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I'm always interested in the intersection of art and business, and I always wonder how in the world you can have a multi-million-dollar enterprise like a feature film production depend on the whims of an artist trying to give birth to his beloved story. This article provides a window into the process.
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I missed this post back when you first wrote it (your prolonged periods of silence on the blog cause me to miss it when you do post :), but I've been guilty of the same), but I found it to be very interesting.
Regarding the question about multi-million-dollar enterprises and art, I am inclined to think this question an unfortunate result of the tendency of our modern world to lower everything to the level of economic commodity. The fact that there is a music, film, or art "industry" at all seems undesirable to me. Does that mean that the financiers of art in the past were merely funding art for art's sake? Of course not. I'm sure there are a variety of motivations that vary in purity from "to the glory of God" to "to the glory of me, the benefactor", but I think that the democratization of art by market forces has had a decidedly negative effect on the quality of art as an end to itself as opposed to a mere means to financial gain. I wonder what the Renaissance would have given us if the artists had been creating their works with the interest of satisfying the tastes of the masses.
End rant. That being said, I recognize that this is simply not the world that we live in. There is a film industry. There are very few writers who are given the leeway that Kaufman is. It seems that this story does give a pretty good feel for how this process unfolds. An artist has crazy ideas, finds someone who's willing to take a chance on him/her, providing that the artist is willing to submit to some limitations, that crazy project ends up meeting with some success, which means that the artist gets more leeway to create more work that might be closer to his original vision. I think that the next step is usually that the artist creates something so incomprehensible to the public (such as Synecdoche, New York), that all of the good will that the artist had accumulated is spent on one project and he/she is forced to go back to being reigned in by the industry forces.
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