The question is worth asking because hundreds of thousands of people work in creative industries and millions more wish they could. Understanding creative urges will help us understand where niche media is headed.
Creativity has to be about difficult truths.
A few days back I sat with Julian Castagna, winemaker. Julian used to shoot adverts for TV. He worked with James Garrett, one of the most influential advertising guru’s in post-war advertising. Briefly in the 1980s I worked with his son Stephen Garrett, who now runs Kudos, producers of spy series Spook for the BBC.
Julian has pedigree. This is why he gave up making ads. “Every meeting I went into it became an issue of the politics of getting the film done, not the film itself. I didn’t enjoy it anymore.”
He’s an advocate of doing things because you love it, because you have passion. That’s different from getting a high or a kick from doing things.
Most people in the media world have given into a different process: sticking in there, making the profits, getting the film out, getting the paper through the door. I don’t say they submit to these processes for egotistical reasons. But they are not creative processes. A creative process begins with an intractable problem or a breakthrough opportunity. You have to be dealing win the near impossible, the near unsayable.
Routine, however varied, doesn’t invite these intractables. As much as people at the top of the media tree believe they work in creative environments, in reality they work on a production line, second guessing audiences. That was a real surprise to me – the extent to which all decisions are guided by attempts to second guess what an audience will watch and how an audience will think. That’s why I say it is a production line. Making wallpaper and chairs is also about second guessing audiences.
My one anxiety for niche media is that it’s more of a production line.
