This is How Indie Artists Win When the Game is Rigged

Deep thinking with baseball stats & Tomato Logic.

Let’s think about thinking.

A hot topic, I know.

But thinking is, and I mean this, the only way out of this.

This being the state of the industry, the state of the world, the state of our wearied capacities and bandwidths and mental loads.

Deep thinking is a form of wealth and access.

It propels us onto an unknown planet, locked inside a grotto, hidden in the dark abandoned forest between our synapses.

It’s a nowhere place. AI can’t get there. It involves things like hunches, peculiar connections, unexplainable feelings, and faith.

Most people opt out.

Deep thinking’ll do that sometimes.

Without deep thinking, though, life can feel like a slog through digital muck. We try to convince each other of our legitimacy and coerce our own minds toward self-validation, but instead, we wallow in a steady tide of dwindling “organic reach” and the weedy growth of sloppy “content” all while holding fast to the dream sold to us when we signed over our never-made fortunes to an institute of higher education that took hundreds of thousands of our would-be dollars in exchange for a collegiate sweatshirt (that you still had to pay for) just to stock up on the credibility you thought you needed to get the job you thought you wanted to build the life you were told was possible when it wasn’t.¹

But deep thinking reveals something simultaneously infuriating and life-saving:

We’re trying to solve the wrong problems.

Me looking at my secondary and tertiary screens, wondering why I’m spending more time posting than creating & thinking, and considering if that could be oh idk the goal of a data extraction system meant to control the working class. Maybe not. But could be.

The Moneyball Method Every Indie Artist Should Understand

Let me show you what I mean by “the wrong problems” by way of the film Moneyball.

Promise to make it fun.

THE SET UP: Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) is the general manager of the Oakland As. He wants to build a World Series-winning team. The As aren’t playing well, and THEN, they lose three of their best players. And PLUS, they don’t have enough money to get any top talent to replace them.

THE SCENE: Billy and his scouts talk about who to sign next.

Here’s it is:

The scouts think the problem worth solving is — replace Giambi.

Billy thinks the problem is — the game is rigged.

If the problem is about replacing Giambi, they’ll never be able to do it. They don’t have the money.

But if the problem is that it’s a rigged game they’ll never win, then they have a two options:

1. Try to make the game fair.

2. Play a different game.

Billy goes option two: play a different game. Instead of buying well-documented talent, his strategy is to sign players who can get on base. If they get on base, they’ll eventually get runs.

His young statistician / sidekick, Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill), explains it:

“Your goal shouldn't be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order buy wins, you need to buy runs.”

And they only get runs if they get on base first.

They’re not solving for the problem of replacing Giambi.

They’re solving for the problem of getting on base.

It’s the same for us.

The Advice We’re Getting is Errr! Wrong.

We over-index on solutions to the wrong problem. The standard advice we hear is stale, albeit tempting. Like the block of cheese you found in the back of your fridge that you can’t help but smell, just in case.

If we were sitting around a table with a group of scouts, discussing the best strategies to win at an independent career in the arts, instead of hearing “Replace Giambi!” we might hear:

Post more consistently! Grow an audience! Be on every platform!

But those sound like tactics for the big dogs of an industry who already have lots of attention, media coverage, and the technological infrastructure of a streaming platform. Not to mention cash.

How do we compete with studios and streamers and conglomerates who’ve got the money to distribute, saturate our feeds with content, and package instantly recognizable, no-brainer-to-watch, top level talent?

Posting consistently, growing an audience, and being everywhere is a pay-to-play rigged game for the big dogs.

So what’s ours?

The only game plan I’m interested in this summer.

Diagnosing the Actual Problem

Moneyball is going to tell us what to do. Let’s jump back to the scene.

In the above script, Billy gives the scouts two chances to face the facts and recalibrate toward reality. The first is this:

QUESTION: Is there another player like Giambi who we can afford?

ANSWER: No.

Here’s how I translate that against my own ambitions as a writer/director:

QUESTION: Can I be Sarah Polley?

ANSWER: No.

So if I try to solve my own independent career by looking at how anyone else did it, I’m always always always always (and I can’t stress this enough) always gonna come up short. It will never work. It’s not reality. I can like Polley, I can be inspired by her, I can even steal a few things I like from her films and put them in mine. But I will never rise to the level of my ambitions by trying to replace her.

