It also functions as a great exercise for colorists and other designers in the motion picture world.

Here’s to the make-believe world of 2011.

“Of course it’s happening inside your head. Why should that mean it’s not real?”

Films in order of appearance: http://filmography2011.tumblr.com/

This was how I felt about myself when I looked at my own productivity over the last few months.  Not for lack of accomplishment: I was still making a living as a freelance artist, and that’s success enough.

But my schedule was ridiculous.  I yo-yo’d between too much sleep and not enough.  And I’m getting to a point in my life where stability doesn’t feel like compromise.

So I wrote the Artist’s Contract.  And it is, simply, the terms of agreement for a sustainable, productive career as a professional artist.  The working conditions, the expected results, and a mini-code of conduct.  Just like you’d have at any other job.  Because, in the end, that’s what being a professional artist is.

And that’s where it would have stayed, had my long-time friend Doc Waller not convinced me to share it.  So, I’m releasing my version of the contract under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Mine is specifically geared toward professional storytellers.  You can find a new version of the contract (more appropriate for all sorts of artists)  at Doc’s arts organization, The Layman Group.  They are even including an accountability program to help artists stay focused on their work.  I highly recommend you check it out.

Let’s create some work, everybody.

• Download the Artist’s Contract

(If you’re interested in developing the contract for some other purpose outside the CC license, contact me directly)

The Artist’s Contract by Earl Newton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.  Based on a work at blog.earlnewton.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://blog.earlnewton.com/2011/11/the-artists-contract/.

Art of the Pitch by Max Adams (Courtesy of the Austin Film Festival)

“If one accepts that the tea party is, in fact, operating on principles that have more to do with LaVey’s Church of Satan than with Jesus’ spiritual teachings, the alliance between social and fiscal reactionaries that is the tea party becomes more than ironic. It’s downright comical.”

There’s a story here, chums.

This is a tricky question.  We decided “accessible” couldn’t mean simply “popular,” otherwise it’d become a box office contest.  It couldn’t be about talent.  It would have to be based on how many different kinds of cultures (and different ages) could appreciate the work on their own terms.

It was a standard we felt more than we could put into words, so we started with two simple guideposts: Pixar is a 1 (most accessible), Salvador Dali is a 10.  Some directors’ careers covered a wide swath of accessible and less-accessible work, and in those cases, we averaged the director according to our own reactions.  Example: Peter Jackson’s early work put him in the “bottom 5,” but post-LOTR he is obviously much more accessible, so he found himself at a 3.

We had no idea where it would go. It was difficult to assign any director an abstract number, but we were surprised how quickly we agreed upon the numbers when we compared one director against another.

Here was the list we ended up with:

1. Most Accessible: Pixar

Without question, Pixar makes some of the most accessible films today. While not a single director, they so clearly represented “accessible” stories that we had to make them #1. Their films are visually beautiful, with mature, developed ideas that are nonetheless easy for even young children to understand.
In this category: Pixar, Joe Johnston. James Cameron clocked in at a 1.5, accessible to NEARLY everyone.

2. Steven Spielberg

Spielberg almost qualified as a 1, but some of his hallmark work (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) cut him off from younger audiences. We also included Brad Bird in this category, along with 1970s-era George Lucas (American Graffitti, Star Wars: A New Hope).
In this category: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (1970s), Jon Favreau, Ron Howard.

3. Tim Burton / Michael Bay

Tim Burton was fascinating, as he’s actually a director whose quirky ideas would probably put him at a 6-8, if his style didn’t make them so accessible. We also included Michael Bay here, as his work is very popular, but not very emotionally-accessible.
In this category: Tim Burton, Michael Bay, Danny Boyle, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Rodriguez, Sam Raimi (post-Spiderman), Peter Jackson, Gore Verbinski, Judd Apatow (3.5).

4. Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood was another fascinating find: he’s the anti-Burton. As a director he often chooses very accessible topics, but his choices actually make them less accessible. Example: his films usually lack the cornerstone elements that are a draw for the genres he works in (Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven lack any triumphant final fight, Flags of Our Fathers has no patriotic pro-America swells, Gran Turino has no big revenge moment or touching old-empathizes-with-youth scene, etc). This isn’t a judgment against him at all; it could be considered a compliment. But it is interesting.
In this category: Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino (brilliant but very genre-specific), David Cronenberg (post-History of Violence), Guy Ritchie, Martin Scorcese, Kathryn Bigelow, Frank Darabont, Guillermo Del Toro, Mel Gibson, Mel Brooks

5. Average Accessibility

Remember that only 1 and 10 were decided at the outset. The 5′s were decided based on their relationship to where the other filmmakers fell. Nonetheless, we were surprised to see how easily most of the name directors we thought of fell into the “middle 5,” especially #5. Directors in this category were usually very accessible in either style or theme, and less accessible in the other.
In this category: George Lucas (Phantom Menace), Francis Ford Coppola, Christopher Nolan, Roman Polanski, Francois Truffaut, Ben Affleck, Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, Jonathan Demme, Zack Snyder, Tyler Perry, Oliver Stone, James L. Brooks.

6. The “Safe” Quirkies

Most of the directors in #6 were niche directors of one kind or another, but who still managed to leave a bit of the door open for new audiences to find them. Stanley Kubrick and Spike Jonze were especially notable. We labeled Jonze the “bottom-5 Burton,” as he also takes very inaccessible ideas and makes them more available. In both his themes and his style, we wanted to label Kubrick a 7, but there is something greater than the sum of his parts that makes him more accessible than a Jim Jarmusch or an Ingmar Bergman. Therefore, we filed Kubrick as a 6.5, along with George Clooney and the Coen Brothers.
In this category: Spike Jonze, Ingmar Bergman, Terry Gilliam, Kevin Smith, M. Night Shyamalan (very accessible early work, very inaccessible later work), Ang Lee, Sam Raimi (pre-Spiderman), David O. Russell, Robert Altman, Darren Aronofsky, Spike Lee, Gus Van Sant, Stanley Kubrick (6.5), George Clooney (6.5), the Coen Brothers (6.5).

7. The “Artists”

This category started with Jim Jarmusch, and that set the tone for everyone to follow. #7s tend to be focused on personal films and expressions, sometimes to the point of leaving the audience behind. #7 films are ones that, when they are good, are worthy of detailed study, and when they aren’t, don’t always make a lot of sense.
In this category: Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michel Gondry (we are ignoring Green Hornet), Steven Soderbergh (Schitzopolis and his later films skewed him heavily down the list), Ingmar Bergman, David Mamet, Pedro Almodovar, Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Uwe Boll.

8. The Grisly Outer Limits

#8, without our intention, became the ersatz home for some of the underground horror filmmakers. This category started with David Cronenberg (pre-History of Violence), whose work is very intriguing, but the tone and topics pushed him past filmmakers like Kubrick and Jarmusch.
In this category: David Cronenberg (pre-History of Violence), Tom Six (director of Human Centipede), Chan-Wook Park.

9. The David Lynch Category

I don’t think this needs a lot of explanation. David Lynch would be the mayor of this category on FourSquare, except you actually have to leave it in order to check in again.
In this category: David Lynch, Werner Herzog.

10. The Final Frontier

#10 is a theoretical “impossibility” that we nonetheless filled in. It started with Salvador Dali because, well, that’s obvious. But eventually, Terrence Malick moved in as well. Malick made it this far because his work is actually deceivingly accessible: it LOOKS like a movie we’re familiar with, but everyone seems to behave in a way that is only fully clear to Malick himself. In that way, interestingly enough, it felt like David Lynch was actually MORE accessible, because from the outset it’s clear that his work is not accessible, and you go in expecting that. We’re entering the quantum physics of film here.
In this category: Terrence Malick, Salvador Dali.

While there are names I’m still unsure about, what I love about this list is how we had to rethink everything we assumed about our favorite directors. Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers, and Stanley Kubrick all describe the distant ends of very different galaxies, but in this list, it makes sense to include them. It also made me think about my own work, and where I would place myself in the list.

Did we miss one of your favorite directors? We probably got tired. Leave your comments below.

