A Hollywood Survival Skill
Hello!
Still coming to you live from Revue. I’ve been trying to migrate everything over to Substack and making sure I haven’t missed any recent signups, but getting the full subscribers download list from Revue has been an issue. I have a feeling the last few hamsters running the wheels at Elon’s Twitter have bigger problems to solve. Hopefully the next one will be coming to you from Substack. I wrote my guest column for Ben Blacker’s Re:Writing in the Substack interface and I just like it better anyway.
Quick work update:
I finished all of my series pitches with the studio and producing partners. We did the last one the Monday before Thanksgiving, and we’re still waiting to hear back from one last place. We did nine pitches total, eight passes so far but we’re still holding out hope. It only takes one "yes!" Right? Right??
The common refrain I hear in all of my meetings right now is, “It’s crazy out there.” If you’ve been following the news over the last couple of weeks you know there are a lot of layoffs and downsizing and leadership shakeups (Welcome back, Bob Iger). If you have a job, or you're on a deal, or you sold something and now you’re in development, count yourself lucky.
I had another series pitch yesterday with some producers I dearly love (Hi, if you’re reading this!), and I still have two more to go before everything shuts down for the holidays. One is a feature pitch for an OWA and the other is an animated version of GODS AND MONSTERS. We’re going until the clock runs out and leaving it all on the floor.
In the meantime, I started my supervising job. I’m keeping notes along the way of any new things I learn going through the pilot gauntlet and I’ll share them at the end. Because it isn’t my show I can’t really talk about it in as much detail but I will share what I can when I can.
A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to see ROLLING THUNDER (1977) on the big screen at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Theater. It’s one of my top five favorite movies. I first saw it with my friends Jason Jenkins, Brandon Withrow, and Josh Edwards, in Brandon’s apartment in the early aughts. I remember when it was over we were just kind of shellshocked, and then a minute later we were quoting lines back and forth. It reminded me of the first time I saw RESERVOIR DOGS and stumbled out into the night in downtown Cincinnati, mind on fire.
If you’re not familiar with the movie, it was written by Paul Schrader and directed by John Flynn. William Devane plays an Air Force Major named Charles Raine who finally makes it back home to San Antonio after years in a POW camp in Vietnam. Tommy Lee Jones plays his best friend, a Master Sergeant from El Paso, who also survived the merciless torture and beatings in the camp.
In the opening scene they land at the airport and are given a hero’s welcome by the town. But from the first few minutes it’s clear there’s trouble on the horizon. Charlie’s wife, thinking he was dead, fell in love with and agreed to marry a local sheriff’s deputy. Charlie’s son was a baby when he left. Now he barely remembers his dad. While they’re in the middle of working through this complex new dynamic, Charlie and his family find themselves in the crosshairs of a group of outlaws looking to steal a cache of silver dollars Charlie was given as a gift from the local community.
I won’t spoil any more of it for you, you should really check it out for yourself. The setup is clear, simple, and emotional. The characters are richly drawn, the performances are great. The packed house at The New Beverly laughed and cheered and recoiled in all the right places. It’s a spare, muscular masterpiece.
There’s one particular scene that I’ve mentioned before in the newsletter. When Charlie comes home he decides to sleep in the shed, rather than moving back into the house. His wife’s new fiancee interrupts Charlie’s workout to bring him a beer and have a man to man talk about the uncomfortable situation. He talks about how he admires Charlie, how he doesn’t know if he could have survived like Charlie did.
Charlie susses out that the guy wants to hear the specifics of what happened in the camp, so Charlie shows him one of the torture tactics. He makes the guy tie Charlie's arms behind his back with a rope and lift it toward the sky. The guy balks at first but Charlie berates him until he really goes for it and you can see that Charlie’s in extreme pain and the guy is sick to his stomach from what he’s doing to him. It’s an intense scene and in the beat after, the guy says he doesn’t understand how Charlie got through it.
Charlie says, “You learn to love the rope. That’s how you beat them.”
I’ve thought about that line a lot in the years since and I’ve applied it to all kinds of things in my life. I hated pitching when I started, especially when I was in somebody else’s room and had to pitch my story off of index cards to the showrunner. I dreaded doing it. I’m a writer now, I left my acting days behind for a reason! But I conditioned myself to look forward to that process. I started to relish the chance to tell my story in a room full of people who had the power to make it happen.
