Legacy and Creator: The Collision That's Reshaping How We Train Storytellers
The AFI director Rebecca Green was right about one thing: we’re at an inflection. Here’s what she’s missing
Everyone is talking about a recent run of creator-made horror movies that just crushed at the box office. Naturally, every person with a Substack or Beehiiv is now beating the subject to death with such abandon that we might call it, rather than blogging, a flogging.
But there’s one angle worth exploring still — these three creators were not trained through the legacy system. None of them went to film school. And that tells you a lot about what’s happening now. Because film schools and their relevance are a perfect metaphor for the larger conversation: legacy and creator systems colliding, converging, changing each other, becoming inseparable. It’s what makes it interesting to anyone paying attention — whether you’re rooted in the old system or building the new one.
Last August as I was looking at the implications of all this and couldn’t ignore the questions about the relevance of film school. I teach a class at Columbia University and also studied there and love and cherish it. And I’ve taught and guest lectured at a handful of other institutions over the years.
So I wrote a substack about it.
The gist was this: Film schools are built on a broken model. They trained talent for a system that no longer exists, and now they’re watching the creator economy build its own training grounds without ever needing them. The feeder pathways they once staffed have disappeared. But I wasn’t arguing they should close — I was arguing they still matter. But they need treat the creator economy (and AI) as foundational curriculum, not electives. They must start building real partnerships with the world that’s actually operating instead of mourning the one that’s gone. And I even suggested that every student should build a youtube channel. Duck and cover!!!
The substack generated a lot of controversy. I got emails from old professors, I heard about others ranting and railing against it despite the fact that I also espoused the virtues of learning the fundamentals.
Watching three self-taught filmmakers crush at the box office and my desire to write about it brought back memories of all the backlash. But there was one reaction in particular that I felt compelled to re-read in the wake of these recent events.
It came from Rebecca Green a well-respected producer and now Director of Producing at the AFI Conservatory. She writes a blog called Dear Producer and in it, she took a very strong position against my article.
Her thesis was essentially this: She agrees schools need to innovate, but she pushes back on the core premise. Film schools don’t need to chase the creator economy. The real mistake is reducing art education to job training and monetization metrics. What I was missing in my article is that students come to film school to master self-expression and learn to create — not to launch YouTube channels. The purpose of art education is developing complete human beings with critical thinking and empathy, and if schools optimize for resume virtues instead of eulogy virtues, they’ve already lost what makes them matter.
I didn’t push back too hard at the time but only invited her to a deeper discussion to which she never replied.
But as I spoke to more and more professors and deans about these issues, the more that I felt that a lot of people in these institutions were thinking what Rebecca was saying out loud. And furthermore, it’s what a lot of legacy execs and producers feel as well about the industry writ large. And now at this pivotal moment, where an awakening has happened about the relationship between these two forces and their convergence, I’m providing my rebuttal to Rebecca.
I agree with her that part of the obligation is to build the craft and provide the inspiration and guidance that allows for better self-expression. Many kids who go to film school want to make the kinds of films and TV shows that impacted them when they were young. Some want to be artists with a capital A. Learning the fundamentals and creating an environment where they can develop these skills is a fantastic service to provide.
But I don’t think we can ignore how the world is changing — and how that’s changing storytelling itself. Film schools need to provide craft AND the literacy to move through this new landscape. Because the best self-expression in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t reach the people who need to see it.
I think if you are gonna be 50k, 100k, 200k in debt, your film school should be educating you how to make a living when you graduate not just teaching you self-expression. There is nothing that says that all film schools need to play by the same rules. AFI is perhaps the best film school in the nation pound for pound and perhaps it can stay pure in its intention. But in my experience of teaching students, for the vast majority while one voice in their head wants only to be the artist, the other is asking sincerely how he or she can actually make a living. And so, I feel pretty certain, do a majority from the students graduating from one of the 500+ schools or programs across the nation.
