Wealth & Money Quote by Adam Duritz

Duritz isn’t romanticizing “collaboration” here; he’s diagnosing why movies feel like a committee product while music can still feel like a diary entry with a beat. The blunt economic framing does the work: when the money gets bigger, the circle gets wider. Film’s scale doesn’t just buy better cameras and bigger sets, it buys layers of authority - producers protecting investments, executives chasing demographics, brand partners guarding optics, test screenings sanding off anything too sharp. “More people involved in the creative process” lands as a neutral description on paper, but the subtext is friction: more hands means more notes, more compromise, more risk-management dressed up as storytelling.

Coming from a working musician, the remark also carries a quiet defense of music’s comparative autonomy. Albums can be expensive, but a song still plausibly begins and ends with a few people in a room. That intimacy is an artistic advantage, even if it’s born from a harsher marketplace. Duritz is essentially pointing out an inversion: movies have cultural dominance partly because capital flows toward them, yet that same capital makes personal authorship harder to sustain.

The context is late-20th/early-21st century entertainment economics, where labels tightened, touring became the lifeline, and film budgets ballooned into franchise territory. His “exponentially” may be casual, but the feeling is accurate: once you enter movie-money, you enter movie-politics. The line reads like an artist’s way of saying: if you want a singular vision, look where the margins are smaller and the gatekeepers fewer.