Thank you for writing this. I come from a working class background and applied to NYU because I was struggling to move from crew work into the creative path I had long aspired to. I was accepted, but once inside the program I began to see how many opportunities, including financial support, are skewed towards students who already have financial resources and significant support systems.
For a long time, I didn’t even have the language to identify what I was experiencing and have only recently started recognizing it as class disparity. The path has ended up costing more than just extreme debt. The stress of navigating the institution without the resources many peers took for granted eventually took a significant toll on my health.
We need to talk more openly about class in film, including the experiences of those of us who have taken out unfathomable debt to attend elite institutions and do not come from wealth.
Thank you for your message. This is exactly the conversation I’m trying to have. It took me a long time to articulate this, almost a decade. I totally agree we need to talk a lot more about class.
I had a similar experience at NYU. My family is upper middle class for the W coast but definitely not at all for NYU. I felt like I was constantly being invaded by a small army of intellectual colonialists.
Once the children of the unethically wealthy discarded me and moved on I was able to develop my artistic voice without a lot of competition. It is easy to forget the reason why the children of the unethically wealthy pretend they are underfunded is because talented, hardworking artists and scientists are capable of creating beautiful works with very little in materials. I am always sad that I was pushed out of the path I chose, however, when I look back at the path I took to circumvent little Neros, it is objectively it is more impressive than their awards.
As a Chinese American filmmaker who grew up poor in the greater New York area, I want to push back against an idea in here because I think your Zhao example suggests things I think you don't intend.
You use "diverse and female child of the elite" as if "Asian woman" were a clean stand-in for identity-over-class, which is the worst category to run that argument through. Asian Americans are the most income-divided racial group in the country (by Pew's measure the gap between the top and bottom is the widest of any race) so the label tells you almost nothing about someone's class. In New York City, Asians have the highest poverty rate of any group, roughly twice the white rate, even while Asian Americans post the highest median household income nationally. That contradiction is the model-minority trap: the wealthy tail makes the poverty invisible.
So the real issue isn't that Zhao is an Asian woman who got institutional support, it's that she isn't an Asian American at all in the sense that matters to your essay. She grew up wealthy and ethnically dominant in her own country, which offers national-class privilege, and not the experience of being a racial minority in a society that isn't yours. Folding her into the same bucket as a poor Asian American kid flattens two completely different lives into one demographic checkbox. On that, you and I actually agree: a festival checklist that asks for identity but never net worth is the problem.
Where I'd part ways is the implication (even if unintended) that pushing for racial diversity and pushing for class diversity contradict when the subject is Asian. For a group this underrepresented in film (and this internally unequal) that framing risks using the wealthy outliers to argue away the poor majority. I say all this as a fan of her work...I just don't think she's the case that proves your point.
EDIT: It looks like the author added a section “The Problem of Terms Like BIPOC” in response to this comment, but it honestly kind of misses my point by boiling it down to “Chinese/Indians = rich. Hmong/Burmese/Bangladeshi = poor.”
When I say that Asians have the highest poverty rate in NYC, the plurality of those Asians are Chinese. Not Hmong, not Burmese, not Bangladeshi. Nearly 40% of Chinese New Yorkers live in or near poverty (Asian American Federation). And NY has the largest population of Chinese people outside of Asia, so that is a LOT of poor Chinese people, all erased by the model minority myth to fixate on foreign Chinese elites like Chloe Zhao.
That’s a fair criticism, thanks for sharing. I do not mean to indict all asians in any way, and am aware of the class disparities. If there were more clean class metrics perhaps it would help overcome, however slightly, those disparities in the asian community.
You make a fair point about the variance of wealth disparity among the Asian American community but it does not warrant six paragraphs, edits based on the writer’s amendments and so much pushback. You can make your point that the writer folds Asian Americans into a box, but that is not at all the primary point of the article. The mention of Asian Americans as a relatively wealthy groups is just a sidebar as part of the greater discourse. And that fact still says something about how misinformed the identity/racial obsession can be in this country, regardless of the variance among the group.
"Racial obsession" is an odd charge for a piece that scrutinizes one woman of color's finances for half its length, then waves off Kubrick's and the Coens' family money in a sentence. In an industry built by wealthy white men, that's a strange place to aim the magnifying glass.
