Ted Hope gave a talk at the New York Foundation for the Arts that ties together a lot of things he’s been talking about at his Truly Free Film blog. The section up front that pulls together some statistics about the state of our arthouse cinema is pretty sobering. I won’t summarize it here — just go to the link to read it — but I especially liked a paragraph near the end in which he urges people to get out of the single-picture mindset and to see their activites as a film artist as part of a continuum of life activities designed to give themselves and their fans value and pleasure. Despite the fact that the piece is called “The New Model for Indie Film,” I think the subtext of this piece is that that model is as much of a perceptual or behavioral one as an economic one.

From the piece:

Your work is your life. You aren’t striving for any one thing other than to improve and to change. Don’t think about that ONE movie you want to make;focus on the long term and what you need to feel as excited, as engaged in fifteen years as you are today. Use your resources. Use your audience. Grow it. Sustain it.