This Article Should be Required Reading in Every Film School

I have something of a love/hate relationship with The New Yorker. I think they print some pretty amazing articles, but I have to wade through their smarmy Manhattanite bullshit to get to them. Though the little cartoons help.

That said, I think this article should be required reading in every film school.

In many ways, my education did very little to prepare me for the real world film industry. There's this bizarre, pollyannaish attitude that you can write something like The 400 Blows, and Harvey Weinstein's gonna swoop in and give you a Rich & Famous Contract and they'll spend $100m to create your vision just because you're just so very very special and it's gonna open on 2000 screens and win an Oscar and you're gonna be a Hollywood rock star, the end.

In reality, I've found it's a synthesis of real estate, professional sports and wild cat oil drilling. But, instead of selling developed land, light sweet crude and the Chicago Bears, it's selling narrative dreams which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to put into a format which can be shared with other humans. And you usually only get to keep doing that if the one you created before made money.