In response to Edward Clapp’s call for papers for 20Under40 and “This is our Emergency” open letter, I invited my brother to co-write a chapter proposal with me. We have been a screenwriting team for over ten years, and though we have had some success in writing for television, we have not had the success we wished for in film. He was the first to point this out to me: what do two people like us have to say about the state of working in film today? I believe we have everything to say, but his skepticism got to me: does not “making it” make us failures? Does that mean we can’t be leaders, despite our continued attempts to break into the industry?
Like many younger sisters, I have spent my whole life looking up to my brother. He is the funniest person I know. He is able to tell stories visually, concisely, and always pull it off with humor and style. He is a perfectionist in the most devoted and irritating way—he will always push you to make what you have better, to see it a different way, or to entirely abandon it in pursuit of something much edgier and more unique. The thing is, he knows he is all of these things—he knows he is good at what he does. So why does he feel so powerless to speak about his craft? Is it him; is it the film industry specifically; is it the ambiguous state of success in the arts more broadly; or is it, as Edward Clapp and Eric Booth might say, a generational disempowerment perpetuated by an organizational structure borne from a field-wide complex?
Perhaps it is all of these factors converging that have inhibited his confidence, magnified by the organizational limitations that he has come up against in his professional work. But I would not discount the mind games that being an artist carries with it. They act on me too. My brother’s refusal to consider himself a leader fed into my own self-doubt, until I too began to fear that I had anything meaningful to say. My daily pep talks to him were starting to feel forced and repetitive—I wasn’t sure I believed them.
My brother’s main argument was, I’m having a hard time believing a reader will value what someone like you and I have to say when we have yet to achieve success—yet. For lack of a better example, if I were interested in learning about how to win in Fantasy Baseball, I wouldn’t want to hear advice from people who have never won. Or take any profession for that matter! It’s like someone saying they want to be a doctor, yet they failed every test to get into the right schools. Then what? They’re going to write an essay about how the tests were too hard? I’m sure you will say that there are differences between the two worlds of art and… other careers (?) …but to me, it feels like we should have a success under our belt before we tell someone what to do or even what NOT to do.
The problem with his argument is that there is no way in or out of it. He refuses to accept himself as a leader and therefore will not produce the work that he believes would earn him a title of leader—and therefore the right to speak. This is not a novel argument—I have heard this many times as the rationale for pursuing a doctoral degree: “When I have my doctorate, then I can write and people will take me seriously.” Is this really the way we think about ourselves? Whatever the source of this hollow confidence, this is a terrible way to view one’s professional path—that we have no permission to attempt to succeed… until we succeed.
Thanks to my bro for letting me qualify, critique, and challenge his insecurity as a leader in this public space.
To laugh your a** off, visit http://www.michaelbellino.com/
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Michelle brings up a great point, one that is too often echoed in emails I have received from young leaders who feel they haven’t made it, and that making it seems a grim pursuit. Rather than sit back and be silent, I think there are lots of us out there in the world who can learn a thing or two from the Bellino duo’s story. Just because you haven’t “made it” doesn’t mean you don’t have something to contribute to the conversation. The more we self-select out of engaging dialogues, the further in the distance making it will begin to fade.
Excellent post Michelle.
I think your brother, in a way, is right. If you want people to follow you, then you need to have some record of success. But I think you can define success in a lot of ways:
Maybe you guys haven’t gotten a feature film up yet, but perhaps you have:
- Developed strong relationships with studio execs
- Have a track record for writing consistently
- Have developed a particular good editing process for your writing
- Learned a lot about how to write as a team
All those may be examples of useful skills that you have. Those certainly would be useful skills for others to use and that’s why you should contribue to the conversation.
Something Adam left out of his list that you and your bro have probably been successful at, namely: identifying the variegated roadblocks to success that keep people from realizing their potential in the arts.
That’s an essay I would read…
I would add another level to the definition of success. Our culture has quantified and commodified the term so that the Bellino duo have a hard time feeling successful by those norms. I am an etymology freak and often find a lost truth under the accepted definitions of terms we commonly use. The etymological meaning of “success” is “to have a followthrough” as in the succession of queens and kings. By this ancient definition, you are a successful artist if you continue to make art that interests and satisfies you. I think 21st century artists need a balance of both definitions of success, so the writing Bellinos need to keep writing for the joy/intrinsic satisfactions as well as the market and commercial reasons. It becomes difficult to sustain artistic work if one gets overbalanced toward one definition of the other. And in terms of getting started, it is almost always true that artists have to make a lot of stuff before making the stuff that begins to “succeed” in market terms. Editorial cartoonists are told to hurry up and draw their first ten thousand cartoons so they can get the crap out of the way and start producing the cartoons that matter. The same learning curve is usually true in all arts, except that we get dazzled by the exceptions to that ancient truth. Writers need to write, and with writing they find the voice and story that fits what the world is eager to hear.
