I like to think about the big entertainment landscape as a massive, sun-seared, teeming African savanna. It’s packed with wildebeest herds (endless sitcoms and reality shows), roaring bull elephants (blockbuster movies), lithe cheetahs who get winded easily (web-series), crazy monkeys throwing poop from the trees (commercials), and lots of wild-eyed jackals who just love to chatter, regardless (standup). There are red-butted baboons (clowns at kids' parties), there are mindless packs of zebras (network programming), there are odd, five-armed creatures no one can really classify (indie films). And all they all really want to do is eat each other. Growl. Snap. Swallow. Yum.
I think of entertainment this way because it’s a fact of creative existence that -- just like the real Serengeti -- everything creative must compete. For space. For attention. For resources. For the love of the tribal people (us), who decide whether each creativity creature will thrive, mill about aimlessly, stagger, or go extinct.
It’s a tough world, out there, on the primal floodplains of creative work. If you show your throat, there’s no end to creatures that will gladly rip your jugular and claim your precious space.
Ah, metaphor land. Roam, lion, roam.
* * *
Okay, as I extract myself from my brain-Kenya, here’s my point: if you’re going to put something creative out into the world, you should be damned sure it’s strong and ready to survive. There’s no forgiveness in entertainment world. Either you have your chops, or you’re fanged and dirt-covered in a shallow grave.
Which is a lesson you learn in professional entertainment, and it’s a good lesson. Because it tells you that just wanting to do something in entertainment/art, and even actually managing to do something and bring it to fruition, none of that is enough to get you what you really want -- which is for strangers to love what you’ve done. Love it. Because only a real love reaction for a product will get people to pay for it. And the only way you’re going to be able to do project, project, project, project (aka, "career"), is if you get paid. Well. Over and over. For a long time.
I learned the “it better be good” lesson in some very visceral ways. I never really knew how to do standup until I wandered out of the protected clubs and into Florida biker bars, where the only thing that made them listen was if you were clearly and super-poweredly worth listening to. I learned how to write jokes -- real, power jokes, jokes that explode and impress and linger in people’s minds -- once I veered away from standup and onto TV talk show staffs where I was on 13-week contracts that wouldn’t renew if I didn’t write stuff that the head writer liked well enough to put on the air ahead of everyone else’s stuff on the staff, including his own jokes. Just think about that as a set-up: you lose your WGA job -- your health insurance, your pension, your $3,500 a week -- if your jokes aren’t better than the jokes of the guy who hired you. And… go!
Making your creative stuff super strong makes sense if you want it to survive -- not on the protected, virtual landscape of just doing things to be doing them -- but on the real, competitive landscape of what strangers who don’t know you actually want to watch, and buy. If you create weak things, you’re just going to sit by and watch as they get viciously snuffed. Or as they starve, slowly, because they can't get in there and claim any nourishment of their own. All the big boys are crowding the carcass. Sorry, little web-series.
And who wants to see that happen to their precious babies?
Not me.
So that’s the set-up. Make your stuff so good that it can lumber around on the open savannah, and leisurely tear hell out of anything that wants to get in its face.
Super powered, high-quality products, baby. That’s what will take you where you want to go.
[Next week: uh, okay, how do you do that?]
[Hint: it’s the magic secret journey called “Great Development Process”]
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