[By, Via]

1. Address a large market,

2. in an industry where most of the companies are either well behind the times or simply run by stupid people,

3. where well-tested ideas and best practices from other industries can be freshly applied,

4. to create both ROI and a positive impact on the world.

Of course, as an avid devourer of information, I've filled in random patches along the way - a book here, a documentary there, hours of wikipedia trolling in between.

Often enough, my best source of information is to trace backwards from a quote. Find something interesting said, and odds are the person who said it was interesting too. Which is why, in the wake of yesterday's post, I got curious about George Jean Nathan.

A renowned theater critic, and an eminently quotable one, he also put forth perhaps the best set of life instruction I've yet come across:

My code of life and conduct is simply this: work hard, play to the allowable limit, disregard equally the good and bad opinion of others, never do a friend a dirty trick, eat and drink what you feel like when you feel like, never grow indignant over anything, trust to tobacco for calm and serenity, bathe twice a day . . . learn to play at least one musical instrument and then play it only in private, never allow one's self even a passing thought of death, never contradict anyone or seek to prove anything to anyone unless one gets paid for it in cold, hard coin, live the moment to the utmost of its possibilities, treat one's enemies with polite inconsideration, avoid persons who are chronically in need, and be satisfied with life always but never with one's self.

Admittedly, I had my fair share of Yale's liquor. But, even so, I could see that drinking to vomiting - much less keeping going after - was a patently bad idea. It smacked not only of poor judgement, but of poor kinesthetic sense. By my experience, a few drinks before the boot-inducing shot, I was always struck by a stomach feeling I can only describe as 'reverse the engines!' Which, in short, I took to be a sign that I had probably had enough to drink, and that having a few more drinks was unlikely to help matters.

I must admit that, once every few years, I lose sight of this simple truth. I vividly recall, for example, an early morning ride on the Metro North back from New Haven, on my way home from some alumni or business event. I don't remember any longer what I drank the evening before, or how much, or even what the event itself might have been, but I can clearly picture standing in the swaying platform between cars, still wearing the suit I had trained up in, heaving my guts onto the rapidly moving rails below.

Which is to say, I'm not perfect. But I do try to listen to my body. I eat when I'm hungry, and I stop when I'm full. I exercise when I'm restless, and I stop before injuring myself. I drink water when I'm thirsty, and liquor when, as George Jean Nathan said, I need to make other people more interesting.

In short, I try to let both kinesthetic sense and common sense be my guide. Try it some time. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Certainly, this was a longer stint than most, but nearly all my good ideas, business successes, and small victories trace back to just such frenzied sessions of 'Eureka!' idea capture.

These bursts of thinking leave me energized to the point of manic, and I want, more than anything else, to share them. I want somebody else to get equally excited. And, unfortunately for her, the person who usually bears the brunt of that ecstatic, high-speed explaining is Jess.

Though Jess is the realist to my optimist, she's kind enough to listen supportively, ask interested questions, and only later tell me the full list of problems she immediately sees that I haven't even begun to consider.

Still, I can't imagine it's an easy task. Which might explain why, when Jess walked in to the office, and found me scrawling elaborate diagrams and flow charts on the wall, her first reaction was to roll her eyes, and say, "Beautiful Mind time, is it?"

But, at the same time, I've certainly had spare minutes, and have similarly come across countless interesting articles and sites that I could have at least quickly posted to the slowly decaying 'salmagundi' section of my right sidebar.

So, as happens about once a year, I've been having a slight blogging crisis of confidence.

This time, however, unlike my normal self-questioning - why am I keeping this blog? - I instead focused on a new area - how am I keeping this blog?

Which is to say, as the underlying infrastructure of this site has gotten cruftier and cruftier by the year - I last redesigned self-aggrandizement.com in 2004 - is the blogging software itself creating a barrier to posting entry, and keeping me from updating as much as I otherwise might?

Tech industry friends have pointed me in a slew of directions: Tumblr was built to address just this very question. As was, at least on the link-sharing front, Twitter. Wordpress is so customizable and nimble. And even Movable Type has come eons forward since the version upon which this site is predicated.

