The Parallel Career
by David Soll on November 23, 2010 in Documentary
I should have written this post six weeks ago.
By that, I don’t just mean I overshot my deadline. What I mean is, if I was to choose the ideal starting point for a year of monthly dispatches on the release of my first documentary feature – Puppet – six weeks ago would have been the appropriate time to get started.
Six weeks ago, I was outputting and quality-checking the final HDCam master of my film and shipping it off to DOC NYC where it would premiere. The last content trims were finished, the credit scroll had been created, and way over four years of tapeless workflow had culminated in a $78 piece of stock which I could carry around under my arm.
So, given that this was the perfect time to begin the story of the film’s release, why would I wait until after the premiere, the reviews, the first contact with distributors had all passed? Why not grab this moment of anticipation to launch the blog? The answer is this: I just didn’t have time. I was buried under the workload of my parallel career.
As the characters inhabiting Puppet (puppeteers working in avant-garde New York theater) point out, it’s not easy to make non-commercial art in America. Their counterparts in Europe and Asia, by contrast, receive the generous government subsidies afforded to valued artists in most of the non-American developed world. High-minded, art-focused puppeteers in Western Europe are accustomed to job security, a reasonable salary, six weeks of mandatory vacation(!), and they don’t generally find themselves, as they approach their thirties or forties, wondering how they made the irresponsible choice of setting out to provide for themselves through puppetry.
In America, by contrast, structuring the finances for a small theatrical production is an art in itself. An emerging artist in America needs to be her own grant-writer, agent, publicist, lawyer, producer and psychiatrist (off topic – if anyone has extra Xanax, please email). Given the realities of New York City rent, the landscape is so bleak it is often automatic self-parody.
Looking upon this reality with my characteristic lack of fortitude, I decided at the very start of my career to try approaching non-commercial art from the other side. The phrase “parallel career” was coined, to my knowledge, by my fellow IFP Lab alum Dara Kell, co-director of Dear Mandela. She and Chris Nizza, her partner, share the parallel career duties – alternately taking breaks from editing their awesome-looking film to take gigs editing reality or sports programming. I would say I bonded with them over the commercial/non-commercial duality, except that they’re actually way out of my league, cool-wise.
When I was seventeen I dropped out of high school, moved to Los Angeles, and tried to get work in post-production facilities. I missed out on the late-teenage liberal arts college experience, but I got a huge head start on a commercial career – building, gig by gig, a resume which I imagined would someday finance independent films. The advantages of the parallel career are obvious. Ten years in, I can make a reasonably secure living. Yes, it is still just a freelance career in media, but compared to the anxiety that pervades the finances of a totally non-commercial artist, I have the job security of a banking lobbyist in a recession. My corner of the commercial world is political advertising – directing, producing and editing TV ads for Democrats. I work for an ad agency in Washington, DC that reliably calls me in the late-winter of an election year, promising eight months of solid work.
In parallel career terms, this kind of seasonal work is as good as it gets, affording about a sixteen month cycle to work on (and finance, albeit in a modest way) a non-commercial project. It’s a reverse sell-out: starting with zero artistic cred by working your way up the career ladder, then spending the excess income – rather than on luxury items like real estate or health insurance – on an expensive art project that offers little hope of reliable financial return. (This is not to say that Puppet won’t make money or even be wildly successful, but verite documentaries about artists don’t on their face compose a fiscally sound retirement plan.) This formula still isn’t the Western European artist’s life, bathing as they do in exclusive Beaujolais hot springs and taking thrice daily investment-banker performed exfoliating scrubs, but, broadly speaking, it works.
The downside, however, became clear about six weeks ago. We were invited to premiere Puppet at DOC NYC, and we were thrilled to get the opportunity. A brand new festival, created by Thom Powers, Raphaela Neihausen, and IFC, promising American premieres of new films by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog. It was impossible to pass up. But the first day of the festival was The Day After the Election.
The moment we accepted the invitation and had a solid deadline to finish the film, my parallel-career model would be collapsing on itself. As the budget came entirely out-of-pocket, I edited it myself and couldn’t afford to hire a finishing editor. I was almost flat broke so I couldn’t pass up the political gig. What followed was a period of the most intense commercial work I’d ever done. 2010 was incredibly busy for Democratic advertising: the Party had more money to spend than ever , and many, many Democrats needed extra media as poll numbers dropped. Weekends didn’t exist – July through October was one continuous 115 hour work week. Puppet was consigned to the rare, late night hours when I still had some caffeine-high and focus left to spend.
So, six weeks ago, when I should have been writing this blog? I was watching down the HDCam master of Puppet at 3am on a Sunday morning, with my overwhelmingly generous advertising colleagues Steve Lipton and Becki Schneider providing redundant eyes. When it was over, at 4:20am, I packaged it up for Monday FedEx, placed it gingerly on the shipping shelf, went back upstairs to the edit suites, and started on an ad for a gubernatorial campaign.
The entire point of the commercial career was to finance the non-commercial career, but in the most crucial three months of my film’s life, Puppet was consigned to the dank, exhausted corners of my brain. I had two additional producers, Jared Goldman and Hannah Rosenzweig, whose help in this time was crucial. Nevertheless, at that moment, the entire model of the parallel career – which had felt so wise a year or two prior, when I was able to buy a small camera and take the time away from a job to make the movie – felt counter-productive and masochistic. My priorities were perfectly inverted; commercial came before non-commercial. The reverse sell-out was suddenly just like selling out.
But, looking at the struggle of the American artist relying on service jobs and sparse grant money, barely stitching together the funds to live and create…it’s honestly impossible for me to say which path works better. Under these conditions, with these options, it continu
ously amazes me that the American art scene perseveres. Puppet is not in any direct way about arts funding, except that one sees implicitly how limited funds strain the lives and relationships of the characters. But this amazement that marginalized art like puppetry happens at all, that it hasn’t just disappeared under the gargantuan inertia of late-capitalism, the strangeness and improbability of this creative act – this was the starting point for making the movie.