It's 9AM
Bing Russell might be my new hero.
He’s Kurt Russel’s dad, an actor in his own right, and a big fan of baseball.
If you have Netflix, you can see a story about him in a documentary called, The Battered Bastards of Baseball.
He had the only independent baseball team in the league at the time, and it’s pretty good watching, even if you don’t like America’s sport.
You’ll walk away with a very “Screw corporate world” and Bad News Bears type attitude.
Which I think we’ve done a good job of squashing.
One of my favorite parts?
He’s giving interviews to local TV stations and drinking beer as he does it.
He was an actor before he became a team owner.
Did thirteen years as the Sheriff on Bonanza.
Was killed in over a hundred cowboy flicks.
Even spent some time with the Yankees when he was a kid when they did spring training down in Florida.
A very interesting cat, and he loved baseball.
I don’t love it quite that much. I love the attitude more than anything.
I got a new book this week, called SKIP THE LINE.
If you heard about the 10,000 hour rule, this replaces it with the 10,000 experiment rule.
I’ll give you an update next week, but the first few chapters got me to thinking about my time pitching scripts to Hollywood.
I lived in a three bedroom house a few blocks from the beach with a couple of other roommates
My brother and two of his friends. They were all actors, going to auditions, working on plays, trying to get a break into the tv and movie business.
I was aspiring to write and direct.
There were rules on how to make it.
Get past the gatekeepers.
I went on a job interview. I can’t remember what show it was for, but it was working with the writing staff.
I knew the guy doing the interview and he offered me a job.
As a writing assistant. I thought I had made it.
But the job was running errands for the writer’s.
I told him I thought I’d be working on scripts. He said no one starts out like that.
Maybe I could bang out a script in my spare time for the show, and one of the writers might help me make it better.
And could I go make a run to Starbucks.
I didn’t last long. The writer’s weren’t that good or talented. They had just put in their time and did the grunt work, and were making their way up the ladder.
In five years, they might have a few scripts on air. If the show lasted that long.
It was crazy.
I didn’t want to wait.
I worked at a five star sports facility from 4 am to 11 am a few days a week.
Met a lot of producers, some stars and a lot of Playboy bunnies and LA Lakers, who had free memberships.
I got to work out, and use the facilities after. Which gave me an interesting story on how Fast and Furious got approved and made.
Plus introductions to some folks.
One time, a tall curly haired guy from Mexico came in with a friend. He was a Mexican telanovella star, who I didn’t know, but whose name could elicit squeals from our mostly Latin housekeeping staff.
I let his friend in free, which was against’ policy, but I thought was good customer service.
A day or so later, Eduardo came into the sauna while I was taking a sweat.
He asked me what I wanted to do in LA, and I told him, then turned it around and asked what he wanted to do.
He regaled me with his vision, and I asked a lot of questions before I got out to cool off.
On the way out of the locker room, he asked for a finished script of mine, just to read it.
Three days later, we sat down with his lawyers and he hired me to write for him.
No gatekeepers. Just a couple of guys in towels, sweating it out.
One of them talking about a huge English language studio making films and TV in Spanglish.
I worked for him for a few years, and met a few people, and his company got bought out by Univision or Telemundo, and I didn’t go with them.
I did have some connections though, and a plan. I was on the inside now.
Then 9/11 happened.
The world changed, and so did mine.
Which brought me on a winding path to here, now today.
Talking about the bastards of baseball to you, and telling you how I ignored the publishing gatekeepers thanks to a platform a guy built in the mid 2000’s to get a few books to you.
It is an amazing world we live in. I wish there were three of me.
Because if I wanted to switch businesses now, I’d be in TX starting a back up generator company and/or a solar power company.
I’d be researching micro-solar farms, and how many watts a rooftop solar system would generate.
And I’d be funding some films made in Austin, with it’s dearth of creative talent, connecting them to some people I knew once in LA, and building a studio to sell off to a larger fish.
But I have a book to finish, so I’m spending time with that today.
I want to send you some encouragement too.
When someone tells you no, just smile and nod and know they’re lying to you.
I spent some time thinking about different things I would do, and things I would do different, and I think a person who is motivated can really do just about anything they want to do in this world.
Don’t know how to do something? Hire it out. BE the one in charge of the team making it happen.
Advice I need to take myself. Hiring German and French translators for the books I have.
Hiring narrators to do the audio, just like I hire artists to do the covers.
Getting books into the hands of studio people to read.
You can skip the gatekeepers and the folks who say it has to be done a certain way.
You should be the Bad News Bears of whatever the hell you want to do. I bet you can do it.
And when I see you being interviewed on TV, tip your beer bottle toward the camera as a sort of secret toast to me. I’ll know what you mean.
Go have a great weekend.
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