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George Lucas
Creator of "Star Wars"
Film is not an easy occupation. There's a lot of occupations that are difficult. Film is one of them. There's always adversity that you're faced with. I like to tell students that I talk to that, you know, it's not a matter of how well can you make a movie. It's how well can you make it under the circumstance, because there's always circumstances. You cannot use that as an excuse. You can't put a title card at the head of the movie and say, "Well, we really had a bad problem. You know, the actor got sick and it rained this day and we had a hurricane." And you know, you can't -- the cameras broke down -- you can't do that. You simply have to show them the movie and it has got to work and there are no excuses. And so, you really have to focus on what you're doing and just plow ahead no matter what hurdles are thrown in front of you.
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George Lucas
Creator of "Star Wars"
George Lucas: I had a very, very difficult time my first two pictures. And when I started working on Star Wars, my second film, American Graffiti, had not come out yet. So, in the beginning it wasn't something anybody was interested in and I had taken it to a couple of studios and they had turned it down. And then one studio executive saw American Graffiti and loved it, and I took him the proposal. He said, "You know, I don't understand this, but I think you're a great film maker and I'm going to invest in you. I'm not going to invest in this project." And that's really how it got made.
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George Lucas
Creator of "Star Wars"
American Graffiti was really my first attempt at doing something mainstream, so to speak, and even it was so -- one, it was in a genre that was looked down upon but I loved when I was a kid. It was about my life as I grew up, so I cared about it a lot. And then on top of it, it was in a style that was different from what everybody was used to. It was intercutting four stories that didn't relate to each other, which nobody had really done before. Now it's sort of the standard fare for television. And it had music all the way through it; not just the score but actual songs from the period, and that is something that nobody had done before. And they just sort of described it as a musical montage with no characters and no story, and so it was very, very hard to get that off the ground, and on top of that it was a B movie. I almost got it set up at American International Pictures, where they liked doing those kinds of movies but it was too strange for them in terms of the style. And Star Wars was kind of the same situation where it was a genre they weren't that interested in. Science fiction was not something that did well at the box office. It dealt with robots and Wookies and things that -- generally most people -- they couldn't read it and say, "I understand what this is all about." They just were completely confused by it. And really on top of that, it was aimed at being a film for young people, and most of the studios said, "Look, that's Disney's. Disney does that. The rest of us can't do that, so we don't want to get into that area." So I had so many strikes against me when I did that. I was lucky that I found a studio executive that just believed in me as a film maker and just disregarded the material itself.
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Paul MacCready
Engineer of the Century
For a while he was down really just six inches above the water, and the changing winds and somehow he struggled along as his left leg cramped from the dehydration. He pedaled mostly with his right. Then his right leg would cramp, and he would pedal mostly with his left. Towards the end both legs were cramped, but he somehow got that last little bit. And there was extra turbulence that was almost beyond the capability of the plane to handle its controls, just in that last bit, 50 meters off shore. But finally he made it, and it was almost a three-hour flight. Beyond all odds, just impossible for human stamina to have kept going that long, but he did.
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Norman Mailer
Two Pulitzer Prizes
One of the greatest difficulties in writing, and it's built into it, is that on the one hand you have to be very sensitive to be a writer. Sensitive in some special way. At the other end, you have to be tough enough to take the criticism and the rejection. Now compared to being an actor it's much easier to be a writer because actors encounter face-to-face rejection over and over and over in auditions, but a writer can live at certain distance from the rejection. But nonetheless, once you get published it is one thing, maybe just a short story and nobody ever reviews it. Once you write a novel and it gets published -- the first novel -- you can't believe how furious you get at reviews. I remember with The Naked and the Dead, which got very, very good reviews, I couldn't forgive the people who gave it bad reviews. I wanted to find them and argue with them, and if it came to it, punch them out if I could. I just hated reviewers. To this day they're not my favorite people because I've always felt it's too easy. You know, it's so easy to be a reviewer and put something down. And, many reviewers have motivations that, to put the nicest word on it, they're ugly. So, in that sense, one of the things you have to learn is to be able to take a punch without punching back, and that's very hard for writers, very hard.
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Norman Mailer
Two Pulitzer Prizes
Norman Mailer: With those bad reviews of my second and third book, I learned the way a young professional fighter would learn that they can take a beating. They can take a bad beating, and they're not ready to quit the ring, and that does give you a fine strength. It also takes something off you forever. I mean, to write a book, a good novel that you care about, and you put a lot into for a couple of years, and then get very bad reviews, takes something out of you forever. If nothing else, it takes away from you a certain large love of humanity that you might have had. Your love of humanity is somewhat smaller. That is part of -- every professional in every trade or discipline goes through that. As professionals, they harden up. It's why they're professionals and not amateurs. Amateurs are still full of love. That's the meaning of the word. A professional is someone who measures the cost of every achievement and decides whether that achievement is worth the effort -- and sometimes the killing effort -- that will go into it. And so for that reason, if you're going to keep at one trade all your life, as I have, you truly do well to become a professional, because it enables you to take the bumps.
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