This is the most difficult week of the year for
American Filmmakers, the week Sundance
announces its picks for next year's Festival.
Of course for a few hundred filmmakers,
including those with shorts and documentary
makers, it's a wonderful week; but for thousands
more it's a disappointing week. The chance to
gain a little attention for their labor of love has
been denied them.
And beyond the filmmakers who applied in
a specific year and did not get in, there are
tens times more who applied in previous
years, failed to get in and know their
work is unlikely to ever get even the little
attention an unsuccessful film at Sundance
will get. (Full Disclosure: I do NOT have
a full submitted to Sundance presently. )
Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggested in The
Black Swan that all prizes, such as the
Pulitzer and the Nobel, be abolished,
because luck plays such a large role in
who wins and the prize hurts a much
larger number of worthies who never
win or receive attention than the few
who do. I admire him for admitting the
psychic pain of losing out to others is
real for artists and not pretending it's
petty or doesn't matter.
His critique seems to apply to Sundance
as well, which for many American independent
filmmakers divides the winners from the losers.
And in ways that don't always seem based on
merit. Certainly having well known actors
in your film gives it a better chance to get
in Sundance than any other factor.
Those small films that do sneak in do so on a
combination of factors, including luck.
The year I came close to getting in
with NIGHTINGALE IN A MUSIC BOX -
I know, because I was warned to make
sure my print was ready - I knew someone
who worked at Sundance who made sure
John Cooper looked at it personally.
Still to admit chance plays a role in who
gets in - and how could it not with so
many entrants for so few spots - does not
negate the good Sundance does in widening
the opportunities for lower budget films.
It's only right to admit that it does so at
a high psychic price for myriads of
disappointed American filmmakers who
find the week before Thanksgiving the most
painful of the year.
Showing posts with label Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The MidTerm Election
One thing is certain. For the next few days
we're going to hear a lot of silliness from
pundits and politicians about the meaning
of this election.
This midterm defeat for the Democrats
was inevitable from the moment Obama
was elected with a combination of such
high hopes - almost messianic among
some of his supporters - and such difficult
problems to overcome.
The next few days would be a good time
to take Nassim Taleb's advice and avoid
the newspapers, cable news channel and
NPR. It would be about as useful as
listening to the endless stream of banal
clichès streaming out of Republican
victors' mouths about "taking back the
country."
we're going to hear a lot of silliness from
pundits and politicians about the meaning
of this election.
This midterm defeat for the Democrats
was inevitable from the moment Obama
was elected with a combination of such
high hopes - almost messianic among
some of his supporters - and such difficult
problems to overcome.
The next few days would be a good time
to take Nassim Taleb's advice and avoid
the newspapers, cable news channel and
NPR. It would be about as useful as
listening to the endless stream of banal
clichès streaming out of Republican
victors' mouths about "taking back the
country."
Sunday, October 10, 2010
What Makes A Mark Gullible?
If N. Nicholas Taleb is looking for confirmatory
evidence for some of his views on human psychology,
he would be interested in this little bit from David Maurer's
classic study, The Big Con, a technical term meaning
a con in which the sucker, i.e. you or me in the right
circumstances perhaps, not only gets taken for the money
which he has readily available, but he also gets sent home
to raise some more.
Maurer talks about what makes a person a good mark,
ruling out stupidity. It usually takes intelligence to
follow the con man's scheme. Here is Maurer's
description of the ideal mark:
Most marks come from the upper strata of society,
which in America, means that they have made,
married or inherited money. Because of this, they
acquire status which in time they come to attribute
to some inherent superiority, especially as regards
matters of sound judgment in finance and investment.
Friends and associates... help to maintain this illusion
of superiority. Eventually the mark.... forgets the
part which luck and chicanery have played in his
financial rise: he accepts his mantle of respectability
without question; he naively attributes his success to
sound business judgment.
- - The Big Con,
- Chapter 4, p.102
- Anchor Books edition
evidence for some of his views on human psychology,
he would be interested in this little bit from David Maurer's
classic study, The Big Con, a technical term meaning
a con in which the sucker, i.e. you or me in the right
circumstances perhaps, not only gets taken for the money
which he has readily available, but he also gets sent home
to raise some more.
