'k. So filmmakers:

The thing you have to keep in mind is that "filmmakers" at the level you interact with them are begging everything they can for free from everyone they meet. And if they get it for free, they treat it like it's worthless. And if they're paying at all, they treat it like it's all the money in the world and lean on you as if they gave you their firstborn. They probably weren't assholes when they started, but they're assholes now, that's for sure.

And as a composer, you have to keep in mind that the minute they opened up Premiere (because it's always Premiere now, because God is dead), they slapped some bullshit soundtrack they'll never be able to afford and they've been swapping out John Williams for Phillip Glass for James Horner for Mark Isham for fuckin' Gary Jules and their "vision" of the project is now "fuckin' Gary Jules but just different enough that I won't get sued."

They probably even told you that they liked your music. They probably told you they were interested in your "vision." They probably told you they were excited "to hear what you come up with." They were lying. They might have been lying to themselves as well as you - and they're probably so far up their own colons that they don't even understand where things went so wrong - after all, weren't we all on the same page (before you had any creative input)? But as it is now, the scenes only work when you use the soundtrack to The Piano or Perfume or Requiem for a Dream or whatever makes their black little auteur hearts swell and their tiny little auteur pricks grow stiff. And you know what? You're not Clint Mansell. You're not Tom Tykwer. And that means you will always and forever be wrong about anything and everything you do because they have a vision and you, my friend, are not living up to it. And that's your fault because they're an auteur.

You know what your real problem is? You were willing to burn your every creative minute in the service of someone else but you weren't willing to do it for yourself. Now that you've burned all that time for someone else you require external validation to justify the expenditure whereas if you'd cooked off that time for yourself you could play it back and go "hot damn."

Never give someone something for free and expect them to act like it's worth something. I once spent two solid fucking weekends polishing a USC audition tape for a friend of a friend. They legit yelled at me when I said I needed to make dinner for my kid because this shit is important. They got their fucking files, they got them on time, and they emailed me a gift certificate for $15 to Cheesecake Factory. And then they called to make sure I got it. Because they wanted to show me how grateful they were.

I made that chick sound like Sarah McLachlan. Because I'm good at what I do. And she didn't get into USC because you know what? She's not. But I wasn't doing it for them, I was doing it for my friend, so the Cheesecake Factory gift certificate was just the icing on a shitcake I was able to throw at him so that he knew down to his very bones that he rolls with assholes (and not to bring them my way ever again).

Make stuff for YOURSELF. Make it the way YOU want it. Don't depend on anyone to validate your efforts because they won't. You have to stand behind it and say "this is worth something" or else it's just someone else's means to an end and you will never, not in a million years, not ever, be that soundtrack they fell in love with their sophomore year when they still thought it was cool to bumper their obsessive swimmy out-of-focus too-long takes between the Academy leader and "fin."

Sometimes they just want a giant spider.

I love you. A lot, man. I’ve never met you in person but you have had a pretty tremendous impact on my life. Your music is gorgeous. This song is wonderful. It makes me want to write and direct a film just to show that idiot what they missed out on.

Really, it’s simply beautiful. Objectively so. When the banjo comes in. What the fuck!!! What are those sounds? And that resolution at the end??!! You are a mad genius. This song is pretty fucking theatrical. It is begging for cinema!!!

You inspire me to make more art. Thanks for pushing me.

Also, get rid of the Nintendo.

You have friends.

I love seeing posts on other social sites of your family. They’re beautiful. Some day your kids will hear all of this beautiful music, they’ll know their daddy made it. They’ll know that art this beautiful can be made... by them!

You’re a badass! Truly!

This is me giving you a hug, saying you do have friends they're just not there with you, telling you that there are so.many.stories about shitty producers and that you can't let them get to you.

There will be more but I have to finish making dinner and pick up the kid.

Very good atmosphere in these tracks. I'm really enjoying them. Congratulations.

Life can be tough, and it has many traps, but we have always to give it a chance. I failed as a professional musician, yet I still play music. I failed as an artist, yet I can't stop creating. I went down the abyss after my heart was broken horribly, and I'm still here, moving forward smiling at life. And many other sad things happened in my life, but I always fought back and raised myself better than before.

I think that those moments where everything seems lost, are moments of personal growth. I think it makes us stronger. Much stronger than we ever thought. One day someone told me "don't be so hard on yourself". The same I say to you. Time will heal everything. Just take it easy.

Everyone just said it, but I say it as well: You do have friends. They're there. You just don't see them because you're paying attention to your busy life. It's part of being an adult.

And my last advice: Don't stop composing that beautiful music. "Life is full of surprises!"

I've had friends who did a fair amount of commercial music to make ends meet. They would submit dozens to a hundred submissions for each thing that got accepted.

The people who asked you to do this are doing it wrong. They just wanted music and thought they would find what they wanted easy and cheap without sitting down, thinking hard about what they wanted and finding the right person to match their particular taste.

The guy who is right for one project is often not the right guy for another. They might not have done this often or thought very hard about fitting the right music to their vision but I bet they are learning a lot about the process at your expense.

There was one guy I knew particularly well. I knew him when he scored his first documentary and I knew him years later when he had done many. He was sweating his balls off full time when he did the first one. Later in life, scoring a documentary was something he fit into a busy full time studio schedule.

The thing that probably made him the most money over time was getting a song from one of his first bands on MTV road rules. He was getting checks ten years after it aired. He never even submitted the song to anyone, they just asked him to use a song from his band that almost no one had ever heard of that he made when he was 18.

Other times he would record a dozen submissions for a Rice A Roni commercial that he really thought were going to be the thing and and stare into the void of indifference. A week after that Northrop Grumman would accept a few tracks to go over military equipment sales videos.

Fitting music to video isn't as easy as asking someone to do it. I hope you learned a lot by giving it a try, learning is where the real value is in this kind of thing if you haven't done it before. You weren't exactly set up to succeed and you shouldn't take it hard in anyway what so ever.