We haven’t spoken directly in awhile, just you and me.
When we met, I told you how to find this place —
this nowhere/everywhere void space hiding in the gaps between Notes-focused editorial calendars and Substack growth hacks and depthless niceties for the clicks.
I’m so glad we’re together, standing in the middle of this dark wood.
I know sometimes it seems fruitless to do this. To go out into the middle of nowhere and try to find your way forward when your iPhone’s flashlight is broken and you’re already at 7%.
But we need to go into the woods to get anywhere at all.
My friend, if you haven’t surmised, I’m talking about the radical new NonDē (non-dependent) world we find ourselves in. A world with no clear path to follow, no sturdy ladder to climb. It’s winding, circuitous, and constantly evolving at our feet.
When folks find themselves here, I often hear a version of,
“It’s nice in theory, but I don’t know how to do this on my own.” OR “It’s nice in theory, but I still want to get picked up by A24.”
When I hear this, I (so lovingly, so gently) want to shake them by the shoulders and say: Who told you those were your only two mutually exclusive options?
Here’s the thinking trap I see people fall into:
“There’s only one path, and you either know it (gatekeepers) or you don’t (me).”
And I get why it feels that way. Capitalism has burned into our minds that there are correct/profitable ways of doing things, and if you can’t hang, then maybe you should find a different party.
The system was designed to seem inevitable, and it does have a certain inevitability to it. Just think about the act of reaching an audience for a second:
Big money can keep rolling out tons of ads and marketing, while NonDē filmmakers are trying to scrap together BTS footage from set to get their movie’s TikTok channel up and running, while shuttling between their multiple day jobs. That one video gets about 203 impressions, a random comment from MoVi3buFF asking “what even is this?” and a good 30 minutes of your time spent just trying to edit the dumb auto-generated captions.
Is that the kind of “audience-building” we signed up for?
Is that the only way we can build a path outside of a withering industry?
Does it have to be the A24 lottery ticket or that?
Well here’s what I’ve learned: no one really knows where they’re going, but the people who try something will always get there faster.
When you find yourself in the woods, the “right” options usually look more like:
Relocating after two decades in the same city because you can see the industry you chased there has changed its rules and commuting might be better for your art than paying $3500 a month for a studio.
Hunting down the cell number of your city’s mayor, writing the most persuasive text of your life, inviting her to coffee and getting full access to make a documentary about her tenure at city hall.
Writing a manifesto based on 7 of your favorite 2000s movies and what they tell us about the future, turning it into a $5 zip file product and launching a corresponding podcast.
Rigging up your iPhone into its most Alexa-like settings with gear that costs you less than $500 and a script you can shoot on weekends.
Finishing a screenplay from 2016 someone told you to trash due to an “unlikeable female lead” because you’ve realized that’s the dumbest note of all time and so you fixed what actually wasn’t working (no stakes and a meandering plot) instead.
Those things move the needle.
So the next term of LGA Disciplines will help you define your own moves in a NonDē world.
Not because you’ll get the right answers or the trade secrets or the information reserved for “special people”. Au contraire. It’s because when you start admitting you don’t know where to go next, and you let yourself look around, the path usually unfolds at your feet.
Instead of forcing yourself to do everything or nothing, you find out the one or two somethings you want to do, from exactly where you are.
And then, inevitably, things get interesting.
If you’re tired of feeling like you have to choose between opting out of your artistic career completely or handing it over to the Powers That Be, maybe it’s time to explore what other options exist.
(Because the best solutions usually aren’t the obvious ones.)
xx
Court
P.S. If you have no idea what I’m talking about when I’m talking about the NonDē filmmaking1 world, I explain it here:
It’s happening in other industries too, fwiw.