Business Insight Zone

Who knows if he meant it this way, but Shatner offered a lovely piece of guidance in his Esquire “What I’ve Learned” interview, published in 2006:

I was always working. Maybe you weren’t aware of the movies I was making, or the television I was doing, or the shows I was creating, or the books I was writing; there have been thirty.* But I have always been solidly at work, running as fast as I can. You just haven’t been conscious of it. Suddenly I’m above the radar.

This reminds me of another quotation from a long-time actor, one noted for the prolificity of his oeuvre. I’m talking about Michael Caine, who had this to say about his nonstop career:

First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones. If they don’t come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

I like these quotes because they do two things at once: (1) display good-humored self-awareness; Shatner knows you probably haven’t read the TekWar books or seen The Devil’s Rain, and Caine knows he’s been the best thing in some bad films. (2) They emphasize the idea that you just have to keep on working. Despite their long careers, Shatner and Caine apparently don’t see their work as a chore. They keep at it.

When I read the Shatner quote to my Hoover’s colleague Russ Somers, he immediately mentioned the concept of the “overnight success” in music. (Russ used to be has for many years now been a musician.) Generally, so-called overnight successes take 15 years or more to see the light of day. It seems like they come out of nowhere, but in fact they’re able to say exactly what Shatner said:

“I was always working.”

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UPDATE, a bit later Friday morning: After I wrote this post, I came across the New York Times obituary of the great comic actor Harvey Korman, who was one of my favorites when I was a kid. (We watched a lot of “The Carol Burnett Show” chez Walker.)

He left college for service in the U.S. Navy, resuming his studies afterward at the Goodman School of Drama at the Chicago Art Institute. After four years, he decided to try New York.

“For the next 13 years I tried to get on Broadway, on off-Broadway, under or beside Broadway,” he told a reporter in 1971.

He had no luck and had to support himself as a restaurant cashier. Finally, in desperation, he and a friend formed a nightclub comedy act.

“We were fired our first night in a club, between the first and second shows,” he recalled.

After returning to Chicago, Korman decided to try Hollywood, reasoning that “at least I’d feel warm and comfortable while I failed.”

For three years he sold cars and worked as a doorman at a movie theater. Then he landed the job with [Danny] Kaye.

So, a man whom Mel Brooks described as a “dazzling” comic talent took, by my count, more than sixteen years to get his big break. It’s a lesson in persistence.

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* To be entirely accurate, Shatner didn’t write all those books, or at least he didn’t do all the writing on all of those books.

(Image from Wikipedia.)

Category: Entertainment, The working life