Maurer talks about what makes a person a good mark,
ruling out stupidity. It usually takes intelligence to
follow the con man's scheme. Here is Maurer's
description of the ideal mark:
Most marks come from the upper strata of society,
which in America, means that they have made,
married or inherited money. Because of this, they
acquire status which in time they come to attribute
to some inherent superiority, especially as regards
matters of sound judgment in finance and investment.
Friends and associates... help to maintain this illusion
of superiority. Eventually the mark.... forgets the
part which luck and chicanery have played in his
financial rise: he accepts his mantle of respectability
without question; he naively attributes his success to
sound business judgment.
- - The Big Con,
- Chapter 4, p.102
- Anchor Books edition
Friday, September 3, 2010
Questioning Success
_ - - _ $$
Charles Ferguson who made the very clear-eyed
No End in Sight, a documentary which showed the
problems of the Iraq war before the view became
fashionable, has a new doc coming out about the
Alan Greenspan - Hank Paulson financial meltdown
from which now we're still trying to recover.
His doc is called Inside Job, and from the trailer one
can see that like Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black
Swan) - but using a different set of evidence - he
believes that the meltdown was plainly foreseeable,
to the players who brought it on. (Or in Taleb's terminology,
this seeming Black Swan was not really a Black Swan.)
Ferguson was one of the first filmmaker's to express
support for my NIGHTINGALE IN A MUSIC BOX,
and I am sure this will be a fascinating study in many
ways. I am looking forward to seeing the movie
and urge anyone who wants to understand the crisis
to go see it. At the same time I hope in his desire
to tell the truth about the money-players who made
so much money while destroying so many people's
lives, he doesn't overlook our own culpability in
what happened to us.
As much as we would like to blame only
Wall Street for our current problems, a usually
overlooked root cause of the meltdown and crisis
is that as Americans we love success.
Our ancestors came here looking for some form
of success; and usually finding it in a different
form than they originally imagined, we as a
people have come to accept and value success
in whatever form it comes: wealth, attention
or even actually achieving something which
helps others.
The one thing we rarely do is question success.
When someone is successful, we rarely ask why.
We usually credit the other person as the source
of his success and never ask if perhaps luck or
unscrupulousness or even weakness in the face
of peer pressure was the cause of his success.
Yes, in the run up to the Greenspan-Paulson meltdown,
personal weakness of character in the face of peer
pressure - in this case peer pressure took the form of
other people's success - led to great wealth.
Many in the financial industry realized the sub-prime
mortgage market was based on a rotten foundation
and therefore bound to fall, but the enormous sums of
money their peers were making created an anxiety about
being left out which led all but the most asocial
traders or most self-confident and self-sufficient money
managers on a dance of short term gain and long term
destruction.
The famous quote by Citicorp's Chuck Prince that
"We have to keep dancing until the music stops"
makes it pretty clear that many in financial industry
knew that (in the words of the Squirrel Nut Zippers)
"in the morning there'll be Hell to pay."
But what if they were wrong?
Or what if they were right but others, the
unscrupulous, made out like bandits while they,
the clear-eyes seers of truth, were left out in the
cold ?
The success of others - especially if we view them as
peers - is too strong for most of us to resist, even if
we know the success may be built on shaky ground.*
As Americans, we believe that nothing succeeds like
success. Success is self-justifying until it blows
up in our face, revealing a cost we really weren't
prepared to pay. At this point it becomes easy to draw
the conclusions which we could have come to earlier,
if only we were less enthralled with the successful,
if only we were willing to question success while the
answers might still do us some good.
* To view this from another perspective, see Dan
Ariely's psychological explanation of this process,
especially paying attention to the 11th and 12th
minutes of this fascinating video.
/:/) $
Charles Ferguson who made the very clear-eyed
No End in Sight, a documentary which showed the
problems of the Iraq war before the view became
fashionable, has a new doc coming out about the
Alan Greenspan - Hank Paulson financial meltdown
from which now we're still trying to recover.
His doc is called Inside Job, and from the trailer one
can see that like Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black
Swan) - but using a different set of evidence - he
believes that the meltdown was plainly foreseeable,
to the players who brought it on. (Or in Taleb's terminology,
this seeming Black Swan was not really a Black Swan.)
Ferguson was one of the first filmmaker's to express
support for my NIGHTINGALE IN A MUSIC BOX,
and I am sure this will be a fascinating study in many
ways. I am looking forward to seeing the movie
and urge anyone who wants to understand the crisis
to go see it. At the same time I hope in his desire
to tell the truth about the money-players who made
so much money while destroying so many people's
lives, he doesn't overlook our own culpability in
what happened to us.
