A story about art and the artist

At the end of the documentary Tales from the Script, screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, who won an Oscar for Ghost, tells the story of being crucified by critics for My Life, which he also directed. The response was unmerciful and threw him into a state of deep depression. Could the film really be this bad?

Some time later he was at a party. A woman cornered him to tell him a story -- and thank him for My Life. Her husband had died of cancer, and their son was never able to deal with it. Now she had cancer. She and her son saw My Life together, which allowed them to talk about cancer afterwards, and about the boy losing his father, and now his mother sick -- the film brought mother and son together as nothing else could.

Rubin realized that he had written the film not for the critics but for this woman. She was his audience. And it was enough.

This is one of the more important and true stories about the meaning of making art that I know.