Quote: (04-25-2016 04:37 AM)AnonymousBosch Wrote:
Even with the Camel story, Prince doesn't strike me as living in 'Prince World'. He was just making the classic mistake of high-intelligence: presuming everyone is as competent and committed as he is, and trusting them to do the job.
I mean, look at Smith's failure to understand why Prince hired him for the job. You'd think a guy who - by that time - had made a series of movies based around long static shots of talking heads in conversation could easily see himself transitioning to documentaries. He thinks he can't do it, Prince, like any good observer of people, believes that he can, and gives him the opportunity to step up.
Note the end of the story: Smith leaves without saying goodbye, then returns, expecting his failure to say goodbye had been noted and is on everyone's mind, only to find Prince simply shrugged and got on with work, and then decides to get sulky about it and judge Prince negatively-for doing so.
I recognise the behaviour from loser friends I had in my teens, which explains a lot about both Smith's weight and artistic-marginalisation since the Millenium.
Quote: (04-25-2016 07:40 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:
^^^
Boschulus,
I was laughing when reading your post about Kevin Smith's monologue. I was thinking the same thing.
Smith sounds like a guy trying to score points off of Prince's eccentricities. I'm listening to his story and asking myself: why didn't he just take the goddamn job and do it? When a celebrity like that gives you a chance, you don't sit around and whine about how you "can't do it."
Instead, Kevin Smith obsesses about Prince's religious views and character traits. My feeling is: what the fuck do you expect? Almost every great artist is eccentric to some extent. Goes with the territory.
You shut your mouth, say "yes" to Prince, and figure it out. Roll with it: Y Ching, Tao of whatever. Go with it, and get the job done.
Funny thing is, I am not even a Prince fan.
I never really connected with his music, but that's just my preferences. But I have to give this dude some respect. If he needed hip replacement surgery from dancing with heels on stage, this guy must have been a very hard worker.
Anyone who works that hard, is all right in my book.
I agree with you guys that Kevin Smith doesn't come looking so good in his video. Before I clicked on it, I thought it was going to be a two or three minute anecdote, not a thirty minute disappointed fan girl whine. Just the fact that he went on for so long, so far after the fact is sad to the extreme and a clear sign of the seething resentment that comes from not being able to set your own terms and deal with the world.
However.
I don't think it is fair to frame this as a frustrated, ineffectual loser vs. eccentric hard working genius story.
For starters, even if you remove all of the whiny, nitpicking, warped, sarcastic Kevin Smith snark from the story, Prince still doesn't come off looking all that great. He is trying to punk Smith from the start, and that is not entirely cool when you are asking someone to come and work with you on a project.
Patrice O'Neal introduced me to the idea of the punk test. He related, in the first episode of the Black Phillip Show, how in high school some guy who wanted to steal his shoes and his jewelry wouldn't just come out and demand it, first he would walk to close to him in the hallway, then he would walk too close to him and whisper insults under his breath, then he would bump into him on purpose. He was testing him to see how much disrespect he would allow. Once he saw that he could disrespect Patrice and get away with it, he knew he could just walk up to him and demand his shoes. He would do nothing.
So look at how Prince first contacts Smith. Someone calls and says Prince wants to talk to him at a certain time, so be ready. At that time the call comes and he is told it will be a later time, and then same thing again, and then it moves to his house, where he is telling everyone not to use the phone, and on and on. Well, this is an old alpha strategy, call someone, and then have them wait to talk to you, like they called you. Okay. Prince is testing him, saying, basically, my time is important, yours isn't, will you accept that frame?
Now, I know Smith acts like a total loser, and his whole audience mirrors his look and attitude, but the fact is, Kevin Smith is a very successful man. he is worth 25 million dollars(
http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest...net-worth/), and he has a beautiful wife, or at least she was when he married her. Here is a picture of Smith, his wife on the right and Shannon Elizabeth on the left:
No hover hand that I can see.
