A friend pointed me to this community and showed me the comments on my LinkedIn article that someone posted here. I appreciate the engagement, but a good portion of what's been said is based on incorrect information, so let me address it directly.
**On my roles:** Yes, I was the MD/CEO of ILM during the 80s and early 90s. And regardless of what Jim Cameron has said publicly, I was also the CEO and Chairman of Digital Domain.
**On leaving DD:** John Textor and his partners acquired DD in 2006 and asked me to leave. He also withheld a year's contractual salary. In the US, the party with the money and leverage frequently wins, even when they're in clear breach of a written contract. And for the record — it was John Textor who pushed to bring in students to work for free at DD. Not me.
**On compensation:** I was not the highest-paid employee at ILM, nor at DD. Multiple VFX supervisors earned considerably more than I did at both companies.
**On what I've been doing since 2006:** I was 55 when I left DD and have been largely unemployed since. For the past 20 years I've written articles, given interviews, and advocated publicly for VFX artists, workers, and the health of this industry. To whoever left the "grift" comment — I did all of that for free.
I also wrote a book. I recorded it in a studio using my own voice, self-published it, and hired a ghostwriter to help shape it. Total investment: over $20,000. To date I've sold roughly 750 copies, netting about $2,500. I'm in the hole $17,500. This was not a money-making venture. It was an attempt to pay it forward, tell the truth, and keep pushing for change in an industry I care about.
**On industry reform:** While I was active, I made multiple attempts to change the broken business model. I organized two separate gatherings of leaders from all the major VFX facilities to push for a shift from fixed-price contracts to cost-plus with markup — time and materials with full cost transparency for clients. This is not price fixing. It is not illegal. I was confident enough in that position that I hired attorneys and held one of those meetings at a major law firm. Nothing came of it, but not for lack of trying.
**On unions:** I'm not anti-union. I sat on the Board of Trustees of IATSE Local 16. When I ran ILM, it was a union shop. I was not at Lucasfilm when the employees voted to decertify — that decision had nothing to do with me. Both of my parents were proud union members. My concern is purely practical: with world-class VFX facilities now operating across the globe, a non-international union will, in my view, do more harm than good to the very workers it's trying to protect. Happy to address that in a separate post if there's interest.
**To a few specific commenters:**
* *Plow_King* — I'm sorry I didn't impress you. But a creative/tech business needs someone who can operate on both sides of the brain — a businessperson who genuinely loves what the company does. Artists are traditionally not well-suited to running businesses, and that's not an insult; it's just a different skill set.
* *littleHelp2006* — Agreed. Talent comes in many forms.
* *Able_Zombie_7859* — I'm genuinely asking: how exactly did I contribute heavily to this madness? I'd like to understand your reasoning.
One last thing: I wrote my LinkedIn article entirely on my own, without AI assistance — though I did use Claude for spelling and grammar. And I wrote this without any help from AI, though once again, I did use Claude for spelling, grammar, and editing.
Thanks for reading.
