Let’s say you’re a Chicago-based director, or working on it. Any age. Maybe you’re in film school, eager for a glimpse of your future, and some wisdom from a filmmaker with a wide range of experience and a quarter-century or so of struggle, success, more struggle, more success.

In that case? April 5 is your day. As part of Cinema/Chicago’s calendar of events — the nonprofit that’s best known for the Chicago International Film Festival — director, screenwriter and producer Karyn Kusama will conduct a master class on what she has learned directing for television and film. The session’s title: “Directing for Television and Film.” Kusama shares that title’s forthright quality.

It took her several years of finance hustling to make her 2000 debut independent feature “Girlfight” starring Michelle Rodriguez. The “no”s Kusama encountered en route came with a wearying refrain: Make the aspiring boxer at the story’s center a white girl, not a Latina. She held out for Rodriguez, who took off from there.

Kusama made “Girlfight” for $1 million. Her second feature, the Charlize Theron futuristic assassin thriller “Aeon Flux,” cost 62 times that. Paramount Pictures didn’t love Kusama’s cut, which led to significant cuts, reshoots, changes and, because studio inference always knows best, a financial failure. Up and down; down and up. This is the way of most filmmaking careers, especially careers straddling independent work and the conglomerates.

I love a lot of Kusama’s films; one of my favorites, her 2015 indie “The Invitation” — another $1 million gem, shot in three weeks with 12 actors and one hillside LA house — works like sinister gangbusters. Without giving the premise away, it ends with a beautiful, ice-cold whammy reminiscent of the ’70s paranoia thrillers Kusama adores.

More recently, she has flourished in television, directing the initial episodes of Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” which she executive produces. This summer she starts filming “The Terror” for AMC, a six-hour miniseries — directing two of the six episodes, executive producing the rest. Master classes such as the April 5 Chicago talk, part of Cinema/Chicago’s Chicago Industry Exchange series, provoke all kinds of questions from attendees, she says. Some gravitate toward the aspirational and idealistic, she says: “What is the art we want to be making? What is the art we want to be seeing?” Others spring from career doubts and the ability to buy groceries, i.e.: Can I make a living behind a camera?

Now 56, Kusama joined me on Zoom from the Los Feliz LA home she shares with frequent collaborator, screenwriter husband Phil Hay, and their son. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: You’ve done these sorts of master classes before. Is “How am I going to make a living?” the question that keeps coming up?

A: It’s the evergreen question, and it has a way of getting overlooked sometimes in relation to matters of personal vision and art-making. Finding a professional path we can actually survive on — how to make this industry and art form work for us, as professionals — that’s the question. And it’s become even more urgent these last couple of years.

I feel like I’ve learned so much in my 25 years in the business, but I’m struck at how it literally never stops changing. And so rapidly.  In my own work, I’m thinking a lot about provoking and encouraging an audience to cultivate a more thoughtful attention span. The attention span of viewers has radically shifted away from … paying attention (laughs). I mean, that’s just the noise of our particular world right now. But it’s an important mission: to get people to sit down and watch something with total engagement. That’s a high bar as a filmmaker to reach, and it’s a high bar for the viewer. I wish it were easier. But I’m open to the challenge of it.

Q: You directed the pilot episode of “Yellowjackets.” This was just before the pandemic?

A: We had our last day of editing the day before the national lockdown in March 2020. Right down to the wire. I remember thinking: Huh. I wonder how bad this virus might be? (With the pilot) we had to be mindful of a television audience required to make a lot of connections between a character we establish as played by a teenaged actor and then that character’s adult counterpart. There were so many things in that first episode we wanted to feel effortlessly connected, hopefully, for the audience. While staying engaging. That’s a constant mission for any filmmaker. Keeping questions about the story alive, while answering enough of them so that a viewer doesn’t feel lost.

Q: So: clear. And interesting.

A: Clear, but just clear enough. And engaging. That’s a tough balance to strike.

Q: It reminds me of your Trailers From Hell segment on “The Parallax View,” the 1974 Alan J. Pakula film. I’m a little older than you but we both saw that at a pretty young age —

A: I just saw a print of that here in LA at the Egyptian Theatre last week! It was so great to watch it on the big screen again. And to be reminded how mysterious that movie is. Inspiring, really. A true artifact of a great era in filmmaking.

Q: There’s a lot of small-screen production going on in Chicago, as you know. And there’s a lot of uncertainty and anxiety among folks graduating from film school here. Wherever you are, in Chicago, LA or New York — you came through NYU yourself, before working for filmmaker John Sayles — it’s not easy to make the next step. What do you tell students about that?

