Professionals, Rutherford, and Moviemaking

Friday morning, Tucker, Greg (another assistant of his), and I were having hamsteak and eggs for breakfast, as Tucker talked about what it means to be a pro. Here were a couple of his main points, and I’m paraphrasing here:

“Games are won in practice. It’s about doing it when it doesn’t matter–when no one’s watching. Because that’s what makes you great when it does matter. That’s what makes you a pro. There’s a reason Michael Jordan is world-famous and nobody’s ever heard of Earl ‘The Goat’ Manigault, even though he was a better basketball player. Jordan was a pro, and The Goat wasn’t.”

“What’s the difference between the mediocre and great? It’s usually not talent. I’m not the greatest writer or businessman or filmmaker or whatever, but it doesn’t matter because I work the hardest. Let’s say you’re faced with 10 important tasks. A loser will do few or none of them well, an amateur might do 5 or 6 pretty well but do ‘just whatever’ on the rest and let them slide. A pro will step up and hit all 10 out of the park, and then do the same thing with the next 10.”

This reminded me of a scientist I read about in A Short History of Nearly Everything:

For all his success, Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics…he wasn’t even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open-minded. For brilliance he substituted shrewdness and a kind of daring. His mind, in the words of one biographer, was “always operating out towards the frontiers, as far as he could see, and that was a great deal further than most other men.” Confronted with an intractable problem, he was prepared to work at it harder and longer than most people and to be more receptive to unorthodox explanations. His greatest breakthrough came because he was prepared to spend immensely tedious hours sitting at a screen counting alpha particle scintillations, as they were known–the sort of work that would normally have been farmed out.

This rings true in any job, any sport, any pursuit–but as I’ve learned over the past week, especially when making a movie. For instance, I never imagined casting strippers all day would be in any way exhausting. And let’s be clear: I was just a fly on the wall, trying to absorb the interactions and process. I didn’t have to make the precise evaluations of a producer or director or casting director.

Speaking of which, when you think PRODUCER, what do you picture? I bet it’s not prolonged discussion over bathroom fixtures and sofa pillows. Think about how much trouble people have just decorating their house. Now you have to keep the house within the taste of a character, then coordinate it with the character development of others, while making it consistent with the themes and evolution of the entire film. Now multiply this over several locations, many vastly different from one another, and then weave in all the practical considerations of money, time, negotiations, and the logistics of filming.  Everything is nuanced, everything counts, and every aspect of the film can be infinitesimalized as far as the artists want to take their art. But you can only manipulate each of these tiny segments so far, or you’ll warp the aesthetic curve of the film. That’s the producer’s job: to see the atoms and the universe.

Well, good ones anyway. The pros. The rest mail it in. This is mind-boggling to me, because even shitty movies require considerable time and resources to produce. As aggravating as that is, I have to remember that the same rules apply–3 out of 10, 6 out of 10, whatever–it’s just on a mammoth scale.