Film Courage: Ken, as a tenured professor in your mid-40s, what made you think you could
change careers?
Dr. Ken Atchity, producer and author: Well this is America and you can do whatever you
want to do.
It’s one of the great things about this country.
What I was doing was very related to a career I’m in now.
It was developing stories, developing writers, and of course teaching a number of things
that I no longer teach like classical literature and Italian literature and I do miss that
part but it was basically an extension of what I’ve been doing all of my life which
is developing stories, analyzing stories, publishing stories, helping people publish
stories, and now, getting stories produced into movies.
So it’s all united by storytelling.
I had no idea which world was sort of the bigger world of ideas, the world of academia
that I had been in for 17 years or the world I went into and I discovered that the world
I went into was really the world of ideas because it’s a world in which people are
tracking ideas across continents to find out who owns the rights to a story.
They pay lots of money to acquire the story (at least they used to pay lots of money)
and they spend millions of dollars to turn the story into a movie and they’re fiercely
competitive about the world of ideas.
The motion picture business is the jungle of ideas and it’s survival of the best idea
and the best business people.
I always so it’s called Show Business for a reason.
It’s not just about show, it’s about the business of how stories get developed into
movies that the whole world can see.
Film Courage: I’m hoping we can go back to maybe before you made this transition to
wanting to be in film?
Was there something that happened, was there a time in your life that where you felt like
“You know what?
I want a new challenge.”
Dr. Ken Atchity: That’s a good question because I’ve reflected on it all of my life
since then and it was actually provoked by my receiving tenure.
I actually belonged to an untenured faculty committee against tenure and one day when
I was a Fulbright professor in Bologna, Italy, I got a telegraph from the Dean of the faculty
at Occidental College telling me that I’d received tenure in my absence.
And my reaction to it was not very understandable to my friends and colleagues.
I became deeply depressed for about a year.
And it took me a long time to figure out why I was depressed and it was because I had really
never asked to be in this golden cage where nothing can happen to you.
It was like the most secure place you could be and I realized at the time that my father’s
chief value in life was security.
He was a child of The Depression and security was all important to him.
And I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t that important to me.
I never worried about being secure.
I’d published lots of things and I was in demand as a speaker and just never had to
worry about it.
And what my value was freedom and I didn’t feel and I didn’t feel freedom when under
a structure where you had to behave a certain way and you had to know a year in advance
that on the week of October 12th you’d be teaching the 8th book of The Iliad.
And it was wonderful to be teaching The Iliad but that to know a year in advance you were
going to be somewhere.
I now live in a world where I don’t know where I am going to be tomorrow literally
and it’s complete opposite, it’s a free world.
And of course I realized that as I got older that freedom is as much an illusion as security
(both of them are illusions), but it was my illusion.
Security was not my illusion and so I’ve lived with complete insecurity but with the
freedom to express myself creatively and in every possible way which is what the film
business allows me to do and so that was very exciting to me.
Film Courage: And do you ever tell people that?
If they are looking to be in a creative pursuit whether it’s being an author or screenwriter
or actor, that security will probably be something that they will not encounter and to be okay
with that?
Dr. Ken Atchity: Absolutely.
I mean this is not a career to wish on anyone.
You have to have a burning desire to do it and you have to be willing to sacrifice anything
to do it and to persist despite every setback and I can tell you that this is a business
in which, a career in which this never gets easier, I don’t care how many movies you’ve
done.
The next one is going to be the biggest challenge you’ve ever faced, the world changes all
the time.
It’s been changing ever since I’ve been in it which is around 30 years now and it
never gets any easier and it never gets any more secure and even if you’ve had windfalls
and lots of money you would, you would put it into your next project because people in
this business believe in what they are doing, that’s their most important common belief,
you can see it at The Academy Awards, you hear the stories as they received rewards
that they never thought they’d get or been waiting for a lifetime for, they all have
one thing in common, the ability to sacrifice what everyone else considers the most important
things in order to achieve the dream of getting the story told to the whole world and that’s
the great thing about the career.
There is no limits to it, it’s infinitely challenging, it’s constantly challenging,
there are surprises every day and it’s completely unpredictable.
Film Courage: I’m almost thinking of a sales position, like door-to-door where you have
to just suit-up and work your farm and it sounds like with this industry it’s an everyday
sort of you have to be that person drumming up leads and things like that?
Dr. Ken Atchity: Yeah, it’s a completely self-starting business.
You hear repeatedly from actors and from writers and everyone that being represented by an
agency does not really help because everyone said “I’ve always gotten my best jobs
myself.”
And I hear that from musicians and from every member of this business that they get their
own work and suiting up every morning is putting on your brain and telling it that it’s got
to be happy and go out there and it doesn’t matter how bad things are in reality, you
have to put on a happy face and I have gone to many meetings that I absolutely did not
feel like going to because something had just happened that was a setback and I just thought
I want to stay home and lick my wounds, but I go to the meeting and it turns out that
those meetings are the best meetings that you can go to and when you walk out you think
“Thank God I went!
I mean what would have happened if I hadn’t gone?”
And that is suiting up, that is definitely a kind of nightly encounter to put on your
armor and go out there and you are working with people who are doing the same thing and
that’s part of the exhilaration to it is that you know that the person sitting across
from you may have had worse things happen to him in the last 24 hours but he’s still
there on the job and putting on a happy face and getting it done.
It’s very deceptive and seductive when people come here for the first time especially clients
of mine, I warn them that they will be experiencing what’s called The Development Dance where
everyone will be extremely nice to them and extremely positive and then they’ll never
hear from them again and that’s because people are doing their job and their job is
to find out what this person has to offer the world and if it’s extremely exciting
(which is rare, very rare), then you’ll hear from them.
But most of the time it’s not extremely exciting and exciting enough and/or it doesn’t
fit the agenda of this person’s company at the moment, they have something too much
like it in development or they have a boss who does not want to do that particular kind
of thing, etc.
But their job is to be the best audience possible for any story that comes along that could
be a dramatic story that people would attract audiences and so they’ll be happy in the
meeting and then at the end of the meeting (you know, behind the back of the person who
came to the meeting) they’ll make a decision about whether to pursue it or not and that’s
what you’re up against.
So you’re like a door-to-door salesman.
I always say there’s a great blackboard in the sky that has every “no” you’ll
ever receive in your life written on it and finally a “yes” at the end of the “no’s”
and the only catch is, you can’t see it so what do you do?
You go through the “no’s” as fast as you can.
That’s the only way to deal with that blackboard and that’s what successful people do in
the business, they just keep getting those “no’s” until somebody says “yes."