“BRYAN CRANSTON ON BEING READY FOR LUCK”
by Bryan Cranston
[The following transcript of a “Brief But Spectacular” essay aired on PBS NewsHour on 1 November 2018. The essayist, actor Bryan Cranston (b. 1956), won the 2019 Tony for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play in Network, which opened at the Belasco Theatre on 6 December 2018 for a limited run and closed on 8 June 2019.]
Oscar-nominated actor Bryan Cranston, best known for his role as Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” didn’t get his big break until age 40, when he was cast in the family TV sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle.” Now, he’ll be playing the role of Howard Beale in the upcoming Broadway production of “Network.” He shares his brief but spectacular take on an unusual career trajectory and the role of luck.
Judy Woodruff: Oscar-nominated actor Bryan Cranston is best known for his Emmy-winning role as Walter White in the TV series “Breaking Bad” [AMC; 20 January 2008-29 September 2013].
But, as he explains in tonight’s Brief But Spectacular episode, it took him some luck to get there.
Starting next Saturday [Woodruff probably meant 10 November 2018, the first preview], Cranston will be playing the role of Howard Beale in the Broadway production of “Network,” based on the famous film [MGM; 1976].
Bryan Cranston: The first thing I look for when I read a script is, does the story move me?
What I truly love about this, and when I talk to audiences about anything I have done or any other movie or stage piece, is that the audience is always right. However you felt, however you reacted to something is always right. That’s how you felt.
And it’s remarkable how you can sit next to someone and watch a movie. I could be weeping, and they’re like, eh. It’s like, really? They say, yes, it missed me.
The only failure is if you move an audience to nothing, to boredom. If they are indifferent about what they just experienced, whether it’s a painting or a recital or a singer or a dancer or a play, if they are, I feel nothing throughout, then we failed. Then we failed.
Actors come to town, to New York or Los Angeles or London, and they say, you know, I’m going to give it a shot. I’m going to give it a year and see if I can become successful.
And to those, I want to say, I can save you a year of your time. If you think that this is something that you can carve out some arbitrary amount of time to achieve certain things, this is not for you. This is a lifetime.
When you first start out as an actor, your answer to any question is yes. Do you want to? Yes, I want to do that.
I started out in 1979 doing background work as an extra. Angry mob. Drunken frat boy. Reckless driver. And then, when you first get that break where you actually have a name, Steve, wow, I actually have a name, I’m Steve, you feel like you have progressed to some degree.
There’s no career that has ever been achieved in entertainment — I truly believe this — without a healthy dose of luck. Someone said, OK, kid, I will read your script, or, all right, you want to audition? Come in. Do it right now.
And then you got to be ready. Celebrity is a byproduct of what I do and what I like to do. It’s not what I was after. I was a working actor. Things were fine. I was paying my bills, leading a very middle-class economic life. And then I got a lucky break at age 40 and was cast in “Malcolm in the Middle” [Fox; 9 January 2000-14 May 2006].
At 50, I got an even bigger break when I was cast as Walter White on “Breaking Bad.”
That was my trajectory. It came when it was supposed to come. And that’s the interesting thing about luck. It doesn’t work on your timetable. It works on its own.
My name is Bryan Cranston, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on being an actor.
[The backstory of “Brief But Spectacular,” a weekly series that premièred on NewsHour in 2015, begins with creator Steve Goldbloom, the creator and host of the original comedy news show for PBS, “Everything But the News,” and his longtime producing partner Zach Land-Miller who conduct every interview off-camera and off-screen. (The segments are all two to four minutes long and there are no cutaways to reporters or interjections of questions.)
[Each Thursday, “Brief But Spectacular” introduces NewsHour viewers to original profiles; these short segments feature some of the most original contemporary figures, offering passionate takes on topics they know well. These have included household names like actors Alec Baldwin and Carl Reiner, artist Marina Abramović, and activist Bryan Stevenson.
[Topics have included comedian, writer, and director Jill Soloway (Amazon’s original series Transparent) on gatekeepers in Hollywood, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on police reform in America, Abramović on the art of performance, author Michael Lewis on finding disruptive characters, performers Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on the rise of their hit Comedy Central series Broad City, engineer Jason Dunn on creating the first 3-D printer in space, and many more.]
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“A HUMBLE
OPINION ON DERIVING MOTIVATION FROM FAILURE”
by Elizabeth
McCracken
[Elizabeth McCracken’s essay about failure on “In My Humble Opinion,” from PBS News Hour on 11 March 2019, brought to mind Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” I’ll present another essay on that passage from Beckett’s 1983 story “Worstward Ho” following this NewsHour transcript.]
It irks novelist and professor Elizabeth McCracken [b. 1966] when people say a success has “humbled” them. She argues it’s in fact failure that produces a humbling effect – but also a highly motivating one. McCracken offers her humble opinion on why the best work doesn’t derive from calm equilibrium, but rather from a “well-nourished, very private sense of revenge.”
Judy Woodruff: New Coke, the Fire Phone, big mistakes for Coca-Cola and Amazon, but their CEOs and those of many other companies have worked the concept of failure into their corporate culture.
Letting employees fail is seen as one way of finding the next big thing that works.
Novelist and professor Elizabeth McCracken also sees the value, but in her Humble Opinion, it’s the darker side of failure that ends up pushing you to success.
Elizabeth McCracken: Lately, I have been thinking about failure.
For instance, it’s a pet peeve of mine when people say that an honor has humbled them. It hasn’t. By what definition could that happen? You might mean that you think you should remain humble in the face of an honor. And, sure, why not? But it doesn’t actually humble you.
