Self-Aggrandizement: Joshua Bryce Newman

Now with 137% more unabashed egotism!

Doubtless one of the best sites on the internet, Self-Aggrandizement is the story of Joshua Bryce Newman, a 30-year old film mogul, former tech wunderkind, and general smart-ass, living in New York City. Learn more about Joshua (according to the Wall St. Journal, "an Internet elder statesmen"), or simply follow his mis-adventures as they unfold below.

Back to Work
Filed Monday, July 19.

"Show business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long dark plastic hallway where thieves, pimps and whores run free and most good or weak men die like dogs! There's also a negative side."
- Hunter S. Thompson

Sharpening the Saw?
Filed Saturday, July 17.

My life has been mayhem of late, and I haven't had the time to post regularly here (or to finish the Making Movies series of advice to young folks gunning for a spot in the film world, despite a couple of emails requesting more).

But, at the same time, I've certainly had spare minutes, and have similarly come across countless interesting articles and sites that I could have at least quickly posted to the slowly decaying 'salmagundi' section of my right sidebar.

So, as happens about once a year, I've been having a slight blogging crisis of confidence.

This time, however, unlike my normal self-questioning - why am I keeping this blog? - I instead focused on a new area - how am I keeping this blog?

Which is to say, as the underlying infrastructure of this site has gotten cruftier and cruftier by the year - I last redesigned self-aggrandizement.com in 2004 - is the blogging software itself creating a barrier to posting entry, and keeping me from updating as much as I otherwise might?

Tech industry friends have pointed me in a slew of directions: Tumblr was built to address just this very question. As was, at least on the link-sharing front, Twitter. Wordpress is so customizable and nimble. And even Movable Type has come eons forward since the version upon which this site is predicated.

But at the same time, I can't help but think of the proverbial "it's the poor crafstman who blames his tools." Or, similarly, but think of the many years - more than a decade - I spent looking for the perfect trumpet mouthpiece, before finally settling into the sad realization that - in the brass playing world, as in the rest of life - there is no secret beyond hard work, done consistently for years at a time, day in and day out.

So, perhaps, updating the code here, or the blogging platform is a fool's errand. A way of avoiding the underlying issue - that writing posts, and curating links, takes real work. Yet, at the same time, I can't help but think it's not just the poor crafstman who blames his tool, but also the poor craftsman who can't tell the difference between a good and a bad one.

So, fair readers, save me. How should I update the front- and back-end of this site?

Two Points
Filed Friday, July 16.

1. Back in town; to all those I owe an email or call, it's coming shortly.

2. But not today, because it's my 31st birthday. Not quite as glamorous as my 30th (celebrated in Paris), but excellent (if work-filled) nonetheless. Joyeux anniversaire a moi.

Self-Pity
Filed Thursday, June 24.

by D.H. Lawrence

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Four
Filed Sunday, June 20.

A bit more than four years back, I got a message on Friendster (a Facebook predecessor that was both cooler and far less cool, all at once) from a girl named Jess. The message was long and rambling and said that she didn't really write this sort of email (as cliche as she knew that sounded), but that I kept showing up on her home page as part of the 'singles near you' feature, and that she had Googled me up and found my website, etc., etc.

Ah, I thought. A crazy girl.

So I deleted the message.

Then, a few hours later, I got another message. This Jess girl had shared the first message with her younger sister who had said that you absolutely couldn't just send that kind of thing to someone you hadn't met, because they would think you were totally insane. So, to prove she wasn't nuts, she then proceeded to essentially do a deep reading of her own first email, explaining jokes, etc., in a message even longer than the first.

Due to apparent technological ineptitude, she sent this second message three times.

By now, I was intrigued.

So, after much back and forth, exactly four years ago today, we met for drinks at Russian Samovar.

