How The Tools Of Getting Famous Can Inhibit Creativity

Watching TV the other day, I stumbled upon a 1999 documentary about Bruce Vilanch, the guy all the stars — actors, singers, politicians, athletes — call to write jokes for them when they have a big appearance coming up, such as for a celebrity roast, an awards ceremony or VIP dinner.

I guess at the time it was something of a revelation that a lot of the people we thought were being genuinely funny were really just speaking lines written by this one ghostwriter. But it’s never been a secret that even professional comics like Whoopie Goldberg and Billy Crystal depend on others to write their stuff. They actually seemed to be proud of it in their interviews for the movie. It didn’t seem to bother them that they don’t come up with the “content” on their own. What they care about is that they can come to the table with something — however they acquired it — that makes them look good.

I’ve known about Bruce for some time, and have heard him interviewed before. But in this doc, I heard him say something that struck me as important, and I’ll paraphrase it here: “I’ve worked with a lot of famous people. And one thing I’d say they all share is that they have a lot of energy for becoming and being famous, and not as much energy for anything else.”

He was saying that, when it came right down to it, everything high-profile people do is geared to the end goal of making them — well, high-profile people. It seemed to make sense. At the time, he was talking about a very small segment of the population — people whose names are household words.

In the years since that movie was made, we’ve all seen the increase in the number of tools for becoming famous and the expansion and escalation of their use. Even Supreme Court nominees hire high-powered PR firms to crank up the fame machine to fill the media with positive messages about them to ensure they get confirmed. And the senators at the hearings use the TV time — not so much to ask questions — but to make speeches geared to help them become famous too.

Even funerals of famous people are being used shamelessly by singers and politicians as a showcase to boot-strap their own franchise with over-the-top performances and speeches they know will be seen by millions on TV and social media.

But to some extent, the behavior of entertainers and politicians is just a natural extension of what was going on back in 1999, and long before that, with that particular group of people. We’d just shrug it off and say “That’s what famous people do: they spend their time getting and being famous.”

The really big news is that the same thing now applies to all of us! In 1999, for most of us the idea of someone we’ve never met actually knowing about us, was inconceivable. But fast-forward to 2018 and, thanks to social media, EVERY SINGLE PERSON has the the tools to make himself known — to become famous.

And boy, are we using them. We’re no longer content to share something with someone we know — someone we think might actually be interested. Through postings and repostings of content, we’re using promotions, vacations, grandchildren, ailments, cures, opinions on this national issue or that local restaurant or that recipe, to essentially become famous with what we hope will be an ever-increasing “fan base.” And a lot of that content we’re using to do it isn’t even our own, but is recycled from others.

Recently, I was surprised to learn that the Beatles’ previous record for number of songs in the top 20 on the Billboard 100 had been broken by an artist whose songs I had never heard. When I dug into it, I found that nowadays “plays” includes not only the times a song was listened to from start to finish for the enjoyment of the listener, but also the number of times people used even a tiny sample of the song to fortify, amplify or enrich a personal posting on social media.

In essence, through the use of re-postings, Likes and Comments, and attaching samples of content created by others on social media, we all have our own “personal Bruce Vilanch” writing material for us. 

With all this energy we’re putting into using anything we can get our hands on to become famous, we ought to be asking ourselves the question begged in the 1999 documentary:

Do we still have energy to create new things from scratch? That is, do we still have the motivation to deliver high quality substance, or are we becoming too easily satisfied just to find something we can use — anything, however we get it — that will get attention?

As if the damping down of the drive to create new things isn’t bad enough, there’s a worse problem right behind it. The actress, Jennifer Garner recently went to a Kroger market to get people to try free samples of her new healthy baby food line. In the articles I read, she was surprised and disappointed more people didn’t want to try her product. She was dressed casually in a tee shirt, and didn’t seem to have on much make up. I guess she was trying to dress the part of a “single mom working to pay the bills.” But she was still Jennifer-the-famous-person, and the folks she approached in their “food-store mind-zone” who might be interested in seeing her on the red carpet and reading about her high-profile divorce, didn’t seem inclined to try her baby food. Ms. Garner may have a great product there, but will anyone find out?

Getting famous presents a two-door trap. The first is that maybe we’ll expend so much energy becoming famous, we may cease to actually produce anything of real value. The second — and the more dangerous — is that even if we do, the people we want to impress might have been conditioned not to look past the fame to discover it.

There may yet be hope for creativity on the horizon. It’s entirely possible that the search for existing content to grab and use might become so difficult that people must reluctantly and as a last resort — yep, you guessed it — start coming up with more original content. Take a look at this quote from a recent article about the hard work of finding samples from existing works to make new songs:

“…finding the perfect sample to flip has become harder and harder. After decades of crate-digging, it’s difficult to find something that’s never been used. And if you do, getting permission from often long-defunct record labels or groups can be next to impossible. So this group of players are creating, essentially, new samples—compositions made specifically for producers to use.”

Why wait for material cribbed from other people to become too hard to find? Start creating your own stuff now!