Dude, you know the Coens’ parents only gave them like fifteen grand for Blood Simple, right? And Kubrick’s first two films combined cost less than Songs, and he was living on unemployment and hustling chess while making them. Combined they cost as much as a grad degree at NYU. Pick up a book before you comment.
I just double checked: in “My First Movie” Joel says his family put in $15k and they went into debt while making it. Tisch didn’t even exist when he went to NYU. They had 65 investors on Blood Simple. Your worldview is not rooted in fact.
True, but neither of them went to graduate school, it was their first feature, and back then NYU cost (for Joel), in 1978, the year he graduated, according to USA Today estimates:
1978• Private tuition, fees, room and board per year:$4,610 (inflation adjusted: $17,680)
so in inflation adjusted terms, his entire undergraduate degree back then, in the most expensive year (he would have started in ‘74), cost less than one year of grad school at Tisch. The $50k from his parents cost half of one year’s current tuition.
Yes? The piece is literally about how perceptions of racial hierarchies intersect with perceptions of class hierarchies?? And how the latter is completely overshadow by the former. This should not be so easy to misunderstand
I am a former Hollywood development exec, who went to a NYC private school for high school and then an east coast liberal arts college (on financial aid for both). And all of what you’re describing is accurate.
Something I think is worth highlighting is that a lot of people who as you say went to these schools but do not see themselves as wealthy (because they aren’t billionaires) usually do not have any real concept of what their quality of life actually costs. They think that having their basic needs met — food, shelter, transportation, etc — is a given. They can’t actually conceptualize how difficult it is to struggle to get your film financed, and ALSO have to figure out how to pay for every other aspect of life that allows you to be functional enough to even make a movie.
It’s a really frustrating, and I would even argue cruel, sentiment when the loudest voices on the internet say things like: “just do it.” Even Ryan Coogler had a very supportive girlfriend in his early days who helped keep a roof over his head. So did Kurt Cobain and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
All of this to say: if you have a calling to be a filmmaker, you should absolutely do it, but figuring out who and what your tangible support systems are is going to be critically important, because it is a really long game and you will need a way to survive it.
I love this. The thing that bothers me the most is the lack of transparency about these things. All artists need a ton of support, and many are in fact people from upper class backgrounds who choose to live far more modest lifestyles than the ones they grew up with to pursue their craft. But it just needs to be a lot more transparent, because it’s genuinely harmful to people who don’t have that level of support.
But I will add this: despite her possible (probable?) class privileges, Chloe Zhao didn’t really break through until she made films with white protagonists. NOMADLAND and HAMNET didn’t disrupt very much in terms of people of color being on the screen, despite her being a woman of color herself. ETERNALS had a woman of color, and was a disaster, but Marvel is notorious for having three thousand cooks in the kitchen.
I don’t think that’s an accident, or something we should dismiss.
The protagonist of the Rider seems white passing, I looked it up and he is part native, I did not remember hinking he was native while watching the film.
It’s hard for me to speak about Nomadland, which I really hate, because I read the Harper’s article and the book and what she did, in my opinion, was truly awful, like taking Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle and making it a pro meatpacking movie. Shitting in a bucket while basically homeless is romantic!
Anecdotally, she seems to have at least partially funded Nomadland herself. There was one really big class thing I wanted to put into the piece but didn’t, for legal reasons, but I suspect there’s a lot more wealth than even the piece unveils.
Eternals is interesting, but she did have a major movie star in it, which is more than one can say for Coogler, in no world was Chadwick Boseman more famous than Angelina Jolie, yet BP crushed it at the box office. Coogler does seem to have very strong popular instincts.
Honestly I don’t know why people thought a filmmaker clearly borrowing a lot from Malick was the right fit for a Marvel movie to begin with. Her recent failed Buffy pilot is another genuinely odd example of this.
I don’t think it requires much transparency to comprehend that a career as a filmmaker is tough if you don’t have financial means.
Maybe we should be more upfront about how impossible it is, as you outline in your article through the lens of Zhao.
But if so, we should even start in high school, explaining to people what skills are currently creating value in society, which skills currently guarantee jobs, how equity vs salary for your labor works in the long run, and the massive oversupply of creatives at the moment, especially in music and film.
Parents have the old adage of how difficult it is, but we can probably quite easily adapt it further to make people, at least a few percent, make slightly smarter decisions when choosing their degrees.
