Success Quote by Robert Mayer

There’s a quietly radical idea hiding in Mayer’s plainspoken praise of “people who... work in the world of film”: expertise isn’t the same thing as fluency in how an industry actually moves. Coming from a businessman, the line reads less like an aesthetic manifesto than a corrective to institutional tunnel vision. He’s pointing at the gap between knowing cinema and knowing how cinema gets made, financed, sold, distributed, and compromised into existence.

The specific intent is pragmatic. Mayer is defending exposure to practitioners not as a nice enrichment add-on, but as necessary training for students who will collide with the marketplace the moment they leave the classroom. Film education, he implies, can become a closed loop: scholars talk to students who become scholars, all inside an ecosystem that rewards interpretation over execution. His “very good thing” is a polite way of insisting that real-world contact de-romanticizes the medium in the healthiest way possible.

The subtext also carries a subtle rebuke of credentialism. “Film students or film scholars” are framed as a type with blind spots: people who may know the canon yet misunderstand the constraints that shape what audiences ever get to see. Practitioners bring the unglamorous variables - budgets, unions, schedules, audience testing, gatekeepers - the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into theory but governs outcomes.

Contextually, this feels like an early argument for what we now call industry-facing education. It anticipates today’s anxiety about creative programs that graduate taste and ambition, but not navigational skill. Mayer’s line lands because it refuses the false choice between art and commerce; it insists that if you care about film as culture, you have to study film as work.