Your barrier to being a "Filmmaker" is working in the most restricted and hardest to access segment of the industry for a very small number of companies (Pretty much just Disney, Comcast, Netflix, Discovery, Paramount or their subsidiaries).

By your logic and gatekeeping rules the following people wouldn't have been considered filmmakers: 1. Kevin Smith (Clerks era) 2. Akira Kurosawa 3. Sergei Eisenstein 4. Ingmar Bergman 5. Pier Palo Pasolini 6. Agnès Varda 7. François Truffaut 8. John Waters (Pink Flamingo Era) 9. Jean Cocteau 10. Arthur Bressan Jr. 11. Cheryl Dunye (A black lesbian who made a film about how white filmmakers use gatekeeping to erase the history of women, black people, and queer people from cinema 🙄) 12. James Gunn (Tromeo & Juliet Era) 13. Russ Meyer (Before the Fox era) 14. Soulemanè Sissè 15. Ali Hatami 16. Wes Craven (early years)

And thousands of other brilliant Women and Queer, African, Asian, South American, Italian, Jewish, Spanish, & Russian filmmakers. The bar of "works on union jobs" is pretty much just people who got into the ol' boys club. Unsurprisingly it leaves out the work of most of the filmmakers in the world.

I get that you're proud of working in the central industry - and you should be proud of the work you do - but that doesn't need to come from denigrating the work of those who lack the access to that world due to geographic, political, economic, or social reasons. Many of the greatest films of all time have been made outside of the system, you don't need a union card to make a great or influential film.

I think that's definitely a sort of selection bias on your part. Since you work in the Hollywood/Network system you view the whole industry and success in that industry through that lens.

As I noted with my examples a ton of filmmakers do succeed, and sometimes rarely even make something that gets them on the radar of the Studio/Network industry (Kevin Smith, Sam Raimi, &c).

I don't think anyone would say "Clerks" wasn't a film, or that Kevin Smith was any less of a Cinematographer on that production just because he (and everyone else on set) also did most of the other below the line jobs too. The boom operator was credited as "whoever grabbed the boom." Still the aesthetic and style of Clerks had a huge influence on 90s and 2000s cinema that we still see today. Moreso than pretty much all of his later Studio productions.

At the same time the conditions of work and the effort in making Yeelen by Cissè were tremendous (shooting for hours in the Malay desert during a series of civil strife and guerilla uprisings), and he created a film that has some of the most beautiful and well composed shots I've seen (Credit to Jean-Noël Ferragut & Jean-Michel Humeau). It was also a tremendous success and influence (The plot, characterization, and shot composition is suspiciously similar to "The Lion King," and it started a period of African epics being turned into films by African people).

The big thing is you define success as "getting into the Studio industry and affording a middle class urban/suburban life through your work," but that's not what drives every Videographer/Cinematographer. Many of us live in much more inexpensive areas so we don't need nearly the same income from our work. The rent on a double-wide in rural/exurban PA/AL/NY isn't exactly comparable to even a studio apartment in ATL/LA/NYC/Miami. Add to that the fact that we get to pick our coworkers and collaborators and do some really creative stuff that wouldn't ever see the light of day in the system, plus the fact that we get to keep a much bigger percentage of the revenue for what we do make, and it means many of us scrape out a living we can be satisfied with (even if many of the people who do this aren't ever gonna be wealthy or even close to middle class). It's a decent and creative life, and even with side jobs (which may sometimes even pay more) and such, it doesn't mean that we're any less "Filmmakers" than someone working in the studio system.

We just make a different kind of films but it doesn't mean we're less dedicated or competent at making films than anyone else inherently (I'm definitely still starting out and learning a lot but many of the people I've worked with have years or decades of experience).

The reality is that a "Filmmaker" is "someone who makes films" and "professional filmmaker" is "someone who earns a majority or significant proportion of their living making films." The Studio system is probably responsible for the smallest and least creatively diverse segment of people who do this work (for a lot of reasons both positive and negative). If you want to say "Studio Filmmaker" or "Network Filmmaker" to differentiate the work you do, that makes a lot of sense. Just don't tell the majority of people around the world who do this they don't count as "Filmmakers" because they don't work on films with a Network/Studio budget.