Choose Yourself! (24 page)

Do you know where Allen was sitting when he won an Oscar for
Annie Hall
? In Michael’s Pub in Manhattan, playing his weekly jazz clarinet gig. Why get on a plane (eight hours, door to door), and go to a party where he would feel uncomfortable, to win an award he probably didn’t care much about (although it magnified his prestige in Hollywood, the city that paid his bills)?

In a 1982 interview with the
Washington Post
he said, “I probably would not have watched anyway,” just to see everyone he knows hunched down in the audience waiting for hours to see who would win. Besides, he had “a very nice time” at Michael’s. For Allen, his pleasure came first, rather than the anxious watching and waiting.

Then he went home. He went out the back way of Michael’s to skip all the photographers out front and was home by midnight for his “milk and cookies.” Then, he went to sleep. And TOOK THE PHONE OFF THE HOOK. Who even does that now? In an age where we (or, I should say, “I”) literally sleep with the iPad and phone in bed. He took the phone off the hook on Oscar night and went to sleep. In the morning, he made his coffee and toast, got the
New York Times
, and only then finally opened it up to the entertainment section, where he saw he’d won the Oscar. Amazing. He didn’t even care when no one was looking. It’s in this way that he keeps his productivity (compared with the lack of productivity many of us suffer now because of the constant influx of outside social stimulants) at a very high point.

6. Imperfection.
Allen has said many times that none of his films were exactly what he wanted. That they were constantly imperfect. It’s almost like he’s the imperfect perfectionist. He wants things just right, and he tries very hard to get them that way. But he knows it will never happen.

That said, he doesn’t give up. He said in 1986, “We go out and shoot…again…and again…and again, if necessary. And even at that rate, all the pictures come up imperfect. Even at that meticulous rate of shooting them over and over again, they still come out flawed. None of them is close to being perfect.” Ultimately, he says, all his movies prove to be “great disappointments.”

And yet, knowing that he will always experience the same thing, he goes out, stretches the boundaries of where he’s comfortable in failing, and does it again. And again. Knowing nothing he will do will be the masterpiece he initially conceived.

Nothing comes out exactly how we want it. But we have to learn to roll with it and move to the next work.

7. Confidence.
I watched
Husbands and Wives
the other day. It wasn’t a funny movie. It wasn’t a pretty movie. I watched it with Claudia and by the end we were both thinking, Ugh, I hope that doesn’t happen to us in ten years. The movie itself was jarring. Instead of being shot traditionally it was shot with a hand-held camera. It was edited with lots of jump-cuts, where you’re looking at a character and suddenly she’s an inch over because some small piece of film was cut out. The editing itself became part of the jolting and jarring in the story. It was as if the story was not just being told with the acting and the writing but with the way it was shot and edited.

It reminded me of something Kurt Vonnegut, considered an experimental writer in his own right, once said: “To be experimental, first you have to know how to use all the rules of grammar. You have to be an expert first in tradition.” It also reminds me of Andy Warhol, who was a highly paid, very straightforward, commercial artist, before he went experimental and started the pop art phenomenon.

In a 1994 interview, Allen said about
Husbands and Wives
(note:
Husbands and Wives
was his twentieth movie): “Confidence that comes with experience enables you to do many things that you wouldn’t have done in earlier films. You tend to become bolder…you let your instincts operate more freely and you don’t worry about the niceties.”

In other words: master the form you want to operate in, get experience, be willing to be imperfect, and then develop the confidence to play within that form, to develop your own style. You see this in Kurt Vonnegut, too, as he transformed from the more traditional
Player Piano
in the early ’50s to
Slaughterhouse-Five
in 1969, a novel about World War II that includes aliens who can time travel.

8. Showing up.
As Allen famously stated, 80 percent of success is “showing up.” Nothing more really needs to be added there except it might be changed to “Ninety-nine percent of success for the entrepreneur is showing up.” What do you have to show up for? You have to find the investors, you have to manage development, you have to find the first customers,
You
have to find the buyers. They don’t show up at your door.
You show up
at their door. Otherwise your business will just not work out. Let’s take Microsoft as one example among many. Bill Gates tracked down the guy in New Mexico to build BASIC. Bill Gates put himself in the middle when IBM wanted to license an operating system. He just kept showing up while everyone else was skiing.

