Filmmakers: To Thine Own Self Be True

Director Mike Leigh, citing the preponderance of independent films in recent award nominations, observed that “the anomaly and paradox of Los Angeles is that it is the juxtaposition of gross philistinism and the height of good taste” (“Five Get First Nods From DGA,” Calendar, Jan. 22). Leigh, awarded best director prize by the L A. Film critics andnominated for an award by the Directors Guild of America, noted that Los Angeles “has the most cultured people in the world . . . but they make Hollywood movies.”

While the clash between class and crass has always been a hallmark of Hollywood, crass usually wins out. What is different in the 1990s is not only that the crass has become more outrageous and overblown, but that it is churned out by an increasingly sophisticated, highly educated and deeply cultured group of artists, producers and studio executives.

Over the past decade, Hollywood has become a magnet for talent from some of the best universities and film schools in the country. While it is an uncomfortable fact to acknowledge, they are in many respects a cultural elite. Most of these people know good art when they see it, and many know how to make it.

Having sat through more than a hundred meetings over the past few years with many of these best and brightest, what strikes me most is the frustration they feel. Barely a meeting goes by without some kind of tacit or overt apology for the nature and quality of the work they are doing, while at the same time they acknowledge the futility of doing anything different.

Again, these people know what good work is, and therefore they are often profoundly disillusioned by the work they do.

So why do they keep doing it? The easy answer is money, since a lot of people are paid very handsomely to do work they don’t respect. But the motivations seem to run deeper.

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Many artists today, in Hollywood and elsewhere, are as lost as everyone else in the society. While they may search their souls for answers to the bewildering array of societal ills, they seem paralyzed by the deep and daunting scale of the problems.

Even as politicians struggle to articulate a vision for the future and business leaders grapple with the rapid pace of technological change, so artists, both inside and outside Hollywood, struggle to find a vital artistic vision of our contemporary world.

With solutions eluding them, many artists fall back on the tried and true. For artists and all other creative people, this can be a deeply corrupting experience.

George Bernard Shaw, who passed through the last turn of the century at the height of his creative powers, decried the energy that was wasted on perfecting the “structures of art”--at that time the “well-made play”--rather than focusing on the great challenges of society or the timeless dilemmas of the human heart.

As in Shaw’s day, much of our extraordinary creative energies are wasted on perfecting the formula, the genre, the pat, the predictable. The answer is not simply to turn our hopes to the independent market, since independent filmmakers seem to be rapidly catching up to Hollywood both in terms of crassness and commercialism, but for everyone in the creative community to recognize the challenges of uncertain times and, despite the difficulties, renew their focus on doing the best and most honest work possible.