Saturday, February 24, 2007, 2:34:04 PM, one spoke:

J> I don't mind hard work so I'm not looking for short hours. I just want
J> to know that if I choose this profession I'll be able to get by and
J> eventually (when I marry, etc.) put food on the table for my family.
J> So...in esence, what you're all telling me is that if I'm determined
J> enough, I could do it? That, that is the key?

Determined enough AND struck by lightening, AND not so embittered by the
experience of either apprenticeship work or graduate school that you
wind up doing something else entirely.

Offhand, of my Undergrad and Graduate school cohorts (total of 60
people), I know of two who have wound up with careers making
non-Hollywood, serious, feature films with commercial distribution
(Sandra Nettelbeck and Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, respectively); maybe
five who are working in technical roles in the industry (two of whom
have made feature-length films that played festivals but no commercial
pickup), maybe three who are teaching*. An attempt to map
"determination" to "success" across that population would be fruitless
... the former was much more evenly distributed; and the first two
groups are evenly split between BA and MFA holders. Calculate your odds
accordingly.

  *Not all of whom have continued to produce work regularly;  generally
  speaking, the productivity of teaching- vs. non-teaching filmmakers is
  much lower (teaching/committees/academic politics/advising actually do
  take more "juice" out of you than carpentry does, and teachers are at
  the *bottom* of the priority list vis-a-vis access to the school's
  equipment).

(These were both admittedly fairly experimental/non-industry oriented
programs; but I don't see a lot of my peers, or myself, showing *new*
experimental work in that genre's venues either.)

The academic day-job concept is one whose time should have passed a long
time ago. The first people who moved into academia in this role
(Brakhage etc.) were obviously (but seemingly unobvious to many) *not*
people who had been educated in university/artschool cinema departments,
because they *started* them. Since the early 70s, every program with say
five filmmaker faculty has produced 30 graduates qualified to replace
themselves. Every year for 30 years. In business this is referred to as
a "Ponzi scheme". (Look at the numbers above: the % of MFA grads
teaching is smaller than the % of BA grads editing, shooting, etc.)

In my experience it is also rare that a film department will be teaching
anything resembling current technology; the tenured faculty generally
will have learned their skills 20 or more years earlier and have no
particular interest in what's being done technically today, and usually
will respond any attempt to discuss it with anti-hollywood boilerplate
rhetoric (plus, there's no way for schools to have access to the capital
necessary to keep up ... "Why do you need more money than the painting
department? Again and again?" ... so generally people will be excited to
buy a 20-year-old used camera (it's what they know, and what they can
afford). I wouldn't say it's quite at the level of a photography
department teaching daguerrotyping, but it might as well be; knowing how
to load an NPR or record with a mono Nagra 4.2 are nice as explorations
of historical methods but will qualify you for the same entry job after
you've graduated as a year of fetching coffee would have, no more ...
and you'll *still* be fetching coffee for six months. (This may have
changed *somewhat* in the last twelve years ... perhaps things have
moved on from 1972 to 1990 in the interim.)

You would be much better off remembering the names of filmmakers you
meet at festivals than devoting a decade of your life preparing for a
different career in the hope it will allow you to work on your own
projects during summer vacations. A structured education is probably
necessary to get entry to Hollywood at this point, yes, for the sake of
conceptual/theoretical knowledge, a foundation for learning *current*
technic, and proof of seriousness ... but I think less so elsewhere, and
is still no guarantee of success.

My *personal* feeling (with a Uni BA and an art school MFA) is that a
University is better than an art school for this, since (as someone else
has already commented) that broad exposure to a variety of disciplines
may seem onerous at the time, but it's where the ideas *come from*. (I
was frequently appalled, as a grad student, with how little knowledge of
even media other than their own (literature, painting, whatever), let
alone science, politics, etc., the undergrads I spoke to in any
department had; virtually everything in my own films comes from my
reading in either science or philosophy & religion.) A filmmaking
practice that only draws on other films for inspiration is obscenely
sterile (viz. 90% of the work done by the commercial industry). Studying
philosophy *instead*? Malick's career is emblematic ... four films in 34
years; but four films many filmmakers would sacrifice a body part to
have on their CV. I draw no conclusions.

But seriously, if you want to wind up putting food on the table, I can
think of few things *more* important than remembering the names of
working filmmakers you actually meet, and making sure they remember
yours. Honest.

Along with marrying well, as David S. says.

-- 
Jim Flannery
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