Failure, on the other hand, tends to humble people, which is right and also good, because only when you fail can you stand up and assess the damage and then, then get really furious, and vow revenge.
I teach creative writing, and I always tell my students that revenge is great motivation. People who are afraid of failure tend to say, I’m harder on myself than anyone else is.
This is never true.
Or else, my problem is that I’m a perfectionist, to which I always say, oh, you don’t like failing in public, unlike the rest of us?
In order to succeed, you have to risk failing. We all know that, but sometimes we forget that failure is actually good for you. Your immune system needs a bit of failure in order to be inoculated against further failure. The antibodies that failure produces are not pretty, but they are motivating, vengeance, hubris.
My most successful students have already failed. Maybe they didn’t get into graduate school the first time. Maybe they were rejected by a bunch of agents. Maybe they started a completely different career because their parents didn’t want them to be writers.
And failure instilled in them a particular feeling, not a commitment to their art or sense of peace about their fate.
“I thought,” one student of mine said just before she sold her novel, “I will show them.”
We often think that the best work comes from a place of equilibrium and support, but the thing is, equilibrium is pretty static, whereas a well-nourished, very private sense of revenge has enough heat and light to power a city, never mind a novel.
It’s almost heartwarming. Sometimes, when you think, I will show them, the them you end up showing is yourself.
Judy Woodruff: Elizabeth McCracken.
[“in My Humble Opinion,” the successor to “Essay” on NewsHour, was a series dedicated to video essays by writers, artists, and thinkers on diverse topics of interest to them. I didn’t find confirmation, but it appears no longer to be a feature of NewsHour; perhaps it’s been subsumed into the segment called “Brief But Spectacular,” to which the first transcript in this post belonged.
[Elizabeth McCracken is an author and is a recipient of the 2002 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Niagara Falls All Over Again. McCracken, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree in English from Boston University, a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, and a Master of Science in Library Science from Drexel University.
[In 2008 and 2009, she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Formerly on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, McCracken holds the James Michener Chair of Fiction of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a 1996 National Book Awards finalist for The Giant’s House, was on the 2014 National Book Awards long list for Thunderstruck & Other Stories, won the 2015 Story Prize for Thunderstruck & Other Stories, and made the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award shortlist for “Hungry.”]
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“’TRY AGAIN. FAIL
AGAIN. FAIL BETTER’: HOW SAMUEL BECKETT
by Colin Marshall
[Because McCracken’s essay “A humble opinion on deriving motivation from failure” reminded me immediately of the quotation from playwright and poet Samuel Beckett (1906-89), "Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” I decided to add a short piece from Open Culture, a website that “scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.” Published on 17 December 2017, the following essay discusses the full meaning of Beckett’s line.]
To what writer, besides Ayn Rand, do the business-minded techies and tech-minded businessmen of 21st-century Silicon Valley look for their inspiration? The name of Samuel Beckett may not, at first, strike you as an obvious answer — unless, of course, you know the origin of the phrase “Fail better.” It appears five times in Beckett’s 1983 story “Worstward Ho,” the first of which goes like this: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The sentiment seems to resonate naturally with the mentality demanded by the world of tech startups, where nearly every venture ends in failure, but failure which may well contain the seeds of future success.
Or rather, the apparent sentiment resonates. “By itself, you can probably understand why this phrase has become a mantra of sorts, especially in the glamorized world of overworked start-up founders hoping against pretty high odds to make it,” writes Books on the Wall‘s Andrea Schlottman.
“We think so, too. That is, until you read the rest of it.” The paragraph immediately following those much-quoted lines runs as follows:
First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.
“Throw up for good” — a rich image, certainly, but perhaps not as likely to get you out there disrupting complacent industries as “Fail better,” which The New Inquiry’s Ned Beauman describes as “experimental literature’s equivalent of that famous Che Guevara photo, flayed completely of meaning and turned into a successful brand with no particular owner. ‘Worstward Ho’ may be a difficult work that resists any stable interpretation, but we can at least be pretty sure that Beckett’s message was a bit darker than ‘Just do your best and everything is sure to work out ok in the end.’
But if Beckett’s words don’t provide quite the cause for optimism we thought they did, the story of his life actually might. “Beckett had already experienced plenty of artistic failure by the time he developed it into a poetics,” writes Chris Power in The Guardian. “No one was willing to publish his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the book of short stories he salvaged from it, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), sold disastrously.” And yet today, even those who’ve never read a page of his work — indeed, those who’ve never even read the “Fail better” quote in full — acknowledge him as one of the 20th century’s greatest literary masters. Still, we have good cause to believe that Beckett himself probably regarded his own work as, to one degree or another, a failure. Those of us who revere it would do well to remember that, and maybe even to draw some inspiration from it.
[Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles (in press) and the video series The City in Cinema.
[I’ve blogged several times on Samuel Beckett, all on his theater. (Many of the posts have been about Waiting for Godot, which readers of Rick On Theater will probably know I think is a masterpiece.) ROT’s Beckett posts are: “History of Waiting For Godot,” 30 March 2009; “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 1 April 2009; “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 3 April 2009; “Is Waiting For Godot Trash?” 17 April 2009; “Waiting for Godot (Gare St. Lazare),”31 October 2015; “Beckett Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby.” 1 May 2016; "‘Beckett by the Madeleine’" by Tom F. Driver, 25 January 2018; and “Waiting For Godot (Druid Theatre Company),” 21 November 2018.]
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