’s post yesterday cracked something in me. Something inside me broke.
Not because I disagreed with it or found it in any way of the mark.
But because I think she said the thing underneath everything.
The thing a lot of us have been walking around with, pretending is just fatigue, or burnout, or market adjustment, or “the business changing.” But it’s deeper than that. It’s grief.
Grief for the work or the craft.
Grief for the version of ourselves that made things because something inside us moved, not because the platform needed feeding.
And I say this as someone who has spent years talking about audience. I believe in audience. I believe in data. I believe in understanding who the work is for. I believe in building a world around the work so one buyer, one executive, one festival, one room, does not hold the entire life of a project in its hands.
I believe all of that.
Probably too much sometimes.
Because Jennifer is right. There is a cost.
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There is a cost to turning every artist into a broadcaster. Every filmmaker into a marketer. Every private thought into a public asset. Every wound into a hook. Every question into content. Every unfinished idea into proof that you still exist.
At some point, you stop asking, “What am I trying to make?”
And start asking, “What does this even become online?”
That is a terrible little death.
A quiet one, but a death.
A few days ago, I watched my first real documentary with my son.
It was the film that broke me into the industry in a meaningful way. Not in some giant fantasy version of success. Not the private jet, champagne, “kid, you’re going places” version. But enough. Enough to open doors. Enough to let me make choices. Enough to make me believe that a film could still move through the world because it was strange, sincere, human, messy, and alive.
I made a fool of myself in that film.
I looked silly, stupid, vulnerable.
And watching it with my son, all these years later, I felt something I was not prepared for.
He was proud of me.
Not because the film was a business model
Not because it was franchise-able.
Not because it converted or scaled or demonstrated audience-market alignment across multiple verticals.
He was proud because he could see me making something with freedom.
That was the part that hurt.
Because I realized that might have been the last film I made where I felt that kind of creative freedom. The kind where the work was hard, but the people were pushing in the same direction. The kind where there was family in it. The kind where the goal was not to optimize the project into some dead-eyed market shape before it even had a pulse.
Back then, the art still mattered inside certain rooms.
But not always.
Let’s not romanticize the past too much. Hollywood was never a monastery. It was always a casino. But there were still places where talent was cultivated. Where new voices were brought in. Where a movie could just be a movie. Where a single film did not have to justify an entire corporate strategy.
Now everything has to become a business model before it is allowed to be a feeling.
A film is not just a film. It’s so much more:
It’s intellectual property, a brand extension, a content funnel, a platform play, a community strategy, a monetizable audience vertical.
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Good God.
I say this a lot, “Sometimes I just want to make a chair”.
A simple chair.
Wood. Lines. Weight. Balance.
Something honest.
Something that does not need a greenlight. Something that does not require me to perform. Something that does not care if the algorithm approves of the grain. Something that just sits there, useful and quiet, because I made it with my hands.
I think a lot of us are looking for some version of that chair.
Something simple.
Something human.
Something that does not demand we become a product before we are allowed to make the thing.
And that is where Jennifer’s piece hit me hardest.
Because she is not wrong about the creator economy becoming the new gatekeeper.
That is the part we have to say out loud.
For years, the platforms sold artists a beautiful little story:
Come here.
Build here.
Post here.
Work here.
Give us your voice, your face, your rhythm, your jokes, your grief, your meals, your children, your process, your breakdowns, your tiny moments of accidental beauty.
Do that long enough, and maybe we will help you bypass the old gatekeepers.
And yes, a few people do.
A few become the poster children and get a deal.
But the rest?
The rest are told to keep posting.
Keep optimizing.
Keep dancing.
Keep confessing.
Keep bleeding in portrait mode.
The old gatekeepers wore suits.
The new ones wear blazers with hoodies.
Different politics for a minute, maybe. Different language. Softer branding. More talk about empowerment and community and access.
But give it time.
It will optimize.
It will condense.
It will consolidate.
It will become the same narrow road with better user experience.
And we will be told, once again, that if we are not making it through, the failure is ours.
Not enough willingness to flatten ourselves into something the machine can understand.
I’m turning 60 in a few weeks.
That sentence feels insane to write.
And I don’t know how much I want to entertain the internet anymore.
I know the model. I teach the model. I believe parts of the model are necessary because I do not want filmmakers walking into a collapsing market empty-handed and calling that purity.
But I am also tired.
Not just from the decades in this fight..
Though that is in me.
I am tired from 25, almost 30 years inside this industry. Tired from watching the language change while the extraction stays the same. Tired from watching artists get told that survival requires one more pivot, one more platform, one more new set of rules handed down by people who rarely make anything except terms and conditions.
And then I went to Europe.
And I saw something that made the wound worse and better at the same time.
Public art.
Not as luxury.
Not as branding.
Not as a sponsored activation where everyone pretends the mural has a soul.
Actual public art.
Free buses taking people to cultural events. Theater that felt reachable. Art in the street. Artists visible in the life of the city. Work that existed because someone still believed culture was part of being alive together.
Not everything in Europe is some artistic paradise. Let’s not be stupid. The business gets ugly there too. Power is power everywhere.
But there was still a civic idea present that felt almost radical from an American distance:
Art is for us and not just for the market or the wealthy or the people with premium access.
For us.
For the public.
For the strange little human project of trying to understand who we are before we destroy each other or ourselves.
That is what breaks my heart about where we are now.
Because after enough time in Hollywood, you start to realize many of us were not working inside a temple of dreams.
We were working in the creative department of Chase Bank.
And maybe that sounds harsh.
But tell me it doesn’t feel true.
Tell me the last 20 years have not been one long migration away from art and toward financial engineering with cool fonts.
Tell me we have not watched the movie business become a risk-management business.
Tell me we have not watched the artist become the pitch, the pitch become the deck, the deck become the funnel, the funnel become the data, and the data become the thing everyone worships because nobody knows what else to believe in.
I don’t want to throw away audience.
I don’t want to throw away strategy.
I don’t want filmmakers to pretend that making the thing is enough when the market has become this brutal.
But Jennifer reminded me that if all we talk about is strategy, we lose the reason strategy mattered in the first place.
The point was never to become better servants of the machine.
The point was to keep the work alive.
The point was to protect the artist long enough for the artist to make something true.
The point was to help the film find its people without making the filmmaker disappear into performance.
So yes, build the audience.
Yes, understand the market.
Yes, know where the work belongs.
Yes, do not walk in empty.
But also remember this:
You are not content.
Your life is not inventory.
Your grief is not a growth strategy.
Your art does not become more valuable because a platform can measure it.
And if you still want to make something just because you hear the music, that is not naïve.
That may be the last honest thing left.
Jennifer, your note wrecked me.
In the best way.
It reminded me that beneath all the strategy, all the market talk, all the decks and data and distribution plans, there is still a person standing there, trying to remember what it felt like to make something freely.
Not for permission.
Not for conversion.
Not for the algorithm.
Not for supper.
Just because the music started.
And for a moment, before the world got its hands on it, you wanted to dance.
Alex LeMay is a filmmaker, journalist, and founder of Shadowfile.Press . PitchCraft publishes from the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and the work of building things that matter.
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