Fame

I would love to be famous, as long as I could do it anonymously. It is terrific when people recognize my work but I can happily live without them being able to recognize me. The kind of people impressed that you're on TV are the last people you want to impress. It's only those who see what you do as special compared to others who do the same thing whose esteem means anything real.

Yes, I realize that sounds strange coming from a guy writing a blog under his real name and who cheerfully plugs his eponymous website at every available opportunity. (See it at: JohnMcQuiston.com!)

What small taste of public notoriety I had during my TV career was enough to tell me that being famous is not all it's cracked up to be. It's the thing I miss least now that I don't do it full-time any more. Scratch that. It's the next-to-last thing I miss. The last thing is working holidays when everyone else is home with their families.

This thought came to me as I thought about a movie I watched last night: Unbreakable. Director M. Night Shyamalan gives himself a cameo as a drug dealer. My first thought was if he's the guy who tells the actors if they got their lines right, who tells him? Then I wondered, do people stop him on the street to ask about his movies? Does the average person even know who he is?

That's when I had my epiphany. I would love to direct famous movies as long as I didn't have to become a famous director. The people whose opinions I valued would know how good I was at my job. I'd still have a pile of money and the artistic leeway to choose projects that appealed to me yet the supermarket tabloids and and my fellow pedestrians would not find me interesting enough to bother. That would be cool.

Another random thought I had that of that might deserve elucidation later:

Only when you are willing to lose everything do you really have anything.