Hollywood Gadfly

Hollywood’s favorite story: the broke outsider who self-financed an $80k movie on credit cards. The receipts: a ~$1M elite education, $330k+ in grants on her prior film, and a father - a Chinese real-estate and equity investor - credited as an executive producer. I call it “poorface.” New piece: open.substack.com/pub/hollywoodg…

@HenryJBaugh @sgcafan Carruth is an asshole but winning Sundance with an $8k feature was too good to pass up. God Killer of Sheep is so good, I want to rewatch it now.

@sgcafan A hundred percent. Or people like Charles Burnett or the two she mentions in the article, Nolan and Carruth (as much of an asshole as he is). Problem is that now the story is increasingly becoming that unless your Film has a projected budget of 100K it won't even be looked at.

My god, this article is saying EVERYTHING THAT I'VE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS. This is cathartic to read.

The politics and funding is a huge part of this essay. I do plan at some point to look into the actual people funding these festivals to see if there is an even stronger correlation between who's giving money and who advances through the system. These essays are incredibly time consuming to research, rewrite and source so it might take a while, and those records are less easily accessible than these interviews.

It’s fine if you don’t want to focus on it but do you know the politics and funding of what’s going behind the scenes with all these “indie fests” and all? If you’re interested in numbers and funding then knowing more about it will help you dig. I want to see more researched takes into the industry, so I’d rather more people know to help their digging.

Very grateful this piece is resonating with people.

@robkhenderson Thanks for reading! Your work has meant a lot to me.

People from wealthy families cosplaying as self-made underdogs who started with nothing. This has been going on a long time but anyone who actually started with nothing can see right through it.

@mikeastahl @AaronWrotkowski I remember that, I think it was a combination of that and credit cards. I'll have to look it up.

@Hwdgfly @AaronWrotkowski Smith sold his comic books and used cards.

I feel like the only real example of the self financed movie on credit cards was Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle. Every other example there's usually someone who came in and helped finance or they mostly had the money. Robert really did take out the credit.

Someone had literally died on the amazon factory floor and been left there for like an hour while the employees were told to keep working the year before she made that movie. I’m not saying it had to be a total polemic, but she changed the book and real stories in ways that became unbelievably offensive.

@ListenTower This is what made me truly insane after reading the original Harper’s piece.

Hollywood’s favorite story: the broke outsider who self-financed an $80k movie on credit cards. The receipts: a ~$1M elite education, $330k+ in grants on her prior film, and a father - a Chinese real-estate and equity investor - credited as an executive producer. I call it “poorface.” New piece: open.substack.com/pub/hollywoodg…

@Akwosiwjaiwnsi1 Thanks for reading and for the helpful context!

@Hwdgfly This is a great read! 2 comments: 1) given zhao was born in 1982, for the first 10 years of her life she was probably dirt poor by American standards. The top 1% in China lived maybe a material quality of life equal to the median American in say Iowa. By 90s her family is rich.

@Akwosiwjaiwnsi1 There’s a version if it where she’s just honest and grateful and it’s like, ok that’s cool.

@Akwosiwjaiwnsi1 The descendants of the slavers getting opportunities designed for the slaves is one of the most bizarre parts of this current political landscape, but it happens so much. So many Nigerians and Ghanaians.

@Hwdgfly 2) there nothing wrong per se with the rich funding rich artistic endeavors. Arts have always had patrons. Poorface is kinda a real problem though, it's the same one where in DEI ivy League cherry picks rich descendants of African slavers instead of descendants of Americanslaves.

@mackaybell I agree. I think the institutions create certain incentives and she just kind of went all in. There are ways to do this that are more gracious and less gauche. But in the end tying the money to all these labs and relationships that you need makes it quite complicated.

Yeah. Spielberg's story is a little more complicated than he made a student film and snuck into the lot (he was Wasserman's protege), but at least he doesn't lie about the details, if allowing the press to skate past some. It's completely unnecessary for Zhao to make up stuff, unless she feels an obligation to play the downtrodden POC the institutions claim to be helping, when in fact they aren't.

