Indie Film's Week of Winners and (Mainly) Losers

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.

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

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.

/:/)                        $