Selling out
In a magazine interview, Brad Pitt once candidly admitted, “I’ve got a couple of friends that might as well be family, and I’ve caught myself just ordering one of them to do something because you get accustomed to people doing things for you… It’s the money and the power, it just crushes everything.”
Julie Delpy [photo] is also very candid in a recent blog of hers [see my Developing Talent blog] that ”Hollywood is an industry where integrity is really a challenge… In Hollywood, people of all ages and creeds succeed through prostitution. They succeed by selling out.”
Evan Rachel Wood agrees it can be a challenge: “You get a script that’s not very good.. but you think, Okay, the script is so bad, I won’t even do it for a million dollars.. And then it gets to No. 1 at the box office and people ask, ‘Don’t you regret not doing that?’ Not really… I keep getting told that if you do the blockbuster, then you can get these other movies made. But somehow I just can’t bring myself to do it.” [Interview, May 2006]
A Los Angeles Times article today [May 3, 2006] says that since starring in the stage and film versions of “Rent” Anthony Rapp has appeared in a number of small independent films: “I’m certainly drawn to things that are a little more unusual,” he says.
“I’ve been in the business long enough now — 25 years — that it’s as much about the experience of making a piece as it is about anything that goes along with it. I’ve met too many actors who aren’t necessarily happy doing what they’re doing, but they get a good paycheck. I’d much rather be part of something I’d be happy to be a part of than cash in.”
[Rapp is author of the book Without You : A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent]
Of course, you need to get paid to do your work, to fuel your passion, but the question is at what point is it selling out - doing something only for the money, and in the process maybe corroding your vision and your integrity as an artist, and a human.
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