I guess if you can defend the legitimacy of Zhao’s supposed outsider status at all, you can at least say that she doesn’t appear to have had any relatives working in Hollywood or entertainment when she “broke in”. Nepotism seems to be the other secret ingredient along with fabulous inherited wealth that predicts success, or at least critical accolades, in show business.
That’s fair, but I would hope to show that diverse status, NYU, the Sundance Labs, Cannes, and family wealth are just as powerful as the family connections.
But you can also point to the fact that her stepmother was a very famous actress in China, where she sourced some of the investment in her first feature.
But your original point I agree with anyway. It’s tiresome how self congratulatory people in show business tend to be when nearly all of them started their careers on 3rd base already.
Yes, but that’s in a fundamentally different ecosystem than Hollywood. It's naive to think that a relative's fame in China carries much currency to open doors in Tinseltown. Curry Barker's dad working in television broadcasting and being a screenwriter carries FAR more Hollywood “insider” weight and relevance. If any of your article subjects deserve the “industry plant nepobaby” tag, it's Barker, not Zhao.
Look at Barker’s dad’s film freeway page cited in the piece and tell me if he looks like Hollywood royalty, like Zhao’s mother, “the Roseanne of China.” Many of her investors on Songs were Chinese. It had to come from somewhere.
While I love a good movie, I’m hardly a film buff. Still, as someone who talks about class and privilege every day, I found this fascinating. It offers a real examination of how poverty is often cosplayed in the entertainment industry. And given the political moment we’re in, I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of image management and deception, making this breakdown feel particularly timely.
I’m always amazed at how the these folks can keep playing the outsider card with zero irony. I suppose, in a way, she is an outsider to that elite group. But to everyone else, the other 99.99%, she’s an insider of insiders.
I would guess that a decade of elite education, every mentorship, scholarship and award the film industry could provide, and significant family wealth might slightly diminish one’s outsider status. Maybe if she wins another Oscar she’ll finally feel at home.
You’re actually so much nicer than me about this. I describe her career as, “she arrived to America and was shocked how many people are poor.” And has been milking her fascination with that for all it can be worth. Can’t stand her movies or point of view. Thanks for writing this and investigating.
People are so uneducated about China too. When it comes to observing the second most powerful nation and one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, theres an open mind. When it comes to observing people in your back yard, it’s judgement day. Sad
Ms Zhang may well be the modern-day equivalent to the famous publisher of modernist literature James Laughlin, who was the heir of a Pittsburgh steel fortune. But of course literature and publishing was always regarded as a pursuit for ladies and gentlemen, while the movies were at least initially the product of a thrusting and crudely materialistic lower class.
But the only really interesting question is the effect that MFAization has had on the quality of the films made today. We will submit that MFAization in literature has resulted in unreadably costive works by and for the upper-middle-professional-class sensibility, and we suspect that the same thing has happened with the movies. For those of us who have seen none of the films mentioned in the article, what say you?
I’ve read about that extensively elsewhere in literature, and I would say it’s similar in movies now. Less and less of the festival movies connect with audiences, and those are the filmmakers who are ultimately brought into hollywood. It makes sense to me!
While I’m not sure it undermines your greater point, you keep portraying the current tuition rates as “generous” to Zhao. It’s the opposite. The cost of education compared to inflation has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, which means it’s likely these costs were much lower in the past, not just accounting for inflation, but compared to what a person of equivalent income earned then. And that’s not counting the possibility of scholarships or grants.
NYU was always super expensive, even when she was going there. I did not inflation adjust. You’re right, it might take 20% off the costs, but it doesn’t materially change the argument, and most people are not so financially literate. That’s a fair point with the scholarships and grants as well. I did not see many in her biography, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
That’s a great catch. I knew something felt off there. But the author went with the safest low end estimates he could for most of the other calculations so I’d still imagine it’s significantly even more expensive to recreate all of the steps that gain you access.
My favorite thing about working for free for Hollywood production companies was the fact that you needed an expensive bachelor degree to essentially do the job of an unpaid assistant. The whole thing is a carefully designed country club, but the inside is rotting.
Never heard of her or of any of them, neither have they, of me, and while I admire your essay for doing the calculations, I'm afraid to say that this must be a common happening; but, more importantly, it would not have happened without the higher education production line, which exists solely to compensate unproductive people who have no talent and couldn't get a job elsewhere. Suckers like this young lady film director who could have purchased a rental property to live off of for what she spent in tuition are born every proverbial minute.