As much as we would like to blame only
Wall Street for our current problems, a usually
overlooked root cause of the meltdown and crisis
is that as Americans we love success.
Our ancestors came here looking for some form
of success; and usually finding it in a different
form than they originally imagined, we as a
people have come to accept and value success
in whatever form it comes: wealth, attention
or even actually achieving something which
helps others.
The one thing we rarely do is question success.
When someone is successful, we rarely ask why.
We usually credit the other person as the source
of his success and never ask if perhaps luck or
unscrupulousness or even weakness in the face
of peer pressure was the cause of his success.
Yes, in the run up to the Greenspan-Paulson meltdown,
personal weakness of character in the face of peer
pressure - in this case peer pressure took the form of
other people's success - led to great wealth.
Many in the financial industry realized the sub-prime
mortgage market was based on a rotten foundation
and therefore bound to fall, but the enormous sums of
money their peers were making created an anxiety about
being left out which led all but the most asocial
traders or most self-confident and self-sufficient money
managers on a dance of short term gain and long term
destruction.
The famous quote by Citicorp's Chuck Prince that
"We have to keep dancing until the music stops"
makes it pretty clear that many in financial industry
knew that (in the words of the Squirrel Nut Zippers)
"in the morning there'll be Hell to pay."
But what if they were wrong?
Or what if they were right but others, the
unscrupulous, made out like bandits while they,
the clear-eyes seers of truth, were left out in the
cold ?
The success of others - especially if we view them as
peers - is too strong for most of us to resist, even if
we know the success may be built on shaky ground.*
As Americans, we believe that nothing succeeds like
success. Success is self-justifying until it blows
up in our face, revealing a cost we really weren't
prepared to pay. At this point it becomes easy to draw
the conclusions which we could have come to earlier,
if only we were less enthralled with the successful,
if only we were willing to question success while the
answers might still do us some good.
* To view this from another perspective, see Dan
Ariely's psychological explanation of this process,
especially paying attention to the 11th and 12th
minutes of this fascinating video.
/:/) $
Saturday, July 31, 2010
The Roasted Swan
? ?!
Those of you who know Carmina Burana know there is
a Black Swan in it, actually a white swan roasted black:
The Roasted Swan
Neither the surprised bird nor Carmina Burana shows
up in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, but
this doesn't stop the book from being the perfect gift for
the young filmmaker or novelist starting out into a career
in which randomness (or luck, if you prefer) plays a large
role. Taleb has caught the artist's predicament very well,
covering everything from how rewards are doled out to
artists in a less satisfying manner than to accountants
to the real toll the success of lesser artists exacts from the artist
struggling with lack of recognition and the knowledge that
there is a very real chance - a strong probability if one is
honest with oneself - that not only will he or she neither get
the money nor attract the many attractive people attracted to
success, but that the work itself, that for which all else has been
sacrificed, might well vanish into a void too.
By Black Swan he means a highly improbable event,
say 9-11 or a stock market crash. People in power and
insurance executives fear Black Swans, but obscure artists
chase after them. For filmmakers, even getting into a film
festival is a highly improbable event if they have no
actors the public has heard of. The one Black Swan I have
managed to catch is winning the Jury Prize for Screenwriting
at Slamdance in 2004 for NIGHTINGALE IN MUSIC
BOX, which I also directed.
This was the only one of my four features to make any
splash on the festival scene, eventually winning several
more prizes and playing European festivals as well.
Slamdance receives over 5,000 submissions per year with
about 3,0000 of of them being features. They show under
30 features, meaning getting shown there at all is by
objective measure a highly improbable event.
It leads to Park City, but it did not lead to fame and fortune,
and my next film BLACK MAIL has had the same difficulty
all my films previous to NIGHTINGALE had even getting into
a festival. What's the difference between NIGHTINGALE'S relative
success - you can buy it on Amazon after all! - and the
obscurity of my other films? Taleb would argue that it's as
likely to be a question of luck as of the quality of the movies
themselves. To say I was lucky with NIGHTINGALE is not
to deny its quality, but just to say the first reviewer had to
like science fiction, or be in a good mood that day to even
give the film a chance.
