The Ledger: Dan Schindel, Film Critic, New York City

As told to Abby Sun

The Ledger is The Holdout’s irregular column on the often-hidden financial realities of independent film workers, as told to our editors. Dan Schindel is a Brooklyn-based film critic and a former associate editor for Hyperallergic’s documentary vertical (where, many years ago, Dan edited an essay I pitched). Like many critics of his generation, he started out writing for free. He describes a choice many of his peers have also made—working a job outside film so that he can continue writing film criticism, which has only a handful of staff jobs left in the U.S. This account has been edited and condensed from a questionnaire and an interview.

🗂 Profession: Full-time editor; freelance film critic 

🕰 Years in the industry: Nearly 16 

📍 Based in: New York City

“If They Could Pay, Surely They Would”

My parents were comfortably middle class, so finances weren’t much of an issue growing up. I always wanted to be a writer, and they never pushed me toward a safe career. I grew up at the “end of history,” when you could take for granted that a college degree would guarantee your future prospects, and it didn’t even matter what kind of degree. That illusion was shattered during my freshman year of college, in 2008, when the economy collapsed. 

I studied film and was pulled toward criticism, not thinking about how I’d realistically make a living. After graduation, I was adrift. I finished a seasonal job at Walmart and did temp work at a landfill during Hurricane Irene cleanup. Then my grandfather, who was 91 and living in Florida, needed someone around to watch out for him. My mom managed his finances, so she paid me to be his caretaker, nothing official. I stayed with him from fall 2011 into spring 2012. There wasn’t much to do in Florida, so I watched movies and started a WordPress blog to build a writing portfolio.

In April 2012, I moved to Los Angeles on what I’d saved, living with two roommates I’d found through my old film program’s alumni group. Rents were cheaper then, and money went further. I canvassed, phone-banked, worked as a background extra, and wrote multiple pieces a week for sites that are mostly dead now—or sometimes not, depending on whether someone has paid the hosting fees. My bylines were scrubbed from some of the still-alive sites years ago, which I don’t mind, because nothing I wrote for them was good. 

The articles I wrote during this time easily numbered in the hundreds. I was enchanted by being invited to events like press screenings and junkets. All the nicest food I ate in 2013 came from junket buffets. It didn’t occur to me to ask for payment, because, hey—if they could pay, surely they would, right? I was 22. I didn’t know enough about economics or have enough class consciousness to ask. Writers in my generation were way too comfortable writing for exposure. If there’s one improvement since then, it’s that even the content mills pay something now.

The first thing I was paid to write, in 2013, was a submission to the Los Angeles Times dating column, funnily enough. The only steady writing money I received was assistant-editing honorariums of maybe $50 a month. This was the era when “Film Twitter” was a thing you could conceivably know everyone on. People hung out in their cities or talked shit online. But I didn’t talk about rates with anybody, and nobody talked about them with me. It took me a long time to build up the courage to approach sites that paid at a higher level, to internalize the idea that I could write for them at all. When sites started paying me around 2014, I thought $20 an article was a good rate, and $40 or $50 felt extravagant.

I look back and wonder whether I was writing well enough to justify more. But you turn someone into a good writer by editing them well and asking more of them. 

That’s the trap of how so many sites are structured: content slop, in whatever format is fashionable. Sites that don’t pay didn’t ask much of their writers, either. Now, we see a lot of newsletter writers rewarded for low standards because they have big followings and no editors.

On Contract and Part-Time Gigs

My first full-time job, obtained in early 2013, paid California minimum wage, something like $12 an hour. I worked on the night shift at first. The company, Movieclips—which became Zefr—was a product of the “Silicon Beach” era, when people were trying hard to make Venice, California, a tech hub. They submitted copyright claims on YouTube on behalf of their media company partners. I built searches to find clips of whatever movies we were assigned. It was drudge work—enough to get by, but I was always looking for something else.

A friend at Cracked alerted me of a copy editing gig, and I stayed almost six years, eventually as the site’s only copy editor after it downsized in 2017. It was contract work the whole time, so I managed my own health insurance and taxes, which was a fucking headache. But it clicked, both because I was good at it and could get paid more, as I had another part-time copy editing job at Bustle. With freelance writing on top of that, I had a good thing going. I never wanted to be a full-time freelance critic; being part-time was enough of a hustle. The idea was to find something to hold me until I could land a full-time staff critic job.

Hyperallergic [an online arts magazine] was the big pivot. I pitched them aggressively enough that they started treating film as one of their regular coverage topics. When they got a Ford Foundation grant in 2019 for documentary coverage, I went for their grant-funded associate editor job. It came with health insurance—but was part-time, so I also kept copy editing. I moved to New York, fit in great, and figured I’d parlay the job into a full-time editorial position. I’ve never felt more optimistic about myself and my career than I did then. Then I lost the Cracked gig right before the pandemic. Film editorial work during quarantine meant scrambling for anything to say about online releases. The stimulus checks helped, and so did the “blessing” of having nowhere to spend money.

In 2022, my Hyperallergic work became a contract, at-large position, and that ended that fall. I abandoned a very ill-advised attempt at grad school in Europe, came back, crashed with my brother, and saved up from temp gigs. I shifted priorities totally. I wanted stability. I took a part-time copy editing job at Axios that had me up at 4:30 a.m. editing newsletters, then another part-time copy editing job. When I finally found my first “real” job, again as a copy editor—full-time, salaried, and with health insurance—I was able to settle down.

My job has a 401(k) with a good match. I’m starting late, so who knows when I can retire, or what happens to the stock market. A guy can dream. I still have trouble saving. New York is expensive, I insist on living alone, and things keep happening. For a while, I went into medical debt. My cat was recently hospitalized, and I’m waiting to hear what pet insurance will cover. I’ve started a GoFundMe for the costs I know I’ll be stuck with, just to try to avoid getting pushed into another hole. Things keep heading off my attempts to build a nest egg, which causes me no small amount of ambient stress.

“If I Just Wrote Enough” 

My financial life relies on something else so I can keep writing criticism. There are so few writing and editorial jobs in film, and whenever a new one comes up, I know it will go to someone more in with that particular outlet. And the compensation these jobs offer is usually (though not always) lower than that at my day job. Even if that work is so much closer to my heart, I don’t want to take that hit.

It’s part of the broader crisis of journalism. Criticism is better when writers are paid well, have time to develop their thoughts, have editors to hone them, and are in dialogue with each other. There’s less and less of that. 

It seems like a common trajectory: Either you burn out, or you make do by splitting the financial burden of your life with a roommate or a partner. Or, if you’re dedicated and fortunate and make the right connections, you can plug away as a full-time freelancer or land a rare staff critic or editor job. 

Posting on social media and networking well is what will put you top of mind for publicists, editors, and programmers, and that’s how people end up on film festival juries, host Q&As, or guest-program at theaters. I’m not great at those things. For way too long, I thought that if I just wrote enough, that would be enough.

I became a critic because I liked thinking about what I watch and sharing those thoughts. I still get a great deal of satisfaction from explicating my feelings about a movie, and if I get in a good phrase or two, that’s satisfying. It’s still cool to interview people I admire about their craft. And it’s always a good feeling when somebody says they checked something out because I recommended it.

If the outlets stopped paying, I’d write less, but I’d still do it. I have a Substack for things too niche to pitch, or that someone beat me to. A few people pay. Substack loves its metrics, so I dutifully watch the subscriber line go up, and when it hits around 500, I guess I’ll start doing paid-only posts. For now, it’s mostly unpaid.