Whether she has any talent or not, to write, select actors, choose a staff, manage the bank office functions and contracts, find locations, direct, edit and deliver a finished product viewers might benefit by watching, is entirely unimportant to those in the pseudo-educational world.
They have told children since 1968 they can be anything, do anything and anything is possible and everything is good. But they can't and it's not. It makes me very sad. But then angry, to think of these people who pretend to be stewards of young people exploiting their hopes and dreams so they can continue to pull down a salary while their students suffer under the weight of enormous debt taken to pay those who feed off of them.
The Rust Belt of Higher Education can not come too soon for me, but it is coming, has already begun. The whirlwind, anon!
"Common" refers to frequency, with the hint in this context of surprise. "Event" is inapt, being shorter in time than happening, which can occur over an longer unspecified period of time. "Awful" is a reference to your own misuse of English.
Bummer you blew your jets, daddy-o … maybe you can zonk, rip your axe and spend a little bread to cool until everything’s out of this world again? I dig your anti-square King’s jive cuz it’s so hep!
Thank you for writing this. I come from a working class background and applied to NYU because I was struggling to move from crew work into the creative path I had long aspired to. I was accepted, but once inside the program I began to see how many opportunities, including financial support, are skewed towards students who already have financial resources and significant support systems.
For a long time, I didn’t even have the language to identify what I was experiencing and have only recently started recognizing it as class disparity. The path has ended up costing more than just extreme debt. The stress of navigating the institution without the resources many peers took for granted eventually took a significant toll on my health.
We need to talk more openly about class in film, including the experiences of those of us who have taken out unfathomable debt to attend elite institutions and do not come from wealth.
Thank you for your message. This is exactly the conversation I’m trying to have. It took me a long time to articulate this, almost a decade. I totally agree we need to talk a lot more about class.
And the debt stuff is no joke. Hope you’re doing well.
I'm publishing a new piece this week that addresses this more carefully, and was inspired by this comment. Thanks again for sharing.
I had a similar experience at NYU. My family is upper middle class for the W coast but definitely not at all for NYU. I felt like I was constantly being invaded by a small army of intellectual colonialists.
Once the children of the unethically wealthy discarded me and moved on I was able to develop my artistic voice without a lot of competition. It is easy to forget the reason why the children of the unethically wealthy pretend they are underfunded is because talented, hardworking artists and scientists are capable of creating beautiful works with very little in materials. I am always sad that I was pushed out of the path I chose, however, when I look back at the path I took to circumvent little Neros, it is objectively it is more impressive than their awards.
Beautifully written and investigated.
Now do the Safdie brothers.
I’ve heard rumors of their fortune but they don’t seem to disguise their wealth quite as aggressively.
Yes please
As a Chinese American filmmaker who grew up poor in the greater New York area, I want to push back against an idea in here because I think your Zhao example suggests things I think you don't intend.
You use "diverse and female child of the elite" as if "Asian woman" were a clean stand-in for identity-over-class, which is the worst category to run that argument through. Asian Americans are the most income-divided racial group in the country (by Pew's measure the gap between the top and bottom is the widest of any race) so the label tells you almost nothing about someone's class. In New York City, Asians have the highest poverty rate of any group, roughly twice the white rate, even while Asian Americans post the highest median household income nationally. That contradiction is the model-minority trap: the wealthy tail makes the poverty invisible.
So the real issue isn't that Zhao is an Asian woman who got institutional support, it's that she isn't an Asian American at all in the sense that matters to your essay. She grew up wealthy and ethnically dominant in her own country, which offers national-class privilege, and not the experience of being a racial minority in a society that isn't yours. Folding her into the same bucket as a poor Asian American kid flattens two completely different lives into one demographic checkbox. On that, you and I actually agree: a festival checklist that asks for identity but never net worth is the problem.
Where I'd part ways is the implication (even if unintended) that pushing for racial diversity and pushing for class diversity contradict when the subject is Asian. For a group this underrepresented in film (and this internally unequal) that framing risks using the wealthy outliers to argue away the poor majority. I say all this as a fan of her work...I just don't think she's the case that proves your point.
EDIT: It looks like the author added a section “The Problem of Terms Like BIPOC” in response to this comment, but it honestly kind of misses my point by boiling it down to “Chinese/Indians = rich. Hmong/Burmese/Bangladeshi = poor.”