9. The medium becomes the message.
I mentioned this in the point above but it deserves further elaboration. The jump-cutting, the handheld camera, every aspect of
Husbands and Wives
became woven in with the story. Allen said, “I wanted it to be more dissonant, because the internal emotional and mental states of the characters are more dissonant. I wanted the audience to feel there was a jagged and nervous feeling.” In this he shows not only his own evolution as a filmmaker but what he’s borrowed from the artists before him—not only Godard and Bergman, who did their own experimentations, but musicians like Profokiev, where the dissonance itself is so tightly wound with the music that it becomes a part of the music, as opposed to just the notes being played. This is underlined at a very high level in Allen’s latest movie,
Midnight in Paris
, when Owen Wilson, the main character, pinpoints the roots of his own art by going back further and further in time.

My takeaway? Study the history of the form you want to master. Study every nuance. If you want to write, read not only all of your contemporaries, but the influences of those contemporaries, and their influences. Additionally, draw inspiration from other art forms. From music, art, and there again, go back to the influences of your inspirations, and go back to their influences, and so on. The facets that resonate with time, even if it’s hundreds of years old, will resonate with your work as well. It’s like a law of the universe.

In today’s day and age, we want to transform decades of work into years or even months. Allen built up his career over five decades and kept at it persistently, even when scandal, or a bad movie, or a bad article, would cast gloom over his entire trajectory. But he shrugged it off.

So what can we learn from Woody Allen?

• Wake up early.
  
• Avoid distractions.
  
• Work three to five hours a day and then enjoy the rest of the day.
  
• Be as perfectionist as you can, knowing that imperfection will still rule.
  
• Have the confidence to be magical and stretch the boundaries of your medium.
  
• Combine the tools of the medium itself with the message you want to convey.
  
• Don’t get stuck in the same rut—move forward, experiment, but with the confidence built up over experience.
  
• Change the rules but learn them first.
  

The same can be said for any successful ChooseYourself-er. Or for people who are successful in any aspect of life. Is Woody Allen a happy man? Who knows? But he’s done what he set out to do. He’s made movies. He’s told stories. He’s lived the dream, even when it bordered on nightmare. We can only be so lucky.

COMPETENCE AND THE BEATLES’ LAST CONCERT

On January 30, 1969 the Beatles hated each other, and they were sick of working on their album
Let It Be
inside of their cramped studios. On a whim, they took all their equipment and moved it five floors up to the roof, in the middle of winter. Then they performed for about a half hour. They had last performed live more than two years earlier. It was their last “concert” ever. They broke up shortly afterward and never performed together again.

I say it was a “concert” because people in the blocks around them quickly began to realize what was happening. People couldn’t believe it. You see office workers climbing out of windows and down ladders to get a better view. Women running up and down the streets to try and see better. An older man with a pipe climbing up a fire escape to stand on a rooftop and watch. After about ten minutes, the streets were crowded with people staring up at the roof of the building where the music was coming from. People on the ground couldn’t see the band but they knew it was them. The effect of the Beatles singing live shut down London for a half hour.

About halfway through, so-called reality started to hit some of the passersby. One guy said, “It’s a bit of an imposition to absolutely disrupt all of the business in this area.” We’ll never know the name of that guy. We’ll never know what he was working on in January 1969 that was so important. Or what any of the “business” in that area was that winter afternoon. But forty-three years later we still watch the video. We still listen to the songs.

A couple of things I find interesting about this video:

A)
The members of the group hated each other. At this point the Beatles were basically over. The album was originally called
Get Back
after one of the songs in it. But they couldn’t “get back” together and ultimately it was called
Let It Be
. It was their last released album. You can blame it on anything: Yoko, Linda, creative conflicts, Phil Spector, Brian Epstein’s death, on and on. But whatever the real “reason(s),” they hated each other despite the mega success they had created together.

