I cheated.
Please don't judge me.
It's admirable that I am admitting it, isn't it?
Truth is, I'm pretty sure my wife would have done the same thing had she been in my shoes. We are only human, after all.
I cheated and I don't regret it and I'll probably do it again!
Any parent who claims not to have cheated at Candy Land is lying.
My 3-year-old had reached the second to last square on the board and the chance of him not ending the game with his next draw was literally about 10%. The game had already dragged on (as every game of Candy Land does), so it was time to be done.
It's not that I don't enjoy playing games with my kids. I really do. But I consider Candy Land only marginally a game with its mindless path crawling and sadistic redundancy. A 3-year-old's attention span can barely handle a full game of Candy Land. Neither can my son.
I sneaked a peek at the next two cards in the deck. Sure enough, his next draw would have yielded him the gumdrop sending him back near the beginning of the game where I was still trudging along having drawn the gingerbread man almost immediately after drawing the coveted ice cream cone. And the cycle would have continued.
Candy Land is a game that, statistically speaking, could continue in perpetuity without a little persuasion from time to time, so I was happy to manipulate the system a bit to reach the goal.
To make it in Hollywood, you almost have to manipulate the system and bend the rules. Once you've made it... well... you still have to bend the rules. Call it cheating if you must, but it's more about adapting and manipulating the rules to best accommodate your own situation.
That sounds narcissistic, but it's less a reflection on the individual bending the rules and more an observation of the circumstances surrounding a person.
We Davids tend to defend our own rule bending as noble and resourceful while we abscond the Goliaths for doing the same. The Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign raised nearly $6 million dollars in donations and Zach Braff's campaign is above $2.5 million with over a week left.
How dare they! Kickstarter is for us little guys! We are fighting tooth and nail to scrounge up whatever finances we can while the already rich and powerful take money that should have gone to us!
Right.
Who's to blame the 91,585 people who pitched in some money to fund a Veronica Mars project they'd love to see? If Larry David put up a campaign to do a Seinfeld reunion, you bet I'd support him. Not because he needs any financial support necessarily, but because I need me some more Seinfeld.
As a struggling David (not Larry) in the film industry, I'm less than thrilled to see established Hollywood Goliaths running Kickstarter campaigns, but I'm not crazy enough to believe they are taking any money away from me or other little folks. Jealous? Sure. Resentful? No.
Are they breaking any rules? Of course not. Breaking tradition? I guess. The filmmaking landscape is an evolving beast. The rules that applied in days past don't necessarily apply today, so creativity is needed not only on the screen, but behind the scenes.
True, the rules of the motion picture industry are about as clear as the smog that blankets its major studios, but one must know and understand what has and hasn't worked for others in order to best establish themselves in this crazy business.
A forthcoming book by producer Gary W. Goldstein (Pretty Woman, Under Siege, The Mothman Prophecies) appears destined to become a cornerstone of any upstart producer's library. The book is currently seeking publishing funds via Kickstarter.
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| Producer, Gary W. Goldstein |
Oh. The. Humanity.
Here's the cool thing about Mr. Goldstein's campaign - for only $15 you get a digital copy of the book before it goes on sale to the public. That's about what you'd pay for an already published book. By contributing to the Kickstarter campaign, you're essentially buying a book and receiving it as fast as you possibly can. It hardly seems like a donation.
Throw in a few more bucks and you can receive a number of career building opportunities from Mr. Goldstein or another from his team of Hollywood professionals.
And his goal is $12,000; not $2,000,000.
Mr. Goldstein seems committed to helping others achieve success similar to his own. My interactions with him have been supremely pleasant and I get the impression he's a genuinely good guy.
I asked him why he went the Kickstarter route and he commented, "[Kickstarter] fascinates me with the amount of engagement that happens not by putting something up for sale but by asking a community to breathe life into a project. I like the idea of actually being able to connect to each person, to provide things beyond the book that might not be readily available."
Gary W. Goldstein's approachability and cordiality has convinced me his heart is in the right place. I'm happy to support people with heart, whether they are a David or a Goliath, a gingerbread man or an ice cream cone. Truth is, Mr. Goldstein is too humble to claim to be a Goliath in this industry.
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