I was smitten. After that date, I was the one sending long messages (or, as previously discussed, faxes). And, long story short, Jessica Gold Newman is now sitting next to me as I write this on laptop on a flight back from Portland, Maine, where we celebrated our four year date-iversary, with huge amounts of foodie eats (a win for me), equally large amounts of terrifying vintage stuff and antiques (a win for her), and some time at the beach getting our first sun of the season (a win for both of us, though somewhat reduced for me, as she tans and I [after a solid twelve months locked indoors] hop straight to medium-well done]).

To which I say, god bless the internets. All my love to Jess, and looking forward to another four and four and forty and forty.

Public
Filed Thursday, June 17.

Huge congratulations to the team at Higher One, the first portfolio company in the Silicon Ivy Venture Fund, where I was a founder and managing partner a decade back.

As of today, they've IPO'ed and are publicly trading on the New York Stock Exchange, under the symbol ONE.

Nice work.

Making Movies: 4 - Get to Work
Filed Wednesday, June 16.

Sure, it's great to keep an eye on your long-term goal. But, as your parents are doubtless constantly reminding you, you need a job far more immediately. Unless you intend to live in their basement.

But what kind of job? Keeping with our functional approach, let's think for a minute about what a job can give you:

1. Money
2. Experience
3. Connections
4. Credibility

Let's look at each of those a bit more in turn:

1. Money

Unless you were born with an extensive trust fund (in which case, come talk to me about investing in movies), you're going to need to make money to pay for your life. The tradeoff, though, tends to be that as you maximize how much you earn in any given job, you tend to minimize your returns in the other three categories. Make sure any potential gig pays well enough to cover low-cost essentials (an apartment shared with roommates, vodka that comes in plastic bottles, etc.), or you won't be able to sustain yourself moving forward. Then, beyond that, focus more on the intangibles you can get out of a position, at least in the near term.

2. Experience

Looking back to the three-leg theory of filmmaking, there's a fair amount of technical expertise involved in aligning each leg. If it's raising money, are you familiar with PPMs, pitching investors, operating agreements, or the laws regarding accredited investors? Or, if it's attaching cast, do you know how to make offers, draft deal memos, or figure out the finer points of a most-favored-nations deal?

And, of course, especially if you're looking to produce or direct, would you actually be able to make a great film after the three legs are in place? Are you familiar with tech scouting, storyboarding, or how a shoot day runs?

There's a lot of stuff to learn, and you can probably only pick it up by doing. So, ideally, a job helps you start filling the void in some area of your expertise.

3. Connections

All three legs of a film have at least one thing in common: getting them in place is far easier with an excellent Rolodex.

On the money side, for example, there's a old adage that investors pick jockeys, not horses - they're betting on you as much as on the project. Which means a cold-call is nearly always doomed to fail. Whereas a pitch to someone who knows you, who's been actively following your career, and who is waiting for you to put something exciting in front of them, has an incalculable leg up.

A job, then, is a great way to start building your network. Perhaps it gives you the chance to meet agents, established producers, writers with interesting spec scripts, or entertainment bankers. All people you'll need to know eventually. And all people you can meet far more easily if you're in the context of an established company.

4. Credibility

People are like sheep - they love to follow the flock. If a number of name actors are attached to a film already, for example, it becomes increasingly easy to bring in more.

Eventually, to direct, write, or produce, you'll need a lot of different people to place bets behind you. And the more you can provide social proof, evidence that other people have already bet on you in the past, the easier that will be.

That's one more thing a job can potentially provide - a stamp on your resume indicating you've already been picked as smart and savvy by a decision-maker at some organization.

Here, too, there's often a tradeoff. Working at a small literary agency, for example, you'd likely get much more hands-on experience, get to build many more outside relationships directly. Whereas working at CAA might leave you literally delivering mail, but provides a far more impressive piece of resume padding.

So, how to balance those four factors? And what kinds of jobs, specifically? In our next several posts, we'll look at a number of possibilities, and the upsides and downsides of each, through the lens of those four factors.

Making Movies: 3 - Triangulating
Filed Tuesday, June 15.

