Can Artists Work Separate from Dirty Money?

Once again I have to speak out against a company I work for

A lot of artists sacrificed to make this film that speaks out about the collision between capitalism and commerce.

From our financier Ted Hamm to our Producers Sean McKittrick and Ray Mansfield to our DP Luke Geissbühler to George Mandl our editor to Lesley Arfin to Jesse Pearson to Amy Kellner to Simon Ostrovsky to Fat Jew to Dave-1 to Santiago Stelley to Taylor Lorenz to Chrome Canyon our composer, etc, etc, etc, everyone took below market rates to push this film out at a time no one was spending money in Hollywood.

While my wife pushed out our son, Senna, I might add.

We did it because this was an urgent and cautionary tale about watching private equity swallow up an entire cultural scene as it did with DIY culture in Brooklyn.

For the uninitiated, Vice began as a magazine that covered punk, rap, but most importantly DIY culture in Williamsburg reporting on the scene through places like Death By Audio or Cokies or Checks Cashed.

Roughly 10 years after Vice’s arrival in Williamsburg, it takes on hundreds of millions of dollars in private equity money and eventually displaces the venues it sought to report on like Death By Audio. That’s what’s happening to every single cultural outlet these days. The corporation purporting to report on, foster, or invest in the work eventually becomes the work itself by placing the importance of its bottom line over the artists and what they’re trying to say. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what the thing stood for in the first place because once private equity touches you funny the objective is simply to make money.

I’m a cynical person, but if you told me last October when we sold this cautionary film about private equity to Mubi - a premiere art house distributor at the time - that they would be consumed by private equity before our movie even came out, I would have told you to take the tin foil hat off and have a Long Island Iced Tea.