It’s easy, when you’re starting an entrepreneurial venture, or trying to carve your own unique creative career out of an unforgiving landscape, to stress about each lost opportunity and worry or despair about how long the road stretches out without a breakthrough or “success.”
But in doing interviews for a review of the George Lucas film Red Tails, which came out in theaters last week, I got a sharp reality check from two men whom most would deem very “successful.” Their stories gave me some valuable perspective on my–or anyone else’s–expectations, when it comes to passion-inspired projects we choose to pursue.
In or around 1952, a Tuskeegee Airman by the name of Robert Williams wrote down his recollections of his time as a Tuskeegee Airman (the group of African-American pilots trained as an “experiment” in World War II, to see if “Negros” could, indeed, do something as challenging as flying an airplane–and who ended up being some of the most sought-after and successful bomber escort pilots of the War) intending to turn them into either a book or a movie. He wrote a screenplay based on his and his colleagues’ experiences and started pitching it to people, trying to get support for the project.
The Tuskeegee Airmen’s story was, it seemed, a natural sell–underdogs who became heroes–but Williams found it very difficult to get anyone interested in his project. Over the years, he re-wrote and re-wrote the screenplay, trying to make it better, and more likely to get support. In the mid-1980s, Columbia Pictures finally said they wanted to produce the movie … until they were bought by Sony, which killed the project’s funding. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that HBO finally agreed to produce the screenplay as a made-for-television movie, with a tiny budget (although huge for a TV movie) of around $8 million. The Tuskeegee Airmen, starring Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding, John Lithgow and Malcolm Jamal Warner, finally aired in 1995–43 years after Williams began working on the project.
A decade before HBO released The Tuskeegee Airmen, filmmaker George Lucas (creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones mega-success movie franchises) came across the Tuskeegee Airmen story and decided he’d like to do a movie about it. He even had the ability to self-finance initial production of a movie that he hoped would be the greatest World War II movie ever made. He had a name, resources, and a track record of astounding successes. And yet, he could not find a single taker to back or distribute the movie.
As Lucas told host Jon Stewart on The Daily Show shortly before the film was released, Red Tails doesn’t have any significant “white” characters in it, and the budget for the movie ($58 million) was far more than Hollywood had spent on any “black” movie. The studios, he said, didn’t think a movie about black pilots would gross enough money to make the investment worthwhile, especially since they didn’t believe it had much of foreign market potential, even with George Lucas’s name on it.
In the end, it took George Lucas 23 YEARS or persistent effort, with lord knows how many rejections, to get the movie finished and released. And yet, here it is, hitting the big screen at last. [click to continue…]
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