“When a man comes to this point in his life, he wants to turn over the things he’s been blessed with… turn them over to friends… as a reward for the friends he’s had…and to make sure that everything goes well after he’s gone.” - Hyman Roth “The Godfather: Part 2”
The desire to be remembered is one of the things that makes us human, but the desire to be remembered by people we have never met and will never know is one that may be unique to the entertainment business.
Ask anyone in Hollywood… actor, writer, director, lawyer, creative executive, producer, manager or agent… why they came to Hollywood and you’ll likely get a practiced self-serving speech about the power of art to change the world or something else similarly disingenuous, but the real answer is that most of us came here to chase immortality in one way or another.
OK yes, also money, but there are much easier ways to make money. Hollywood of the 1980’s was, famously, full of aggressive alpha males who turned their backs on the easy money of Ronald Reagan’s Wall Street, choosing instead to slave away in the Agency mailrooms, impatiently waiting for their shot at fame and fortune… or at least the chance to burn hot and bright on the way to the inevitable cliche of the very public crash and burn.
The contemporaneous joke was that these ambitious young men (and also women) did it in part because the ladies were better looking in L.A. and also because of the rumor, perhaps perpetuated by a fantastic Robin Williams gag, that you could write cocaine off on your taxes by categorizing it as “snacks.”
But mostly they did it for immortality… because no one remembers the names of stockbrokers.
And I’ve never met anyone more willing to part with their hard-earned money than a starry-eyed millionaire rube who has become rich in another business and now wants to try his hand at making movies in Hollywood. The indie financier graveyards are full to the brim with the corpses of wealthy entrepreneurs, Texas oilmen and Bay Area tech bros mostly, who thought they could find immortality by beating the house in the movie business.
The movie business has always attracted the world’s biggest dreamers, and certainly no one ever comes to Los Angeles hoping to “make it average”… we come here to make it Big. But if we are going to spend our lives chasing immortality to the exclusion of all else, the question of whether or not the movie business can actually deliver that immortality becomes an important one.
Certainly Tom Cruise has achieved immortality, right? And what about Michael Jackson, who has a blockbuster movie about his life in theaters right now… surely MJ achieved immortality?
Well, maybe.
Bing Crosby was once a massive crossover star in both the movies and in popular music, just as Michael Jackson was… so much so that he was even caricatured in a 1950 Bugs Bunny cartoon aimed at kids. But ask someone under the age of 25 who Bing Crosby was and the best case scenario is that they maybe kinda mighta sorta recognize his name from the Christmas songs they hear on the radio once a year. As with Bing Crosby, it’s entirely possible that there will come a time when “Tom Cruise” and “Michael Jackson” will be names future generations may have heard before, but which no longer carry much meaning for them.
And of course the Cruises and MJs of the world make up the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%… most of us here in Tinseltown are not Movie Stars or Pop Legends, and the list of executives, producers and agents whose names are remembered long after they march off to the great movie premiere in the sky is a very short one indeed.
The business of Hollywood is, as Jerry Maguire once said, “an up-at-dawn pride swallowing siege.” It is a 24/7/365 business in which agents and managers get calls (and texts) from their clients late into the night and then again first thing in the morning long before most Americans’ alarms have even thought about going off. It is a business where American studio movies shoot in Budapest and Bratislava, where night shoots go from dusk-till-dawn and production craftsmen don’t see their own beds for months at a time. And where studio executives stay up into the wee hours pouring through scripts in a futile effort to stay one step ahead of the development flood. And in all this mania and mayhem, there is often very little time, to say nothing of headspace, to chase the one kind of immortality that is actually real and measurable.
On a recent episode of The Dave Ramsey Show, one of Dave’s guest hosts said something that I’ve been thinking a lot about… “we have a cancer infecting our world where we ask someone what they’re worth and the answer is a number.” In Hollywood, we don’t measure one’s worth by a number, but rather by a list of produced credits or of A-list clients. But the point is the same, we are valuing a person’s worth in terms of their work product and not on the lives they have built as a spouse or a parent… which is the only true mark of immortality that any of us will ever leave behind.
And that is the heart of the problem. It is very easy to come to Hollywood, spend a couple decades busting your ass to get to the top, only to wake up one morning to discover that you’re 40 and that somewhere along the way you forgot to build a meaningful life for yourself outside of the job. I know because I’ve watched it happen to a lot of my friends… hell, it very nearly happened to me.
There is an old saying which tells us that in order to live a fulfilling life, our reach must exceed our grasp. I believe deeply in this idea, but it is also true that if you live your life this way, you will one day come to the end and discover a gap between your goals and your results. This is, of course, entirely natural… even Tom Cruise must surely have goals he has not yet achieved.
Part of growing older is learning to live with that gap between what we imagined our lives would be and what they actually are, to appreciate what we’ve done and achieved and to find contentment there.
Throughout my professional life, people have asked me how to build a successful career in Hollywood, and having a good answer to that question has been an important part of the career I’ve built. But lately I’ve found myself adding something to the advice I give to those seeking the secrets to Hollywood immortality… don’t forget to build a life, preferably one with a marriage and family… not only is it awesome, but these days it may be the most counter-culturally transgressive thing you can do.
Your family will remember you… the folks who see the movies you help make will not. Or as Hyman Roth (legendary acting coach and father of “method acting” Lee Strasberg) might have said… “no one reads the credits.”
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