A: Well, let’s start with this: Chicago is one of the greatest cities in the world. If I could live anywhere other than LA or New York, it would be Chicago. So much about it is historically, architecturally and politically significant to me. I see it as a center of art-making. And I like to instill that sense of local pride (in young filmmakers) of where we come from, where we got our education, wherever we first truly interacted with art. There’s always so much interesting material in the place we come from. I grew up in St. Louis, which always wanted to be Chicago, but for a lot of reasons it didn’t turn out that way. Yet I appreciate everything I got out of living there.

I’ve talked to some of the film schools in Chicago, and I don’t lead with the idea that all the action’s in Los Angeles or New York because I don’t think that’s true. There’s a wealth of young talent gaining real skills in Chicago, different from the skills they might’ve gotten from film school in Los Angeles or New York. It’s a more intimate community, and a great place to make some lifelong connections. There are times with LA particularly where it just feels sprawling and impossible.

Q: Coming out of NYU, did New York’s compression or however you want to describe it — did it make things easier?

A: It can. But wherever you are, there’s the likelihood of doing a lot of the wrong kind of work for a while. I went along a path working on music videos, and industrial videos, which is good training. But I didn’t necessarily find my direction for a while. It helped to meet a filmmaker like John Sayles, who was such a mentor to me, and in many respects a bridge between the indie film world and the studio world, for which he wrote a lot of screenplays. I was really lucky my trajectory led me to him. It takes some time to find those people.

Q: When you talk to groups, based on how you watch movies yourself, is there any advice you feel is important to pass along to younger filmmakers about what to do, literally, with the camera? How to use it in a way that serves the material, and in ways that won’t feel like nobody in particular designed the shot? 

A: I think young filmmakers have to identify how they like to see, and what they respond to in the films they love. The films that make them feel something. There are films we may admire, or be impressed by, but for me, the goal in making movies is to make people feel something. I encourage young filmmakers to let a movie work its particular magic on them, and then revisit it in order to unearth what made the movie work, what kept you up at night. Some movies just disturb me so deeply, I want to get better control of it, in a way, and learn for myself how and why it works the way it does. And then you can start to look into technical choices, every element and detail of the filmmaking, the sound, the color, the movement, and of course, the performances. It all builds your emotional reality.

It’s not something you learn overnight. Or ever fully learn, period. Luckily.

Q: Let’s say I’m 23. I’m about to direct my first feature. I show up to your master class, and I’m looking for one good practical piece of advice. What is that advice?

A: Honestly? I’d tell you to make getting a good night’s sleep your mission in life. Every single night. I am now at an age where a single night of bad sleep throws me off for too long. And I can’t afford it anymore. Young people should get in the habit of great sleep hygiene. It makes or breaks your ability to think on set.

Q: That’s fantastic advice. I’m not making any movies, but I’ll try it.

A: It’s mom-of-a-teenager advice, I guess. Which I am. But I’ve come to believe it for myself.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Tim Henderson | (TNS) Stateline.org

From health care for immigrants in California to universal school vouchers in Tennessee, states are being forced to rethink expensive projects as tax revenues decline and federal pandemic aid ends.

State tax revenue fell last year by 4%, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Census Bureau estimates released this month. Revenue is still up since 2019 by about 28%, though, higher than the inflation rate of about 18% in that time.

California and New York bore a disproportionate share of the loss, even accounting for their large populations. Those states lost a combined $56 billion in state tax revenue, the bulk of the $66 billion national loss.

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, confronting a budget deficit that has ballooned to $73 billion, called on lawmakers to reopen the state budget for changes, including a proposed $1.5 billion increase in taxes on health insurers to maintain an expansion of state health insurance for low-income people regardless of immigration status.

Republican Assemblymember Bill Essayli called the expansion, which would include $4 billion in state funds, “money we don’t have” for “illegal immigrants” in a March 14 budget committee meeting ahead of an Assembly vote. Democratic Assemblymember Akilah Weber, who is also a San Diego physician, said the expansion would mean “we can keep on doing our work and helping patients without having to cut services.”

The higher tax would need to be approved by March 21 to get federal approval. The governor and lawmakers are negotiating other budget changes, which could include more taxes or billions of dollars in cuts to school construction, homeless housing, broadband or transit funding.

