hollywood Archives

The Difference in Small Fears vs Big Fears

Last updated on November 2nd, 2021 at 05:17 pm

I’ve been thinking a lot about small failures lately.

In my experience, they’re more difficult to publicly face than large failures.

For example, in 2008, when my father opened the first Shogun, the idea that “this might might work” didn’t cross my mind too often. I felt like:

“Of course this might not work!”

It’s a big risk. The economy is depressed. One out of 4 restaurants fail in their first year. That number rises, to three in 5, over the next 3 years.

We faced plenty of other obstacles:

Was there a market for Japanese food in Delmar?
Was the market in the Capital Region over saturated?
Lack of knowledge of this particular business.

There was an enormity to that task that made it okay if we didn’t succeed.

I followed the same logic with moving to Los Angeles and trying to start a career in Hollywood. There wasn’t much fear, because there were already so many challenges:

Didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles
Didn’t know anything about the entertainment industry
No job, or apartment lined up to serve as a safety net

If things didn’t work, there was an enormity to the task that allowed me to shrug and say, “well, if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. Let’s give it a shot.”

I say this with no brag. This isn’t unique, people do it all the time with varying degrees of success.

The Topic of Failure and Fear

Where it manifests and how to manage it, gets covered ad nauseum in the self-development world. Three techniques worth mentioning are:

Regret Minimization Framework (attributed to Jeff Bezos) – in 50 years, what decision would you regret, doing it or not doing it?
Fear Setting (attributed to Tim Ferriss) – identify your fears, how to prevent, and what you’d do to recover.
Understanding the Lizard Brain (attributed to Seth Godin) – fear is an artifact of our evolutionary response to life-threatening stimuli in our environment, that we continue to experience today (even though our lives aren’t actually in danger).

For endeavors or projects that’d result in a big failure, these techniques are especially helpful.

Fear On a Smaller Scale

On a smaller scale, however, it doesn’t work as well. Some examples:

Making Youtube videos no one watches
Starting blogs no one reads
Sending emails that don’t get responses
Rejection

This has been exacerbated, I feel, in part because the idea in Hollywood is that any failure is completely unacceptable. That you’re not allowed to misstep, and “assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.” When you do fail, it’s so public:

Hollywood is actually very small town like – everyone talks to everyone
The iterative approach is not widely accepted
They’re quick to criticize what hasn’t been done before

Which in turn, is further exacerbated by social media, where everyone naturally posts the good things in their life, and you begin to thinking everyone is doing better than you in their carefully crafted social presence. You begin to think you’ll be defined by this one failure.

So how do we overcome that?

What’s helped me is to find examples of others who faced public failure or criticism, and who have either addressed it, or moved on so quickly this was barely a blip on their radar. I make informal case studies of the “bigger names” out there, to grasp their mindset. Those are below:

Case Studies

Oprah and Arianna Huffington Ripped On in Deadline
In an article entitled DESPERATE: HuffPo and Oprah Team Up Now that barely passes for journalism, Nikki Finke reams out Oprah and Arianna Huffington for all of Hollywood to see. As Hollywood knows, Nikki never wears kid gloves, but in this article in particular, there’s an animosity that goes regular snark:

“This pathetic pairing sounds to me like an ill-conceived partnership, and it’s interesting that no mention is made of AOL which bought HuffPo last year.”

How does Oprah respond to Nikki? She doesn’t.

First she has a nervous breakdown.

Then she gets over it. And six months later, goes back to kicking ass.

Tucker Max versus Gawker
Tucker Max’s life has been fairly public. Posting stories and building a brand around all the women you’ve slept with and treated poorly will do that. He’s made the public very aware of his successes.

“I’m so far up the power law curve of book sales, dude,” Tucker told me. ”The very tip-top are J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, James Patterson, and Paulo Coelho. People who sell tens or hundreds of millions of books. That’s just a different game. That’s like, the Bible. They’re competing with the Bible. I’m not in the Bible tier.” (I can hear the religious among readers thinking: thank goodness!)

“I’m on the tier below that. But still, on the power curve, I’m all the way at the tip. I’m on the same tier as Tim Ferriss or Chelsea Handler or Jeanette Walls—we’re in the 2, 3, 4 million range.” — as told to Michael Ellsberg

Of course, this kind of publicity is a double-edged sword. For every success Tucker trumpeted, Gawker splashed his failures all over its front pages. It’s even created a special page on the site, breaking down this Tucker-Gawker feud to its individual campaigns.

Some of Tucker’s public failures:

His movie, based on his best selling book, I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, bombed
His media company, Rudius Media shut down in 2009
During an interview on Sirius Radio’s The Opie & Anthony show , he was essentially laughed out of the room.

Yet amidst the waft of all this dirty laundry, Tucker has marched on. He’s moved beyond his fratire brand, started a new blog, published on the Huffington Post, and getting his rebirth featured in Fortune.