When I say that Asians have the highest poverty rate in NYC, the plurality of those Asians are Chinese. Not Hmong, not Burmese, not Bangladeshi. Nearly 40% of Chinese New Yorkers live in or near poverty (Asian American Federation). And NY has the largest population of Chinese people outside of Asia, so that is a LOT of poor Chinese people, all erased by the model minority myth to fixate on foreign Chinese elites like Chloe Zhao.
That’s a fair criticism, thanks for sharing. I do not mean to indict all asians in any way, and am aware of the class disparities. If there were more clean class metrics perhaps it would help overcome, however slightly, those disparities in the asian community.
Interestingly enough I’m reading the annenberg report right now and all 7 of the top 100 female directors of color in 2025 were asian.
I added a new section on disparities within the asian community. Thanks for the critical feedback!
You make a fair point about the variance of wealth disparity among the Asian American community but it does not warrant six paragraphs, edits based on the writer’s amendments and so much pushback. You can make your point that the writer folds Asian Americans into a box, but that is not at all the primary point of the article. The mention of Asian Americans as a relatively wealthy groups is just a sidebar as part of the greater discourse. And that fact still says something about how misinformed the identity/racial obsession can be in this country, regardless of the variance among the group.
"Racial obsession" is an odd charge for a piece that scrutinizes one woman of color's finances for half its length, then waves off Kubrick's and the Coens' family money in a sentence. In an industry built by wealthy white men, that's a strange place to aim the magnifying glass.
Dude, you know the Coens’ parents only gave them like fifteen grand for Blood Simple, right? And Kubrick’s first two films combined cost less than Songs, and he was living on unemployment and hustling chess while making them. Combined they cost as much as a grad degree at NYU. Pick up a book before you comment.
I just double checked: in “My First Movie” Joel says his family put in $15k and they went into debt while making it. Tisch didn’t even exist when he went to NYU. They had 65 investors on Blood Simple. Your worldview is not rooted in fact.
Fifteen thousand dollars in 1984 is almost fifty thousand dollars today.
True, but neither of them went to graduate school, it was their first feature, and back then NYU cost (for Joel), in 1978, the year he graduated, according to USA Today estimates:
1978• Private tuition, fees, room and board per year:$4,610 (inflation adjusted: $17,680)
so in inflation adjusted terms, his entire undergraduate degree back then, in the most expensive year (he would have started in ‘74), cost less than one year of grad school at Tisch. The $50k from his parents cost half of one year’s current tuition.
Yes? The piece is literally about how perceptions of racial hierarchies intersect with perceptions of class hierarchies?? And how the latter is completely overshadow by the former. This should not be so easy to misunderstand
“poorface” is such a perfect description of many representants of today’s “creative” workers. Absolutely stealing this
I am a former Hollywood development exec, who went to a NYC private school for high school and then an east coast liberal arts college (on financial aid for both). And all of what you’re describing is accurate.
Something I think is worth highlighting is that a lot of people who as you say went to these schools but do not see themselves as wealthy (because they aren’t billionaires) usually do not have any real concept of what their quality of life actually costs. They think that having their basic needs met — food, shelter, transportation, etc — is a given. They can’t actually conceptualize how difficult it is to struggle to get your film financed, and ALSO have to figure out how to pay for every other aspect of life that allows you to be functional enough to even make a movie.
It’s a really frustrating, and I would even argue cruel, sentiment when the loudest voices on the internet say things like: “just do it.” Even Ryan Coogler had a very supportive girlfriend in his early days who helped keep a roof over his head. So did Kurt Cobain and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
All of this to say: if you have a calling to be a filmmaker, you should absolutely do it, but figuring out who and what your tangible support systems are is going to be critically important, because it is a really long game and you will need a way to survive it.
I love this. The thing that bothers me the most is the lack of transparency about these things. All artists need a ton of support, and many are in fact people from upper class backgrounds who choose to live far more modest lifestyles than the ones they grew up with to pursue their craft. But it just needs to be a lot more transparent, because it’s genuinely harmful to people who don’t have that level of support.
I agree one thousand percent on transparency.
It irks the hell out of me as well.
But I will add this: despite her possible (probable?) class privileges, Chloe Zhao didn’t really break through until she made films with white protagonists. NOMADLAND and HAMNET didn’t disrupt very much in terms of people of color being on the screen, despite her being a woman of color herself. ETERNALS had a woman of color, and was a disaster, but Marvel is notorious for having three thousand cooks in the kitchen.
