You could do worse for career advice than consulting Wizard, though Peter Boyle’s monologue does leave a few dangling questions.
Some time ago I saw a documentary called Je t’aime… moi non plus: Artistes et critiques, which was comprised of footage shot at the Cannes Film Festival by the actress Maria de Medeiros, Bruce Willis’ whinging girlfriend from Pulp Fiction, and a vision in the great João César Monteiro’s 1982 Silvestre.
The subject is the testy relationship between, yes, critics and artists—namely, filmmakers. De Medeiros takes her title from a Serge Gainsbourg song—it translates, basically, as “I love you… me neither”—famously recorded with Jane Birkin, whose enraptured and breathy delivery gave rise to rumors that she was, in fact, getting fucked in the recording booth by Gainsbourg. Given that neither directors nor critics are, for the most part, eye-candy, I am not certain why de Medeiros saw fit to plant this particular image in her viewers’ heads.
I don’t remember much from de Medeiros’ not-terribly-professional film, except for a pretty good crack by Pedro Almodóvar, which went something like: “No child ever says ‘I want to be a film critic when I grow up.’” The idea is that criticism is a sour grapes career taken up only by those who can’t hack it as directors—a pretty reductive way to regard not only critics but, implicitly, the panoply of types who participate in the various strata of the filmmaking process, a process of which criticism is, yes, an indivisible part.
While most children who aspire to a career in movies will naturally latch onto the most glamorous or visible roles initially—stars and starlets, the name above the title—time and experience teaches that one’s particular gifts or proclivities might mark one for another line of work. If you have spent any time in film school you know that there are certain people who are just natural-born grips: They have simian climbing capabilities; they feel duvetyne and spring clamps on a deep, spiritual level; they keep their souls in their work gloves. And while it is absurd to say that any grip will ever be able to exercise an authorial influence on a picture equal to what a director can, it is just as absurd to suggest that, in having found their proper place in the on-set ecosystem, they have somehow failed to live up to their destiny as directors.
As for being on-set, my own professional—that is, non-student—career began and ended with three days in Cleveland attached in some subservient, unpaid capacity to the Art Department of the American Splendor film. During this time I got to re-paint the trim in an East Side diner and listen to the New York-based personnel make fun of working-class Northern Ohio accents while they were drawing pay for working on a film about a man whose life work was a paean to working-class Northern Ohio. Which is, of course, no fault of the film itself—which also stunk, but that’s beside the point—but did establish my total incapacity to function in an environment I didn’t have a modicum of control over, i.e. in an environment that wasn’t my living room. (By the way, has everyone seen the bizarre Harvey Pekar statue recently unveiled in Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library?)
I was about to say that American Splendor was also the last unpaid work that I’d ever done, but that discounts the first few years of movie chat that I wrote for public perusal—which, strange as it seems today, didn’t really seem like work at the time. I think I eventually squeaked in under the deadline dictated by Mark Twain: “Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.”
This sage advice, which has stood the test of generations, may finally be showing its whiskers. As established by a much-discussed tumblr account that has recently cropped up, no-body is actually going to offer to pay you a subsistence wage for journalism, ever. Jane Birkin, it seems, isn’t the only one getting fucked on the job! The plight of film journos in particular was brought up in a recent interview with Elvis Mitchell, formerly of the NY Times: “The workload for a film critic today is just so Herculean. They’re writing reviews, they’re blogging and they’re doing extra things for the Web. And, with movies that are based on books, you want to at least give the book a thumb-through and prepare. Add in film festivals and I’m not sure how people in the profession can keep up with it today. It’s just shattering now, the workload.”
The workload is such, of course, because each of the abovementioned activities pays fry-cook wages. (Meanwhile, here in NYC, even the fry-cooks are trying to unionize…) All of which is probably more unfair to those being written about than to those that are writing. I think frequently to something I dredged up in the process of putting together an article on writer/ director Bill Gunn—his 1973 letter to the NY Times: “One white critic left my film Ganja & Hess after 20 minutes and reviewed the entire film. Another was to see three films in one day and review them all. This is a crime. Three years in three different people’s lives graded in one afternoon by a complete stranger to the artist and to the culture.”
The situation today is, then, pretty grim. Was the situation ever much better? I am dubious. Of his move from The Chicago Reader to the The Chicago Tribune, Dave Kehr told an interviewer in 2001: “The Reader was a great place, but I couldn’t afford to work there when I was 35 years old. It was definitely time to move on to a more grown-up job, one where I could make enough money to live without a roommate and with more comfort. That’s pretty much impossible at alternative newspapers.” And that doesn’t just go for alternative newspapers—one of the few revelations of interest in Brian Kellow’s recent Pauline Kael biography was the fact that, even when arguably the most famous movie writer in America, Kael was barely making a living.
To embark on a career in arts journalism is, then, and perhaps always has been, to predestine one’s self for failure in any terms recognized by society as a whole. The problem is that to write with any degree of effectiveness requires not only sustenance and a room of one’s own, but a certain amount of self-esteem—and where is one to find self-esteem without the visible trappings of success?
The life of Harvey Pekar, who wrote his comics (and journalism besides) while steadily employed as a file clerk at a Cleveland VA Hospital, suggests one solution: Get a regular gig, then do what you want on the side. (Though who past a certain age wants to write about Rise of the Guardians out of pure love of wordcraft?) Otherwise, I recommend the unearned assumption of spiritual aristocracy. Reading the great American literary critic Van Wyck Brooks’ chronicle New England: Indian Summer, I ran across the following description of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson at the end of the 19th century, which suggests the proper intellectual alchemy for transforming life’s lead into gold:
“In a day when success was the only visible goddess, a poet could only point out that it signified failure; and Robinson’s successful men were Feathertops in every case, whited sepulchers full of dead men’s bones. This, and its natural corollary, was the whole of his teaching. In all his long psychological poems, he stripped the emperors of their clothes—what was false within always betrayed them; while he turned the tables on conventional opinion by showing goodness and genius walking in tatters. It was the Fernando Nashes and the Captain Craigs, the castaways who ‘went begging’ that really ‘went giving;’ and this, the oldest of morals for poets, had never ceased to be new.”
So I say to you, striving young journos, in lieu of any material reward, remember that your penury is proof of moral superiority, and that the home-owners at your forthcoming high school reunion are so many whited sepulchers! Like Arrested Development’s “Mr. Wendell,” you have a freedom that the 9 to 5ers think is dumb! Easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye and all of that! And if you try to take any freelance work off of me, so help me God I’ll mash you into the muck and mire like one of those rebels at the beginning of Lincoln.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.