Is there an appetite for blue collar voices in the arthouse film & TV world?

taking stock of the prestige game in one corner of Hollywood

I used to be a poet and academic. Few worlds have tighter gatekeeping. In the worlds of poetry and academic humanities, to make it through the gates to the next stage of your career, you have to offer something to the gatekeepers, something beyond the promise of making big bucks for them. Because high cultural gatekeepers usually aren’t looking to rake in the big bucks. They’re looking for something else.

Don’t you want to read these guys’ A24 scripts?

In poetry and the humanities, that “something else” is usually prestige. That is, the more rarefied a cultural economy gets, and the more detached it gets from the gears of mere profit, the more a strong credential or association weighs.

I’m a believer of the dinner party theory. Or maybe the originator? Either way, I think a lot of decision-making by well-off gatekeepers is informed by what they can brag about at their next dinner party. “We just admitted a great young writer from Princeton.” “We hired the cinematographer of Moonlight to film our commercial.” “I just went to a great retrospective at the Whitney. As it turns out, we just hired the artist’s daughter to…” Etc.

I think people in gatekeeping positions — especially in something like poetry, where profit doesn’t ever come into play — make curatory decisions based on what’ll make them feel and sound impressive. Prestige by association. I do it, too. Whatever. But it also informs what the gatekeepers see, who they see, and what they value.

My alma mater…

My perspective, of course, is mostly grounded in my own limited personal experience. I sort of grinded my way across multiple levels of academia. I started out going to my local community college (Green River Community College), then I finished up my undergraduate at a strange right wing Christian college for poor kids (College of the Ozarks), then I did a poetry MFA at a state school (University of Arkansas), and then I did a Ph.D. at a pretty prestigious private school (Duke University). I even ended up doing a visiting writer gig at an Ivy League school (Brown University).

So, lots of different levels of higher education. The air got increasingly rarefied as I went along. And by and large, the intelligence and creativity of those around me didn’t increase all that much as I went along — though I did encounter more genius tier professors at Duke than elsewhere — but the prestigious credentials and associations of those around me certainly did.

And the higher I rose within the worlds of poetry and academia, the more I was expected to offer some kind of prestige — via credential, accomplishment, or association — of my own in exchange.

One anecdote that I often repeat: after getting accepted into Duke’s Ph.D. program, I went to my first English Department social function. I was introduced to an English professor with Ivy League credentials who’d just been promoted to dean. Smiling, he asked me where I went to undergrad. I told him: “Green River Community College and College of the Ozarks.” His smile dropped. He looked me up and down, turned and walked away, and literally did not speak to me my entire six years as a Ph.D. student.

In fact, when some of the other English department professors (also with Ivy League credentials, of course) were impressed enough by my doctoral dissertation that they pushed the department to hire me for a tenure track professor gig that had just opened up, I’m pretty sure he was the dean who vetoed the idea. Apparently, such a hiring practice would’ve been unprecedented. (Thank you, snooty dean, for helping push me to my present and much more interesting career.)

To this dean, I’m sure my lack of rarefied credentials meant that I was a random member of the unwashed masses who’d somehow slipped through the gates without the proper paperwork. I had no reciprocal prestige to offer him via association. Thus, his sudden rejection and departue.

If he’d stuck around to talk, maybe I could’ve reassured him by listing off my national literary awards as a poet, or the cool lit journals I’d edited and been published in, or my shiny GRE scores. And maybe one of those could’ve been found to be acceptably prestigious for a mutually beneficial exchange. But, of course, that never happened.

In fact, one of the reasons that I left academia and rolled the dice on a screenwriting career instead was that I wanted to escape this prestige economy. As I’ve mentioned endlessly, I grew up in a trailer park in a small town, born to a working class family. And although I was doing okay in making my way up the ladder in the poetry and academic worlds, I’d grown to loathe the prestige game intensely. Probably because I never felt like I was particularly adept at playing at.

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So what the fuck does this have to do with screenwriting?

Here: in my screenwriting career, the closer I get to the rarefied worlds of arthouse, Sundance type of films and TV, the more that I feel like I’m returning to the prestige economies of poetry and academia.

