Cinema, a place filled with glitter and stardom by nature seems very different from Academia which is filled with obscurity and simplicity. But, a strong analogy exists between the two in terms of their organization and functioning.
The ultimate goal in cinema is to create successful movies while academia is all about producing useful knowledge. Although, not all movies have the director as the story and screenplay writer, many successful films do. A professor is the director’s equivalent in academia. They conceive ideas and filter the ones worth pursuing. Professors hunt for money to carry out projects from various funding agencies and directors hunt from large studios and investors.
The director chooses actors to implement his project whereas a professor chooses Ph.D. students to work on projects. Universities make this selection easier/harder for professors and studios fulfill this role for directors. The most difficult phase in either field is the actual implementation of the projects. A lot of hard work from everyone goes into experimenting/acting, improving, and deciding on the final output of the project. While students and professors spend countless hours toiling in labs, actors and directors do the same on movie sets.
Finally, comes the part of releasing the work for viewing/reading by public and peers. A wide release is equivalent to publishing academic work in journals. Both directors/professors and actors/Ph.D. students try to publicize their work by attending interviews/seminars, comic-cons/conferences etc. Papers that are well written get a lot of citations and blockbuster movies bring in millions of dollars of revenue, both of which are sometimes bad measures of success because there are a lot of other factors that should be considered in evaluating success.
The analogy makes me feel that a person good at doing his/her job in one of the two fields can perhaps do well if they try their hand at the other. I was able to see this strong resemblance between the functioning of the two fields because of two reasons: 1) I developed an analogy between power systems and food webs in my research and I keep looking for such analogies everywhere now 2) My involvement in academia and my interest in making movies. But unfortunately, my interest in cinema keeps waning since I joined grad school. Hopefully, I will find time in future to work on keeping my interest in cinema alive. I also keep pondering if such analogies exist between any other fields that I may not have thought of.