Does Middle Class Art Have a Future?

I went to work for the film industry in 1994. I’d never done it. Oh, I’d dabbled — as a teenager, I’d worked in the mailroom of Creative Artists Agency for a summer — but past that, not really. I was a child of Hollywood, my father was and still is a successful talent agent, and my mother was a well-produced screenwriter. Everybody I knew, every last person I’d grown up with, it seemed, had dutifully entered an industry that’s much like the Mafia in this respect. Casa Nostra runs in the blood. Having scrupulously avoided the movie business for most of my 20s — I was a schoolteacher, in San Francisco, had exiled myself in search of work that had meaning — I found myself in that most cinematic, and criminal, of positions. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.