Now, it can simply be that I don’t write or direct the kinds of stories that arthouse sorts of people are interested in. Or if I do, maybe I’m just not that great at it. Very possible! But even if that’s the case, I also don’t think it’s just me.

With my first film National Anthem hopefully debuting sometime next year, a lot of my career thoughts have been focused on how I want to build my writing-directing career going forward. I’ve written before about how I admire Taylor Sheridan’s career. But I suspect my sensibility is a little too weird to really produce something as spectacularly popular as Yellowstone.

In the 1970s or 1990s, I think I’d be a pretty mainstream writer-director. But in 2022, movies like The Sugarland Express or Michael Ritchie’s Smile or American Graffiti or Taxi Driver or Boogie Nights or Clockers or Dazed & Confused — these would be niche A24 sort of arthouse films.

And those are the sorts of films I want to make. Personal, grounded stories set in the real world, but filtered through a highly personal vision. So in 2022, maybe that means I’m an arthouse guy? I mean, maybe? I used to be a poet. Nothing I’d love more than to have A24 release a film I made. I’d really love to have a film screen at Sundance. Probably my biggest goal is to have a film in the Criterion Collection. So maybe I’m actually an artsy-fartsy director, even though I like to think I’m telling old school stories.

This was my thinking when I decided to waste some time awhile back. I spent an afternoon researching and putting together a list of arthouse/Sundance/A24 type of directors from America who were, as far as I could tell:

1) from blue collar backgrounds like me,
2) still in the middle of their career.

Basically, directors who were from working class families. This meant no Sam Levinsons, Sofia Coppolas, etc. Obviously. But who weren’t on the back half of their career. This also meant no esteemed 65+ year olds with working class backgrounds like Paul Schrader or Martin Scorsese or Charles Burnett or Alison Anders.

I was focused on artsy American directors from working class backgrounds who were say within fifteen years of my age (I’m 47). 32 to 62 year olds. A pretty wide swath.

Or so I thought. I wanted to build a list so I could study these mid-career artsy-fartsy directors’ filmographies and interviews and such more closely, just in terms of how they managed to sustain themselves without — presumably — stepping into the director’s chair with a lot of prestige or connections behind them.

Or without them even necessary being fluent in the language of credentials and cultural prestige, which is among the many real benefits of coming from a more upper class family. (I just have to compare my kids’ knowledge of the wider cultural world to my own at their ages to see the stark differential).

Anyway, the first director that I came up with was Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk). A spectacular model.

Another name that came immediately to mind was Sterlin Harjo, who has mostly done microbudget films (I really like Mekko) and whose FX series Reservation Dogs is my favorite current TV show.

Those were at the top of my brain. Then I thought about my favorite sort of American “dirtbag” filmmakers: the Safdie brothers (Uncut Gems, Good Time) and Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket).

I couldn’t find info on the Safdies’ parents. It’s obvious from their work and interviews that their upbringing was chaotic at best. But it also appears they have uncles and other relatives who are successful enough to have their own wikipedia pages. None of my relatives have moved away from the Ozarks, let alone gotten onto Wikipedia. That’s a pretty different class background.

Sean Baker’s one of a tiny handful of the most exciting mid-career American directors for me. He’s certainly seemed to have had his rough patches, which he’s been candid about. But it also seems like he has one parent who is a pretty successful patent lawyer. Fine. But again, a different class background from what I was looking for.

Now, this isn’t a critique. Or measuring who has had it “harder” or “easier.” As much as I hate the prestige game, I’m not interested in its opposite, either, where we measure each others’ authenticity by who has had the hardest life.

This whole listing exercise was just a private thing. At first. It was me selfishly trying to make a list of artsy-fartsy types of directors of whom I’m a fan and who are in the middle of interesting careers and who came from similarly blue collar economic backgrounds. Simply because I felt like these directors might prove the most useful models for myself going forward.

Meaning, I was looking for artsy-fartsy American directors who if they went to college, went either to a community college or to a state school on scholarship. People whose families weren’t made up of artists, executives, businessmen, architects, professors, lawyers, and doctors (the families of most arthouse directors), but of janitors, Walmart employees, factory workers, police officers, truckers (my family).