Love him, hate him, admire him or loathe him – he’s taken his brunt of public failures.

And he’s still standing.

Blogger / Entrepreneur Tynan and His narcissism
Blogger Tynan Smith and his lifestyle was recently featured (favorably) in the San Francisco Gate. What followed next, he describes in his blog post, was “hundreds of comments, 95% of them negative.”

“The negativity was absolutely astounding. I could hardly believe how many people spent the time to sign up and leave vitriolic comments.”

He could have ignored the article, and all the negative comments. He could have just called everyone haters. But Tynan didn’t. He addressed the fact many people felt he was a narcissist, and even owned up to it:

“I wear a silver necklace with my name on it.”

Then he went back to programming and writing. His work went on.

An Author’s Fans Vote “No”
Blogger and Science Fiction Author Jamie Todd recently put out a survey, asking his readers if they’d be interested in him putting out a newsletter. I don’t know how many readers/subscribers he has. But 50 people voted in this survey, and the response was overwhelming “no.”

Jamie could have swept this poll under the rug. He could have pretended like it never happened. Regardless of how stoic you are, that must take an emotional toll, your readers telling you, “no, we don’t want this.”

Instead, Jamie posts the results. He says, “thanks for voting. I appreciate the feedback.”

He gets back to work, posting nearly everyday, writing thousands of words a week, and continuing his Going Paperless Series.

Ramit Sethi covers “3 Crushing Fears I Had”
Best selling author and personal finance blogger Ramit Sethi covered these 3 fears to his email subscribers. They were:

Charging for products on his site
Firing people
Saving money in strange places

He says:

“I looked around and saw other people doing better than I was. Posting pics on FB of their fancy vacations…getting covered in the press…having more RSS readers or email subscribers or revenues…and I would start thinking, “Maybe they’re just better at this than I am.” Notice I didn’t say — they’ve practiced their skills more, or they’ve learned more strategies, or they’ve just been at it longer. No, I made it about them being a BETTER PERSON than I was.”

He continued working though, chipping away at the fears, and growing his business. It’s not something that happened overnight — he’s been working at this “blogging thing” for 8 years now.

The Knowing-Doing Gap

That’s the clinical or academic term for the space that exists between “knowing” what you’re supposed to do, and actually taking action on it.

For me this space is a gulf when it comes to acknowledging the fear of failure and doing something about it. I still listen to self-development nearly everyday, but find myself tuning things out if I’ve heard it before.

I say, “yes, yes, I’ve heard this before, let me find a new tactic.” But the value is in actively reflecting on the fears. This is work. It’s not something that happens when you half-ass it.

Reading and learning new case studies, though, and seeing how others approach their fear of small failure helps. It provides different lenses to see that fear, often so insidious, to spot it and face it down long enough to get back to the work we’ve set out to do.

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Photo Credit: epSos.de, Manuel Valadez Acuña

hollywood

What I’m Reading: Understanding Michael Ovitz

Last updated on November 2nd, 2021 at 05:17 pm

I think understanding context is crucial for education and self-development.

An example: my current employer, Intellectual Property Group is a successor to the H.N. Swanson Literary Agency, one of the greatest Hollywood Lit Agencies of all time.

Swanie represented some of the greatest literary heavyweights: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, etc.

The foreword to his memoir, SPRINKLED WITH RUBY DUST, was written by client, the late great Elmore Leonard.

career

Low Point

Last updated on March 20th, 2017 at 04:55 pm

No one expects to wake one morning and say aloud, “Yup, this is it: today’s the lowest point in my life.” You don’t anticipate rolling out of bed and thinking, “I don’t have a fucking clue why I’m even getting out of bed today.”

You sort of just arrive. While you’re pouring your Fruit Loops, or dumbly clicking your mouse. Or head to your unpaid internship, where you watch Youtube videos for eight hours straight in an urban cave shared by two dozen other 20-somethings, an activity gently dubbed as “business development.”

A few weeks shy of my 26^th birthday and inside that cave was where I sat, unsatisfied with my work, unsatisfied with my writing. I didn’t know what I was still doing in Los Angeles. Later that day, I trudged back to my car in the rain, and I found a lovely note from the county’s parking enforcement, asking to please remit $63 to their offices.

If a child kicked my shins and a dog pissed on my shoes, I wouldn’t have been surprised. All I wanted was to bury my head in the sand. I wanted to stew in my misery and “figure my shit out,” whatever that means. It’s the approach I took for the first 25 years of my life: bottle it in, tell myself not to be a pussy, and get back to work – except it’s taken me 26 years to realize how self-destructive and insidious self-this behavior was. Doesn’t matter how hard you shovel, you can’t dig your way out of a hole.