But at the same time, I can't help but think of the proverbial "it's the poor crafstman who blames his tools." Or, similarly, but think of the many years - more than a decade - I spent looking for the perfect trumpet mouthpiece, before finally settling into the sad realization that - in the brass playing world, as in the rest of life - there is no secret beyond hard work, done consistently for years at a time, day in and day out.

So, perhaps, updating the code here, or the blogging platform is a fool's errand. A way of avoiding the underlying issue - that writing posts, and curating links, takes real work. Yet, at the same time, I can't help but think it's not just the poor crafstman who blames his tool, but also the poor craftsman who can't tell the difference between a good and a bad one.

So, fair readers, save me. How should I update the front- and back-end of this site?

2. But not today, because it's my 31st birthday. Not quite as glamorous as my 30th (celebrated in Paris), but excellent (if work-filled) nonetheless. Joyeux anniversaire a moi.

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Ah, I thought. A crazy girl.

So I deleted the message.

Then, a few hours later, I got another message. This Jess girl had shared the first message with her younger sister who had said that you absolutely couldn't just send that kind of thing to someone you hadn't met, because they would think you were totally insane. So, to prove she wasn't nuts, she then proceeded to essentially do a deep reading of her own first email, explaining jokes, etc., in a message even longer than the first.

Due to apparent technological ineptitude, she sent this second message three times.

By now, I was intrigued.

So, after much back and forth, exactly four years ago today, we met for drinks at Russian Samovar.

I was smitten. After that date, I was the one sending long messages (or, as previously discussed, faxes). And, long story short, Jessica Gold Newman is now sitting next to me as I write this on laptop on a flight back from Portland, Maine, where we celebrated our four year date-iversary, with huge amounts of foodie eats (a win for me), equally large amounts of terrifying vintage stuff and antiques (a win for her), and some time at the beach getting our first sun of the season (a win for both of us, though somewhat reduced for me, as she tans and I [after a solid twelve months locked indoors] hop straight to medium-well done]).

To which I say, god bless the internets. All my love to Jess, and looking forward to another four and four and forty and forty.

As of today, they've IPO'ed and are publicly trading on the New York Stock Exchange, under the symbol ONE.

Nice work.

But what kind of job? Keeping with our functional approach, let's think for a minute about what a job can give you:

1. Money
2. Experience
3. Connections
4. Credibility

Let's look at each of those a bit more in turn:

1. Money

Unless you were born with an extensive trust fund (in which case, come talk to me about investing in movies), you're going to need to make money to pay for your life. The tradeoff, though, tends to be that as you maximize how much you earn in any given job, you tend to minimize your returns in the other three categories. Make sure any potential gig pays well enough to cover low-cost essentials (an apartment shared with roommates, vodka that comes in plastic bottles, etc.), or you won't be able to sustain yourself moving forward. Then, beyond that, focus more on the intangibles you can get out of a position, at least in the near term.

2. Experience

Looking back to the three-leg theory of filmmaking, there's a fair amount of technical expertise involved in aligning each leg. If it's raising money, are you familiar with PPMs, pitching investors, operating agreements, or the laws regarding accredited investors? Or, if it's attaching cast, do you know how to make offers, draft deal memos, or figure out the finer points of a most-favored-nations deal?

And, of course, especially if you're looking to produce or direct, would you actually be able to make a great film after the three legs are in place? Are you familiar with tech scouting, storyboarding, or how a shoot day runs?

There's a lot of stuff to learn, and you can probably only pick it up by doing. So, ideally, a job helps you start filling the void in some area of your expertise.

3. Connections

All three legs of a film have at least one thing in common: getting them in place is far easier with an excellent Rolodex.

On the money side, for example, there's a old adage that investors pick jockeys, not horses - they're betting on you as much as on the project. Which means a cold-call is nearly always doomed to fail. Whereas a pitch to someone who knows you, who's been actively following your career, and who is waiting for you to put something exciting in front of them, has an incalculable leg up.