Another addition to my blue collar artsy director list was a friend of mine, Kat Candler. Her excellent first feature is Hellion, and she’s also been doing great work in TV and cool short films.

I also thought about Greta Gerwig. I love, love Lady Bird, not least because of how that personal story is so much about coming-of-age on the wrong side of a class divide. But even though her family feels on the wrong side of affluence in that film, their professions (loan officer, nurse) are more professional class than what I was looking for.

I kept thinking of my favorite mid-career cool indie types of directors. When I’d search around on wikipedia and google, the family backgrounds I’d find would include parents who were billionaire businessmen, world famous film directors, theology and art history professors, museum directors, successful visual artists, university provosts, musicians, poets, therapists.

Great for them! But how about artsy-fartsy directors who were first-generation college students like I was? Or who worked in manual labor and/or service jobs for a big portion of their adulthood like I did? Or who didn’t have any books or exposure to “the arts” while growing up but who were still drawn to being a writer or artist anyway like I was?

How did directors like that manage to tell personal, non-franchise, non-superhero stories in contemporary Hollywood? And keep their career going and keep the lights on? Was it even possible any more?

I kept searching and I couldn’t find any other American arthouse mid-career directors with a truly blue collar, working class type of background on my own.

A bit despondent, I took to twitter to ask for help. From folks there, I got some strong additions to my “American blue collar arthouse canon”:

Kelly Reichardt (First Cow, Meek’s Cutoff, etc)
Lee Isaac Chung (Minari)
Janicza Bravo (Zola)
Jerrod Carmichael (On the Count of Three)

Then the afternoon ended and I went and picked up my sons from (private!) school. And went back to writing the next day.

Now, I know (hope?) that there’s plenty more American blue collar arthouse directors that I’m missing. But either way, it was way, way harder to come up with this rather short list of careers to study than I’d imagined it was gonna be.

I went into making the list just wanting to find some good models of artsy directors who maybe had some of the same baggage that I had, but who had built cool careers for themselves anyway.

I came out of making the list with a touch of the ol’ existential terror as I feared that artistically-ambitious, highly-personal cinema had in the last decade or two become — like poetry and academia before it — almost exclusively a playground for the born affluent.

Was I heading right back into the prestige economy again?

But at least there were a few names. And even within this short list, there was a notable pattern. Often the story that really put a blue-collar American arthouse director on the map was a personal story that featured an underrepresented segment of American society: Moonlight, Minari, Reservation Dogs.

Also notable as a pattern: I had trouble coming up with arthouse American directors from a blue collar background that were, well, straight white dudes like me.

Jeff Nichols is a fantastic director from Arkansas. And he might be arthouse though his sensibility would’ve been pretty mainstream in earlier decades. His family owned a furniture store in Little Rock. Which doesn’t make him blueblooded by any means. But my family members are the types to work for his family. Which is different.

Taylor Sheridan has worked a lot of manual labor jobs. But I think his family also owned a ranch? Either way, he’s not arthouse in the slightest. He’s a meat-and-potatoes mainstream genre storyteller, to his credit.

And then there’s the big 800 lb gorilla in my psyche, Quentin Tarantino. He’s the guy who made me want to do this in the first place. Mostly because Pulp Fiction took the top of my head off when I was a teenager. But also because he was a dorky blue collar white dude who wrote his way into becoming, well, Quentin Tarantino. And I was a dorky blue collar white teen dude who desperately wanted to write his way into becoming, well, anyone else.

But I also don’t think Tarantino is an arthouse guy. He’s a genre guy who tells populist stories with an arthouse flourish.

What is my point here?

My point is not to bemoan the state of the white dude in Hollywood in 2022. I’m a straight middle-aged white dude and my career (knock on wood) has never been more enjoyable or rewarding than it has been in 2022. Many of my favorite mid-career directors are white dudes. Sean Baker! The Safdies! PTA! Robert Eggers! David Lowery! etc. (They all just happen to come from a different class background than my own.)

My point is to try and give readers — specifically, blue collar and other “outsider” readers — a practical perspective about making it as a Hollywood screenwriter in 2022. And my own experience and my surveying of the arthouse field has brought me to this conclusion:

If you are coming at this with a blue collar or even middle class background, breaking in with an arthouse type of script is going to be harder than hard.