This is the classic Identitarian PR textbook that has shielded Zhao from day one. It's almost like people of color can't be rich or successful, and are permanently shielded from criticism. The whole essay argues that these opportunities and resources could have gone to people who were actually economically marginalized, including, obviously, women of color. The one thing you can always count on these people to do is not actually read or comprehend what you're writing. If these are the people getting the grants and prestige, and you are an actually marginalized woman of color, perhaps you need to pursue another strategy.

@mackaybell The lying is what bothers me the most.

Or at least Zhao could have resisted lying about it. If her connections got her other connections, and her parents wealth allowed her the opportunity to pursue her dreams, she didn't also have to claim to be poor and and an outsider. She could have just been open about having great opportunities, supportive institutions, and let her talent and hard work speak for itself. To a large extent she is providing cover for all these corrupt elite institutions, which primarily exist to jump the children of the elite to the head of the line, but have to pretend to be serving the underclass to cover their tracks and take public money and donations.

@ThatGuyYus Read the piece and decide whether those other ones would be as appropriate. We know Scorcese, Coppola and Lewis are nepo babies. Fennel seems less willing to constantly say she's poor. This is a human and not an identity category.

Yeah, there's def a reason why they picked an Asian woman as the face of this and not any number of white filmmakers in Hollywood. Emerald Fennel, Roman Day-Lewis, Sofia Coppola, and Francesca Scorcrse are right there.

@Mmmmummmmxx @publicenem35789 It was crazy how much it was softened by the movie. The greatest piece of corporate PR ever made.

@Hwdgfly @publicenem35789 i read nomadland when it came out, it’s not even fiction. you can read how amazon tortures its seasonal workers and this woman changed it in her weird fiction/non-fiction film

I was very amused by how Antonio Banderas was forced to be hispanic when he identifies as white. From something else I wrote: The US federal "Hispanic" category, for example, is defined by Spanish origin/culture, which is precisely why someone from Spain can claim it, so your wealthy Madrileño doesn't have to fudge a thing. He literally qualifies as Hispanic the moment he files a US diversity form, while being as European as a person can be. The Spaniards are so insistent on their whiteness that Antonio Banderas being labeled a person of color at the Oscars actually sparked a backlash. Banderas himself recalled that when he went to check the "white" box on an official US form, he was told that was wrong, that he was Hispanic. npr.org/2020/02/09/803…

@Hwdgfly @Big_Mark_Photo To dive into some eye-opening numbers, look at the number of internationally-reared directors and writers in Hollywood fellowships, film funds, and in academic diversity reports, counted as “BIPOC minority success and progress,” when none were minorities in their home countries.

@Mmmmummmmxx @publicenem35789 She did even worse than that, she shilled for Amazon while doing it. That will definitely be a piece, the one I've been building toward for a long time.

@Hwdgfly @publicenem35789 hey please write about how a millionaire, frances mcdormand played poverty p*rn in nomad land while the rest of the actors were real life poor people

@themandowitch I mean, I’m not Rob Henderson, but you do know he’s asian, right?

a man named ROB HENDERSON wants to tell us about the privileges of an Asian woman director breaking into Hollywood. how riveting.

@HenryJBaugh Thank you. I’m so glad to hear it. It was scary and difficult to write, very moved that it’s resonating with people.

Most indie filmmakers who are not wealthy earn their living a handful of ways: teaching, commercials, corporate, crew work, or other day jobs. If I were to give some advice to a young person, I would say get really good at editing. Rich people want to be writers and directors and occasionally producers, they don’t want to be editors. But they know how important editors are creatively, so they often are willing to pay for them. Zhao definitely paid her editor on the Rider. As you age, crew jobs become more brutal and take you away from your family for extended periods of time. Cinematographers are well known for a lot of divorces. Editors get to stay in their hometown and work (somewhat) fixed hours. If your passion is on set, by all means. Just one idea of how you can make money while building the other parts of your career.

@TheHofstatter @Hwdgfly Understood. Thank you for talking about it

@filmdweeb Yeah I found it strange that she got such a pass on that one. It was probably the last year she would have pulled it off, right before #oscarssowhite

I always thought it was odd her first film was a native american movie. like everyone is making native american movies except actual native americans and it's well, because other people have money