It's 9AM

Do You Wanna Break Some Rules?

May 30, 2023

It was called the Green Flash Bar and we spent some sunsets searching for the legend.

Facing west across a stretch of sand, staring at the horizon.

Gray water tugging and pulling at the shore.

Lovers cuddled on the beach, hoping that the big orange ball dipping into the water would ignite something between them.

Or reignite.

This was pre-selfie, pre-smart-phone so at least there were no influencers holding up hands in the shape of hearts around the sun.

Just me and a couple of buddies scraping up dollar bills to share a pitcher and a little hope.

How did the legend go?

Catch the green light and you get a wish?

Or is it your wish will come true?

We shared stories while we shared cold ones.

The couple of buddies were all budding actors.

At the time, you would have seen them in Olive Garden commercials and as extras in big blockbuster movies, but the roles were far between.

They catered and tended bar and told tales about their next big auditions while we sat among other aspirants.

Aspiring writers. Aspiring directors. Aspiring producers.

And of course, actors.

It was LA after all.

Not Lower Arkansas, Los Angeles.

And if ever there was a town built on a wish, it was it.

I wonder now why anyone would go.

My filmmaking heroes did it in their backyard.

Robert Rodriguez filmed an action movie running back and forth across the border from Texas to Mexico.

Kevin Smith got his friends together in the store where he worked after closing time.

And the birth of the digital revolution meant an entire movement out of Europe where people were filming entire indie films in their living rooms and getting standing ovations at screenings.

Anyone with a smartphone now can do what they did.

Ten times better.

It just takes hustle.

And hustle is hard.

Hustle is the toughest part.

Anyone who has had success says the grind is the best part, because of how much it makes you appreciate success once you reach it.

But the Grind is also the part that is hardest for people to understand.

That gets to the why.

Why do the hard stuff?

That’s the part people who aren’t in it complain about.

Why are you doing that?

What is it going to accomplish?

Why haven’t you made it yet?

Why is it taking so long?

All the voices around you echoing doubts you may hold in your head.

And the biggest voice you need to hear is the one asking one simple question.

What’s it going to take?

Is it long hours? More learning? More training?

Is it finding the right group of people to share a beer and ideas with?

Is it just creating luck?

If so, how?

Every morning, those buddies of mine would get a fax.

We couldn’t get on the phone from 8:30 am – 9:15 am because dailies would go out.

This was a list of auditions they could submit for, or sometimes even crash.

A list of what casting directors were looking to find.

Male, mid-20’s, athletic, greaser attitude. Must be 5’8” or close. Bring two monologues and change of outfit, business suit and jeans.

Or something along those lines.

An assistant somewhere started a black market network because this list of dailies was only supposed to go to agents.

Yet every actor I knew, knew somebody and shelled out twenty bucks to get that fax broadcast every day.

An unwritten rule of the movie biz game was ignore all the rules.

Which someone reminded me of recently.

Life and work and love and everything has an entire set of rules about the who, what, why and how things are supposed to be done.

Except most of the big success stories involve breaking the rules.

Like the big indie wave of movies made at home went against all the rules of how to get into the movie business.

And every actor I was hoisting a pint with tried to break the rules every day to get noticed and their foot in the door.

I like hearing and reading about the mavericks who broke business rules to start their own success stories.

The thing is we marvel at them, even as we follow most of the rules.

Their stories inspire us, or motivate us, and yet…

Rules persist.

Norms exist.

I know it’s for a reason.

To avoid the chaos of everybody doing their own thing and disrupting the flow of the world.

Even if sometimes the flow needs disrupting.

Which is why the rule breakers end up being the stories we talk about the most.

With or without cold ones.

What “rule” do you wish you would have ignored the most?

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