I’ve always loved The Brothers McMullen and…loved even more the mythology surrounding it – how Ed Burns filmed it on a shoestring budget, using his family’s home for many of the pivotal shots and leftover film stock from other movie and video shoots to pull it together. He was considered a wunderkind at a young age, the toast of Sundance, and he often referred to shooting the film as the “12 best days of life”…and then, well…let’s say his post-McMullen career proved a little more sporadic, and arguably never quite as successful.
Recently he released a memoir, Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of My Life, detailing his entire career. It’s full of fascinating information about the movie industry, but more importantly, it’s an interesting retrospective from a career-artist; someone who has spent most of his adult life pursing his artistic visions. In the book, Burns is refreshingly honest about the highs and lows, and the numerous mistakes that he’s made along the way. Yet, there’s never any regret or angst – on every page, you get the sense that this is someone who throughout it all was doing exactly what he wanted to do, how he wanted to do it, and likely wouldn’t change much of how it all turned it out, even if he could.
All of us who try to create something, be it a movie or a book or a play, have to struggle with self-doubt, failure, sometimes ridicule. It’s not often easy, but even at its hardest, we wouldn’t want to do anything else. As Burns says throughout his book, he didn’t choose to make films, film-making chose him. It’s all ever he wanted to do – all he wanted was to capture “another 12 days,” and that meant he was willing to deal with the sacrifices necessary to make those days a reality.
Again, it’s a great read. And when I got done with it, it prompted to me re-rent one of his “little movies,” Purple Violets, which is all about what it means to be successful, or not, as a writer. A really great movie from a great director.
And that’s probably exactly what he’d like to hear.
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