A few days before watching ROLLING THUNDER I saw a clip from Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist from Stanford, talking about dopamine, discipline, and motivation (linked below). In it, he says, “When we receive rewards, even when we give ourselves rewards, we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward,” because of the way our dopaminergic circuits work. The peak in dopamine from a reward lowers your baseline and your brain interprets it as, “You didn’t do the activity because you enjoy the activity, you did it for the reward.”
When I heard that I immediately thought of all of the very successful writers I know who find the actual process of writing excruciating. How many times have you heard someone say, “I hate writing but I love having written?” I’ve felt this way to a certain extent in my own creative practice over the past couple of years. Sometimes it’s just really freaking hard to sit down and make myself write. Or to make myself memorize my pitch backwards and forwards and say it out loud. Sometimes I motivate myself with a reward.
For twenty years, writing WAS my reward. It was the thing I looked forward to at the end of my shift in the coat check, or merch stand, or tire warehouse, or office job. When I finally got the chance to hide out in a quiet stairwell in a Broadway theater after the show started, or slump into a seat on the subway on the ride home, I could open my journal and do the thing that brought me the most joy. I was in love with the creative act and the pursuit of a career. I was in love with the effort.
On my 40th birthday I got the mother of all dopamine peaks when we sold EXTANT. The news hit the trades and for the next week my phone blew up with everybody I’ve ever known calling to congratulate me. Oh, and there was a lot of money attached to it! I was able to do things and buy things and go places I’d only dreamed of. There were Emmy parties, gift suites, premiere parties, and on and on. Then there's the huge rush of just getting to make your show or your movie, of engaging with some of the most talented, creative people on the planet.
But the inescapable truth in this business is that every job comes to an end. It may take a year, it may take twenty, but eventually the show is going to run its course, it may get canceled, you may get fired, it could be any number of things. And you have to start the process all over again.
"Wait, you mean to tell me that in order to get all that back I have to write a whole new thing??"
It gets a little harder every time. You know all the rewards. You want the rewards. But writing for or toward the rewards is a one way trip to Sadsville.
In the video he also gets into the concept of “growth mindset vs fixed mindset,” a theory created by another Stanford doctor named Carol Dweck. If you have a fixed mindset you believe that things like intelligence and creativity are static and can’t really be changed all that much. A growth mindset believes that those things can be improved and developed through dedication and hard work. Huberman explains it as, “I’m striving to be better. I’m not there yet, but striving itself is the end goal. People who have a growth mindset end up performing very well because they’re focused on the effort itself.”
In order to cultivate growth mindset you have to find the effort pleasurable. If you don’t actually believe that you have to condition your brain to believe it. This video is why I wrote the post-it note that I told you about in the last newsletter. I was so scatterbrained and stressed out before a pitch that I found myself dreading it. So I wrote a post-it note that said, “Slow down. This is fun. You are so lucky you get to do this.” I took a few moments to really trick myself into believing it and it made all the difference for that next hour.
(After watching this clip I started reading Dr. Dweck’s book called MINDSET right now and I love it. There’s a great chapter on artistic ability and creativity, using people like Adam Guettel and Jackson Pollock as examples. Also highly recommended.)
I've practiced some form of this for a long time (and talked about it here) but until the last couple of weeks I was never able to articulate it to myself in such a clear way. Since then I’ve been applying these ideas to the act of writing again. I never lost the love of it but I have definitely felt myself drifting toward a more results oriented drive, rather than writing just because I love the act of writing. After I watched this video I put a lot of my focus on the idea that, “The effort part is the good part.”
What I love about this concept is that it not only helps keep you going through difficult times, it also protects you from losing your way in success. A career in the arts is a marathon, not a sprint. Life, in general, will be a constant stream of successes and failures, ups and downs, joy and pain.
Cultivating a growth mindset, embracing the challenge, finding pleasure in the effort... learning to love the rope… this is a basic survival skill that will help you weather the good times and bad.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success: Dweck, Carol S.: 9780345472328: Amazon.com: Books — www.amazon.com Mindset: The New Psychology of Success [Dweck, Carol S.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
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