George Clooney, Judd Apatow & The Flipside

Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:

Humphrey Bogart's sweethearts, Dwayne Johnson on a boat, Sandra Hüller in space, a new Exorcist and keeping quiet.

Let’s go!

(Included in today's edition is a chat I had with director Christopher Wilcha)

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FLIPSIDE: A REQUIEM FOR CREATIVE FAILURE

Flipside. Oscilloscope.

Christopher Wilcha is an authority on creative failures.

I interviewed Chris about his new documentary Flipside, EP’d by Judd Apatow, which begins by detailing the promising start of Wilcha’s career.

His debut doc, The Target Shoots First (2000), won the audience award at SXSW and the top prize at Slamdance. Instantly, Wilcha was dubbed:

“The Michael Moore of the New Millennium.”

But Wilcha made a Faustian bargain to take on commercial work to support his family, and slowly but surely, his time was reallocated to things that took him away from the art he loved.

In Flipside, Wilcha details a litany of abandoned docs on various subjects:

• Ira Glass (This American Life creator)

• Herman Leonard (iconic Jazz photographer)

• The White Stripes

What I found so striking about Flipside was it found its heart in the deep examination of how our attachments define and distort our identity.

Wilcha explained:

“You can feel devastating heartbreak over all the things you didn’t do and probably never will, while also loving the life you’ve made.”

Wilcha finds his path to creative salvation by examining a purer time in his life when he worked at a record store as a teenager.

Wilcha said something to me about the record store that I felt was a perfect summation of his film:

“Part of the allure of it is the mystery, is not putting something into a search engine to know exactly what you're getting, is going there with no expectation that you're going to get anything you even want, and then finding shit you can't believe even exists.”

Translation: the beauty of the artistic journey is the self-discovery along the way.

Flipside opens on Friday in NYC. Limited release beginning next week.

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