Urgency & Drive vs. The Opposite

Tuning out discouragement & other things

I went to an independent film panel this week. One of the panelists is a former CEO at a prominent film company. He opened his talk by, no joke, saying the following:

“I don’t know anything you don’t know. Every company is using AI to read your scripts. All the execs you’re talking to, they’re using their mouths but they’re glancing down at what AI has said to them. And they know their boss is doing the same thing. They know they’re about to be fired and they’re afraid to say anything. The algorithm and now AI is controlling them and they don’t know the criteria for anything. You’re all wasting your time being here, but at least we’re here together, so we can waste time together.”

I appreciated his honesty. I also left immediately after he said that. Not because I was upset at him — I just took him at his word that it was a waste of time. He saved me an hour of my life.

I think one reason we love artists’ early work so much is because there’s an urgency behind it. You can sense that with filmmakers, writers, musicians. No one was asking for their early work. They’re not a name. They had to fight to get anyone to read their work; to get anyone to listen to their work; to get anyone to cough up the most minuscule of funds, space, or time to give them the resources to make their work. No one wants to be the first person to say something is good. They want to be the twentieth person to say something’s good, because then they’re taking less of a risk. I’m honestly not sure everyone has the ability to perceive something as good in a vacuum, independent of branded consensus.

There’s a lot of stuff I want to make. The projects I’ve been fortunate enough to make, I tend to will into existence out of stubbornness. No one asked for Flatbush. I had a former rep who sent a dismissive email when I sent them the first independent short that served as the proof-of-concept for the Showtime series. I’m thankful that I didn’t listen to their input. They would’ve had me throw it in the trash. I had a previous rep who said I shouldn’t make Cramming because, “There’s already Euphoria.” I ended up making the short. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. I’ll also make a feature version of Cramming out of the same stubbornness.

I heard that former film exec say the above quote at the panel and it was freeing in a sense. It was a good reminder that people in entertainment spend so much of our lives asking for permission — for money, for resources, for someone to tell us an idea is good, hoping for a write-up in a website that thirty people read.

I get frustrated when funny, creative friends tell me they had an idea, but it was shot down by their rep or a peer or some random idiot in conversation. Any idea can be fine. It’s an idea. You should protect it and develop it. People give fly-by discouragement so easily, because it’s easier to knock something down that’s fragile. The risk is zero, the imagination is zero. The people who blindly discourage don’t know anything and they’re probably not even listening. They might as well be replaced by AI, because they’re functionally dead.

Here’s something James Baldwin wrote that sums up that urgency and drive needed to get stuff made:

“Every artist is involved with one single effort, really, which is somehow to dig down to where reality is. We live… in a civilization which supposes that reality is something you can touch, that reality is tangible. The aspirations of the American people… depend very heavily on this concrete, tangible, pragmatic point of view. But every artist and, in fact, every person knows, deeper than conscious knowledge or speech can go, that beyond every reality there is another one which controls it. Behind my writing table, which is a tangible thing, there is a passion which created the table. Behind the electric light you might be reading by now, there was the passion of a man who once stole the fire in order to bring us the light. The things that people really do and really mean and really feel are almost impossible for them to describe, but these are the very things which are most important about them.”

I do think we can sense when there’s a drive and passion. This also isn’t a priority for too many people when consuming something. And that’s fine, too. I’m mostly just speaking to the people who are pushing boulders up hills to make stuff. 

I don’t know the solution to this late capitalist hellscape we’re in. That former CEO was speaking like he was just about ready to let the tides sweep him into the sea. I think the main thing I took from his comment – and from the limited success I’ve had – is that we need to be protective of our ideas, preserve our desire to make something, and just navigate around the brick walls that don’t have that same desire. The work itself is a hard enough boulder to push up a hill. We can’t spend more time convincing people who don’t see it to see it. With their approach – without drive, without purpose, without urgency – nothing gets made. We have to save that energy for making the stuff, however we can make it, for whatever fraction of a budget, whatever abbreviated version, the best version within those means. Because then at least something is made.

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