FOMO.
How we spend our lives boxing the shadow of success.
Quality is hard to assess. Even when films are made and released and seen the arguments as to how good or bad they are rage on unendingly. Hoping to foresee the quality of something before it’s made is hubris. William Goldman’s great axiom, “no one knows anything” is surely the one thing we do know. Except… I mean, we do know some things, don’t we?
Peerless indie film producer Ted Hope remarked recently that the essential quality you need to finance a film was FOMO. Yes a charismatic cast, a compelling script, a visionary director, an actual story but none of those things, individually or together, matter as much as the investor’s fear of missing out. This holds true of selling the film once it’s made and of drawing audiences to see it. No one wants your work because they know it’s good, they want it because they’re scared it might be amazing.
I find this the sort of sanguine brilliance that reshapes the way you think. Whilst hardly cheering, it’s actually neither good news or bad, better, it’s practical, both diagnosis and prescription. It defines the negative space of success. What seems to happen when your work wins awards or acclaim or draws crowds, is that the lauded artist is now trusted. What Hope is pointing out is that their success also creates an anxious shadow stretching before them. If that was good, imagine what they’ll do next?
This is also true of artistic debuts. To launch your career you don’t need to square the impossible circle of proving your excellence, you need to instil in others the fear of missing it. The possibility of being special is vastly more compelling than its evidence, which is why debuts, though hard, are still easier than sophomore creations (he types bitterly). It never matters precisely which award or audience figures you did or did not attain, it’s whether you still conjure the anxiety that passing on your next idea would leave someone feeling sick in six months time.
This is also the reason why so much of what is produced in film and tv fails to fulfil its creative potential, even when, by other metrics, it’s a success. (Which is to start, but not finish, a conversation about Moana 2 becoming one of the highest grossing films of all time.)
From the outside, by which perhaps I mean from outside the giddy neurotypical dance of social reinforcement and conformity - ok imagined in the abstract - the process of filmmaking feels like one that should begin when someone is inspired to tell a story. That story then inspires others who collaborate on the process of bringing it life. Others see this work and are excited by the prospect of helping it reach an audience who then, you know, have a great time watching great movies and shit… Look I’m not from the moon, I’ve always known that’s not what’s going on. It’s just I always thought the problem was simply capitalism.
Like all other positive human actions, if you subtly dislodge the original ambition with the profit motive, leaving all other aspirations as “nice to have but non essential” then you create a hellscape with the end of civilisation sewn inevitably into its fabric. Making clothes is a life affirming skill, clothing someone well is an empathetic gift, running Shein is a crime against humanity. I’m not against people earning money, it’s something I’d like to do more often, but sadly it’s never the thing I want to do most.
It’s easy to see how making money rather than telling stories is a terrible way to tell stories. But that thought gets you nowhere except screaming at a blood red sky whilst Hollywood burns. Ted Hope’s insight is to name the actual commodity that most people are buying most of the time.
Sure, if you’re a well-masked autistic person then you buy shoes when your old shoes fall apart, as that’s the point where you need shoes. But the hierarchy of needs is no way to grow an economy. Growth needs consumers to buy shoes other than out of need, it needs them buy shoes they don’t need. To do that we need to fire up the hierarchy of wants…
(More on the power of the desire to feel wronged here) (simultaneously satisfying the desire for distraction.)
But there you are, happily selling things no one needs and you look up and someone else has just overtaken you because they’ve juiced up something even more powerful - the hierarchy of fears…
Now you’re not only selling things no one needs, you’re selling them things no one even wants like skimmed milk and life insurance.
The green lights that usher film and tv into existence come not from a desire to create, the excitement to share or the passion to support but at root from that anxious dread of missing out. This is what works for the audience as well. Which argument is the more persuasive, “Adam Scott is great in Severance” or “Have you not seen Severance yet!?”
The downside to this is that when the thing you’re really selling is freedom from anxiety that’s purchased on the way in rather than the way out. It never matters if the party is good or bad, just that you know because you were there. Of course, if you’ve anxiously rearranged all your plans to get there and it’s so disappointing you end up spending more than you can afford at the bar, then that leaves you feeling sad, frustrated and disappointed but at least you know you’re not missing out. The same is true of every hit tv series that bummed its last episode, of every film that failed to live up to its trailer, of every script by a hot talent that you didn’t develop properly because hey “no one knows anything”.
Which is to say the problem with Goldman’s law is that it rapidly become a self fulfilling prophecy. To pretend that we don’t know anything about what makes a project compelling, to act like what makes something creatively worthwhile is total guesswork, is to give the floor to FOMO, to disavow your own creative instinct and rely instead on what feels like its trending. And of course there’s no surer way to truly miss out than that.
My writing course returns on the 27th March in London and online.
I’d love it if you’d take a moment to think of anyone you know (you perhaps?) who you would enjoy 9 weeks of screenwriting, storytelling and creative self discovery and then urge them to come and find me. Info and booking for the course here.
And should you or anyone need in person convincing, there’s a one night taster on the 11th, which becomes free if they sign up to the full course. You can book that here.
If you prefer your inspiration and insights bound and published then I’ve recently adored reading George Saunders beautifully humane book on the craft of storytelling “A Swim In A Pond In The Rain” and I urge you to take a dip yourself.