Money Story: Grant Conversano: Invisible backstories, peer influence, and betting on yourself.

Grant Conversano (they/them) is a filmmaker. They graduated the UNC School of the Arts in film, and started Apple House Pictures with their brother, Adam Conversano. They currently live in New York City.

Hannah Cole: Who are you, what are your pronouns, and what do you do?

Grant Conversano: I’m Grant Conversano, I use they/he pronouns. My brother and I are filmmakers, from Concord NC, and I went to UNC School of the Arts in filmmaking. I’m living in Brooklyn with my brother, and we run a small production company. We produce commercials, documentaries, music videos and write our own creative projects and features. We recently wrapped commercial content for Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign.

HC: What brought you to a place where you wanted to learn how to get your money stuff together?

GC: Before the pandemic, I had only anecdotal knowledge how to be a freelancer after art school. I only knew the basics from friends just out of school. Really, if I’m doing what they are doing, that’s fine, living paycheck to paycheck, scrambling, getting 1099s together at the end of the year.

I remember thinking “Oh I got a big tax refund,” like that’s a positive. But I remember that you said this, “if you don’t trust yourself with money all year long, then getting a refund is a way to save. But that is something to look at.”

During the pandemic, I was unemployed, and I needed to get income. Freelancers were newly eligible for unemployment. Stimulus checks were coming, and I knew I needed to get in the system as fast a s possible to keep things going. It was unclear how to do this. The tax code was changing, there was new money from the government, all on top of just entering my mid-20s. I went to Google, we found your website and we went from there.

My desire to get into your program was realizing how much the world was changing,I’m in my mid 20s, and I’m starting to look at the scope of life.

HC: Can you tell us about where you are coming from in your money story?

GC: We had a turbulent upbringing. Our father was a lifelong alcoholic, and had trouble holding down a job despite having a master’s degree. He has a lot of social mobility on one hand, but mixed with addiction, that really rocked our family for many years. The last job I remember him having, I was nearing the end of high school. He didn’t have a job the entire time I was in college. My mom was the single income of our family while there were a lot of student loans being taken out in my name. My brother followed behind. I didn’t have a sense of the implications of taking out loans to go to art school. I was young--17. In 2013, no one discussed what that meant. No one discussed that we might be signing up for a lifetime of debt.

My parents wanted the best for us. But getting out of school, the reality of student loans, the pressure of moving to a city like New York or LA, the class barriers became apparent very clearly. In school they were masked to a degree. I thought I was doing all the right things--taking internships at very prestigious places, being an assistant to people I have learned a lot from in the industry. It was absolutely unsustainable--I was incurring credit card debt on top of that. It caught up with me quickly because I wasn’t making enough to live on--close to nothing for people in the industry, even though it seems like that was what I was expected to do. All the signals said, “keep going down this road,” but at a certain point, the numbers weren’t working.

I read a book by the Duplass brothers. It was honest and practical in terms of life story, money, housing, what you really need to be thinking about. They are talking about film, but really life in any creative pursuit. How long it took--they couldn’t always be in the most expensive place--that isn’t what made their careers. Sometimes they were on the outskirts.

I moved back to North Carolina, my brother and I moved in together, a year before the pandemic. We talked about building something together - we were getting signals that we were making a mistake, doing the wrong thing to stay in North Carolina. But then the pandemic came along, and it felt like it really was the right decision. We would rather bet on ourselves than bet on the approval of some institution. 

People really realized during the pandemic that they had to retreat and fend for themselves. It became clear who had bigger safety nets than others. We were still very fortunate to a relative degree. But the illusion that we are all in this together cracked.

We started building from there. Working from home, editing for other people, building up a portfolio, getting clients for ourselves. My brother dropped out of college and we started working. We started our own production company.

A lot of people in their 20s get a bunch of roommates and make that work. I didn’t want to do that anymore. There aren’t many boundaries between our work and life - we live together and work all the time.  

HC: What have you learned from this experience?

GC: Reading about business in general, treating this work as work, and knowing it is a business, and that we need contracts. Knowing we need a system, and truthfully letting go of naive ideas we indulged in art school of the purity of film. It’s an expensive art form at its best, and most of the time you’re working with a lot of people. You need to have boundaries set in place to navigate that. Taking the business side of every job seriously. That was a choice at a certain point.

HC: Have you had any revelations?

GC: For the majority of us, our sense of self and of money is so wrapped up. It took a lot of work--therapy, and taking your course. They echoed each other. You have to take responsibility for your own life, actions, choices. At what age do I stop blaming my parents and take responsibility for myself? Not using the idea of being an artist as a defense in the tax code. As though knowing about taxes would make me less of an artist.

I think a part of it is our culture. The mega-successful artists - the image that is put out there is that they don’t talk about the other things. It penetrates some illusion that people arrived at all this success on their own, and without business savvy or skills. But if you peek behind any story of how someone made it somewhere, there was a lot of help involved. Do people publicly acknowledge that? Or do they let people believe they magically arrived there?

I think even for instance, I did get into investing before all this. I naively downloaded Robinhood. I wasn’t putting serious money into it, but was interested in understanding investments. The Gamestop moment was really interesting. Part of me was like, whoa, what if I put more money in? I know that is about as close to gambling as you're  going to get. Building for sustainability is an important transition I’m making. Your course on long term investment strategies was helpful in thinking in decades, not just in moments. 

It’s weird because, ultimately, you just gotta put your faith somewhere. There’s a lot--it’s not clear what’s going to happen next. 

Everyone’s story is different even if you think your peers and you are in the same world, the same school, the same party. Everyone is different. Everyone is coming from a different place. Most of my life, most people didn’t know about the alcohol or dysfunction in our life. That just looked like “I’m not eating lunch today.” Trying to fake it because of the insecurity. Owning that. Owning, “well, this is the insecurity, and we’re just starting here.” I’m actually taking steps from where I come from, and that can be true for anybody. Owning where you’re at without shame. This is where I’m starting from.

I had to get over whatever shame I had about money to even call you. That was a big step--asking for help. And that is usually when things start to look better. It’s like, “Hey, I have Google, I’m not alone, I can see what happens.”

Having the gumption to push past certain fear. Some people can walk back to their parents’ house, and we couldn't. So we were just like, “I guess I’m just gonna plow ahead.”