So, I did the unthinkable. I contoured a film idea I’ve developed over the past couple of decades to meet the requirements of a grant application. 

After twisting the plot, tweaking cast demographics, scuttling locations, and arbitrarily shoe-horning in some pseudoscience per the funder’s particular requirements, I’m happy to report that I did NOT get the grant. 

Phew. Close one. What a piece of shit that would’ve been. 

Given the creative compromises and consistently poor results of my grant writing efforts, I wonder why I subject myself and my work to this process in the first place. The facile answer is the money. Movies are expensive, even for a micro-budget matinee idol. But is that entirely the issue? Is there not some underlying motivation, some Freudian force simmering in my subconscious? 

When I’m making my appeals to the gatekeepers I’m doing so, in part, for the institutional legitimacy that the Good [insert verb here] Seal of Approval confers. And the money.

This happens to me every time I embark on a new feature film project. I forget that I’m neither in Hollywood nor strolling The Croisette in Cannes. My work isn’t commercial, nor is it always catnip for cineastes. I make upper-middlebrow comedies that deliver a decidedly nose-thumbing, B-movie sensibility to the art house.  

Sure, it’s a weird niche, but this little klieg light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…

To wit, I’m leaning into what I call Impasto Syndrome — the opposite of imposter syndrome—in which we take our own aesthetic, vision, ethos, etc., and lay it on thick, like the impasto painting technique. “Paint as thick as peanut butter,” my sixth grade art teacher explained. Thick enough you need a palette knife to smear it on canvas.

While my contemporaries in the screentrade are currently tallying their Oscars snubs and jetting to Park City this week, I’m quietly plotting. Literally. I’m rewriting the plot of my next film to align solely with my own artistic instincts rather than the cinematic sophistry some funders demand.

Impasto Syndrome prescribes that external validation is suspect. But if I trust my own artistic instincts and those instincts are rejected by institutions, it seems reasonable to distrust the institutions. Besides, we artists have always been adept at getting institutionalized on our own merits. This isn’t to say I’ve transcended the need for money, praise, or the occasional laurel. I haven’t—I’m still proveably human. But instead of applying for grants, I’m applying more of myself to the work—Impasto-style. Or as my sixth grade art teacher would say, “Fuck ‘em.”