Although I’d played around with 8mm film as a kid, I got my first taste of real filmmaking — of telling a story with sound and images — in 1972, during my senior year in college.

If you want to be an independent filmmaker in today’s rapidly changing environment, you face a very steep learning curve. Even experienced filmmakers are throwing up their hands in despair, and if I see another death-of-cinema article in a national magazine I think I’m going to scream.

It’s sad that so many good films never get beyond the festival circuit. They get a buzz, some nice reviews, maybe even win an award, but they don’t get distribution deals and then they disappear, never to be seen again. Many filmmakers still think that their job is finished when the film is done, that it’s somebody else’s job to promote it. That’s where they’re wrong.