A job, then, is a great way to start building your network. Perhaps it gives you the chance to meet agents, established producers, writers with interesting spec scripts, or entertainment bankers. All people you'll need to know eventually. And all people you can meet far more easily if you're in the context of an established company.

4. Credibility

People are like sheep - they love to follow the flock. If a number of name actors are attached to a film already, for example, it becomes increasingly easy to bring in more.

Eventually, to direct, write, or produce, you'll need a lot of different people to place bets behind you. And the more you can provide social proof, evidence that other people have already bet on you in the past, the easier that will be.

That's one more thing a job can potentially provide - a stamp on your resume indicating you've already been picked as smart and savvy by a decision-maker at some organization.

Here, too, there's often a tradeoff. Working at a small literary agency, for example, you'd likely get much more hands-on experience, get to build many more outside relationships directly. Whereas working at CAA might leave you literally delivering mail, but provides a far more impressive piece of resume padding.

So, how to balance those four factors? And what kinds of jobs, specifically? In our next several posts, we'll look at a number of possibilities, and the upsides and downsides of each, through the lens of those four factors.

Essentially, getting an indie film - or really, any film - made is building a three-legged stool:

You need a good script. You need a strong cast. And you need the money.

Once you have those three things, you can start production.

And, interestingly, if you have two of those things, the third quickly falls into place.

Get a script and attach some name actors, and you can easily raise the money.

Get the money and that same script, and suddenly actors (and their agents) will come on board.

The challenge, then, is when you have only one of those three legs. When you have, say, just the script. That's the position that most young directors are in - they have a script, perhaps even a very good script. But they don't have either financing or stars.

At which point, putting together the film becomes a giant game of chicken. You have to bullshit the cast about the money, and the money about the cast, and then hope it all comes together.

It works, sort of, sometimes. But not consistently or repeatably. So, while next up, we'll be looking at jobs - and at what you should be trying to get out of them - keep in mind that, atop the list, is developing the ability to bring those three legs together on film after film. Because if you can do that, congratulations: you have a career.

But any two directors or producers or screenwriters likely took completely divergent career paths to their current jobs.

Which, essentially, is both the good and bad news.

On the plus side, in a world like film, you can get where you want to be much sooner. There's no way to circumvent a decade of medical training, but a lot of brilliant features are made by early 20-somethings.

On the down side, you can also end up never getting to where you want to be at all. While the vast majority of med school grads go on to practice medicine, the majority of film school attendees never make even a first feature film, much less a career's worth.

So, in such a nebulous world, how do you carve out a plan?

First, you need to look at what it takes to get a movie made. In the next post, I'll lay out the three-leg stool theory of greenlighting films. Which, in short, says there are three things you need to somehow line up on every single project you do if you want to roll camera.

Then, you need to look at potential jobs as ways to build your experience with and access to each of those three legs. It's a functional approach, and one that may lead you to jump around from company to company, job type to job type. And it also may dictate that you should be spending nearly as much time and energy pursuing side projects and networking opportunities.

But, first and foremost, you need to accept that figuring it all out is your responsibility. There isn't a straight line you can default to, or a job you can take now that will take you to where you want to be just by putting your head down and working hard. Instead, you need to think, to carve out a path of your own, with the end in mind, and with savvy decision-making along the way.

Writing? Directing? Producing? DP'ing?

A surprising number have absolutely no idea.

Which makes things very easy. As the Cheshire Cat observed, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

If you don't know what you want, I don't know what I can do to help you. The only advice I'd have in that case would be to get on any sets you can (short films, student films, gonzo porn) in any capacity you can (PA, POC, fluffer), and then watch and listen and watch some more. Get a sense of how films work. Of what the jobs are. And then come back here. [Or don't. I'm not your mom.]

This guide, then, is for people who already know what they want. Say, you want to direct features. And the purpose is simple: get you actually doing that job, in a sustainable, career way, as quickly as possible.