The second brush with reality for the scouts is this:

If we act like the Yankees in here, we won’t be able to play with them out there.

Translating the principle to my own film career:

If we act like big studios in here, we won’t be able to compete with the big studios out there.

Recreating what studios do is destined to fail. They do what they do because of money and the access it grants them.

Without money or access, no one looks twice at you. You’re contextless. No one knows if they can trust you with their financial investment or their attentional investment. I can’t produce my films like a big studio would produces theirs. No one knows who I am. So I have to play a different game.

How I feel when we start talking about actual strategies for indie artists.

Here’s How Independent Artists Get on Base

Remember Billy’s strategy: instead of using money and notable stars to get ahead, he focused instead on the first domino to fall — getting on base.

You don’t worry about winning yet. You don’t solve for winning. You solve for getting on base.

So what is the first domino to fall for indie filmmakers?

Let’s work backwards.

To win the World Series (Academy Award²), you need a movie that gets attention. To get attention, you have to have a strong position (inside the story of the movie itself, in your direct relationship with your audience, with your peers and colleagues).

The strong position is what gets you on base. It gets the key players to take a look at you. Without a strong position, you’ll need money to buy that kind of attention.

New Game to Play, New Problem to Solve

You don’t win an Oscar without attention and you don’t get attention without a strong position.

Solve for the position. Not the success.

Solving for a strong position means digging around to find out what you actually believe. And remember, we can’t copy/paste what Polley believes. She already exists. We have to look at ourselves. We have to think deeply and critically about what we’re doing. We have to be rigorously intentional about every move we make. We’ve gotta be smart.

Here are some questions to help you figure out your strongest position:

• What position makes me likeable?

• What position makes me unlikeable?

• What is the strongest position I’m wiling to take?

• What do I feel scared to tell my best friend?

• What do I purposely NOT subscribe to?

• What makes me look dumb?

• What are people not talking about?

• What is my limit?

• What’s worth sacrificing for?

These should not be comfortable questions. They should not arrive at comfortable answers. A strong position doesn’t mean something iconoclastic just for the sake of going against the grain. A strong position is something you believe on a cellular level.

Channel Michael Dorsey in his agent’s office and boom, positioned.

“Oh Yeah?” An Example of a Strong Position

Michael Dorsey (played by Dustin Hoffman) in Tootsie believes in his guts that he’s a good, employable actor.

In this scene with his agent, he defends his performance as a tomato:

Your strongest position is “Oh, yeah?” energy.

It’s something you’re willing to stake your reputation on.

As evidenced via the Tomato Logic, your strong positioning doesn’t have to be anything spectacularly sophisticated. It just has to be honest. It must be true. It can’t be bullshit. If it’s bullshit, you blend in.

If you believe something with your guts, your position becomes magnetic. You become infallible. People might disagree with you, but they’ll still want to watch you. They’ll want to be around what you’re doing.

You can feel how this is a wholly different strategy than “Post more consistently! Grow your audience! Be everywhere!” right?

You can feel how rigorous this is, right?

This is deep, critical thinking.

This is not insignificant stuff. This is art. It takes time and honesty about your inner life. You can’t short cut it, and you can’t pretend.

And like I said, most people won’t do it.

But if you want to win, you gotta get on base.

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This is the second post in a series considering the concept of rigorous thinking and how independent artists can leverage it to gain more power.

Rigorous Thinking Series:

1. The Revolutionary Rigor of Working Class Independent Artists

2. This is How Indie Artists Win When the Game is Rigged

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Tell me in the comments: What is your World Series?

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Besides making movies and writing, I help other folks with writing and indie infrastructure.

1. Tell me what you’re working on and let’s hop on a short development call. (FREE)

2. Get The Writing Process Stack to resurrect your Untitled stream of consciousness drafts from your Trash folder and start using your forte voce.

3. Take the Artist Timeline Quiz, which is honestly just a lot of fun. Folks often take it multiple times as a sort of quarterly calibration. (FREE)

1. My millennial is showing again.

2. I’m using Academy Award as a simple parallel to the World Series, but it depends on you. What do you actually want to happen in your career? What is the big goal you’re striving towards? It’s okay if it’s out of reach, maybe it’s even better if it is. It’s helpful as an orientation. Just having a direction doesn’t commit you to the destination.