Experiment

“All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make the better.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

In all my research and experience, I’ve learned a lot of gray.  If any truth exists in this industry, it’s that there is no predestined path leading to success.  What worked for John C. Reilly or Lisa Kudrow or Michael Bay or Bryan Singer likely won’t work for you and me.  That means we just have to experiment until we carve our own path to success.

I started acting professionally eight or so years ago.  That didn’t take off as quickly as I’d hoped – was it really too much to expect starring roles in Hollywood movies within a couple years of graduating from college?  With a degree in education? ;) – So I started writing screenplays a couple years later.  I figured I’d sell a screenplay in which I could star, thereby launching my career.  Didn’t go quite as planned.

Well, the next logical step seemed to be to produce a short.  I would write, direct, and act in it, send it to a few festivals, win a couple awards, and hire a secretary to handle the resulting inundation of phone calls.  Again, fate let me down.

Alright, might as well produce a feature-length movie, sell it, earn enough money, clout, and adoration to make more movies, win an Oscar, buy a winter home, and secure retirement for my parents and in-laws.  Alas, the feature didn’t require the hiring of a cartographer for my name.

How about a television pilot?  Might as well give it a shot.  Thus, Soap Athetic was born.  Zero budget.  Zero leads for selling it once it’s finished.  Zero calories in mustard – sorry, needed another ‘zero’ to finish the trifecta.

With Soap Athetic, I had an outlet to release it online, earning a few dollars along the way.  Foolishly, I thought it would maybe catch a break on YouTube and reach several hundred thousand people, create a buzz, and at least garner a phone call from the people who hired the “Ask a Ninja” guys to rewrite “Attach of the Killer Tomatoes.”

The YouTube release of Soap Athetic has come and gone with little fanfare.  It was received well, earning high ratings and overwhelmingly positive comments, but with a viewership smaller than Duluth, it didn’t exactly take the community by storm.  Luckily, YouTube was only part of the journey, not the destination.  What will become of it, I don’t know.  It’s just too good of a show to passively set aside.

No matter what becomes of Soap Athetic, I will not consider the experiment a failure.  Nor will I consider any of the aforementioned experiments failures, for each has brought me one step further along my personal path to success.  It may not be the same path taken by Shia LeBeouf or Evangeline Lilly or Harold Ramis or Sean Levy, but I do believe it’s heading in the same general direction.

See you along the way when our paths cross.