So here’s where Rebecca and I most diverge—
The YouTube channel requirement:
She wrote in her piece: “While I said in my job interview that no student should graduate film school without understanding how to monetize YouTube, I don’t believe you need to launch your own channel to learn how the platform works or innovative ways to connect with audiences.”
My rebuttal:
She is perhaps unwittingly contradicting herself. If she truly believes that each student needs to learn how to monetize YouTube, then ask anyone who works in the creator economy how you do that — and they will tell you there is only one way: actually doing it. Like making a movie, you learn way more from doing than reading about it. The methods are constantly changing and it takes building muscles to understand it. You improve by iterating, by posting, by getting feedback, by adjusting. No one, not one creator I’ve ever spoken to (and over the last two years I’ve spoken to a lot), learned to monetize watching videos or sitting in a classroom. Not one.
Who Needs Another YouTube Channel?
She wrote: “And the last thing the world needs is more YouTube channels. [This] reminds me of when Facebook was the cool kid on the block and someone declared it necessary for every filmmaker to have at least 10,000 followers in order to be successful.”
My rebuttal:
How many more student short films do we need? I’ve watched hundreds, if not more. I’ve taught the making of short films, I’ve sat on juries, I’ve voted on shorts for the Academy. About one in a thousand actually moves or entertains me.
The point isn’t the finished product. It’s the exercise.
Most short films are forgettable for the same reason most Hollywood movies are forgettable. Once in a while something exquisite or hilarious or moving is made, gets noticed, and opens doors. Once in a long while.
And so it goes with YouTube. It is not some alien corruption of cinema. It is another training ground, only with a harsher teacher: an algorithm that measures, in public and in real time, whether anyone actually wants to keep watching. And like it or not, that teacher is no longer confined to YouTube. It is changing how audiences interact with all content: what they expect, how quickly they judge, when they lean in, and when they bail.
When The Daniels won the Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” one of them said something on the Academy stage that got lost amongst the pandemonium — “The world is changing so rapidly and I fear our stories are not keeping pace, and sometimes it’s a little scary knowing that movies move at the rate of years and the world on the internet moves at the rate of seconds.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, but the relevant point here is this: you cannot make work for this moment without understanding where culture is actually being shaped. The internet doesn’t just distribute stories — it shapes how they’re told. How we think. What we find moving. You can’t separate those things. And the Daniels — they couldn’t get arrested in TV or film and ended up becoming creators (and making youtube videos!!!!) And by their own admission, EEAAO was inspired and shaped by internet culture and the things they learned making content online.
So why make a YouTube channel in film school? More like, why wouldn’t you? You can always ignore what you learn, but you can’t implement something you’ve ignored.
To Sell a Movie You Can’t Talk about the Movie
And it’s not just the YouTube channel as content that matters. No one is going to find your film and watch it if you don’t reach your audience on social media channels. That’s where people decide what to watch. It used to be young audiences. Now older ones too.
In a recent substack I wrote called “To Sell a Product You Can’t Mention the Product” I broke down the A24 marketing strategy behind Marty Supreme. The point was they weren’t so much marketing but extending the story of the movie across the different surfaces of the internet. So to get people to watch your movies, you’ll increasingly do better by learning how to reach audiences on the internet, just as Markiplier, Curry Barker, and Kane Parsons have all done in very different ways. Each used a combination of community relationships, cultural awareness, and audience understanding to build demand for their work. This was never a buden, it was just an extension of what they’ve been trained to do.
But is it so revolutionary?
When I first started making movies, one of the heads of theatrical distribution at a major studio told me: “While some movies fail despite a director’s involvement in marketing, I’ve never seen a movie work where the director wasn’t heavily involved.”
Even the most artistically ambitious films today rely on filmmakers helping shape how audiences discover and connect with their work. And by the above logic, if directors must be involved in their marketing campaigns for their films to succeed, then they better learn how to make content for social media.
