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"It's not WHAT you know... It's WHO you know." I've heard that statement. Heck, I've SAID that statement, and it keeps becoming abundantly clear.
I watched the American Movie Classic's "BACKSTORY" they did on the film "There's Something About Mary" and the screenplay was the first script these writers had written. When I heard that I smacked myself upside the head. FIRST SCRIPT! Ahh, but then the truth came out. It had been optioned by "Interscope" and sat in turn-around for 10 years. How did it finally get made? A good friend of theirs, an actor in the business, trying to make the move to Producer, got the rights to the script and pitched the idea while sharing a chair-lift at Sundance.
Sam Raimi, director of the blockbuster hit: "SPIDERMAN" used to make low-budget films. "Evil Dead" he made over a time span of a number of weekends. One of the people who worked on the film? Joel Cohen of the Cohen brothers. As their career took off, they involved Sam in the making of their films, even hiring him as an actor.
Connections and relationships. It's a common thread.
Do you have those connections? Have you formed those relationships? If not, can you?
Six degrees of separation. If that is true, any one of is six degrees separated from Steven Spielberg or Tom Cruise. Heck, I'm ONE degree separated from those two. I wrote a screenplay once optioned by Ron Schusett who is currently working with Spielberg and Cruise on "Minority Report". Now, Ron probably doesn't remember me from the guy who bagged his groceries last week, mainly because I never fostered that relationship. I never pursued a working relationship or even a friendship with him. To me he was a business man and that was that.
Don't make those mistakes. Foster those relationships. Create those friendships. Make sacrifices to help them and they will, in turn, help you.
DON'T GET ME WRONG! I'm not talking about some "kiss their behind until you make it and then ignore them" type of relationship. I'm talking about real sacrifice. Real help. Real understanding. It is in being REAL and offering REAL help that foster REAL relationships.
You never know when your next door neighbor, who you ignored as he tried to fix a flat on his '78 AMC Hornet, is going to get a three-picture deal at Paramount.
Hollywood relationships: It's a common thread.
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