Taleb's concern with randomness and luck reminds me
of Boethius and his Consolation of Philosophy, a wonderful
book whose Wheel of Fortune shows up in 24 Hour Party
People. Taleb also finds some consolation in randomness,
especially since the internet now gives the obscure thinker
or artist a place to wait in the antechamber of success for
the work to be discovered.* This is because work can
survive basically forever in digital form on the net. He
uses the term long tail to refer to this relative permanency
of any work now, no matter how obscure, and says of the
long tail: "the world is made no less unfair for the little
guy, but it now becomes extremely unfair for the big man.
Nobody is truly established."
In other words, those at the top of the wheel will come
down when it turns again - thereby creating room at the
top - and so those of us who feel we have not yet
received the attention our work deserves can pray,
Oh, Fortune, turn your wheel one more time!
--- ---- -----
*Of course it could turn out to be the antechamber
of further obscurity too. There is no way to tell is
one of his points. The insecurity is not only
frustrating but over the course of a lifetime injurious
to the health of the artist, Taleb argues.
I want to stress that I can not comment on his
economic advice, which is what he is best known
for. I just do not know enough about it.
Those of you who know Carmina Burana know there is
a Black Swan in it, actually a white swan roasted black:
The Roasted Swan
Neither the surprised bird nor Carmina Burana shows
up in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, but
this doesn't stop the book from being the perfect gift for
the young filmmaker or novelist starting out into a career
in which randomness (or luck, if you prefer) plays a large
role. Taleb has caught the artist's predicament very well,
covering everything from how rewards are doled out to
artists in a less satisfying manner than to accountants
to the real toll the success of lesser artists exacts from the artist
struggling with lack of recognition and the knowledge that
there is a very real chance - a strong probability if one is
honest with oneself - that not only will he or she neither get
the money nor attract the many attractive people attracted to
success, but that the work itself, that for which all else has been
sacrificed, might well vanish into a void too.
By Black Swan he means a highly improbable event,
say 9-11 or a stock market crash. People in power and
insurance executives fear Black Swans, but obscure artists
chase after them. For filmmakers, even getting into a film
festival is a highly improbable event if they have no
actors the public has heard of. The one Black Swan I have
managed to catch is winning the Jury Prize for Screenwriting
at Slamdance in 2004 for NIGHTINGALE IN MUSIC
BOX, which I also directed.
This was the only one of my four features to make any
splash on the festival scene, eventually winning several
more prizes and playing European festivals as well.
Slamdance receives over 5,000 submissions per year with
about 3,0000 of of them being features. They show under
30 features, meaning getting shown there at all is by
objective measure a highly improbable event.
It leads to Park City, but it did not lead to fame and fortune,
and my next film BLACK MAIL has had the same difficulty
all my films previous to NIGHTINGALE had even getting into
a festival. What's the difference between NIGHTINGALE'S relative
success - you can buy it on Amazon after all! - and the
obscurity of my other films? Taleb would argue that it's as
likely to be a question of luck as of the quality of the movies
themselves. To say I was lucky with NIGHTINGALE is not
to deny its quality, but just to say the first reviewer had to
like science fiction, or be in a good mood that day to even
give the film a chance.
Taleb's concern with randomness and luck reminds me
of Boethius and his Consolation of Philosophy, a wonderful
book whose Wheel of Fortune shows up in 24 Hour Party
People. Taleb also finds some consolation in randomness,
especially since the internet now gives the obscure thinker
or artist a place to wait in the antechamber of success for
the work to be discovered.* This is because work can
survive basically forever in digital form on the net. He
uses the term long tail to refer to this relative permanency
of any work now, no matter how obscure, and says of the
long tail: "the world is made no less unfair for the little
guy, but it now becomes extremely unfair for the big man.
Nobody is truly established."
In other words, those at the top of the wheel will come
down when it turns again - thereby creating room at the
top - and so those of us who feel we have not yet
received the attention our work deserves can pray,
Oh, Fortune, turn your wheel one more time!
--- ---- -----
*Of course it could turn out to be the antechamber
of further obscurity too. There is no way to tell is
one of his points. The insecurity is not only
frustrating but over the course of a lifetime injurious
to the health of the artist, Taleb argues.
I want to stress that I can not comment on his
economic advice, which is what he is best known
for. I just do not know enough about it.
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