Marketing has already made the shift. Stories live across screens and platforms now, not in 30-second spots. Film schools should teach that. Make it mandatory or make it an elective — but put it on the curriculum. Creators didn’t have the luxury of choice here. They learned to move stories across surfaces because they had to eat. When film students become filmmakers, they’ll face the same reality. The only question is whether schools prepare them for it or let them figure it out the hard way. (OK, lets be honest, filmmakers have always needed to know how to pull an audience, its just now the rules are different).
And I actually believe that there will be more and more filmmakers, artists, who call themselves creators and see the canvas of storytelling spread across screens and platforms as some kind of living, breathing organism.
Filmmakers as Creators?
Rebecca wrote: “I have yet to meet a film student who is attending school to become a ‘creator’.”
My rebuttal:
I have. Many. But first I’ll start with this story--
I guest lectured at a respected film school in Texas and asked 30 undergrads how many want to be creators. None raised their hands. Then I asked how many watched a movie or TV show in the previous week. I’m not making this up--not more than three of them raised their hand.
And finally I asked how many had watched content on social platforms that day.
Every. Hand. Went. Up.
My response to them — why would you not want to make the content you are actually consuming?
I have more direct stories as well. Students of mine who are very actively interested in becoming creators and filmmakers because they consume both equally. They see the connection. Not all, some. And then there are all the ones like those in the school in Texas who aren’t even paying attention to their own consumption.
Maybe there is a 1%, the purists, who can afford to focus only on their movie.
But let’s talk about the 99%, which I include myself in.
I’ve made probably produced a half dozen prestige films out of a couple of dozen movies. In order to afford to make those movies and still get my kids through decent schools and pay my mortgage, I’ve produced unscripted shows, scripted TV, animation, docu-series, and plenty of remakes and rom coms. Truthfully I’m proud of many of those as well. But I could never make those prestige movies if I didn’t do the others. I couldn’t afford it. And I’m not special. Most producers have a similar story. Directors and writers too.
Today’s filmmakers are going to pay the bills making YouTube videos like Ridley Scott made commercials or John Sayles wrote and re-wrote blockbusters for Hollywood. Some might like the freedom they have so much that they never actually make a traditional film. But some will see it as a means to an end. Many will just see different screens and formats as different forms of expression. The medium changes but the work doesn’t stop.
I spent my 20s as a screenwriter and while I loved it, it seemed too impractical a path for me. I saw the great ones and I was never going to be one of them. I went to film school to learn producing because I felt it would give me creative satisfaction while also providing me a solid way to make a living. And its mostly worked out. I even got to write a few things along the way.
I come from a place of pragmatism.
Build a career, don’t just make a movie. That’s part of my point about how film schools need to change. Even before the great convergence I saw so many talented filmmakers spend five years after film school getting one movie made and then realizing it would take just as long to make the next. So they went back to whatever job they had before they went to film school in the first place. And for the next 20 years, they’d be paying off their loans. And then there were the 60 / 70 / 80% of the class that couldn’t even get that first movie made…. Im sure AFI’s batting average is high but a bet a healthy number of graduates never build a sustainable career. And the traditional path will only get worse as the industry shrinks.
As I write the next chapter of my own business, 3Pas Studios, we have been leaning more heavily into the creator economy. One project has brought in more revenue in eight months than a feature film based on a script I fell in love with 11 years ago and only just got made.
So yes, if I have to build more creator businesses to afford the movies I love, I will. That is not selling out. That’s just being a producer.
And, clutch your pearls, I actually enjoyed making the creator content too.
Words and Ideas Can Change The World But Only if They Are… Movies?
I admire Rebecca’s resolve. I really do. There is something deeply moving about reminding artists that words and ideas still matter, especially at a moment when the industry feels like it is coming apart.
Where I differ is in the frame.
I don’t think the inflection point is the enemy of great art. I don’t think change is the thing we have to protect art from. More often, change is the thing that forces art to find new forms, new audiences, new languages, and new ways of mattering.
