Commercialism

Cynics measure success on a commercial scale. I didn’t go to Hollywood to look for fame, I wanted to tell stories, and I wanted to help with the stories of other people. I wanted to learn and see for myself. It was a rich time and an environment much better than expected, full of creative and passionate people, especially if you looked beneath the layers most folks are thought to be chasing there. New York would already then have been my preferred destination, sure, but the aim wouldn’t have changed either way.

Most performers aren’t born on a Broadway stage, and most writers don’t spontaneously appear with a dependence on smokes and whisky in front of a typewriter in a minuscule city apartment. I never feared that a regional background was a problem, because the output is the same. Write to write, act to act, help to help. What happens with it after is just a kind of accident.

Is that outlook glamorous in a commercial sense? No. Do people trip themselves to fawn over you? No. But if those two things are your goals, then the art just becomes a tool to achieve something else, which means you’re operating with a different set of values. I never look at a blank page and ask myself what people want or even what I can give them, I just focus on the story in my head and filter it through all the experiences and all the passion I’ve encountered over the years. You don’t get better at writing because you sell a million copies instead of a few thousand, you get better by paying attention.

At the highest peak, my commercial hope is to not have cost publishers and producers more money than they can earn from the work, and that has always felt more like an empathetic stance than one rooted in materialism. You don’t want to burden those who believe in you.