So, here we go. The most important, though possibly most obvious, thing I can tell you about making movies:

Essentially, getting an indie film - or really, any film - made is building a three-legged stool:

You need a good script. You need a strong cast. And you need the money.

Once you have those three things, you can start production.

And, interestingly, if you have two of those things, the third quickly falls into place.

Get a script and attach some name actors, and you can easily raise the money.

Get the money and that same script, and suddenly actors (and their agents) will come on board.

The challenge, then, is when you have only one of those three legs. When you have, say, just the script. That's the position that most young directors are in - they have a script, perhaps even a very good script. But they don't have either financing or stars.

At which point, putting together the film becomes a giant game of chicken. You have to bullshit the cast about the money, and the money about the cast, and then hope it all comes together.

It works, sort of, sometimes. But not consistently or repeatably. So, while next up, we'll be looking at jobs - and at what you should be trying to get out of them - keep in mind that, atop the list, is developing the ability to bring those three legs together on film after film. Because if you can do that, congratulations: you have a career.

Making Movies: 2 - Off-Roading
Filed Monday, June 14.

Any doctor in the US became a doctor in roughly the same way: pre-med coursework in college, then med school, boards, internship, residency, maybe a fellowship.

But any two directors or producers or screenwriters likely took completely divergent career paths to their current jobs.

Which, essentially, is both the good and bad news.

On the plus side, in a world like film, you can get where you want to be much sooner. There's no way to circumvent a decade of medical training, but a lot of brilliant features are made by early 20-somethings.

On the down side, you can also end up never getting to where you want to be at all. While the vast majority of med school grads go on to practice medicine, the majority of film school attendees never make even a first feature film, much less a career's worth.

So, in such a nebulous world, how do you carve out a plan?

First, you need to look at what it takes to get a movie made. In the next post, I'll lay out the three-leg stool theory of greenlighting films. Which, in short, says there are three things you need to somehow line up on every single project you do if you want to roll camera.

Then, you need to look at potential jobs as ways to build your experience with and access to each of those three legs. It's a functional approach, and one that may lead you to jump around from company to company, job type to job type. And it also may dictate that you should be spending nearly as much time and energy pursuing side projects and networking opportunities.

But, first and foremost, you need to accept that figuring it all out is your responsibility. There isn't a straight line you can default to, or a job you can take now that will take you to where you want to be just by putting your head down and working hard. Instead, you need to think, to carve out a path of your own, with the end in mind, and with savvy decision-making along the way.

Making Movies: 1 - What do you Want?
Filed Thursday, June 10.

The first thing I ask young film people is: if you could wave a magic wand, and be doing anything in the film world right now, what would it be?

Writing? Directing? Producing? DP'ing?

A surprising number have absolutely no idea.

Which makes things very easy. As the Cheshire Cat observed, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

If you don't know what you want, I don't know what I can do to help you. The only advice I'd have in that case would be to get on any sets you can (short films, student films, gonzo porn) in any capacity you can (PA, POC, fluffer), and then watch and listen and watch some more. Get a sense of how films work. Of what the jobs are. And then come back here. [Or don't. I'm not your mom.]

This guide, then, is for people who already know what they want. Say, you want to direct features. And the purpose is simple: get you actually doing that job, in a sustainable, career way, as quickly as possible.

Craving further genius?

Check out the archives.

Now with 137% more unabashed egotism!

Back to Work Filed Monday, July 19.

Sharpening the Saw? Filed Saturday, July 17.

Two Points Filed Friday, July 16.

Self-Pity Filed Thursday, June 24.

Four Filed Sunday, June 20.

Public Filed Thursday, June 17.

Making Movies: 4 - Get to Work Filed Wednesday, June 16.

Making Movies: 3 - Triangulating Filed Tuesday, June 15.

Making Movies: 2 - Off-Roading Filed Monday, June 14.

Making Movies: 1 - What do you Want? Filed Thursday, June 10.