I mean, breaking in with any script is difficult. But the blue collar to arthouse pipeline really appears to be more or less impossible.

I just don’t think blue collar voices are interesting to the gatekeepers of the arthouse world. Now, these gatekeepers are interested in someone with a prestigious background telling a story set in a blue collar world. But a new storytelling voice coming out of a blue collar world? Rarer than rare.

That said, one exception to this would seem to be if your arthouse type of script is also

1) a personal story, and
2) features an underrepresented facet of American society.

That is, if you can offer your own Moonlight, your own Minari, your own Reservation Dogs. Easier said than done, obviously. But a script of this type — even from a non-prestigious blue collar writer — might break through within the rarefied, well-off, gatekeeping cultural world where the producers, executives and studios who make arthouse types of films tend to live.

But otherwise, as far as I can tell, the arthouse/Sundance film world is mostly reserved for the kinds of people who excel at the prestige economy. Those who come from professional or better types of backgrounds, and who went to elite private schools, and who know how that world works because they were born into it.

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What’s left for the rest of us?

Probably genre.

At the risk of being a cheerleader for the gentle healing powers of capitalism: producers and studios and networks can make a genuine fortune if a populist genre-driven movie or TV show strikes a nerve. And this profit-drive really sorta eliminates prestige as currency in my experience. At the least, it makes prestige weigh much, much less in genre worlds than it does in the arthouse world.

That’s not to say there aren’t still hurdles and blind spots. It’s still going to be harder for outsiders than it will be for insiders to pitch or sell a genre script. Or to even get into the room. Sexism, ageism, racism, prejudice, and insiderism can all still prevail. Which I’m sure most of you who are reading this can attest to much more than my straight white middle-aged dude ass can.

But I’ll also tell you this much: if I’m pitching a horror story or an action series to a group of execs, no one listening cares where I went to college, or that I was once an award-winning poet, or if I know what the coolest new restaurants in LA are (I don’t). They care if the story I’m pitching is scary enough to draw an audience, or if the action series kicks enough ass to get eyeballs and advertising dollars.

I mean, a track record helps. Definitely. But if you’re trying to break in via genre, you don’t have a track record to offer. But you have to offer something. Same as in the arthouse world. But for a blue collar outsider writer, that something is probably more achievable in the genre world than it is in the arthouse one. Because there’s money to be made.

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So if you, dear reader, can keep my snooty Duke dean smiling and engaged when you and your credentials are introduced to him at a social function, then maybe the arthouse world will likewise smile at you.

But if you come from a working class background, and went to public schools, and mostly hang out with other working people of whatever color or creed, and you want to tell idiosyncratic personal stories anyway: then you might have some hard questions to ask yourself.

Do you have a personal story that you want to tell? And can you imagine NPR being interested in doing a report on that socially-important story?

If the answer to this is “yes,” then writing an arthouse, indie, Sundance type of script might still be a viable path to starting a career for you, even if you don’t have connections or prestige to offer.

But let’s say that you don’t have the sort of background or credentials that’ll make my old dean smile and that you also don’t have (or simply don’t want to tell) the sort of personal, socially-important story that will make an NPR listener go “hmmm.”

And let’s you still want to write an arthouse type of script anyway. What should you do?

If you can’t help but still want to write it, then I say write that artsy-fartsy script. Because fuck the gatekeepers. Fuck NPR. And fuck fancy dinner parties. Take a swing anyway. It shouldn’t just be the cool, well-credentialed, born rich who get to tell weird personal stories on film.

But you may want to also have a great genre script that you really love in your backpocket as well. A killer spin on the horror genre. Or a romantic comedy that has a wild new angle on the genre. Or an amazing action or crime story that fuses with your unique background to bring something new to that mode of genre storytelling.

Because there’s money to be made in genre. And when money’s the main currency, prestige just doesn’t have the same weight. If you can make a junior executive see $$$ and/or a promotion by page twenty of your script, it doesn’t matter if you went to Yale or to my community college. You’ve got a shot.