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Lights Out
ephemeral nature of our work
I imagine these same questions are what the Twitter alums are dealing with right now. It will be difficult for them, too. But this [company closing and turning off all the servers] is a necessary step in the career for anyone who wants to arrange electrons for a living. Because the things we make, the ways we express our creativity, none of it is tangible. It can all go away with the press of a button. And we have to face that part of the bargain with our eyes open. Making something lasting of our lives is difficult, and very few of us will ever do it. But making something lasting with electrons? It might be damn near impossible.
(from When the Lights Go Out).
Projects fall apart. We hate it when they do, but they do sometimes. Blue Sky is a movie that was made in 1991, and then spent 3 years in a vault after the production company Orion went bankrupt. Then, Jessica Lang won an Academy Award for her work when it was finally released. There’s a story (I’ve not been able to confirm) that Brad Pitt, before Thelma & Louise, was in a movie that was going to be his star-making turn. The footage was lost in the scramble to evacuate from Yugoslavia as it descended into war.
But less dramatically, sometimes funding falls out. Sometimes people withdraw, sometimes any number of things make a project stop, dead in its tracks. The lights go out.
What are we to do, as actors, how are we to seek any sort of meaning; will our work even be remembered?
Even highly established actors may not be widely known in a generation. I heard a story once of a teacher in the 21st Century marveling that their students didn’t know who James Cagney, Marlene Dietrich and other major 20th Century stars are. Their students simply hadn’t been exposed to work by some titans of the industry, people who helped define what film is.
