which - lucky for me - our neighborhood Blockbuster stocked. Lots has been written about how that film exposes the dark underbelly of Reagan-era America, and sure there’s that, but what struck me at the time - and what still floors me about every David Lynch film despite having watched them all about a million times - was that it always feels as though you’re stepping into a fairy tale when you watch his movies. Yeah a dark, fucked-up, fairy tale, but no filmmaker better approximates for me the feeling I had as a small child of cracking open a book (I was a voracious reader as a kid) and transporting myself into magical realms. David Lynch is an artist in the purest sense, and a national treasure.