A superstition, roughly defined, is anything stupid that someone else believes in. For instance, I sometimes assign certain trivial future events – making it to the dry cleaners before they close, for instance, or finding a parking space in the closest row to the supermarket door – with enormous personal significance.
“If I can get there before the mean lady shuts the door,” I’ll tell myself, as I race to the dry cleaners on a Tuesday afternoon, “then the rest of my week will be hugely productive.”
“If there’s a space in the next row,” I’ll say to myself as I pull into the supermarket car park, “then at some point today my agent will call with good news.”
The truth is, I don’t really believe any of this – I went to university; I took science classes; I’m a rational person – but it’s impossible to resist seeing portents and omens in everyday events.
On a very fundamental level, I know that there’s no way the supermarket car park knows if my agent is about to call, and the mean lady from my dry cleaner is absolutely and utterly unconnected to anything I might be writing, but, well, I can’t help it. I keep reflexively making one thing depend on the other.
The entertainment business – and probably every other business – is such a chaotic mess of competing signals and signs and often so baffling and contradictory, your mind naturally looks to something – anything! – to make some order out of it.
In the early part of my career, I noticed that whenever I was out of the country and got a message to call my agent, it was always – without fail – good news. I have had television series ordered by networks from payphones in France, had large contracts renewed from rickety docks in Belize, and once pitched – successfully – an entire season’s worth of episodes in a mobile phone call from Halong Bay, Vietnam.
The phone call cost me $1,700 (Dh6,250), but it was worth it.
On the other hand, whenever my phone rings when I’m doing something prosaic and humdrum around town – filling up the car with fuel; getting cash at the bank – it’s almost always deflating and depressing information.
I’ve had television series cancelled standing outside of In-n-Out Burger, had projects shut down while standing in line at the key-making kiosk, and discovered I’ve been replaced by another writer while I was walking the dog. Worse, while I was cleaning up after the dog. It’s one thing to be fired. It’s quite another to be fired while carrying a small plastic bag filled with …well, you get the idea.
In ancient times, when the world seemed filled with random dangers and unexpected disasters – which, come to think of it, isn’t all that different from today – it was only natural for man to conjure up some kind of primitive and foolish set of magic levers to push. If we all do a certain kind of dance, then the rain gods will smile on us. If we kill a chicken in a precise and (for the chicken, anyway) upsetting ritual, the wind will rise up and we’ll be able to set sail.
Hollywood is about the closest thing we’ve got these days to a primitive kind of tribal region. So this kind of thing still goes on.
“I set my intention,” an actress friend of mine told me recently, “during my yoga class. While I’m moving through the postures and poses and focusing on my breath work, I keep my inner eye trained on this part I really want in the new Keanu Reeves movie.”
It’s unlikely, of course, that the casting director of the new Keanu Reeves movie is swayed by the vibes emanating from a yoga studio in Santa Monica, but who am I to criticise? I’m the guy betting big on a specific kind of parking space.
“I’m pretty sure your new pilot is going to get ordered to series,” my assistant told me yesterday. “This morning,” he told me, “when I put milk in my tea, it swirled around in a spiral rather than billowing up like a mushroom cloud.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I told him.
But his good news carried me the rest of the day, until I was in the alley behind my house, sorting my household rubbish into its (city mandated) recyclable categories, when the phone rang.
It was my agent.
I didn’t answer it. I need to think about this. Maybe I should fly somewhere far away, somewhere exotic and expensive, before I call him back.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
