We were lucky to catch up with Naomi McDougall Jones recently and have shared our conversation below.
Naomi, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of our favorite things to hear about is stories around the nicest thing someone has done for someone else – what’s the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?
I have been fortunate to have had a great many people do me innumerable kindnesses over my career and lifetime, so I’m going to take the superlative out of the question. I don’t know that what I’m going to describe is the “kindest,” but there are is a time that springs to my mind as a moment of incredible and important kindness.
It occurred at a time when I was still struggling fiercely to make ends meet financially (which, to be clear, was true through solidly the first 10 years of my career). I always had enough to live, but barely, and any unexpected expense always stood fatally jeopardize my teetering balance.
Once during that time, I had an unexpected dentist bill – my memory is that it was for $200 dollars. I was on Medicaid at the time, but there must have been some procedure that wasn’t covered and this came at the moment as a catastrophic expense – one that I couldn’t not pay, but also did not have a way of paying. I was having a lot of self-pity and anger over how many times I’d skimped and saved on little expenses, sacrificing things that many people don’t even think about (tickets to the movies, a pair of new, rather than pre-owned pants) in order to have this career in the arts – and then here came this Mack Truck of an expense out of nowhere. Anyway, I happened that week to be attending a conference of fancy ladies. I was attending for free – in one of those strange artists realities of simultaneously barely earning enough money to pay ones rent, but then sometimes being sent along to posh events as the interesting artist guest – but everyone else there was successful in fields where success meant earning a lot of money. The whole week, I was caught in despair and frustration over the ease with which people around me were spending money and how this $200 bill could break me – it felt alienating and confusing and awful. I eventually admitted my predicament to one of my fellow attendees in a quiet moment alone and she was very empathetic and kind about it, which made me feel a bit better.
Then the last day of the conference, as we were leaving, she quietly handed me an envelope and told me not to open it until after I’d left. When I did on the train home, there was a check for $200 inside a card that read, “You are not allowed to thank me for this and we won’t ever talk about it again. I didn’t start from an easy place either and I would never have gotten where I am without people helping me out of tight spots.”
The sheer generosity of her understanding, not only how important the money was, but giving it to me in such a way that didn’t ask for anything back – and actually forbid it – in the form of the kind of kneeling gratitude I would have felt it only appropriate to display (and would have felt emotionally) as breathtaking. She understood, perhaps from her own experience, that accepting money in a desperate situation would cost me an amount of dignity and shame and, so, she bypassed that too. It was an extraordinary act of kindness – the sort that allowed me to go on and keep fighting another day – and I will never, ever forget it.
Naomi, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I wanted to be a performer from the time I was very small. My mother recounts taking me to see “The Nutcracker” when I was maybe four and how I stood up in the middle of the second act, pointed excitedly at the stage, and proclaimed loudly, “I want to do THAT!” So… who knows where that came from, but something born into me has been magnetically obsessed with the magic of participating in the telling of stories for as long as I can remember.
I soon decided that that meant I wanted to be an actress, which became my driving passion through childhood and teenager-dom and what I went to college for at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. I got out of college and pounded the pavement and audition rooms with the kind of enthusiasm and energy reserved for someone who has spent the first twenty years of their life panting to arrive in this city and do precisely this thing. I got cast with regularity – often, at first, in truly crumby theater and film productions – and, occasionally, into more inspiring and creatively expansive ones. But, it didn’t take me long to notice that the parts available for women, especially as I got cast more and more in film, were…ahem, underwhelming. I experienced a mounting sensation that the passion for storytelling that had set me on this journey was not quite lining up with my turns as a stripper with a heart of gold, the super-supportive girlfriend, or naked body #5.
Sharing a pique of frustration over lunch with an acting school friend, Caitlin Gold, one day, we decided that we would make our own movie. I had spent the last several years as a sort of in-the-closet playwright: I had had seven plays I’d written produced in New York and around the country, but kept that strictly on the DL after a conversation with my agent in which he told me that I could be either an actor *or* a writer, but the the industry would get confused if I did both. At any rate, though, I figured that I could probably figure out how to write a movie with better female characters – with female characters that more accurately resonated with the women we knew in real life – and, we decided, we could probably figure out how to produce it and I would act in it and…
That film became “Imagine I’m Beautiful,” which we made for a highly-scraped-together $80,000 and which eventually went on to win 12 awards and get a 10-city theatrical release.
