On Artistic Failure, or Should You Make The Indie Film Of Your Dreams? Maybe, Maybe Not.
Fail is Yin to Winning's Yang
As per the times, this post is mostly about me. Beg pardons. I’m an artistic failure. I’ve failed at what I set out to do more than most people I know who’ve set out to do a similar thing. Am I “aspiring?” Not really, I’ve done the work, it just didn’t work out. Am I making a living at this thing I’ve spend 70% of my life doing? Not really. Am I experienced in my field? Absolutely.
When the question of “What You Do” comes up, I usually identify my main-passion-path-gig as “filmmaker.” That’s not because I have actual films to show you. (Basically no one does, we’re mainly video creators now.) “Filmmaker” implies that you make narratives which might be shown at film festivals, as opposed to pragmatic videos which tell you how to insert a keyfob battery (“YouTuber” is like “filmmaker” but a little different, and I haven’t hit the benchmark there either.). Generally, the path of filmmaker goes towards making a “feature” — another holdover term from when we watched stories which were longer than 27 minutes — and that feature is sort of the apex American arts product, in that the feature film is thought of as the most expensive and most potentially lucrative artwork you can attempt to make, the feature film integrates most of the other disciplines including theater, music, fiction writing, and photography, and (here’s the only distinction which keeps movies in a slightly exalted category apart from video games) if you make a feature film, the local news might write a piece about it, and your mom may be proud of you.
All that to preface, I’ve made two feature films that basically no one has heard of. I like to think that gives me an experience subset that not a ton of people have, and also affords the license to self-identify as a very accomplished Artistic Failure, as opposed to someone who’s “aspiring.”
“Go big or go home. Never give up on your dream. Dream big.” These are the mantras of the Los Angeles fame-aspirants, oft-touted by what I guess is called “positivity culture.” The bravado is useful, up to a point. As a younger person, like many millions of people who have moved through the Los Angeles region over the decades, I believed it was good to throw everything I had at the goal of making a feature film that would, well, turn me into something other than a loser.
To condense two long stories into digestible form, the Big Dream didn’t happen, twice. I spent all my life savings. I got talented people to work on difficult projects in an indie model which is harder to get away with these days, in essence: “Pays almost nothing, but you’ll like hanging out with us, plus networking and a bit of exposure, so you totally want to give three weeks of your life to this set, right? Look, we’ve got fruity schmear for the bagels today.” As of today, the films are sorta kinda viewable on YouTube, and I have a lot less money and fewer favors to call in than I did before.
Being honest, I wish I hadn’t tried. I wish I still had those life savings. I wish I’d put more effort into other things. I was younger and dumber. Fail.
But there are other ways of looking at it. For one thing, failure and success are yin and yang, two inextricably linked parts of a whole, and if you’ve never known failure, you probably don’t truly understand success. Athletes and card players know this — you literally can’t win ‘em all. It’s the question of “failing big” that challenges one’s whole concept of being alive, i.e., “If my fails are this big, oughtn’t I do something else with life? If my fails are on this scale, generating depression and significant life setbacks, doesn’t that indicate that my core failure was the delusion that I should attempt the artist’s path in the first place?”
(#Relevant, the Breakup Song offers this useful model: I knew you were trouble when you walked in. But look what ended up happening anyway. Cf., every breakup song about a relationship you probably shouldn’t have started.)
There were some timing issues: I wrote for a web show, get this, before web shows existed. I shot the first feature on a DVX-100, the last great SD video camera before everything went HD. The second feature was shot on an excellent Sony HD camera just around the time that Canon DSLRs became the indie video “look.”
There is, of course, the question of whether my stuff just sucks. I like to think that’s not the case, but after many years of working at it, I don’t have any institutional support or audience, and less energy than I had decades ago when I was starting up and hadn’t failed yet. I wrote a script that was accepted into the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and am very grateful for that, but as of this moment, I would happily trade a kidney for 300 lousy YouTube subscribers.
I have sort of a clearer head about it at the moment: There’ve been recent months and years when the failure hung over me 24/7 and defined me as a Person Who Does Nothing Useful. I didn’t sleep (I still don’t sleep much) for regret, for shoulda couldas, for feeling I let down the good people who worked with me, for wishing that I hadn’t erred so hard, that I might still retain some thread of hope. Particularly during the peak pandemic years, in an isolated state with zero artistic inspiration or output (I know, some of you finished your opus in quarantine, good for you), it felt for me that hope was not a thing.
Because one’s chances to do something are finite in number, and one’s heart can take only what it can take, and you may have used up your tries for this life.
And in the house-on-stilts-aspirant culture of Los Angeles, perhaps in the United States writ large, the word “failure” is treated as anathema, as antithetical to the American Dream. This is the compelling yet poisonous idea I’d hope to dispel, in my advancing years. The notion that there is nowhere to go but up, and any failure of dreaming must be regarded as a pariah, is not good for us. Again, every pro athlete knows that sometimes you lose. It is, curiously, mainly in the arts space that we try to live in defiance of failure, because it tarnishes a resume that must smell only like success to potential funders. Not only does this unspoken ban on speaking the word “failure” lessen our ability to try again (which is what competitive athletes do), it’s pretty depressing, from firsthand experience.
I like how this one turned out, a concept-pilot for an unscripted TV series about karaoke culture.
But then, as time passes, no one cares, and with that comes a little serenity. A wise friend said to me once, “Everyone is way too involved in their own crap to worry about your crap,” and, to a degree, it’s true. The peak pandemic months, while depressing and difficult, also offered a perspective reset point: a lot of things which seemed important before just weren’t.
What I gained from almost completing two indie feature films:
met great people - crew, designers, actors, with whom I’d enjoy working again
cool stories - the one time our shoot was almost shut down by hundreds of DHS, LAPD and LAFD officers because our grip truck was parked next to a government building in Van Nuys; in that case, the show went on, I ate the cost of the cops busting the rental van window
learned how to do (indie) filmmaking - a skillset that retains the questionable value of being sought-after by everyone else who wants to make a feature for less than $30,000 USD
What I wish I’d gained:
a regular gig using my filmmaking skillset; this usually involves gaining some institutional support, which I’ve had in drips and drabs. The arts isn’t a meritocracy, it’s a subjective luck-ocracy — every artist you’ve heard of who’s “made it” has had at least one moment of luckily being chosen by someone with wealth or influence. My film projects haven’t enjoyed that moment of lucky choosing.
some recognition from peers and colleagues <=OKAY IT’S MAINLY THIS ONE
the chance to not start every project from zero, in terms of production budget and resources; again, am more experienced than most at making something from nothing, it’s just a drag to actually do it
What I’m doing these days:
writing a trashy crime thriller novel that probably wants to be a movie
making an album of pop songs, some of them comic-book nerdy;
12 Valentines on Bandcamp, YouTube Music, etc.pop-culture podcasts and videos and nerdy screeds with Nerds of Color, and my personal YouTube channel Melancholyball
…and I’m quite thrilled about how those projects are coming, especially the songs. It’d be nice if one of them somehow found an audience? It’s been a while since a win, man. I was moved to write out this rant by stumbling across an ad for the indie film East Bay, which purports to be about a “total failure,” living in the East Bay Area, from an Asian American perspective — huh!
I really like how this song came out. Music is hard to make, but not quite as hard as movies. Probably should’ve been doing this in the first place.
Also in the sub-genre of feature films that are unapologetically about people who have failed at life, I highly recommend Lonesome Jim, starring Casey Affleck and Liv Tyler.
Here are my Patreon and Ko-fi pages. For whatever it’s worth, I am still constantly making this stuff.