B)
You can see on their faces as they get to the roof: they were never going to perform again. Ringo looks sad. George Harrison looks particularly upset. In fact, a few weeks earlier he and John Lennon had gotten into a fistfight and Harrison had run out and said he was “quitting.” “See you in the clubs,” he said as he left. The band debated replacing him with Eric Clapton but Harrison came back. McCartney had the wherewithal to say that the Beatles wouldn’t be the Beatles without the four members.

C)
Harrison hated the fact that Lennon was growing more and more detached from the band and doing his own thing. Lennon hated Harrison’s and McCartney’s music writing. (Lennon, after the album came out, said of “The Long and Winding Road” and producer Phil Spector’s treatment of it: “He was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever, and he made something of it.”) In other words, they hated each other. And they didn’t hold back. They just simply did not want to work with each other anymore despite the years of creative and financial success. George Harrison joined the Beatles when he was fourteen years old. They had grown up together.

D)
The second song they sing in the video, “Don’t Let Me Down,” is poignant. It was originally written by John Lennon for Yoko. Despite his success, Lennon was terrified of being let down by Yoko. Despite our attempts to climb away from the worst fears of our childhood, success only magnifies those fears. We’re like birds trying to climb a tree to reach for the freedom of the blue sky. Only when we learn how to fly can we truly be free. For Lennon, being let down as a kid or young adult exploded into a plea not only to one woman but to millions of eventual listeners.

It feels like he’s not just singing it to her. He’s singing it to the Beatles, who he felt let down by. He’s singing it out there to the air, to the blocks of people staring out their windows at him. He’s singing to London. He’s pleading to his future, where he would be creatively on his own—“Don’t Let Me Down.” And, prophetically, the world let him down in the worst way on December 8, 1980. The song never made it to the final, released album. I like the original shot in the video, of Lennon and McCartney singing it together, with Ringo in the middle in the background. The three were barely speaking to each other at that point. They had all let each other down. And yet that wouldn’t prevent them from creating beautiful music.

E)
Competence. Despite all the troubles. Despite their contempt for each other’s musical abilities. Despite the fragmented legal and emotional fallouts that were quickly cascading them toward the band’s demise, they went up on that stage and PERFORMED. I’ve listened to the video a hundred times. Paul opens his mouth and the music begins and doesn’t stop for twenty minutes. It’s beautiful. Competent people move forward and do what they do. I hope in my life I can be as good at any one thing as the four of them were at what they did that day, but I doubt it will happen.

And finally, “beginner’s mind.”

At the end of the video, with the police now getting into the action and telling them to shut it down because of noise complaints, they finish with the song “Get Back” again. Paul McCartney riffs in the middle of the song, “You’ve been playing on the roofs again, and you know your Momma doesn’t like it, she’s gonna have you arrested!”

And when they finally put their instruments down, John Lennon only half sarcastically says (the last line the Beatles ever say to an audience), “On behalf of the group and ourselves, I hope we pass the audition.”

A creator can’t ever rest. No matter what you do, no matter what your creation is. Every moment is the audition. Every time you create is a chance to go on the roof and do something new, in a way that hasn’t been done before, in a way that is potentially disruptive, playful, unique, and vulnerable. People will hate you, people will love you, people will climb on the rooftops to see you before the police arrest you. The Beatles passed the audition that one last time. Now it’s our turn.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE REJECTED

Everyone around the table had been brutally rejected hundreds of times. I was at a dinner with a bunch of authors who had gone the self-publishing route via Amazon. All of them had chosen themselves. And all of them, except for me, were fiction writers who had sold more than one hundred thousand copies or more of their various novels. The guy sitting across from me had just sold the movie rights to his latest science fiction series. Another woman was working on the sequel to her “young adult paranormal” series. Another guy had sold more than five hundred thousand copies of his various thrillers. The guy sitting next to me had been very successful at his “children’s chapter books” series,
Sweet Farts
.