Capturing an artist’s creative process on film can be a tricky proposition. There have been many films, both fiction and non-, that have managed to capture that intimate intensity that only scratches the surface of what’s bubbling beneath. In fact, the best films about artists and musicians leave more unanswered questions than answered ones about the mystery of the creative impulse.There is a certain freak-show curiosity about those of us who really don’t do much else with our lives but make art–those of us who skirted the path of least resistance and jumped into a realm in which, in order to survive, one must do some heavy creative lifting. And for some artists, that can be a torturous existence since we live in a society that doesn’t tend to support or understand that kind of thing.I met Matthew Wallin, the director of the film project I Die Daily, at this year’s IFP Conference and Market. I saw a work–in-progress cut of Wallin’s film about artist and filmmaker, Matthew Barney, and was immediately intrigued and wondered if there was a chance for me to jump on board the project as a creative/consultative producer to help the filmmakers find funding to move into post, and to act as added support to see if we could get the project out there, looked at, and noticed. Not to mention exhibited, marketed, distributed and sold. It’s garnered a special invitation from the Berlin Film Festival early next year, and so it’s a key time for the director to show what he’s got to the European market.

As an indie producer, my tastes tend to run towards projects like these. And so in my short sojourn in New York, I’ve already met several directors with similar projects about artists and musicians looking for some baksheesh to give their films legs, already. Muy dificil. Because all the wealthy art patrons and successful recording barons want to see a finished product first before they invest/donate. Well, okay, donate. So, ironically, where there’s money and where there’s intense interest in the subject matter, there’s no vision, no sense of largesse in pouring resources and money into film like they do into art and music. But these are films on the very art in which they’re investing. And they’re a bargain compared to what someone will pay to hang something on their wall. Curious.

Is a film an art object if it’s about an artist? Or is it an ancillary piece of PR one can use to up the ante at auction time? I do not purport to understand the art world, believe me. But what I do see is profligate spending on what could kindly be called “crap,” and my mind boggles. What the medium of film offers the art world is a living archive.

Everyone’s in a whirl about the “democracy of filmmaking” today, when an unwashed and un-film schooled kid with a video camera in, say, North Dakota, shoots something brilliant and gets a movie deal. Well, more power to those that have that kind of vision and the creativity to churn out something fresh and new, raw though it may be. M dot Strange leads the way in this revolution of the DIYer, literally making and finishing his film in his bedroom. I admire filmmakers like him and Wallin and Matt Boyd. Boyd has a potentially award-winning film, now a work-in-progress (which I also caught at IFP), called A Rubberband Is An Unlikely Instrument, his doc on musician Walter Baker, a Brooklyn-based artist and iconoclast, the kind of guy who visibly delights in his own obstinate refusal to understand, or honor, late fees on his college loans. (He and his soft-spoken, intensely intelligent, wife are in some serious debt.) Boyd, who’s worked with Jem Cohen for years, turns his playful and curious eye on Baker’s world and finds an artist’s life is fraught with perils most of us wouldn’t know how to handle, at least not with that much grace and humor. I fell in love with his character and this film after watching a few minutes of what amounts to pieces of footage cut together to give a viewer the gist of a project. I can’t wait to see how this transforms itself into a completed movie.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Diane Bernard is directing The Lord of Light, a feature documentary that tells Barry Geller’s story. Geller, a writer and inventor, makes plans to produce a sci-fi blockbuster in the late 1970s, to be accompanied by the world’s first science fiction theme park. Ultimately bamboozled by a more experienced Hollywood shark, the film and theme park go nowhere. But twenty years later, Geller’s work is bastardized by the CIA when they use the script and the storyboards of his aborted film project to help rescue hostages from Iran!

Did somebody say “stranger than fiction”? Currently in production, Bernard is also looking for funds to continue this project to completion–very modest budget, animation by Yorgo Alexopoulos, featuring original art work by Jack Kirby, all rights available. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller, Bueller?

The films we make, along with our museums and galleries and the other “safehouses” for art, show us it’s possible to persevere artistically and push back a bit in the face of societal indifference, a Republican government and a fairly shoddy reputation on the international political scene.

A Yale-educated, American created The Cremaster Cycle, for goodness’ sakes–we don’t need to hang our heads in shame. We just need to invest in projects that are being made, not for the glory of the filmmaker or his or her subject, but for the glory of showing off how innovative and limber we can be in our guise as creative folk, instead of constantly showing off our destructive side.