The current arc of my career crystalized in the course of making that movie in two ways.
The first is that, from the first day on set, I knew I wanted to make movies for the rest of my life. The experience of writing – many, MANY drafts of – a story in my living room over several years and then, one day, to walk onto a set where 30 other adults were running around building sets and props that I had invented in my head, *becoming* characters that had previously only existed in my mind, is, for me, the most magical experience of life. It’s like being a wizard – maybe better than being a wizard. In that moment, a creative seed that came from me blossoms out into this enormous creative organism that is suddenly so much bigger than me – of which I am now only a tiny piece – to become this thing that is more complex and more marvelous than anything I could have made on my own. It is indescribable. Chasing that experience again, I made my second feature film, “Bite Me,” several years later and am now a little less than a year away from shooting both my third feature film, “Hammond Castle,” and my fourth – a as-yet untitled microbudget psycho-sexual thriller that takes place at a defunct nuclear power plant.
The second career thread that emerged from making “Imagine I’m Beautiful,” was that, being confronted with truly mind-melting levels of sexism as an all-female producing team making a film about female characters for (largely) female audiences, I began shooting my mouth off about what I was experiencing at Q&As after screenings of our film. This was 2014, so a handful of years before #metoo, at a time when it was profoundly dangerous to ones career to say these truths out loud. At first I was naive enough not to realize that that that was the case and by the time I was informed of that reality, in no uncertain terms, by an Oscar-winning female producer who had been, until that moment, one of my heroes, I was too indignant to be silenced. As a result of my willingness to say the inside things out loud, I quickly got put on the international speaking circuit, talking about these issues, which eventually led to me giving a TEDTalk that went viral in the height of #metoo, getting to write a book about the subject, “The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood,” co-founding The 51 Fund, a private equity fund to finance films by female directors, and a rich, multi-layered career as an activist, advocate, speaker, and writer pushing for parity in cinema.
I suppose I am driven today by the same innate desire that caused my 4-year-old self to leap to my feet: a fervent wish to transform the world through the stories I tell, as well as, by experienced necessity, a need to transform the landscape of storytelling to make space for stories both like and unlike mine.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
I believe we are in dire need of a media/arts equivalent of the “slow foods movement” – I am actually at work on a book about this at the moment.
A whole host of factors – unprecedented levels of mass corporate consolidation of media companies, streaming platforms of all varieties training audiences to expect more media for less money, the exploitation of artists that has inevitably accompanied that, and more – have led to a moment in which audiences are consuming more media than ever before in human history, corporations are making more money from that than they ever have in human history, artists are getting paid almost nothing for their work and being exploited by the corporations in a whole host of ways, and, as a result of this, the stories and content themselves are getting increasingly corporatized and audiences are being driven away from the kind of “nutritional storytelling” that can only come from a system that cares about storytelling as a medium of importance (which Hollywood and the tech companies that own it definitively no longer do).
We need to help audiences wake up to these realities, to say, “Hey. Notice how the ways in which you are consuming stories now is not actually expanding, inspiring, challenging you in the way that stories importantly do, but now more closely resemble a drug of which you cannot consume enough? Do you notice how binge-watching fast food stories from your couch drives you further away from other people, rather than building community as stories have the unique and special power to do? Does it matter to you that 5 corporations are now deciding exclusively what you watch? Would you pay a little more to have more healthful choices, if you knew that the artists making those stories were being adequately compensated?”
We are in a situation that has happened both so fast and so subtly that most people haven’t really noticed – or wouldn’t be able to explain what they are experiencing – but I believe that there is a better world beyond this one for artists and audiences alike if we can break ourselves out of this mega-corporation matrix. And I do believe that is possible.
Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?
It is entirely possible that I am going to be on the wrong side of history here, but I believe that five years hence they will have gone the way of the Beanie Babies.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.naomimcdougalljones.com/
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- Twitter: https://twitter.com/NaomiMcDougallJ
Image Credits
Talitha McDougall Jones Piero Basso Eun-ah Lee April Frame