So I’m waiting for a crosstown bus and I’m staring at this poster:
I hate this poster. And it's everywhere--it must be featured on every third bus stop. "Why" I ask myself, “Why do I dislike this poster so?”
First, you should know I have had it up the butt for the advertising industry since I was in high school. That's when I first realized it was about using fear and/or desire to trick me into buying something or trick me into buying into something.
Second, for those of you who don’t know, I’m a filmmaker, so looking at this is akin to someone who works at an Oscar Meyer meat plant and seeing an ad where a happy mother oversees her happy offspring as they eat bologna. The meat plant worker knows what goes into bologna, and he knows Oscar Meyer isn’t selling that, they’re selling happiness and some vague idea of health and nutrition.
What the New York Film Academy is selling here isn’t filmmaking. It’s selling cool, and that's bologna.
Look at those two photogenic young people in their New York Film Academy t-shirts. Look at that cool hat the cinematographer is wearing. (Why isn’t he wearing one of those t-shirts, though?) Look at those people in the background looking at what these young cool people are shooting. Why, it’s just like the crowd of little people that forms around the Law & Order crew, all full of fascination and envy. Don’t you want to be one of those cool people everyone envies?
Now I know advertising is not in the business of telling the truth. No one is these days. And I'm not coming down on the New York Film Academy. I'm sure if you went there you'd learn stuff about filmmaking. But I am coming down on whoever is selling the New York Film Academy. You know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see, running beside the left of this poster, the documentary Lost in LaMancha, and hanging to the right of it a copy of The Battle of Brazil by Jack Mathews, bound the way they used to bind phone books in phone booths, back when those things existed.
In Lost in LaMancha, Terry Gilliam struggles to realize his version of Don Quixote, a film he has been trying to make for 10 years. It’s a gigantic film with big beautiful stars, financed exclusively with European money because Hollywood wanted no part of it. But poor Gilliam, on his first three days of shooting NATO F-16 fighter jets continuously fly over his location in Spain, a hail storm of Biblical proportions washes away equipment, and his lead actor becomes incapacitated and can’t ride a horse, and Don Quixote must be on a horse. A rough start. So rough that the film is shut down and has not been started up since.
And in The Battle of Brazil Mathews recounts Gilliam’s struggle to get Brazil shown in the U.S. Universal Studios chairman Sid Sheinberg believed Gilliam’s cut of Brazil was unreleasable in the U.S. for three reasons: its commercial unviability, its bleak ending, and, at 142 minutes, its protracted running time. Sheinberg voiced his concerns and insisted on an edit and a sunny ending. Gilliam told Sheinberg that the ending was not negotiable. A standoff dragged on for eight months, during which time Gilliam and Sheinberg exchanged jabs in the press and Gilliam took out a full-page ad in Variety asking Sheinberg when he was going to release the director’s cut of the film. Gilliam’s version of the film did finally get released in the U.S. Gilliam screened it secretly for the L.A. Film Critics Association and they awarded it best film honors. This forced Universal to release. But the corporate giant gave it little marketing and advertising support. The book is an inside look at the Machiavellian world of the modern Hollywood studio system. When you read it, you understand why Hollywood produces so much lowest common denominator product and you wonder how anything of any quality ever makes it out of there.
So if my vision of this bus stop were a reality, and you were a youngster sitting there, imagining what it would be like to wear one of those New York Film Academy t-shirts, and you watched Lost in LaMancha and you read The Battle of Brazil, you might think making films isn’t really all that cool. You might realize, in fact, that it’s really hard work and often provides little or no financial reward, and though sometimes people will stop because you have a camera out, they don’t really care what you’re doing, they’re just killing some time. You want to do something cool, move to Williamsburg, learn how to play an instrument, start a band and make sure to have either "deer" or "bear" in your band's name. That would be cool. Filmmaking isn’t really so cool and the only reason to learn it is because you can’t imagine doing anything else.
