A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art
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For our listeners, Viore is offering 20% off your first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at viore.com slash pjsearch. That's Viore, V-U-O-R-I dot com slash pjsearch. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over 75 bucks and free returns. Go to viore.com slash pjsearch and discover the versatility of Viore clothing. Welcome to Search Engine, I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small, no question too repetitively echoing in my head seven times a day. Okay. I've been telling stories professionally for 16 years. I complain about work like anybody else, but the more honest part of me always knows that really, I'm getting away with something. Being paid to make art you love is as close to a scam as you can run without being in legal danger. It feels impossible that this is all true. And the thing is, some years, it wasn't true. When I first started in audio, podcasting didn't really exist. It was radio.
And there would have been no business model to support a show like the one you're listening to. I've been here long enough that I've watched the business model arrive. I worked for a few years where there was tons of money in podcasting, and I'm here in the era after, where a low tide ebbs again. The state of things comes up on the show sometimes because one of the biggest questions that actually preoccupies me day to day is how are we going to get people to pay for this shit? Free art, pay what you want, is a funny thing to build a life on. It preoccupies me. And I know it preoccupies me because lately, when I see something good, a movie, a book, a live event, I don't think so much about the creative choices enabling it. I think... How is this getting funded? Even what does the lifestyle of the person who made this look like that it permits them to make art? Do they have kids? Where do they live?
This documentary came out this week called Wiseguy, which is about The Sopranos, my favorite TV show, maybe my favorite piece of narrative art. And watching it, it felt like the documentary was asking the same question that has been haunting me. How do you make something personal and important when the entire system is conspiring to keep that stuff off the air? The documentary, appropriately, is by the director Alex Gibney, who has spent his career defiantly making non-commercial films. He made Going Clear, critiquing one of the more lawsuit-happy groups in America, Scientologists. He won an Oscar for his bleak but fascinating documentary about American torture, Taxi to the Dark Side. He also works in the same office as me, so sometimes we see each other at the coffee machine. I still don't know how to work. I wanted to ask Alex Gibney how to work that coffee machine. Just kidding. I wanted to ask him how he's figured out how to make a career doing risky creative work that other people pay for.
And also about what he learned from interviewing Sopranos creator David Chase, one of the people who most successfully made something personal and strange while still connecting with a massive audience. Alex, welcome to Search Engine.
Hey, thanks, BJ.
Good to be here. So this is my theory for the structure of our episode. The Sopranos was a show about observing decline. The pilot of The Sopranos opens with this monologue from Tony Soprano about how America is in decline, how he was born too late and he missed the good old days.
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