For a long time, I wanted to believe otherwise. It was convenient to believe that the kind of work I knew how to make, the kind of work that paid my bills and gave me my identity, carried some higher cultural value than the work being made on newer platforms. It was comforting to think a movie meant more than a YouTube video because it looked more like the thing I had spent my life learning how to make.
But that comfort was also a trap.
Accepting change meant accepting that I had to learn a new operating system. Not because the old one was worthless. It wasn’t. I still love it. But because audiences were already living somewhere else, speaking a slightly different language, building meaning in places many of us had trained ourselves not to take seriously.
My bubble was burst several years ago. While I was studying at Berkeley’s Haas school a professor told me that Hollywood was a walled garden and its walls had been breached and we were all “fucked.”
That’s when I started writing Open Gardens and forced myself to watch creators without judgment. And I have found some really interesting voices, some artists, some craftsman, some entertainers… and I’ve seen an awful lot of shit. Sounds like about the same experience of watching the thousands of movies made every year around the world.
That’s when I realized how easy it is to assume we knew better. That’s exactly what leads to blindness. To missing what’s actually happening in the culture.
The hope is in the convergence.
It is not legacy versus creators. It is the fundamentals of storytelling meeting the fluency of the creator economy. Craft meeting speed. Infrastructure meeting audience intimacy. Capital meeting community. Each side has something the other needs.
Look at the three movies everyone is talking about: Iron Lung, Obsessions, and Backrooms. None of them emerged from the creator economy in some pure, untouched form. Each relied on legacy in a different way, whether through infrastructure, craft, financing, distribution, production experience, or plain old Hollywood know-how.
The mix was different in each case. But the lesson was the same.
Creator instincts made them matter. Legacy muscle made them durable, financeable, producible, and real.
Technology has always disrupted and transformed storytelling. The printing press. Photography. Cinema. Radio. Television. Look how TV pushed cinema to create the widescreen and elaborate sound systems. Look how cinema changed the pacing of plays. Why is this any different? We are witnessing a transformation. We can be part of it. If we stay open. Its not the end of movies, it’s the beginning of something else…
Obviously Obvious
She called my piece “thoughtful but obvious.” Fair enough. It is obvious.
But obvious things still need to be said when entire institutions are behaving as if they are not true.
What interests me is the contradiction. She says film schools need to innovate, then resists teaching students the very skills that innovation now requires. That tension is worth examining, not because I want to win an argument, but because I’m watching students enter the industry with real talent and real fear, while being underprepared for a world that has already arrived.
I’ve never said film schools shouldn’t be a place to foster artists and self-expression. I’m saying they can’t pretend the world doesn’t exist outside the classroom door. Not when students are carrying six figures in debt. Self-expression is a luxury when you’re terrified about how you’ll survive. Effective art education has to account for that.
And just as vital, storytelling is changing. Like it always does. Art can exist anywhere, and the places we dismiss as commercial, unserious, or disposable are often where the next language of art is being born. Movies were once treated as a diversion too, until artists learned how to turn them into cinema.
And the convergence is real. It just happened three times in six months. Don’t focus on the movies focus on the patterns.
A 17-year-old kid today with a unique voice and point of view is probably not sitting in a dark room watching Kurosawa and Kubrick the way I did. Maybe some are, and God bless them. But many are living in a different media world, drawing inspiration from different places, different formats, different rhythms, and different communities.
That does not make their influences less serious. It just makes them different.
Art and genuine self-expression can come from anywhere. Ignoring that because it feels “obvious” is how institutions become beautifully preserved rooms: admirable, important, even noble, but increasingly disconnected from where the next generation is actually making meaning.
And noble rooms are hard places to make a living.
I wanted to talk to Rebecca, and I still do. Everyone is online, barking past each other, so I’m extending another invitation: let’s do a Substack Zoom and actually discuss this.
At the end of the day, we want the same thing: to see the next generation of storytellers prosper and inspire. We just disagree on how we get there.
That disagreement is worth having out loud.