fly a kite

keep dreaming and flying your mind-kites

Dear word explorer,

July means it’s festival season in my local city of Galway. The Galway Film Fleadh has just wrapped, which is an important international festival, and a big week for the Irish film industry. Galway is a small, medieval city, with two universities, a fantastic food/drink/music/theatre scene, and a vibrant upbeat atmosphere, so the Fleadh (as everyone calls it) is permanently popular. If the weather is benign, Galway radiates a Mediterranean charm.

There is plenty to attend, with famous directors and actors promoting their premières and giving workshops, talks about movie themes or changes in trade protocols, plus hobnobbing and (hopefully) getting your face in front of producers. You can walk the winding streets in between meals and films, listen to the buskers, and enjoy the bohemian babble of Galway city at its best. It’s especially enjoyable if you’re on the dime of your production company, festival or development agency. Accommodation in the city for the month of July is scarce and expensive.

A typical scene on High Street in Galway during the summer.

I didn’t go to anything, which is a bit unusual for me, since in the past I’ve even introduced and interviewed directors for the Fleadh. Ultimately, I felt a weariness regarding the rigmarole of showing up to coffee events and discussions about the current roadmap of the film/TV industry, and absorbing the pervasive anxiety in the room from the writers about the future of the biz.

If you are a writer, a good approach is to consider it a fun opportunity to watch the latest films and socialise with friends in a low-stress way. Maybe you’ll bump into a producer in a causal manner and chat about your work and they’ll offer you a gig in a few months time. Adopting an easy-going, confident attitude will reap the most rewards. Desperation is always the worst vibe to emit, yet the industry’s mechanisms actively encourage it.

I took the opportunity to catch-up with a screenwriting friend of mine, with whom I’d collaborated on a TV project a couple of years back. When screenwriters get together there’s always a certain amount of complaining! The power dynamics of the industry are skewed and can be abusive (financially and emotionally) for the ‘talent’ with the least amount of clout — which is the writer, strangely enough.

What I dislike the most now, and what I’m trying to avoid, is how the industry deliberately induces stress and paranoia in their writers (and members of the creative team). This is a self-sabotaging strategy when dealing with people who make up stories for entertainment. It engenders suspicious, bullish or fearful behaviour, and risks an utter collapse of the writer’s morale and an inability to work again. If you suspect you will be burned, thanks to past experience, then you don your flame-retardant suit before that first Zoom meeting and don’t take it off. That bulk inhibits the work.

The pressure comes from the top down. Those with the most secure jobs squeeze everyone lower on the chain until the most vulnerable are scrabbling about trying to produce sound work while scrimping to make ends meet.¹ All the time the brass are threatening to shelve work that people have been labouring over for years. The new, awful fate in the twentieth-first century is when the film/TV series is written, developed, cast, filmed, edited and ready to be streamed or released but instead it is thrown into a cloud-vault never to be viewed because that’s a better tax write-off for the company. They have accrued all the rights to the project and can do with it as they wish. That includes erasing its existence.²

Yet, the film and TV industry is also crammed with dreamers. We have all experienced the profound effect of watching a well-crafted film or TV series. Every person has memories of an impactful character or scene that enlightened us in that moment. The visual spectacle connects deep with the consciousness of human beings. It’s a magic we chase our entire lives. It’s why filmmakers endure difficult conditions and continue to hope and strive for better. We want to be part of the next generation of movies or shows that will be beloved and special to their audiences. Despite the many obstacles, exemplary work appears all the time.

Perhaps, it’s why mediocrity can offend people more than a terribly-crafted film. We can forgive the experimental, avant-garde or low-budget, but the well-made but meaningless fodder only reminds us of similar voids in our lives, and does not boost our spirits. The din of online chatter is a new form or distortion that shapes the responses from risk-averse accountants. Instead of saying ‘meh’ it was okay, the response has to be ‘it was a crime!’

Outsized responses are taken as concrete value judgements, when they are simply algorithmic amplification of bloviating opinions.

But working within this soul-sapping system can have terrible consequences for your creative output. I’ve experienced it and so have my friends in the business.

But, this is the third act and there is a heroic solution! You have to decide not to take on work with shady players, firmly ask for proper terms, fight for what you deem important, and walk away from what is not advancing your artistic development.³ None of this is easy, however. It requires a solid self belief, and that may be hard to maintain when you have been affected by poor interactions in the past. Words like ‘career suicide’ will be bandied about, and you’ll say it to yourself plenty of times. It’s a hell of a lot harder when other people are dependent upon your pay check.

It’s taken me a few years to step back and see the erosion of my confidence by a number of challenging experiences, and how that made me gun-shy and anxious. Anyone who has been in an abusive relationship can see the correlations, but we rarely apply that dynamic to working conditions. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t not notice.⁴ There are people with an innate confidence and self assurance who will not be as susceptible to these issues, and guess what, they are often further up the chain and calling the shots. These are the people who will state in mournful tones how you are putting the project in jeopardy because you are asking for your contracted payment upon delivery of your work.

I’ve made mistakes and I’ve disappointed people. I’ve recriminated myself in ways that hindered solutions. In the end, I was the only one who could fix this problem, and so I have set about being braver and writing for people who don’t mess me about or the work itself. This newsletter and my fiction series, Moon Hook, is part of that rehabilitation.

No one expects things to be perfect all the time. Collaborative filmmaking is difficult, exciting, exasperating and wonderful. When you are working with people who are invested in making the best film/show possible then you will put up with adversity because you love what you are creating and you’re pulling with a team who are serious about their craft, but know how to enjoy the process. Even if it doesn’t meet the ambition of its first burst of enthusiasm, if you emerge proud of your efforts and with your spirit intact then it’s a win — and it supplies you with the energy to dream again!

Yes, we need grit, determination and hard work, but before all that we need to be a dreamer. That’s the part we must protect fiercely. That is the creative wellspring, and we must not allow anyone to pollute or drain it.

Without that we have lost our essential self.

So, dear reader: dream in defiance of reality! Soar on the winds of imagination untethered from pragmatism. Not all of your wild visions will become manifest, but remember and indulge the joy of unfettered play!

We all come down to Earth eventually, but keep those mind-kites flying high.

1. Yes, I know this is an example of a captialism in action, but I’ve become leary of over-using that term. Private companies can employ people on fair terms and turn a profit.

2. A recent example is the TV series Nautilus, which Disney+ refused to air in 2023 despite its completion, although it was broadcast this year in Sweden. In 2022, the movie Batgirl was shot but never released. ‘It was financially more lucrative to not release the title and claim a tax writedown on the cost of production than to invest more money in reshoots, marketing and royalty payments.’ Wenlei Ma, writing at The Guardian.

3. This is why a good agent remains a useful aspect of the film industry. It’s much easier to out-source your confidence and determination to an invested champion. Plus, unions and guilds to keep the focus on humane and equitable conditions for all parties.

4. Gaslighting, negging, ghosting, Jekyll and Hyde behaviour, isolation, domination… it can be hard to maintain your discipline and courage when the full arsenal of unsavoury tactics are deployed.