Audiences need a leader to create a safe space for their entertainment. They need to trust that things are handled so they can dig in, engage, and enjoy.
This trust is not about being smart or even about being benevolent. It’s about ability to navigate the particular entertainment experience consistently and give the audience what is promised.
Consistency comes from experience
I’m not going to stop saying that entertainers must be prolific. Must get “stage-time.” The top entertainment geniuses in the world are experienced as fuck and they will tell you that their experience is more important than themselves. A comedian’s personality is forged by clashing with audiences, a film-maker’s voice is defined by pushing through collaboration with limitations and connecting with the crowd.
In Vaudeville
The olden times allowed performers to get on stage ten or more times in a day. Okay, doesn’t sound fun. The result, though, was these people who knew exactly what to do on a vaudeville stage. Their physique was perfected for their specialty. They knew everything that could go wrong in their 10 minute set. They knew what to do if someone passed out. They knew how much to project their voice. They knew exactly what every audience needed. That 10 minutes gave them a chance to kill.
The reason we don’t want to see a vaudeville act today is that it’s old. Unsophisticated. These acts were a bunch of inventions to quickly get the entertainment happening. The performer/creators didn’t have tv, film, audio recordings to build on. They usually didn’t have access to seeing very many live performances. They were super experienced, but not very educated.
Flip that for now
Now, we have all the recorded history of entertainment available to us on demand. Due to labor laws and good taste, we’re not doing continuous vaudeville shows. A comedian who goes out every night to open mics needs to go out 10 times to do 10 shows — and that is unlikely — so, peeps are not getting the stage-time.
Entertainment industry folks are now generally without a ton of experience but with a high level of education.
If only education mattered
The problem with entertainers becoming more schooled in entertainment is that audiences are also more educated. It’s not that spectators are jaded, but they don’t need more of the same. They need twists… surprises… fulfillment… entertainment. If they’re not getting that, they won’t trust you. If you’re not in the high percentile of what they’ve seen, you will be emotionally beige.
For those starting out : small pond, lots of swimming
If you want to be trusted quickly, specialize tightly and start hustling.
Don’t be a car mechanic, be a tire valve specialist. Educate yourself completely on tire valves, then fix a thousand of them in the next month. Go to the junk yard and do them for free. Put up posters around your neighborhood. Eventually, you’ll work on the whole tire, then maybe the wheel, but first you can be the valve person of absolute trust.
If you want to do political puppet shows for 12yos in 100 seat venues. That’s pretty specific. You do 20 of those and you may be the best in the world at it. You do 400 of them and you’ll probably be good enough to make the impact you want.
It’s a relief
Most people are trying to build without experience.
Knowing that our issue is not funding or education, but experience is a relief to me. Anyone who wants to rise above the main-stream just needs to start doing the thing they want to do; and it’s probably free.
You don’t need to go to kickstarter to get all the funding for your first project ever (which you hope to be your legacy). You can go make 600 crappy specific works right now and then get whatever funding you want to make a truly awesome thingy.
If I made 347 ten-minute action hero movies doing my best to make them good, would people trust me to make a ten-minute action hero movie? Yes.
Would they be right to trust me? Yes.