Creative people in Hollywood

Creative people in Hollywood

Excerpt from Shrink Rap Radio podcast transcript -
David Van Nuys, Ph.D. interviews
psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo, M.A., MFT

Dennis Palumbo is a writer and licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues. He’s the author of Writing from the Inside Out as well as a new collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime.

Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter, his credits include the feature film, My Favorite Year, for which he was nominated for a WGA award for Best Screenplay. He was also a staff writer for the ABC-TV series, Welcome Back, Kotter, and has written numerous series episodes, and pilots.

His column, “The Writer’s Life,” appeared monthly for six years in Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild of America. Currently, he is a contributing writer to The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, and does commentary for NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

30 Rock Dr. Dave: What are the challenges of working with creative people in Hollywood?

Palumbo: Well, there are many, many challenges.

I think unlike most people, my patients do work that is perceived and seen and marketed to the public at large.

Their work is critiqued, reviewed; people go to see it in droves or stay away in droves, you know.

So their successes and failures, both personal and professional, are played out on a more public stage, which sort of intensifies the heat.. of what they’re going through.

If you are a very successful film director, and your son or daughter is bulimic or having substance problems or gets a DUI, that’s a very different experience than if you’re a bricklayer in Dayton, Ohio, and your son or daughter gets a DUI.

It’s not in the newspaper; it’s not in the tabloids.

So there’s that huge public focus.

And secondarily, to be honest with you, I think in my experience, many people, creative people – not all, but many – come to Hollywood in search of an approving parent, and it’s the worst place in the world to find one.

And so creative people tend to make the audience, a studio, their agent into a parent figure that they have to constantly appease or impress to maintain the connection, the emotional tie.

Dr. Dave:     That’s interesting, because I think most of us have a stereotype that you have to have a really big ego or be extremely narcissistic to make it in Hollywood, so…

Palumbo: Well, the thing is, you kind of do and you don’t. A friend of mine said,
talking about writers, he said they’re egomaniacs with low self-esteem.

Dr. Dave:     (laughs)

Palumbo: And that’s really a great description. I mean, you do have to have a certain amount of grandiosity to be a writer or director or movie star.

Ben Stiller You do have to have a certain amount of narcissism.

Again, in defense of people in the entertainment industry, I would argue that the narcissism that’s necessary to say, “Gee, give me $150 million because I want to direct this movie,” isn’t that different from the narcissism that says, “Give me $150 million; I want to be your president.”

I mean, most achieving people have a very large amount of narcissism and grandiosity.

And Goethe said that writing, for example, is so difficult, you need the hubris to believe that the world cannot live without what you’re doing. ‘Cause it’s so hard to do!

And so I don’t have quite the problem with the narcissism or the ego because you find narcissism and egotism in big-earning CEOs and lawyers.. Most captains of industry hardly have what I’d call small egos.

In fact, if anything, I remember one time, a reporter from the Los Angeles Business Journal asked me a couple questions about all these titans of industry, like Jack Welsh and those guys, all publishing these sort of self-congratulatory autobiographies about how they became rich and famous.

Double Indemnity And to me, they have the vanity of actors.

I’d be hard-pressed to say, well gee, some poor screenwriter has more narcissism than someone like that.

That’s foolish.

So to me, the hardest thing if you’re a creative person is dealing with the insecurities of the business, number one, and the fact that the raw materials of your work are your interior life.

You know, if a bricklayer is depressed that day, he doesn’t even know it’s depression, usually, and he’ll go to work, and the bricks will still be there. And no matter what his frame of mind, he can lay the bricks.

But if you’re a writer, the raw materials – your bricks – are your internal world of experience, your feelings. And so as a result, how you feel affects how you work very, very much.

And so if your marriage is in trouble, or you’re financially strapped, or the critics have slammed the last three things you’ve done, it’s a tremendous burden to try to stay focused and do your work, particularly as the marketplace changes and there’s a new trend every week.

I mean, the ground is never steady under your feet, so you have the same issues everybody else has, and you have it in an industry that’s changing and swirling around all the time.

Excerpt from Shrink Rap Radio podcast #159 - see link for audio podcast and rest of transcript.

Dennis Palumbo's site: www.dennispalumbo.com