C&C 27: Directors with and without Money

Fiscal advice from unlikely quarters, plus the usual recommendations

I’m continuing my trek through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and this week is all about money. Or abundance, as Julia calls it. It’s going to take me a while to get the hang of this lingo.

Money is never far from my thoughts. Why? Because I’m the child of working-class immigrant parents. Because I’m a freelancer who grew up in a union household. Because I am a writer fortunate enough to have a gainfully-employed spouse who finds my hijinks amusing, otherwise I’d have packed in this racket long ago. I freely admit I have issues with money. I forever hear wolves scratching at the door, even on those days when the sun is ablaze, breezes are blowing, and the doors are thrown wide open.

I’m working on it.

So I was happy to encounter an instance of the synchronicity that Julia has advised me to expect. As abundance week began, some sound fiscal wisdom appeared in my inbox—from no less than Francis Ford Coppola, a figure I’ve read a lot about lately.

Image from Coppola’s One from the Heart

Journalist Paul Kix’s weekly newsletter brims with tips for longform writers. The most recent edition is called “Francis Ford Coppola’s guide to making more money.” I erroneously assumed it was prompted by Sam Wasson’s book The Path to Paradise. Instead, Kix cites a conversation between Coppola and Gay Talese from Esquire in July 1981, when, as Kix wrote, both men “ruled their respective worlds.” It was also a time when Coppola was on the financial ropes, battered by the production of his musical One from the Heart. Talese asks about it:

Coppola: I knew that I couldn’t expect help from a lot of people.

Talese: Why not?

Coppola: Because I think most people regard money as a vital element of life. You hold onto it and don’t jeopardize it. My attitude toward money is that it is just something to be used. But many others really think seriously about loaning money. It’s really just their own limitation.

Talese: Did you know that before, or is that something you learned in these past months?

Coppola: I’ve learned it over the last twenty years of my active career. People are hampered by money. It does not free them. It does not encourage them to go on and try new things. It makes them more conservative.

This observation jibes with my admittedly limited experience at fundraisers and literary galas, where the conversation tends to be stultifying and invariably about hanging on to what you’ve got. At such functions, you’re better off talking to your bartender. As a general rule, you’re always better off talking to your bartender.

Kix acknowledges that “viewing money not as a scarce resource but an abundant one” requires “some mental jujitsu, especially for people who grew up without money (as I did).” Put me in that number; our family mantra was “The Keenans are not meant to have money.” Kix backs up his argument with plenty of peer-reviewed psychological research. And then there’s the Coppola case study. As the filmmaker says later in the interview—I went into the Esquire archive and read the whole thing:

Today, if you gave me a billion dollars, I’d have it spent in a year. But it’d be worth $10 billion a year later. Money is a tool, a tool of influence. It’s a way that I can get you to come over here and play with me.

Money as a means to an end, not an end in itself. A sentiment I never heard at any of those fundraisers or literary galas.

Maybe Coppola isn’t the first person you’d turn to for financial advice. But I’ll take the word of someone who has won and lost multiple fortunes over all of the hustlers on Shark Tank.

When it comes to writer/directors leading boom-and-bust lives, the trail was blazed by Preston Sturges. Key scenes in the most recent Renee Patrick novel Idle Gossip are set at The Players, his beguiling boondoggle of a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. One of his coinages about coinage has stayed with me. I should put it into practice in 2024.

Money is not star material. One should never have enough of it, or enough lack of it, to allow of its playing a principal role.

What I’m Reading

Speaking of Paul Kix, his book You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America (2023) is deservedly showing up on best-of-the-year lists. He focuses on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. The book is not only a work of history but a strategy manual as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the others leading the SCLC’s effort struggle to recover from a series of stinging public failures that have jeopardized their cause as they adjust to moves made by the powers that be in Birmingham—and in the Kennedy administration. It digs deep into the decisions made, chiefly the one to place children (aided by coded messages from a disc jockey) on the front lines of the movement. Kix writes in propulsive, cinematic fashion, with an eye for the telling detail. He explores every internecine struggle, every moment of weakness, and produces a humanizing, galvanizing look at America. Coming off as a true hero in these pages: the late, great Harry Belafonte.

In the New Yorker, Ali Fitzgerald considers Patricia Highsmith’s lost career in comics.

The schedule for Noir City 2024, pairing classic noir with international films in an edition dubbed “Darkness Has No Borders,” is now out.