Conservative agendas also are under scrutiny as tax revenues dipped in 32 states last year and failed to keep up with inflation in 40 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Stateline analysis.

Tennessee Republicans favor Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s $140 million proposal for universal school vouchers. But a budget deficit has some GOP members questioning increased public school funding meant to sweeten the deal and dampen opposition from Democrats and others who fear the program will harm public schools.

Republican state Rep. Charlie Baum noted that the current House version of Lee’s voucher plan includes an extra $320 million for public school funding in rural areas, staff health insurance subsidies and construction costs — spending the state can’t afford given its $400 million budget deficit, he said.

Some states are adding taxes to find more money as surpluses dwindle: In New Jersey, where state tax revenue dropped 4% last year but remains 32% higher than 2019, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy asked lawmakers to approve a tax on large businesses to support the state transit system by raising about $1 billion this year. The extra funds may help preserve a program to lower property taxes for older people.

In Arizona, a projected $1.7 billion budget deficit looms after a flat income tax enacted by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in 2021 took effect last year. Current Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs proposed clawing back money from road projects and school vouchers approved under rosier forecasts. The Stateline analysis shows Arizona state tax revenue was down 8%, or about $1.9 billion, last year compared with 2022, but up 26% from 2019.

Tax cuts may be “coming home to roost” for states such as Arizona that cut deeply during the pandemic, slowing states’ ability to improve things such as schools and housing, said Wesley Tharpe, senior adviser for state tax policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“More than half of states used the cover of temporary surpluses coming out of the COVID-19 recovery to enact permanent reductions in their state income tax,” Tharpe said. “In several states the reductions are really, genuinely historic like Arizona, North Carolina, West Virginia. It’s not only that states might have to cut services, when they cut taxes this deeply — it’s also that they’re forgoing revenues that could be used for unmet needs.”

But conservatives insist cutting taxes will help states in the long run by putting more money back in the hands of consumers and attracting more high-income workers.

“Most states which cut taxes found ways to deliver responsible, sustainable tax relief,” said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the pro-business The Tax Foundation. “Tax competition matters more than ever, and if you’re balancing a budget, you’d much rather be dealing with the tax-cutting Mountain West than some of the tax-hiking states on the coasts right now.”

Utah and Iowa also had double-digit state tax revenue decreases.

Falling oil prices in 2023 hurt some states. Alaska had the largest percentage drop in state tax revenue last year: 50%, or $2.1 billion, though the state expects a boost this year from higher oil prices, and state tax revenues are still 32% higher than in 2019.

Maryland, which — like California — is unusually dependent on income tax revenue from high earners, is facing political battles over whether to cut spending or raise taxes in light of continuing tax revenue disappointments that created a $500 million deficit in the proposed budget.

States got used to having their revenue and giving it back, too, as most states were able to cut taxes and increase spending at the same time because of stimulus funding, a booming economy and consumer spending that boosted tax collections. Now decisions are getting harder as consumers tighten their wallets, tax cuts take effect, stimulus spending is over, and some sources of high-income jobs such as energy and tech have fallen back to earth.

One worrisome new trend in late 2023 continuing to this year: lower sales tax revenue as consumers spend less on retail items, said Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“This is alarming,” Dadayan said. “The two holiday months, November and December, saw declines in sales tax, indicating that consumers are tightening their wallets.”

Texas reported a 2% drop in March sales tax revenue distributed to local governments based on January sales, and Arizona retail sales tax revenue grew by only 1% in January, the lowest growth in a decade. Maryland is considering expanding its sales tax to more services in light of a retail slump.

The puzzling sales tax dip is especially hard on small towns that depend on it to pay for basic services such as police and firefighters. Sales tax revenues make up more than 43% of the budget for Greenwood, Arkansas, a city of about 9,600 near the Oklahoma border. Sales taxes are about flat so far this year instead of growing 4.5% as forecast, said Finance Director Thomas Marsh.

Greenwood’s sales tax revenue soared 50% during the pandemic as big-box stores and restaurants in the nearby city of Fort Smith closed and residents did their shopping and eating out closer to home or online — an Arkansas state law required local sales tax for online purchases starting in 2019. City officials expected growth to slow, but they were caught off guard when growth stopped in January and February, which could force a hiring freeze and postpone building projects if the situation continues, Marsh said.

David Thurman, director of Tennessee’s Budget Analyst Agency and president-elect of the National Association of State Budget Officers, said Tennessee and other states need to take a step back on ambitious programs for a “reset year” while taxes drift back to pre-pandemic growth levels.

