Francis Ford Coppola pays the bills with his day-job: making wine. Photo via Grazia Magazine

In a recent interview, auteur film director Francis Ford Coppola alludes to a future where the  intersection of art and commerce resembles our past more than it does the present.

Interviewer Ariston Anderson asked, “How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?”

We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to  make money?
- Francis Ford Coppola

“Is it important to veer away from the masters to develop one’s own style?”

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep,  he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

I know…I owe you a real post, but I’ve been in songwriting and screenwriting mode. So until I can return to writing words for you, I leave you this work of a former Daily Texan colleague of mine, the brilliant Chris Ware. I was quite fortunate and worked at the Daily Texan during a time that it was teeming with talent: Chris Ware, Greg Weiner, Robert Rodriguez, Shannon Wheeler, John McConnico, John Moore, Joey Lin, Robert Wilonsky, Jeff Turrentine…it was ridiculous. Another one of those Pip from Great Expectations moments for me.

I’ll be back tomorrow…promise.