Do you need to hit a home run every time you swing? by David Gaynes
I remember vividly a doc shoot I was on for just a day, as a camera operator, about the Long Island Ducks, a successful minor league baseball team. The project meant little to me, but something that was said in an interview challenged the way I saw myself, my work and my dreams and I've been thinking critically about it ever since. The subject was a former banking executive-turned-entrepreneur who launched the unaffiliated league in which the Ducks play based on the soundness of a balance sheet. For fans, the ticket price offers a more affordable experience for those who can't stomach the cost of a major league game and players get an equally enticing proposition, one that makes the whole business model tick: the opportunity for one or two more seasons of pro ball at what is likely the end of their playing careers. It allows them to engage their dream while playing for peanuts. Most will not earn a living wage from the seasonal gig. In the interview, the executive explained the business model in earnest: “It's the business of dreams,” he said, staring wistfully at the outfield fence.
For those of us who find ourselves directors of independent media in 2021, particularly mid-career makers like me who have had many seasons now of mixed financial and artistic success, limitless hours of hard work, plenty of reason for hope and certainly more than a fair share of disappointment, the idea that our very dreams, if not our actual product, might actively fuel a business that provides a lucrative payoff somewhere else, particularly for those who do not dream, can seem like an offensive equation to reconcile. What is to be made of a scenario where our highest intentions as artists become an active well of psychic fuel for a machine that takes stories, grinds them through gears of algorithm and funnels the pulp down the throats of tired, demoralized subscribers that are seeking comfort from the digital jukebox, not challenging, transformational cinema?
In a recent issue of his essential email newsletter “Sub-Genre,” producer/seer Brian Newman calls attention to a Variety article, “How ‘Becoming Cousteau’ Producer Story Syndicate Built Up Its Powerful Documentary Pipeline,” which celebrates Story Syndicate, the generative doc production company of film veterans Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan. I appreciate the argument that Cogan and Garbus successfully pivoted from selling their films independently to pitching and producing films directly for streamers. I don't appreciate the dig Newman made in the opening paragraph of his email newsletter: “if you don’t follow where the money’s going, well… it ain’t gonna be easy for you, but more power to you Super-Indie.” I hate that it's assumed -- by an independent producer -- that because some of us may not choose to follow the money, that we must be self-righteous for doing so. I don't consider myself “Super” for believing my one-off work of cinema should be made. The choice to directors of cinema is real, but perhaps not as simple as whether to follow the money or not. To be clear, it doesn't even feel like I had a choice.
A little about my dream: I came of age in the 90's with the luxury of a duplex cinema one town over. From the first time I felt the crunch of popcorn under my sneakers in 1992, until the last show I attended, probably around the summer of '97, I saw many of the features that would come to make up the canon of the “new” American Independent Cinema, the dawn of the Sundance Age. As someone who aspired, vaguely, to work with a camera to tell stories, the films and the theater itself, merged into what would form my dream, to be part of something that could do for others what it did for me: transcend time and space and open a window to my crushingly small sense of self – to spawn new universes of understanding.
I might humbly suggest that the way to keep a dream alive, is not to play one or two more seasons at cut-rate, because you're still good enough to step to the plate. It may be to find your own sandlot where you can invent the rules to an entirely new game. I certainly have not hit a home run every time I took a swing, but along with the risk of being an independent filmmaker has been the potential reward of always being able to make a truly independent film.
Director, Cinematographer, Editor
David Gaynes is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with three critically-praised features in distribution. His work focuses on ordinary people amid extraordinary circumstance and attempts to do so with earnestness and reverence.
Next Year Jerusalem (2014, Netflix / First Run Features) follows a group of frail elderly seniors on the last trip of their lives. Saving Hubble (2012, Hulu / Cinema Purgatorio) is the story of the Hubble Space Telescope’s surprise rebirth. Keeper of the Kohn (2005, Hulu / SnagFilms) examines the relationship between an older, autistic man and his terminally ill friend.
David is also a working cinematographer and editor, having collaborated on dozens of doc projects large, not-so-large and so-not-large for over 15 years.