The way I understand success is in the ability to achieve a goal. I successfully got out of bed this morning. That doesn’t mean I did it well—or that it meant anything to anyone. I’m half on board with Eric. Either we need a new definition of success for the 21st Century, or we need to stop thinking about success and draw our focus to a new word, a new way of talking about achievement in the arts.
Plenty of theatre companies successfully put on plays that no one comes to. Visual artists successfully make paintings and sculptures that no one sees. And the Bellinos successfully write screen plays that never get turned into feature films. All of these artists, however, are successful in achieving their goal of making their work.
Forget just making the work, we need to get the work out there.
While the language may not mesh, I think we need to make a shift from thinking about success, to thinking about creativity. Specifically, one particular type of creativity. In a 1999 article, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi presents a systems approach to creativity (feel free to substitute the word success for creativity). He removes the locus of creativity off the individual and places it at the nexus of the individual, a domain, and a field. The individual is the artist (the Bellinos), the domain is the symbol system the artist works in (film), and the field are the gatekeepers that determine what is or is not accepted into that domain (film industry executives/movie producers). Csikszentmihalyi believes that creativity occurs when an individual makes a contribution to a domain that is accepted by the field, hence, changing the symbol system of the domain. He posits that in order to be creative, individuals need to focus on the field—convincing the gatekeepers to admit their work to the domain. My reading of this is—creativity needs a marketing department.
Back to success: to be successful, we need to be able to market ourselves. It’s no longer enough to have a good idea, to make good work. One needs to have a good idea, make good work, and know how to sell it.
OR… perhaps the field—the gatekeepers that oversee our artistic domains—have been in their posts for too long, and there needs to be a change in WHO decides what is in or out of a domain, in order to change the face of that domain (does this sound like a familiar tactic someone you may know might be taking?).
How do we help the Bellinos and all of the frustrated artists they represent? Let’s take a careful look at who the gatekeepers are in their domain, and ask ourselves if these are the right people that ought to be there…
I agree that there needs to be a shift in thinking and that it needs to be directed to a word that begins with a “C” but for me that word is credibility. We live in a world that uses a success-based model. As Edward said, success comes in many forms (I wrote a play, produced it, directed it, people saw it – success! I got a 6 figure salaried job for the man, I can afford things my family never could – success!) but what does it really mean? Success can be fleeting and is often tied to a financial result but more than that what is after success? And, what room does being successful have for the failures as well? Whereas credibility suggests something earned over time, something that is trustworthy and built on experience. Success is a component of credibility, as is failure.
Basically, I think a “cognitive shift” is in order to encourage long range thinking about how artists and the field that supports them look at their work. I mean really I think the whole country needs to make this shift given that all the trappings of our national success-based model have pretty much bottomed out in the last year anyway.
YES YES YESSSSSS…
Except that I am not a fan of Csikszentmihalyi’s (limited) view of creativity as needing to change a domain, nor do I believe that (unfortunate though it may be) creativity=success. Not when you can have the potential to be creative but no power to affect the domain. OK maybe I am talking myself into Csikszentmihalyi. But his theory is a synopsis of what exists– can we change what exists to change the way this system behaves, and the way we as actors behave within it?
I’m a big proponent of Eric Booth’s concept of success as “followthrough.” But the thing is, despite what we say– that ideally we all pursue our craft for intrinsic reasons– extrinsic factors impinge on intrinsic sensibilities. So the lack of market success, the inability to affect a domain– or even get the domain to turn its head, in a sense, feeds back into how we view ourselves as social actors. This is where all the self-doubt becomes too heavy to bear. I’m not sure whether there is any way to pinpoint accountability here, since agency and structure are inevitably reflexive. But if we can find an entrypoint, we can find a way to change the system.
Are there solutions to this? Do “powerless” people have to create their own markets and their own domain subculture where we become our own gatekeepers (if I have to get on board with Csikszentmihalyi!)… is that what the internet is already doing? Democratic spaces such as youtube seem to create their own space for media creations to test audience response… but success on youtube does not equal any professionally recognized success, necessarily. See South Park, “Canada on Strike” (#1204) for one elucidation of this theory.
There is much to be learned from South Park!
I feel old. Am I old? I’m drunk and listening to Buddy Guy…”I’m an old man and I’m not the same…”