Some Perspective on Perseverance

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.
I’m not sure whether these stories offer encouraging or discouraging news for anyone trying to bring a project, idea, product, or change into the world. Kind of depends on how you choose to view it. You can either see it as, it took these men 23 and 43 years, respectively, to get their projects successfully launched into the world, and one of them was already an industry icon … or you can look at it as evidence that sometimes, even something that meets failure over and over, for DECADES, can triumph in the end. Glass half full, or half empty. Take your pick.
But in any case, it underscores just how difficult bringing something new into the world can be. Even if it’s inherently a good idea, and one your whole heart, soul, and passion is behind. To my way of thinking, it’s also a reminder that life is a marathon, not a sprint. And one lost opportunity, or delay, or unavoidable turn onto a side path for a while, does not mean that the dream you once had is lost. Because if these movies could find success after 23 and 43 years of effort … it means none of us should despair if things don’t work out the way we want, as fast as we might like them to work out. There’s hope–as long as hope is not your only strategy, of course. I guarantee neither of these movies would have seen the light of day if Williams and Lucas hadn’t kept working on them, even if they had to put them aside at times, and even if the road seemed endless and their spirits lagged more often in those years than they’d care to remember.
That’s also why passion is so important for new or creative ventures (or for changing anything in the world at all). Because their unshakable passion for, and belief in, their projects, is what made Williams and Lucas unwilling to give up, no matter how long and steep the road ahead loomed, and no matter how many rejections they had to push through. Their belief in the importance of telling the Tuskeegee Airmen’s story (not just telling a story they could make money at, but that particular story) is what kept them going. In other words … just as a vision of what could be, and a belief in the importance of that vision, is what sparks the flame of passion, a deep and abiding passion is, in turn, is what fuels the long-burning embers of endurance and perseverance. And it’s those embers, more than any fast-burning flame, that really gives those dreams and visions a chance of coming true.