Los Angeles seems most vigorous in the spring. Frenzied neighborhoods buzzing with leaf blowers and sneezing. Viridescent shrubs erupting with charismatic jasmine. Exhausted billboards pleading for your consideration.
And yet I thought the email was a joke when I opened it earlier this month: “The Minimalists: Less Is Now has been nominated for a 2022 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Directing Team.”
What?!
After verifying the @netflix.com email extension was, in fact, real, I lifted my jaw from the floor, placed my eyeballs back in their sockets, and rushed to share the news with our gifted director, Matt D’Avella, and the team of creative people who poured their hearts (and other organs) into the film.
Nobody expected this. Those FYC billboards contain oversized images of Jimmy Kimmel, Drew Barrymore, and the flawless faces of Euphoria, not a couple schmoes from Dayton, Ohio. But here we are—nominated without a single advertisement (yay!).
Of course, awards for art are a touchy subject. On one hand, it’s nice to be acknowledged, especially since that recognition will breathe new life into our project and expose it to viewers who may benefit from its message. On the other hand, art is subjective, polarizing, abstruse, and unquantifiable, so why would anyone get to define its greatness?
Suffice it to say, it’s complicated. So Matt, Ryan, and I have decided to sit in the middle—to be grateful for the new attention without needing it, to accept the praise without grasping for it (or renouncing it), and to be at peace no matter the outcome.
Perhaps this nomination is just a metaphor anyway.
After a human is born, their life bends toward a sequence of stockpiling. They flounder through puberty, become an adult, and accumulate possessions and relationships and careers and credit cards until they feel the weight of excess. To “remedy” their situation, they attempt to organize their hoard, trading their “wrong” things for the “right” things, going into debt, working hard to collect cars and clothes and cosmetics that merely get in the way. None of it makes them happier.
When the stuff ceases to fill the void, they create new clutter—mental clutter, emotional clutter, spiritual clutter—always chasing more as the antidote to the chaos. They never stop to consider less.
Maybe now is the time.
For your consideration: Less Is Now.
Or, more succinctly: consider less—now.
–JFM
P.S. Big thanks to Matt D’Avella, Booklight, and the entire team for helping us create something meaningful. It’s a “win” just to know you.
