By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Independently Poor: Jon Jost, Errol Morris in the HerTrib
While John Clark‘s extended take-out in the Herald-Tribune eventually hits the fates of Sundance vets who want to be “independent” filmmakers but are stymied by the casting demands of the money men, it’s bracing to see him start the piece talking to, well, someone truly indie: “Jon Jost might be considered the epitome of the aging, alienated and aggrieved independent film director. He is sitting in a borrowed New 
York apartment in hand-me-down clothes, doesn’t have a place to live and has no visible means of support, other than a coming arts residency at the University of Nebraska.
“Most people from my generation became teachers long ago,” Jost said.” Across 40 years, “Jost, 63, has been making films on shoestring budgets with no-name casts that almost nobody outside of European film festivals ever sees. Perhaps the closest he has come to popular awareness was All the Vermeers in New York [which played on PBS]. Since then he spent a decade in Europe toiling away in relative obscurity and then moved to Montana, where for four years he scrounged from garbage cans and lived with a single mother and her daughter in one room with no heat or running water. His latest address was Portland, Oregon, where he stayed at the house of one of the actresses he cast in his most recent film, Homecoming, which he is still trying to find a festival home for domestically – forget about distribution. His income [comes] from selling DVDs of his work on the Internet. “I can’t say I’m happy not making a living after 40 years in the business… I’m not independently wealthy. I’m independently poor.” Clark cites many Usual Suspects and few surprises, but also gets this in: 
a “filmmaker who has found both a lucrative and technically satisfying way to make a living outside his chosen profession is the documentarian Errol Morris.
Over the past decade, in addition to winning a best documentary Oscar for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, he became what he describes as “an unlikely avatar of American business.” In other words, he directs commercials for Apple, Toyota, AT&T and Miller Brewing while making movies about mole-rat specialists and Holocaust deniers. Morris, 58, is one of the few independent filmmakers who have benefited from the turns the business has taken over the past two decades…. Now, of course, in part because of the success of his films… documentaries are the darlings of the indie world. Still, they won’t make Morris rich. Advertising may. It has also contributed to his skills and to… his films. On a Reebok commercial he [indulged] his interest in “shooting the world at alternate speeds” by playing with a high-speed digital camera. “Will I use that in my next movie?” he asked. “You betcha.” Morris is also not above using locations required by his advertising work to further his documentary aims… [F]or The Fog of War he needed to shoot a B-29. The only one available was appearing at an air show in Rockford, Illinois, so he asked his agent to get him a commercial in nearby Chicago. He did, for Quaker Oats, and the company has since become a steady client.” [More at the link; here’s Jost’s site.]
