The below clip actually comes from a very charming Q&A Zach Cregger gave to a class of high school students. Here is his great follow-up answer to what to do if Elfing isn’t working for you
A 24-year-old Polish tennis player arrived in Paris last week ranked 114th in the world, with no sponsors, no guaranteed income, and no certainty she could even pay for her hotel room.
She had to win three qualifying matches just to enter the French Open main draw. Prize money is only paid at the end of the tournament, so a Polish sports drink brand quietly stepped in and covered her hotel bill.
Her name is Maja Chwalinska. And today, she plays in the French Open final.
Before this tournament, she had won exactly one Grand Slam main draw match in her entire career. She had battled depression so severe that in 2021 she couldn't get out of bed. She underwent knee surgery in 2022. She spent years grinding through small tournaments across Europe just to stay afloat.
Then she arrived in Paris, won three qualifiers, and kept winning. Zheng Qinwen. Elise Mertens. Maria Sakkari. Diana Shnaider. Nine straight matches. One set dropped.
She is now the first qualifier in French Open history to reach the final. The last time a qualifier reached a Grand Slam final, it was Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open. Raducanu won.
By simply making the final, Chwalinska has earned more prize money than her entire career combined. The runner-up cheque alone is $1.6 million. If she wins today, she takes home $3.25 million.
One week ago she couldn't pay for her hotel room.
"Art director making $300 a day is a livable wage."
One thing people don't understand about the film business is it's feast or famine. You may not work for weeks or months so that money has to be saved and amortized.
Then the Obsession crew lives in LA, so they're paying the highest rents, highest gas, highest utilities, highest insurance (to be fair they keep voting for it, but that's another story).
A 14 hour day doesn't account for 1 hour of traffic each way. Indies can routinely go 12-18 hours.
Art department is an especially brutal crew. They are the first to get on set, the last to leave. No set, no shoot.
Then crew heads don't really get paid for their time. Reading the script? Free. Thinking about it? Free. Talking with the director? Free. Creative discussion, creative obsessing, detail planning on weekends. Free free free. The time on the clock is not the time on the job.
$300 a day on an 18 hour day, before gas or any other expenses, is $16 an hour. The off the clock work is double that. So $8 an hour. Now save that to survive the next actor/writer strike.
Is it a livable wage? Sure. In Iowa if you're a mid level stripper. Not a film crew in LA.
Hi all,
I'm working on a story for about the latest report regarding the recent decline in work opportunities and income for many off-camera professionals in the entertainment industry, especially in #Bollywood.
None of this is satire.
→ A company spent $500,000,000 on Claude in one month because nobody set usage limits
→ Uber ran leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used, not what they shipped
→ Uber burned their entire 2026 budget by April. Their COO said he can’t connect any of it to consumer features
→ A CTO told Axios employees were using enterprise AI to check the weather
→ Microsoft canceled most Claude Code licenses because the token bill spiraled
→ Companies are now laying people off to pay the AI bill. Not because AI replaced the work. Because the bill replaced the headcount.
I don’t get it. Why do Indian film journalists got to Cannes and interview Indian film makers? Aur koi nahi milta kya? The only explanation can be that no one else gives them time? Is that it? Baffles me every year.
park chan-wook on the time kleber mendonça filho interviewed him for oldboy 😭
"but honestly, putting so much effort into analysing other people's movies never really felt like it helped much when i was making my own films...some time ago, i met a director in the us, a brazilian director who got a lot of international attention for his film <the secret agent>. he gained a lot of recognition and he's also a former critic. so he said to me, 'you probably don't remember, but during <oldboy> at cannes, i interviewed you.' so i asked him did that experience really help him as a director? he said, "no, not really". 😭😭😭
BJP Corporator in BMC @MNarwekar has raised a loot in the BMC
A Rs. 62 crore tender for the installation of LED lights beneath city skywalks was awarded to a firm blacklisted by the Thane Municipal Corporation. The very same lights available for Rs. 700 on the Government e-Marketplace were procured by the BMC at Rs. 9,600 per unit.
He has asked, “How does a blacklisted firm get awarded such a high ticket contract? Who approved this? And why were Mumbai’s taxpayers made to pay nearly 14 times the market price?”
A report on the same has to be now presented within 15 days.