Hey guys!
I am currently writing my first full length feature film and it is about a struggling artist.
Please recommend me as much as real life stories / books and movies about starving actors,filmmakers,musicians etc. etc as you can.
Thank you.
Well, I think you can say that for the beginnings of a lot of musicians. Off the top of my head, a lot of the early folk artists ran into financial difficulties in the Greenwich Village scene. I know Bob Dylan had quite a bit of struggle before actually getting signed and recorded. (And his idols - people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie)
The same goes for a lot of artists of the 1960's. People like Neil Young, Lou Reed, etc, struggled getting their first things made. (Especially Lou - no one wanted to record the Velvet Underground's first album, which is funny, because now it's considered the quintessential early rock record.)
Bruce Springsteen also had quite the financial struggle in the very early days of the E-Street Band in New Jersey, he didn't enjoy any long term success until after 1975's Born to Run - And his music continued to echo the starving American for another four decades.)
And beyond the iconic artists of the 1960's and 1970's getting their starts, more modern bands struggled to. I know Nirvana went through a struggle for their first couple years - one of their biggest issues was finding Cobain left handed guitars, since they could barely afford the instruments they had, and it was even more difficult when they started smashing them to pieces.)
Any truly iconic artist likely struggled at one point - I was watching an interview with Steven Colbert where he spoke very candidly about fearing for his family in his early days when he couldn't make any money in Chicago and New York. A lot of those early comedians had those issues. (A good show to check out on that is Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee - he gets a lot of those big shots to talk about their early years and the difficulties they had)
The same goes for filmmakers too - read Robert Rodriguez's book, it's an excellent example of a starving artist.
