Breaking in

 

Billy Oppenheimer

@bpoppenheimer

As he was struggling to break into Hollywood, Matt Damon read about how Quentin Tarantino did it: Essentially, he got a big-name actor (Harvey Keitel) to want to star in Tarantino’s first movie (Reservoir Dogs) then leveraged that to get the movie funded. “And so,” Damon said, “We wrote ‘Good Will Hunting’ and that part that Robin [Williams] eventually took—we called it ‘the Harvey Keitel part.’” “Ben [Affleck] and I wrote the movie specifically because we wanted the parts as actors…But we knew [we needed] a big-name actor who could get us some money because Ben and I were worth nothing. And so we wrote ‘the Harvey Keitel part’ really open-ended. So we could adjust it: if Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington wanted to come in and play it—we could make that character from Roxbury [a neighborhood in Boston], and we could explore the historic racial tension in Boston. If Meryl Streep took the part—instead of a father-son relationship, we could make it a mother-son relationship. So we really left it open-ended because we wanted to cast as wide a net as possible because we were just trying to get the movie made.” “And then once we got Robin to sign up to do it, that’s really what got us a green light to make it…He changed our lives.” Takeaway 1: In one of my favorite talks, "Runnin' Down A Dream," the venture capitalist Bill Gurley explains that while studying the career trajectories of three of his heroes—the restauranteur Danny Meyer, the coach Bobby Knight, and the musician Bob Dylan—he noticed a pattern: They studied the career trajectories of the icons in their respective industries. Like Damon, they studied how others successfully got their foot in the door then climbed to top of their profession. And then, they took similar steps towards doing the same. Coincidentally, Tarantino did this too. He made scrap books for each of his favorite filmmakers: Brian De Palma, Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk, and Martin Scorsese. "I was like a film historian," Tarantino said. "I was obsessed with studying how they did it, the evolution of their careers." "Greatness isn't random," as Gurley puts it. Instead, it's usually a predictable step along a studied path of strategically modified emulation and, of course, determination. Takeaway 2: In the clip above, Damon goes on to explain that, not only did Robin Williams sign on to be in "Good Will Hunting," he also went off script and improvised one of the most iconic lines ("Son of a bitch, he stole my line") in the movie. It reminded me of something Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull writes in his book, Creativity. Inc.: "Getting the right people is more important than getting the right idea…If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better." - - - “Bob Dylan said, 'I'm a musical expeditionary.' I looked up 'expeditionary'—it's to travel for scientific research or exploration. And that's what Dylan did...For hours upon hours upon hours, he studied what other artists did. He was a mimic. He was studying, studying, studying.” — Bill Gurley