Go Big or Go Bust: On Pitching and the Burning Question: Do You Have to be Cool to Pitch Successfully? (Part 2 with Brené Brown)

(This post is a continuation of Wednesday’s. The first paragraph is repeated from that last post.)

I spent the rest of the next six years trying to become the most popular girl in the school. I’m not sure if my classmates would agree that I succeeded but I did get elected to a lot of positions. And I felt popular! Hey so what if I barely graduated?

The bad news is, appearing ‘cool’ (at least to myself) didn’t solve anything. If you scratched the surface, I was still as insecure as ever. And so this need to be ‘popular’ followed me to college where, even I could see that I wasn’t going to have the time or the energy to win over enough people to make a dent.

So like water changing its shape to get around a rock, I changed mine. I took on a whole new goal and identity and lived (with some righteousness) as an unknown, outsider ‘real’ artist. Hey, it’s cooler, actually, to be under the radar than to be mainstream. I majored in art history and could even give you a few examples.

This was all well and good … until I wanted to make a second feature film. You can get away with making a no-budget feature when you’re willing to live and work like a guerrilla film maker. With a baby, there was no way I could pull that off. But to get financing from the powers that be in Hollywood, you have to ‘know people’ or put time and energy into meeting them. And for that, your personal cool has to be tested by jumping through some pretty extreme hoops.  

One of the great benefits of aging is tied to the great downside of aging: you realize you’ve only got so much more time and if you don’t get it now, you might just never get it. This awareness brought me squarely face to face with the fact that I didn’t have the courage (or the finances) to take on Hollywood in the way I would have to to get financing. Pitch meetings require a) relationships b) proximity to LA and c) more cool and courage than I had.

This is why I ended up making The Louise Log. Because I could. A one-hour tape cost $3 and I could do all the jobs (except acting) myself. I didn’t have to pitch or deal with anybody. I didn’t have to be cool. All I had to do was convince one person (eventually more) to do something on camera. In this case it was to convince Christine Cook to go to the farmers market, buy some vegetables and sit in a cafe. I immediately put myself on a schedule of cranking out an episode every month which ratcheted up the pressure and turned The Louise Log into the equivalent of intensive psychodrama therap. I was going to have to work out my issues.  

Asking asking ASKING for help, for favors, for more help and more favors and then running out of subject matter and having to resort to … taking lines right from my journals?!!  I was working at least 12, often 19 hour days and even with my ox-like strength and stamina, the experience pretty much broke me-- in a good way. It forced me to face and reveal a lot of stuff I’ve always kept well-hidden. Who knew that this stuff was the material of my life’s work? Listening to Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection this past week, I’m realizing that a lot of us are ashamed of who we are and that it’s in talking about it that we accept and get over it. And, as everybody knows, self-acceptance is the basis of true cool. Some people are lucky and are born into circumstances which instill them with a sense of their basic worth and worthiness. And then there are the rest of us.

I can’t say that I feel like I’m ‘cool’ today, but in fact, at my age, the expectations are a little different. I’m operating from a basic acceptance that I’m not cool and so what. And I’m determined to do what’s necessary to get into the rooms to pitch. I have The Louise Log as proof of concept and you as proof of an audience. And as my friend and colleague Jessica Arinella pointed out, it might not be that hard, the right people may appear, the right opportunity may just show up. In a nutshell that's how things worked with The Louise Log -- meeting Victoria Trestrail and Mathilde Dratwa on LinkedIn, Julie Clark Shubert on facebook. What's the likelihood of that??

I’ll keep you posted as I start taking the steps toward pitching our fake reality series to television.  Stay tuned…

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Go Big or Go Bust: Day 216 (on panic, pain, and Stephen Colbert's life raft of acceptance)

I'm fortunate to have never had to battle depression.  In fact, I've hardly ever been depressed.  But today it's been in a downhill slide since before hauling myself out of bed.  I'd like to think this mood was caused by the second half of that hummus sandwich on the way home from the rodeo --or the barely five hours of sleep.  So I fought it off but it came back.  Again.  And again and again. 

I was starting to fear that the underlying panic (that I'm blowing it, that I'm blowing everything) has solidified into the new me.  

Here I thought it was good to have hopes and dreams (especially supported by astrological forecasts) that the whole 'vision board' thing was a healthy discipline.  Too bad, with my willfulness, it all turns into torture. 

So, not liking pain, I've been scouring for help.  "Plans but no expectations" says John M. Carroll, the (biblical era-type) healer who works with visualization and has helped me and thousands of others with conditions and/or diseases which sometimes (apparently) spring from inner turmoil.  "Forgiveness, no judgment or feeling slighted".  I'm sure he's right, but today I'm not hearing it.

Luckily, Jessica Arinella sent me a cover story on Stephen Colbert which is saving my life.  In the last third of the article, Colbert talks about suffering, about loving your failures and about the importance of accepting them.  "Acceptance is not defeat.  Acceptance is just awareness."  Whattt. 

Many years ago, I had a mentor in a successful artist.  He used to talk about the precious state of feeling completely defeated, that in that moment, your skin is "stretching".  I would think but not dare to say, "Easy for you to say, you with your museum retrospectives and your big career." 

Today his words came back to me with force after reading Colbert's words.  Combined with my late mentor's image of the stretching skin, an action-step came clear: I relaxed into the horrible feeling of my skin 'stretching' and, in an instant, the panic and the pain lifted.  Poof.  GONE.  It was just like the shift of hunching my shoulders and tensing every muscle to not feel a blast of arctic wind vs. relaxing and experiencing the cold as just another feeling.  Once the resistance is removed, it's a state without a positive or a negative charge, like a color.