“We’ve structured the [fiscal] 2025 budget to allow taking care of the normal cost of government but do very little else,” Thurman said. “I think we should all move forward more cautiously until we get a better read on what the new normal will be like.”

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Robbie Sequeira | Stateline.org (TNS)

In her first few months as a Minnesota state legislator in 2021, state Rep. Kaela Berg often wondered: “What the hell am I doing here?”

A single mother and flight attendant without a college degree or prior political experience, Berg now had a seat at the legislative table, shaping policy decisions in her home state.

As she ran against a former two-term Republican representative — a commercial real estate agent — she also was struggling for housing and living in a friend’s basement.

“I’m living in [her] basement, running for office, and the pandemic hits,” said Berg. “I went from three jobs to one. … I found that while I can pay my bills, I can’t qualify for a new apartment because you have to show two or three times the rent and I can’t do that.”

While it was gratifying to receive support from working families in her district, her transition to state policymaker felt overwhelming.

“I had the worst case of impostor syndrome,” Berg, a member of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said in an interview. “I’m thinking, ‘Who do I think I am? I’m a working flight attendant. I don’t have a college degree. Why did I let somebody talk me into this?’”

Minnesota state Rep. Kaela Berg. Berg, a single mother and flight attendant without a college degree, is one of the few state lawmakers across the nation who qualify as “working class,” according to recent research. (Minnesota House of Representatives/TNS)

Berg is a rarity in politics: a working-class state legislator.

Just 116 of the nearly 7,400 state legislators in the United States come from working-class backgrounds, according to a biennial study conducted by Nicholas Carnes and Eric Hansen, political scientists at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago, respectively.

The researchers define legislators as “working class” if they currently or last worked in manual labor, service industry, clerical or labor union jobs. They found that 1.6% of state lawmakers meet that definition, compared with 50% of U.S. workers. Only about 2% of Democrats and 1% of Republicans qualified as working class.

Ten states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — have no working-class state lawmakers.

The dearth of working-class legislators raises concerns that economic challenges such as wage stagnation and the rising cost of living will get short shrift in state capitols.

Working-class politicians are more likely to have personally experienced economic hardship, so they are more interested in policies to mitigate it, Carnes said. And they often propose solutions that differ from those put forward by colleagues who aren’t working class, even if it means diverging from party doctrine.

“State legislatures make consequential decisions, and if you have an entire economic class of people that are not in the room when policy decisions are being made, that’s going to tilt the kind of problems politicians pay attention to,” said Carnes. “It also dictates the kinds of solutions they consider against the interests of whoever’s out of the room.”

Working-class representation in state legislatures has always been low, he noted, but the most recent count is even lower than it was two years ago, when the percentage was about 1.8%.

The state legislature with the highest percentage of working-class lawmakers is Alaska, with 5% — that’s three of 60 lawmakers. Maine has the highest total number of working-class legislators, eight of 151 legislators, with a transportation worker and a bartender among the ranks.

Nate Roberts is a longtime electrician who won a seat in the Idaho legislature. The Democrat is among the small number of working-class lawmakers around the country. (Idaho Legislature/TNS)

Working-class issues

After a 32-year career as an electrician, Democratic state Rep. Nate Roberts was part of a new wave of first-time Idaho lawmakers entering office in 2023.

Roberts knew that it wasn’t just his relative political inexperience that separated him from the rest of his colleagues.

He also was one of the only state lawmakers who had worked a union job. And during his first few weeks in office, he was shocked by how rarely issues such as wage theft, low pay and housing affordability had been talked about in committee meetings.

“That’s when I realized that the only person that’s going to advocate for working-class people is a working-class person,” he told Stateline. “When I moved from state to state working different jobs, I realized how differently states were influenced when it came to policies for working people.”

Roberts learned the power of unions as a journeyman — and fighting to increase worker protections has become his life, he said.

Idaho is one of 26 so-called right-to-work states, where no person can be forced, as a condition of employment, to join a union. Such laws limit unions’ bargaining power.

Roberts would like Idaho to follow the lead of Michigan, which in 2023 became the first state in decades to repeal a right-to-work law. That is unlikely in Idaho, given the state’s conservative political orientation. But Roberts also is pushing to update Idaho’s child labor laws, which were enacted in 1907 and have been superseded by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Roberts said his experience as a laborer in his younger years has emboldened him to speak out against legislation such as a Senate bill that would repeal limits on the number of hours and how late in the day a child under the age of 16 can work.

