Connections vs. Talent in the Arts

I don't know the context of this argument my friends were having but it was in regard to another child of a Hollywood celebrity getting an amazing development deal with little to no experience. The person in question? Not important. Hollywood has a million of these cases. There was the general puritanical outrage that the entertainment industry is not egalitarian. But it's never been a meritocracy.

We all know the game: artistic success is more determined by connections than originality. That doesn't mean you can't scrap your way up from nothing to earn a living. I did and every single POC artists in my circle did without being the offspring of Diddy. Through a combination of talent, shrewdness, timing, and being in the right place (usually a hub city and hub orgs within the hub area), you can zig-zag, run through fiery obstacle course and compete like an "American Ninja" contestant on your way to earning enough money through the arts to afford a bed frame, and being able to get your teeth cleaned on the regular. But that piranha-trenched obstacle course is a lot different from being born six inches from the finishing line and then praising your hard work in your journey of 6 inches.

true talent isn't usually passed down. It's based in both having something to say and having this mysterious 'gift.' Like Fran Lebowitz said in "Pretend It's a City," talent is one of the most mysterious and elusive things that seems to be arbitrarily sprinkled in handfuls of sand over the word. Hemingway's kids didn't try to do what he did b/c they couldn't. They knew 'you either got it or you don't' but then found their way in another artistic form. If you're born sheltered and privileged, it is really hard to develop an 'interesting take' on life. Not impossible but really difficult b/c the most interesting artists seem to come out of some internal AND external struggle. And then on the talent front, I remember going to see my friend's MFA film at NYU the same year James Franco was attending. And there were a lot of interesting films but we were sticking around for James Franco's work which turned out to be glitzy nothingness. He leveraged his name to get attention but there were several directors in the fest who CLEARLY knew what they were doing and had something to say, and then there was James Franco's work which just sort of existed as self-advertisement, as if to say 'isn't it incredible that I did this thing...that's talent.' And it was never more clear that he wasn't talented in this particular field than when put against no-name artists who had nothing but their training and vision.

I didn't know I was writer. My parents were not writers. I didn't grow up around any celebrity authors. But at a certain age, someone said 'you're a writer.' Now I was young so it wasn't like I had developed my craft but this person SAW something they defined as talent that was just in the rough misshapen lump of words I slammed together. Later on, another person later on said 'you're a writer' and I had to have ppl hold this mirror up to me again and again b/c I didn't understand. I still don't get it. I don't write clean sentences. My spelling is atrocious, my punctuation is all over the place, frequently I have to rewrite a sentence again and again just to get it right. But there's something there that I stopped denying. When I was in film school I also directed and edited. I was competent but no one said 'you're a director.' There was no calling. Competence isn't the same as a talent. I have held a number of jobs in my life that I performed fairly well. I can build stuff, I can grow plants, paint/draw fairly well. But if I was the son of Pablo Picasso it would be easy to mistake competence and proximity to genius (aka my dad) as talent vs. finding my own path. And I think a lot of trustfund/nepotism cases have talent but the gravitational pull of their family names puts them into a field they are merely competent at imitating.