Instead I called a friend. And she stayed on the line until I spilt everything I: how incredibly shitty I felt about myself, and what I hadn’t accomplished in two years, that maybe it wasn’t worth it and I should move back to New York. I told her I didn’t know what I was doing with my work, that I hated being poor and stopped feeling good about writing a long time ago.

Nothing was resolved. She didn’t offer any takeaway or sagely advice. But that wasn’t the point. She was there to listen when I needed to say something.

Part of me knew that the job would get better. That if watching Youtube videos and buying up channels was a skill I wanted to excel at, I could get there. I just didn’t know if this particular dip was one I wanted to conquer. No matter how good I got at it, would I be happy signing Youtube talent?

I quit the next day. I decided this wasn’t where I wanted to be in terms of my career, my writing, or my finances. I couldn’t unravel which tangents brought me down this path, so my only choice was to start retracing my steps, trying to remember when my trail was last good again

Photos credit: A guy called John

career

Stories You Were Born to Tell

Last updated on March 24th, 2017 at 06:52 pm

“MODERN FAMILY: there’s a show I feel like I was born to write,” my friend said to me. “It’s like, I can anticipate every. Single. Joke. Before they get to the punch line, I already see the set-up and I know the payoff.”

Makes me think of watching cage fights, with George St. Pierre or Miguel Torres in the ring, and I’m anticipating the shovel punches and the fist-elbow combo thrown, and when his opponent’s going to shoot or if it’s a deke! and instead follows up with a kick, and I know he does this by avoiding deceits flowing from the hands the eyes the head. Instead, he locks on the hips like Master, and that’s how he anticipates every. Single. Punch.

But recognizing technique while reclined in the barcalounger is not the same as stepping into the ring with 155 pounds of War. And calling out a punch line isn’t the same as writing one.

Recognizing and anticipating puts your skill level a hair above those who blindly consume, and hardly an iota closer to someone who creates. Recognition is a tool in a poor man’s arsenal; safety scissors amidst scalpels. Before assuming you’ve got the chops for story, ask yourself: can you talk about which parts of the story work (and which don’t?) Can you break it down for people, step-by-step, moving through the story with a clear head and clear vision and clear words as to why this piece fits better over here than over there? Can you see past the words to spot the structure? Why is a show like Modern Family funny? Why does a bit work, not just on the funny haha level, but that deep, resonate in my gut level? Can you break down why some stories feel like discovering a soul mate and others just the cheap fulfillment of a one-night stand?

That’s ARTICULATION.

Go another level, past articulation, down to limbo, and you’ve discovered where real work happens. No liberties here, no staring at the near completed puzzle and saying, “of course the pay-off happens here, where else would it go?” You’ve CTRL+N’ed yourself to a document so bleak and white it’d give Edith Wharton a symbolic hard-on. Now, CREATE.

That’s the real work.

Yes, story be story. Anyone with years of books beneath their belts and movies behind their eyeballs gots a sense of what that is. Everyone’s got their inkling of the aesthetically pleasing. I look at Starry Night, I’m hit with the vague understanding of its appeal and allure. It doesn’t bring me half a step closer to investing in a Crayola 24-pack and hacking off an ear, though.

Consume. Recognize. Articulate. Create. In that order.

Fortitude and study, that’s what it’s going to take to learn the mechanics, to get a grasp on the science and move from one level to the next. Fortitude and study reveals the magic, and what is magic but some misdirection mixed with sleight of hand, built on a science foundation? Prepare to invest your time if you’re going to articulate rather than recognize, and create rather than articulate. No room for skeptics, neither. No time for rants on “my artistry, hear me roar! unbound by the boundaries of your box, by the man, by rules or convention!” Because art isn’t the doing away of structure, but its understanding: why it works and where it’s limited. Scrapping what fails and retooling the rest.

So where you going to get educated on your reversals, your turning points, your inciting incidents? How you going to study up on three-act structures and the placement of set-ups and payoffs?

By taking classes. Reading screenwriting books and treating the good ones like Testament. By listening to others talk about screenwriting, piping the knowledge of others directly into your brain every chance you get. By reading scripts: piles and piles, spanning across genre and generation.

And most importantly, by wringing out your brain every chance you get, putting pen to page and shedding stories. Even when you don’t think you’re ready. Even if you don’t think this story is ready to be shared.

So that when you find the story you were born to tell… you can.

Photo Credit: Gifford Pinchot National Forest

career

Advice

Last updated on March 9th, 2019 at 04:03 pm

“My catchall, general advice to everyone who moves out to Los Angeles is this: if there’s anything else you can do, anything else that’s your calling, go do that instead. It’s a pat answer,” he admitted, “but this is just too hard…”

Which immediately raises the question: why is it hard? Because people will be mean to you? Because the hours stretch long and your social life sums to nil? Because you’ll be overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated – conditions your mother conditioned you into believing you’d skip right over because you were a unique snowflake?