I don’t think that’s an accident, or something we should dismiss.
Me too.
The protagonist of the Rider seems white passing, I looked it up and he is part native, I did not remember hinking he was native while watching the film.
It’s hard for me to speak about Nomadland, which I really hate, because I read the Harper’s article and the book and what she did, in my opinion, was truly awful, like taking Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle and making it a pro meatpacking movie. Shitting in a bucket while basically homeless is romantic!
Anecdotally, she seems to have at least partially funded Nomadland herself. There was one really big class thing I wanted to put into the piece but didn’t, for legal reasons, but I suspect there’s a lot more wealth than even the piece unveils.
Eternals is interesting, but she did have a major movie star in it, which is more than one can say for Coogler, in no world was Chadwick Boseman more famous than Angelina Jolie, yet BP crushed it at the box office. Coogler does seem to have very strong popular instincts.
Honestly I don’t know why people thought a filmmaker clearly borrowing a lot from Malick was the right fit for a Marvel movie to begin with. Her recent failed Buffy pilot is another genuinely odd example of this.
I don’t think it requires much transparency to comprehend that a career as a filmmaker is tough if you don’t have financial means.
Maybe we should be more upfront about how impossible it is, as you outline in your article through the lens of Zhao.
But if so, we should even start in high school, explaining to people what skills are currently creating value in society, which skills currently guarantee jobs, how equity vs salary for your labor works in the long run, and the massive oversupply of creatives at the moment, especially in music and film.
Parents have the old adage of how difficult it is, but we can probably quite easily adapt it further to make people, at least a few percent, make slightly smarter decisions when choosing their degrees.
I guess if you can defend the legitimacy of Zhao’s supposed outsider status at all, you can at least say that she doesn’t appear to have had any relatives working in Hollywood or entertainment when she “broke in”. Nepotism seems to be the other secret ingredient along with fabulous inherited wealth that predicts success, or at least critical accolades, in show business.
That’s fair, but I would hope to show that diverse status, NYU, the Sundance Labs, Cannes, and family wealth are just as powerful as the family connections.
But you can also point to the fact that her stepmother was a very famous actress in China, where she sourced some of the investment in her first feature.
That’s a big miss for me, I forgot that detail.
But your original point I agree with anyway. It’s tiresome how self congratulatory people in show business tend to be when nearly all of them started their careers on 3rd base already.
Yes, but that’s in a fundamentally different ecosystem than Hollywood. It's naive to think that a relative's fame in China carries much currency to open doors in Tinseltown. Curry Barker's dad working in television broadcasting and being a screenwriter carries FAR more Hollywood “insider” weight and relevance. If any of your article subjects deserve the “industry plant nepobaby” tag, it's Barker, not Zhao.
Look at Barker’s dad’s film freeway page cited in the piece and tell me if he looks like Hollywood royalty, like Zhao’s mother, “the Roseanne of China.” Many of her investors on Songs were Chinese. It had to come from somewhere.
Actors who piss off China suffer—Richard Gere’s involvement in “ Free Tibet” cost him a lot of work.
While I love a good movie, I’m hardly a film buff. Still, as someone who talks about class and privilege every day, I found this fascinating. It offers a real examination of how poverty is often cosplayed in the entertainment industry. And given the political moment we’re in, I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of image management and deception, making this breakdown feel particularly timely.
I’m always amazed at how the these folks can keep playing the outsider card with zero irony. I suppose, in a way, she is an outsider to that elite group. But to everyone else, the other 99.99%, she’s an insider of insiders.
I would guess that a decade of elite education, every mentorship, scholarship and award the film industry could provide, and significant family wealth might slightly diminish one’s outsider status. Maybe if she wins another Oscar she’ll finally feel at home.
She’ll be the insider as the first outsider to win two? 🤓
Two Oscars and a failed Buffy pilot is the ultimate outsider status.
Yep. In this age, Hollywood is more political than ever, for a reason
You’re actually so much nicer than me about this. I describe her career as, “she arrived to America and was shocked how many people are poor.” And has been milking her fascination with that for all it can be worth. Can’t stand her movies or point of view. Thanks for writing this and investigating.
Thank you! I will go deeper into this later in a piece on Nomadland. In some ways this is all just context for it.
