Good v Popular, a Theory of Selling Out

When I left theater school and years of working on stage to head to LA, I had fears of “selling out.” Artistic integrity – I vaguely remember – was something we young folk talked and thought a lot about, and I feared LA’s business focus, as opposed to NY’s more womb-like creative community, might be a threat to mine.

Flash to six or seven years ago, when I was given the opportunity to have breakfast with a big Hollywood director. (Read: a guy with multiple films that have made more than $100M along with multiple TV series.) At the time, just having access for a chat was an exciting opportunity.

During the breakfast, the film CONGO came up. “That was terrible,” I said. The bigwig sternly corrected me: “It made a hundred million dollars.”

And there it was: Selling Out. In the brief exchange that followed, it was crystal clear. This man thought that making a lot of money is the definition of being good.

Very quickly after that breakfast, I started to arrive at this: Good and Popular are two very different, entirely worthy goals for a creative project.

Contrary to what is often implied in our schools and artsy communities, artists should feel no guilt or shame about working hard, explicitly, to make something Popular. Doing so is a challenging, fascinating puzzle. It requires great skill and a rare ability to either listen well to audiences or, even rarer, to intuitively resonate, like a tuning fork, with what audiences will enjoy.

We are told over and over, of course, that artists should feel no guilt or shame about pursuing something Good. And this, too, is a wonderful and deep goal, requiring honing your craft, knowing your personal voice and its strengths, and, in the end, finding and having something powerful to say.

Selling Out is thinking that something Popular = something Good. (And, by the way, Being Pretentious is thinking that something you find Good should inherently = something Popular.) 

The greatest dream is striking both Goodness and Popularity in a single project, of course. But don’t be afraid of working on both Goodness and Popularity as key jobs of the professional artist in the marketplace. Shakespeare alive today would not be some avant-garde off-off-Broadway director, no matter how Good. He would be creating massively appealing, successful stories across the biggest stages and screens of our day.