May 2004

After more than twenty years in the business, I decided to quit my career as a costume designer. I was profoundly depressed by the excessive violence, sex, and emptiness in the scripts I was seeing and the movies I was working on. I have long recognized the power of cinema, and I had come to realize that I no longer wanted to be part of creating entertainment that makes me and others feel hopeless. And so, I have redirected my career objective toward producing spiritually uplifting entertainment that celebrates the diversity of our culture.

It seems you can’t turn around these days without hearing people moan about the high cost of health insurance. Whether it’s presidential candidates duking it out in television commercials, small business owners worried about paying for insurance, or average Americans buried by the cost of prescription drugs, paying for health care is on everybody’s mind.

Long gone are the days when Austin, Texas was merely a breeding-ground for progressive types, presidential hopefuls, and music junkies. As home to the South-by-Southwest Film Festival (SXSW), Austin has become the independent filmmaker’s Eden. As first time filmmaker Allison Berg explains it, "I thought [SXSW] was one of the best festivals for my film to get into . . . I think you have maybe a more laid-back crowd, but a great attendance in getting your film going.

In the Flying Saucer café in Brooklyn, New York, Rodney Evans settles into the same chair he sat in to storyboard almost the entirety of his first feature, Brother to Brother. "I can’t draw," explains Evans, "so I would sketch out these stick figures in a spiral-bound notebook, and then a friend of mine who is an artist made them look like people. The process took me two years."

There are two Sundance Film Festivals. The made-for-television, glamorous, Los Angeles-chic Sundance can be seen on Entertainment Tonight and Extra: Hollywood stars walk red carpet lines; former Vice President Al Gore presses flesh with average moviegoers after taking in a showing of Born into Brothels; Paris Hilton gives an impromptu stage performance at the Blender party at Harry O’s on Main Street; and fresh-faced auteurs are anointed with seven-figure distribution deals with ancillary rights to come.

Everyone knows the value of networking, right?

I could just be romanticizing it now that I’ve moved, but in New York all the filmmakers I knew seemed to be creating by any means necessary—from Super-8 shorts to animation on their laptops while fundraising for a summer-shoot, to staging readings for a work-in-progress in between compiling documentary footage. When I moved to Los Angeles last year, I found myself at a Honda dealership working out the details of my lease agreement with Amir, a fifty-year old Iranian who preferred talking about his script for a $70 million movie to discussing the details of my Honda Civic.