There are very few people in this world who can make a living as a movie director, and even a fewer number who can get a major motion picture made not as a journeyman director, but have their personal visions worked all the way from idea, to fundraising, to casting, past all the obstacles to production by a mainstream studio.
I took a look over at Box Office Mojo (
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/people/?vie...SC&&p=.htm), and, looking by gross profit, he is the 287th most successful director out there. Doesn't sound that great, but he is ranked ahead of, in descending order, Richard Linklater, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Roman Polanski, Barbet Shroeder, David Lynch, Pedro Almodvar, Tom Hanks (as a director.), David Mamet, and Paul Schrader.
Prince is contacting a successful director to get some help on a project, and plays the phone game with him way too much. You don't reach out to another successful person like that unless you are trying to punk him. Smith shouldn't have stood for it. He should have just said, I will be available at this time, call me then, and left it. What Patrice calls taking the loss. Don't let people punk you. Set your boundaries, and if they don't go for it, take the loss.
So the first conversation, the testing continues.
Hardly a conversation between collegial pros, Prince starts quizzing Smith on his relationship to God and chiding him for using swear words, and, this is the important part, Smith lets him get away with it. A man shouldn't let someone else address and judge his spiritual views in the first conversation they have, even if it is Prince and you want to work with him.
All Smith had to do was keep it professional, ask about the work, or at least say, something like, "my spiritual views are private, and I don't think there is anything wrong with swearing. How does all this relate to the work you want to do with me?"
He didn't though. He mistook not standing up for himself with being polite and tolerant. He was letting his own personal values and standards slip away through his fingers under the beta, or maybe gamma impression that he was being the better man, and Prince kept gaining ground.
(By the way, I have done this a million times myself in the past, and am painfully aware of how easy it is to convince yourself you are doing the right thing.)
It got worse from there. He is filming this thing and Prince is secretly recording it and having assistants come out and advise him to change his approach, and he later finds out that he won't get to edit the footage or even see it ever again. Prince turned a respected director into a lowly camera operator without even having to talk to him directly. It is even worse, because I believe in the video that he mentions that he never even got paid for it.
And Smith let him. Prince had him so totally dominated, not directly but by underhanded games of his own, that when Smith finally tries to set a boundary by saying he can only work till a certain time, Prince knows he is punked and can be ignored, in fact he doesn't even have to say goodbye to him.
A complete domination. And Smith doesn't even know that is what it was. He thinks he is just being polite and tolerant, though he isn't really or he wouldn't be telling thirty minute anecdotes about the whole thing much later. In his mind, he has, as the Rational Male would say, invested "Relationship Equity," and made
compromises, that's all.
Which is why he has no problem calling up Prince later to ask to use his song in a movie, and is shocked, SHOCKED, when Prince turns him down. In Smith's (unspoken) tit for tat agreement with the world, he has sacrificed for Prince, now Prince should sacrifice for him, and when it doesn't work out that way, it sinks down into his soul and he carries it around.
So, no, I don't think that you can characterize this as a case of a loser failing to step up to the plate in the presence of a slightly eccentric hard working winner. I think it was more the case of an expert manipulator (he got everything he wanted in the end, Smith did what he wanted and Prince didn't have to pay a dime for it.) playing on the personal, not professional, weaknesses, of another man, to get what he wanted out of him and give nothing back.
To go back to Patrice's theory, if Kevin Smith had just told Prince early on not to walk so close to him or bump into him, he wouldn't have gotten punked so completely. It was all he had to do. Set a boundary. Or say no.
If he had, Prince may have ended up respecting him and they could have worked together to eveyone's satisfaction.
He couldn't though. That is the crux of everything. Kevin Smith couldn't just say, no. Or, don't. He couldn't do it. That was the lesson he should have learned out of this whole thing, and he didn't even come close. Hah! That is the anecdote he should have told on youtube. Learn to set boundaries and say no, even to your heroes, even when you are right on the verge of success you can almost taste.
Instead his anecdote, which AB and QC rightly feel revulsion for, is really an endless seeming rationalization for his own failure to act or learn anything.