I’ll be on the East Coast for the next three weeks, finishing up a commercial I directed (along with some other projects) and generally recharging creative batteries. Looking forward to coming back to L.A. and jumping back into things.

As for Facebook (and Google+)… on a whim, I took a break from social networking for a week. And what I found was pretty simple: more time, more sleep, and more satisfaction. I wasn’t checking messages every fifteen minutes, and when I wanted to reach out to a friend, I actually had to call them. I found out that some things – like friendship – shouldn’t be streamlined and multi-tasked. Social interactions should mean more than a “Like” button.

For someone who makes his living as a “creative,” I’m very left-brained. I love GTD. I work on time efficiency like a poet with a verse. As a child, I did math for fun.

This presented some interesting roadblocks when I started freelancing. How do you really budget time for a creative problem? As freelancers, we speak as though creativity were a quantifiable product: “I can give you forty-five minutes of creativity for that price.”

But that’s not really how it works, is it? Some solutions present themselves in minutes. Others take weeks, years, or our remaining minutes on Earth. We’re really saying, “I will work on this problem for forty-five minutes, then I will abandon it and pick the best of what I have.”

As an organization fanatic, the idea of scheduling a project’s due date as “from here to eternity” makes my eyes twitch. Add to the fact that I’m a perfectionist, and you have lots of time creatively constipated, sitting in front of a calendar full of erased pencilings.

Peace talks have been noticeably one-sided. My left brain needs rules. My right brain blows raspberries and designs popcorn garlands.

In response, the left brain has scrabbled to find rules to compensate. These are the ones that still seem to apply. I offer them as a token towards peace in both hemispheres.

You won’t necessarily have an idea of what you’ll create before you create it.

Just typing this makes the entire right side of my body hurt.

Nonetheless, it’s true. Saying “I don’t have any ideas” isn’t an excuse. Creation is the act of reacting to something. Sometimes that means sitting there and reacting to how much you hate everything you’ve created. (In fact, knowing why you hate something will often be your first step to something good)

A bad idea isn’t a sign of hackery. It’s a signpost to a good idea.

Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. I will pretend, for a second, this isn’t voodoo sissy-talk.

Let’s sweeten it with some lovely math. In an interview, Chris Rock, multi-millionaire, said he’s lucky if one in ten jokes is funny. Jerry Seinfeld, multi-billionaire, said, “One in ten?! I’m lucky if it’s one in one hundred.”

Math! For every successful hour of standup, Jerry Seinfeld has written ninety-nine hours of absolute tripe. If he’s lucky. If he’d stopped at ninety-eight, he’d be a hack.

That means those awkward first drafts can be put to use. We can be more efficient. That’s right, “efficient.” Sexy. Keep your hands out of your pockets while I say this next piece.

You write something down. You hate it. Don’t throw it away. Look at it. Why do you hate it? What’s not working? When you can answer that question, you’re moving toward a good idea.

There is no “good” or “bad.” There is only “true,” “fun,” or “not.”

Relief! Categorizing! Let’s put our right brain in a box and create a flow-chart of inspiration. I’m putting “be a genius” as the first item on my to-do list.

Some things are “true.” They aren’t fun, but something in them resonates as true for us. I don’t mean factual, I mean true. Stop thinking about it, your heart knows what I mean. “Death of a Salesman” isn’t much fun, but there’s a lot of truth in it.

Some things are “fun.” They aren’t really emotionally true, but they are enjoyable anyway. Pop music. Most action movies.

A few things are “fun” and “true” at the same time. This nudges into your personal list of “masterpieces.” The Shawshank Redemption. Leonard Cohen songs. Fun as entertainment, but they speak to something deeper.

Most things are “not” – not really fun, not really true. We don’t innately connect with the truth of it, and it’s not fun. Most advertising and (sadly) a lot of our education falls here.

Don’t worry about “good” and “bad” because they don’t exist. They are abstract value judgments based on other factors.

Proof? You can work toward “more true” or “more fun.” In which direction is “better?”

Smith posits this as a theory about why he should charge $4.99 for an e-book: it spoke to me about the value of doing a little of something every day, versus trying to accomplish an enormous task all at once.