It also prompts the follow-up question: hard compared to what?

When did the resultant response to“too hard” lead to “so don’t try?” Giving up because something is too hard – you attempted, drew conclusions based on the results, and decided to invest your time elsewhere – there’s no shame in that.

But too hard to even attempt?

Easily the worst attempt at advice I’ve ever come across.

Everyone’s journey, — from love to career to family to personal — is just that: personal. To compare how one person experiences joy, pain, and hardship to another is a fruitless exercise. The brilliant academic mind is a tortured soul in social situations that the social butterfly who battles bulimia excels in, while the bum standing outside her bathroom window scrounges through garbage cans of the single mother raising three kids alone because her addict husband couldn’t kick the habit he picked up when he in law school.

Who’s to say what’s “too hard?”

Pursuing your dreams is hard – that’s why they’re dreams; because you gots to stretch and reach and scratch and claw and lie and steal and cheat for them. If you make a living creating art, hustling for every cent, sure, it’s probably safe to say your path is filled with more struggle than someone happy with their nine to five.

But that does not make you a unique snowflake.

Contrary to popular belief, you still are not the hardest working person in your town, or your field. You’re probably not the hardest working person on your block.

Nor does it give you the privilege of passing off bullshit as your own sage adage for the temporary high of superiority and ten seconds of a hard dick you get at the thought of helping a fellow artist with your brilliant insight into the Holllywood machine.

It’s irresponsible to assume fragility, not strength. Individuals are more resilient than they’re given credit for, and we have to make a choice: to be the person who pushes the resiliency of others beyond their limits, beyond what they thought possible…

Or the person who convinces them that, “yes, there’s your limit. Your reach meets your grasp.”

Gotta stretch, baby. Gotta dream. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. Maybe you’ll make it, maybe you won’t.

But at least you won’t leave this earth wondering what would have happened if you never took your shot.

Which would be the hardest thing of all.

Photo Credit: muizei

career

Skateboards and Hollywood

Last updated on March 9th, 2019 at 04:03 pm

There’s this moment, right before stumbling off your board, where you ask yourself, “Really? Did I have to try and get fancy right here right now? Were the potential flair points really worth the mouthful of gravel I’m about to eat?”

Then you’re falling.

Then you’re meeting asphalt.

Mucho gusto.
Igualmente.

Tucking, rolling, sliding, anything you can do to keep the wounds surface-level only, because you’d rather not test the limits of your paltry health insurance.

I throw in a prayer, too: please dear sweet Jesus I hope nobody saw that…

“Hey man, you alright?” a man on the sidewalk asked, trying hard not to laugh too loud. Failing to do so.

“Gotta love it,” I replied, my voice suave and steady as I scrapped myself off the ground, and chased my board which was skittering down the street.

In the past I avoided such moments by skating solely at night, when no one could see my bumbling. Or if they did, they wouldn’t recognize my face in the daylight, and would be unable to banish me back to the darkness where I belonged with looks of contempt. There is something embarrassing about being a 25-year-old man-child putzing around on a skateboard — if you’re skating at that age, there’s this expectation that you worked out the kinks when you were young and foolish enough to believe transportation on a plank resting atop four wheels was a valid mode of transportation.

Except I started skating at 24, only after I moved out to Los Angeles. So when I see the young and fearless skaters, attacking the street or vert or their new trick, I can’t help but resent the little assholes and their 20-year head start.

I started my Hollywood writing career the same time I started skating. My first lesson was, whatever you do, don’t admit you want to write. I interned with a management company, and kinda sorta fibbed about my desire to get into management and being an agent, so executives wouldn’t pass me off as just “another writer.” When people asked why I moved to Los Angeles, I gave pat answers: for the weather, a change of pace, etc. I pursued writing like a prepubescent teen pursues masturbation: alone, in secret, with hands furiously working in the dark. Looking back, this might have stifled my creativity but in the long run it’s not a bad move. Strange as it is to move 3,000 miles and not admit the real reason why, it’s a chore to distinguish yourself from the other millions of 25-year-olds with a whole lot of aspiration and dream, but no credits.

The more skating I watched, the more I noticed that what distinguished a skater from the pack wasn’t their execution of this trick or that move, but how they expressed themselves with their skating. The skaters who drew my attention were the ones who said something every time they stepped on the board. Because once everyone reached a certain level, they all possessed the same arsenal of tools at their disposal, and it was how they used those tools that distinguished themselves from the rest. It was more than transportation, more than a spectacle. It was art.

The only way to reach that level is admitting you’re going to take it seriously. That means pursuing your art in the daylight, and being willing to be judged by your work. You have to put it out there. You have to perform, right in the middle of the road, where anyone can see you fall.

Photo Credit: fish’s box