“I’m still shocked when I get pushback for going against these bills, particularly ones that I feel regress our child labor laws,” said Roberts. “I’ve experienced it. We need to not only protect our kids, but we also need to protect our workers.”

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The political climate is far different in Minnesota, where the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has controlled the governor’s office, the state House and the state Senate since January 2023. Last year, the state enacted a major package of labor-friendly laws.

Minnesota also passed a slew of tenant-landlord laws, with protections favoring the state’s renters.

Berg said the backgrounds of working-class legislators like herself can inform statehouse conversations, even if lawmakers with different backgrounds support pro-labor policies.

“I don’t think there’s enough value in having people with lived experience in the legislature,” Berg said. “When you take someone who … still lives paycheck to paycheck, they are bringing that personal experience to fight for a bill that will impact working families.”

For Wisconsin state Rep. Jenna Jacobson, joining the legislature in 2023 was a lot like “drinking from a fire hose,” she recalled.

One of her policy priorities — expanding aid for free school meals— was influenced by her experience as a schoolkid.

“I was one of the kids on free and reduced lunches growing up. I had the special colored cards because of that,” said Jacobson, a Democrat. “I know so many of our kids who are in a similar spot.”

Barriers abound

For working-class Americans, financial and societal barriers are a major disincentive to pursuing state offices, said Amanda Litman, co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, a progressive organization that recruits candidates for down-ballot races.

A 2021 national survey by Tufts University found that local candidates who experienced poverty in their youth felt especially constrained.

“Structurally, it’s really hard for people who aren’t already rich, or already independently wealthy, have rich partners or rich families to enter politics,” Litman said. “And the gatekeepers at the state level have typically recruited candidates who were safe bets, which is a candidate who can independently raise money.”

The eligibility criteria for statewide office vary greatly by state. Only five states — Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine and Minnesota — allow public financing options for candidates vying for state legislative seats.

Becoming comfortable wielding political power as a working-class person is a transition that can take a while, Indiana Republican state Rep. Peggy Mayfield told Stateline.

Mayfield, who worked as a secretary at the insurance company she and her husband owned together, is now a 12-year veteran in the legislature who knows how to navigate state politics and get bills passed.

But running for office, much less holding state office, is time-consuming and requires sacrifices, she said.

“If I had an employee who came to me and said, ‘I wanna run for office,’ I’m faced with saying, ‘I’m gonna let you off four months a year,’ or make a difficult choice,” said Mayfield, describing how hard it is for many workers who don’t have that privilege. “Running for office itself becomes a full-time job … and for some in the working class it may not make sense to go into politics, if they can pursue more profitable opportunities in the private sector.”

Some states have worked to raise legislative pay, which could entice more working-class people to take a shot at elective office.

Earlier this year, Kansas raised salaries for rank-and-file lawmakers from about $29,000 to $57,000 after some said the lower pay wasn’t enough to live on. Arizona, Kentucky, New Jersey and Vermont are among the states with measures this session that could increase lawmakers’ pay.

New York passed legislation in 2022 that made its lawmakers the highest paid in the country. Pennsylvania has cost-of-living adjustments.

Roberts, the electrician-turned-lawmaker in Idaho, said: “We don’t do this for the pay, and some of us certainly aren’t getting rich off this job. Some of us are making ends meet.

“But we have residents who are also making ends meet, and they rely on us to speak on the issues affecting them, and that’s what keeps you going,” Roberts added.

Lawmakers in Idaho make $19,927, after a pay raise passed in 2022.

Another barrier for would-be working-class lawmakers, Carnes said, is running a viable campaign against more established political candidates. The working class needs infrastructure and coalition-building to compete politically, he said, similar to women candidates who get support from EMILY’s List (a pro-abortion rights group).

“The solution is pretty straightforward,” said Carnes. “If you commit to working-class people and partner with labor unions and political parties on recruiting and training working-class people to run for office — it’s possible you will see more working-class state legislators.”

In Minnesota, Rep. Berg soon realized that her best legislative asset was her ability to vouch for the working experiences of everyday Minnesotans.

A flight attendant for Endeavor Air, Berg has signed on to a bill that, among other provisions, would delete the exemption for air flight crews in the state’s law on employee sick time. Her experience allowed her to confidently explain to legislative peers how the exemption had hurt flight crews.

“Government works best when all types of personal experience are at the legislative table,” Berg said. “I knew that I was uniquely able to speak on issues that my other colleagues never experienced.”

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.