How-To H’wood: Take Credit and Avoid Blame
9 easy steps in a town where success has many parents, failure is an orphan and someone always takes the fall
Welcome back to How-To Hollywood, an ongoing series where I solve the great issues surrounding the most labyrinthine and treacherous of industries. Previous how-tos include how to pitch a film, survive on location, ask a favor and make a friend.
Of all the skills we’ve gone over in our How-To Hollywood guides, none is more important to your survival and growth than the ability to claim credit for success and, even more importantly, to avoid blame in failure.
The problem is that it’s rare for a project’s fate to be pinned on one person’s work, especially if that person's heroic intervention came from the safety of a corporate desk. First of all, there are those pesky writers, directors and actors who are always flitting about claiming they had anything to do with a film. Then there are the thousands of people who worked on the production, dozens of whom may be eligible for awards for it, while the brave executives are offered no trophies for their work.
Even in the executive suites, a film project can wind its way through multiple regimes over years or decades (just ask Wicked producer Marc Platt, who spent 20 years trying to get the blockbuster musical off the ground). The stories of the one executive who intervenes to save a film project no one believes in are the basis of Hollywood legend, but in today’s studios, where armies have to be mobilized for a film over a long period across many departments, big swings tend to be the products of bureaucratic consensus rather than brave, lone-hero interventions.
It takes a village to make a movie — a very large village. But what’s a village going to do with that credit? If you’re going to move forward in this world, your progress depends on making it clear to the world that while the village was certainly there, God bless ‘em, without your bold initiative, none of this would have happened.
So here are the basic tips for the greatest skill in all Hollywood: How to take credit and avoid blame in nine easy steps that follow the production of any filmed project from start to finish:
Step 1: Leave No Fingerprints
If things were just as simple as making good choices and accepting responsibility when you don’t, then everybody would win in Hollywood. Credit and blame are fluid forces in this business, and with other ruthless players around you, both will be wielded as weapons entirely separate from what “actually happened.”
Someday, in a better world, our all-seeing creator will give us exactly what we deserve. Here on earth — who knows what anyone actually said and how forcefully they said it in one of a million meetings six years ago?
If you enter the arena, you need maximum room to maneuver. Which means don’t get ahead of yourself and make it clear to the entire world where you stand on a project before you know how it turns out. If you backed something that turns out well, there will be plenty of time later to grab your share. But if you’ve claimed high and low that a film wouldn’t be here without you, and it doesn’t go well — these things happen — then you’ve made your bed. (Anyone remember David Zaslav’s countless pre-release exhortations over The Flash?)
Being in this business requires making bets, but you don’t have to put all your chips on every one. Do you want to stake your entire career on the chemistry between two stars, the director’s ability to land a joke and the marketing finding just the right pitch to get people out of their homes? Or maybe somebody else’s film from the previous weekend explodes and buries everything in its wake.
These things happen. But you don’t have to live holding your breath about any of them.
Make decisions and take actions if you must, but for God’s sake, be quiet about them. Only a few people are in a meeting, and years from now, nobody’s going to remember what anyone said anyway — especially if it’s said quietly and quickly and you don’t go around reminding the world what it was for years after.
If no one can remember what exactly you were for, no one can pin it on you, and your life is an empty page that no one but you can write on.