People are so uneducated about China too. When it comes to observing the second most powerful nation and one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, theres an open mind. When it comes to observing people in your back yard, it’s judgement day. Sad
Ms Zhang may well be the modern-day equivalent to the famous publisher of modernist literature James Laughlin, who was the heir of a Pittsburgh steel fortune. But of course literature and publishing was always regarded as a pursuit for ladies and gentlemen, while the movies were at least initially the product of a thrusting and crudely materialistic lower class.
But the only really interesting question is the effect that MFAization has had on the quality of the films made today. We will submit that MFAization in literature has resulted in unreadably costive works by and for the upper-middle-professional-class sensibility, and we suspect that the same thing has happened with the movies. For those of us who have seen none of the films mentioned in the article, what say you?
I’ve read about that extensively elsewhere in literature, and I would say it’s similar in movies now. Less and less of the festival movies connect with audiences, and those are the filmmakers who are ultimately brought into hollywood. It makes sense to me!
“poorface” is a great term, did you come up with it or borrowing?,
It’s my own invention! I’m glad people like it, I enjoyed it when it landed.
it’s awesome! i will use it and refer to you as a term coiner 😹🙏
While I’m not sure it undermines your greater point, you keep portraying the current tuition rates as “generous” to Zhao. It’s the opposite. The cost of education compared to inflation has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, which means it’s likely these costs were much lower in the past, not just accounting for inflation, but compared to what a person of equivalent income earned then. And that’s not counting the possibility of scholarships or grants.
NYU was always super expensive, even when she was going there. I did not inflation adjust. You’re right, it might take 20% off the costs, but it doesn’t materially change the argument, and most people are not so financially literate. That’s a fair point with the scholarships and grants as well. I did not see many in her biography, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
That’s a great catch. I knew something felt off there. But the author went with the safest low end estimates he could for most of the other calculations so I’d still imagine it’s significantly even more expensive to recreate all of the steps that gain you access.
The Baffler tried to warn us about unpaid internships back in the 90s. This situation has outstripped their most dire predictions.
My favorite thing about working for free for Hollywood production companies was the fact that you needed an expensive bachelor degree to essentially do the job of an unpaid assistant. The whole thing is a carefully designed country club, but the inside is rotting.
Yeah I love how they set it up so that no individual has to commit any act that might be considered discrimination.
Just, you can’t get in unless you don’t need to be paid till you are 30!
Normal people need to boycott their horseshit non-art until we are given an equal chance to participate.
Nobody wants to hear their genuinely privileged sob stories.
Never heard of her or of any of them, neither have they, of me, and while I admire your essay for doing the calculations, I'm afraid to say that this must be a common happening; but, more importantly, it would not have happened without the higher education production line, which exists solely to compensate unproductive people who have no talent and couldn't get a job elsewhere. Suckers like this young lady film director who could have purchased a rental property to live off of for what she spent in tuition are born every proverbial minute.
Whether she has any talent or not, to write, select actors, choose a staff, manage the bank office functions and contracts, find locations, direct, edit and deliver a finished product viewers might benefit by watching, is entirely unimportant to those in the pseudo-educational world.
They have told children since 1968 they can be anything, do anything and anything is possible and everything is good. But they can't and it's not. It makes me very sad. But then angry, to think of these people who pretend to be stewards of young people exploiting their hopes and dreams so they can continue to pull down a salary while their students suffer under the weight of enormous debt taken to pay those who feed off of them.
The Rust Belt of Higher Education can not come too soon for me, but it is coming, has already begun. The whirlwind, anon!
"a common happening" is just awful. The word you're looking for is "event."
"Common" refers to frequency, with the hint in this context of surprise. "Event" is inapt, being shorter in time than happening, which can occur over an longer unspecified period of time. "Awful" is a reference to your own misuse of English.
Bummer you blew your jets, daddy-o … maybe you can zonk, rip your axe and spend a little bread to cool until everything’s out of this world again? I dig your anti-square King’s jive cuz it’s so hep!
You could use a few writing classes.
Who's going to teach: you? Oh what a great Saturday night laugh. Thanks, you joker! 🤣🤣🤣
i liked the writing here
I am so tired of wealthy kids riding the coattails of the working class narrative for credibility and clout.
Art schools these days are chock-full of Chloe Zhaos. America is not ready for the incoming tidal wave of Mainland Chinese bobo trustafarians.