The Artist and Money
I don’t believe there is an artist alive who doesn’t care about being compensated for their work. At the same time, I don’t believe there’s an artist worth his or her salt — writer, painter, actor or musician— who can stop themselves from being what they are in their bones — an artist — if their life depended on it, regardless of how much money they make from it.
The year he died, my comedy mentor and best friend, musician Col. Bruce Hampton, said to me: “I wasn’t meant to make a lot of money in this lifetime, but I’ll be big when I die.” I have no doubt he was right about that — just give it time.
We know Van Gogh only sold a few paintings while alive. He was driven to paint with a fury and creative madness that now captivates the world. He didn’t go out into a cornfield and paint crows in the wind, thinking he would get rich and retire on the French seashore when he sold his work.
Today his paintings sell for millions, but at the time he painted them no one cared about them, he would’ve had a hard time giving them away. Today art investors trade them, sell them, making millions off of his passion and sweat, while Vincent barely survived while painting them.
F. Scott Fitzgerald struggled most of his writing life to keep up with his living expenses. In debt to Scribners, his publisher, he was even getting loans from his legendary editor, Max Perkins, in the years after publishing The Great Gatsby. He spent nine years writing his next novel, Tender Is The Night, while churning out stories to pay the rent along with his wife’s large medical bills. When the book finally came out it received decent reviews, but didn’t get him out of debt. In reality, it was a literary masterpiece.
In 1936 he took work in Hollywood, writing for the movies, getting paid well enough to support his losses, but having to do hack work in a movie mill where expendable writers were treated like cogs in a machine and expected to mercilessly rewrite each other’s work. In 1940, the year he died, his earnings from published books totaled about 13 dollars.
In the next decade, Fitzgerald’s books began to sell in the hundreds of thousands. Fitzgerald became wildly successful. Tender Is The Night was filmed in 1962 starring Jason Robards, and became a TV series in 1985. The Great Gatsby was remade as a movie in 1974, starring Robert Redford, and again in 2013, starring Leo DiCaprio, all productions netting millions. The unfinished novel Fitzgerald was writing when he died, The Last Tycoon, which critics agreed would have been Fitzgerald’s crowning work, in the literary vein of Gatsby, was made into a movie staring Robert De Niro in 1976. Fitzgerald’s short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, churned out by the writer in a night for a few thousand dollars, was turned into a movie in 2008, starring Brad Pitt, making millions again. In the meantime, royalties from his novels and stories world wide would make F. Scott Fitzgerald one of the richest writers in America, long after he was dead.
I give these examples of artists who were not compensated well for their work in their lifetimes, or as well as they should have been, to illustrate that, although they hoped to make a good living with it, that is not what drove them to do it in the first place, and not the first reward in doing it.
They did it because they had to, that was their calling, that was who they were, and the creation of the thing, of bringing something to life that hadn’t existed before, was the reason for doing it. The joy and fulfillment of giving birth to a song, a painting, a story, a role in a film, is the beginning of everything — there is nothing to describe the personal thrill in those spontaneous moments of creation — and regardless of the money made doing it, there is nothing that would have stopped them from doing it.
Nothing.
The great American artist, Thomas Hart Benton, said, the only time an artist fails is when he stops working. The poet, James Dickey, said, a true poet will drive through a steel wall to get his poem written. Neither of them were talking about money here, only about the work, the great and rich and infinite compensation of doing the work itself. That comes first, and, in cases when a lot of money isn’t made, maybe last.
You can’t depend on money as an artist. You hope for it. You work your tail off, and know you deserve it, and ask for it, but money is not your guiding light. Because money is not the impetus that made you do it, and too often you know there is no justice in what you’ll make off of it.
As a child I was drawn to stories. In school I experimented with writing sonnets and stories, excelling in English. In my first year of college an English professor gave me a C minus on a piece I’d written off the top of my head, telling me I was lucky to get that, accusing me of plagiarizing it. I hadn’t. It was all me. I was infuriated. But it was a message, a clue, an arrow pointing me in the direction I should go. She had unjustly done me a favor.
I was hit soon after by a figurative bolt of lightning that I was, had been, always wanted to be a writer. I left college and wrote obsessively for years, waiting tables and bartending to pay the rent. Writing was the only thing I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it well, and hoped to make money at it. At twenty-six, I got into stand up comedy, which carried me into acting in theater, eventually carrying me into film acting.
I’ve made a decent living as an actor, a healthy career of it, playing many roles. But in the meantime, I was writing furiously. I wrote a screenplay, turning it into my first novel, Creature Storms, spending ten years on the book, and self published it. I wanted it to sell, and marketed it to filmmakers. I’d put it up against some of the best novels I’ve read right now, but as of yet it hasn’t made much money and hasn’t been bought by the film industry. I was also writing poetry and stories, mostly nonfiction, publishing them in literary journals, one nominated for the Pushcart Prize. I have a book of those stories prepared to publish this year called A Pilgrimage To Dennis Hopper and Other Stories.
I believe Creature Storms will find a wider readership in time. I believe one day some young filmmaker will read it and flip out over it and want to put it on film.
But if that never happens, I had to write it anyway. And when I’d gotten it word for word the way I wanted it, and while I was actually writing it, there was a mysterious exhilaration I cannot describe, from seeing this vision living in print, standing up and walking apart from me, like a child that bears your name, that you created and gave life and breath to. It was there inside you, and now it is out in the daylight of the world.
There is nothing remotely like that feeling that can be translated into money, though money is always good to have with it.
During the Covid pandemic, I finished my second novel, which I’m avidly marketing and pushing to get to print. It is powerful and disruptive. I want it to do well and also make it to the screen. But regardless, it was burning in me to be written, to come out and live on the page, and it wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d written it. I was going to write it anyway, with faith in the intrinsic value of bringing my vision into the world.
Artists need money to live. But too much success, especially early on, can be as much the kiss of death as not having enough. Complacency, dissipation, laziness, when you slide into the pleasure temptations of wealth instead of working at the craft that got you there. We see it happen all the time — actors, musicians, writers who have succeeded, floundering in drugs, alcohol, self indulgence, dying an early death, their talents wasted. Having to dig and grind and pay dues for years before monetary success, is the best thing that can happen to most artists. Having to pay dues toughens you, teaches you discipline, and makes you appreciate what you’ve made when you finally have it.
I’m working toward more as an actor and writer, artistically and monetarily. But the journey, what you learn along the way, and those magical rushes when creative explosions occur, those heightened experiences, are what you cannot put a price on.
And if at any point anyone could’ve talked you out of being an artist, changed your mind, talked you into giving up, then you should’ve done something else with your life, because it takes a Herculean drive to be an artist. You are called or you’re not, and if you are called, nothing in heaven or earth will dissuade you from telling your story, painting, auditioning for another role, or writing your song.
You are hardheaded beyond anyone’s ability to understand what’s driving you, because what you are doing is your life.
Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor, seen on “True Detective,” “Hidden Figures,” “Just Mercy,” and a writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.
