Thank You Sid




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  • 2014-01-29 15:42:13
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Alumni Talk the Talk Series. Guest post by Georgi Ivanov. [caption id="attachment_18165" align="alignleft" width="269" caption="Georgi Ivanov's personal archive (Photo by Viktor Chouchkov Jr.)"][/caption] In the winter of 2011-12 we were promoting our film “TILT” as the Bulgarian entry for foreign language Oscar. We spent three months in Los Angeles: working with a publicist, organizing promotional parties, getting invited to parties, spreading flyers, getting ads published, talking to press and Academy members, feeling small, feeling important, feeling desperate, feeling we could have it all. I can’t really say it summed up to anything much, eventually, just this ocean of an industry welcoming the influx of gullible money and efforts into its cycle of self-perpetuation.  So, on the last day, we were taking a walk on Hollywood boulevard, looking jealously at the Kodak Theater, where the Oscar ceremony is now held and which we would not enter in rented tuxes as nominees. Probably you have heard about the Walk of Fame: the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard where each tile holds a star with the name of a movie star in it, from Alfred Hitchcock to Shrek. On this boulevard, just next to the impressive Kodak Theater, there is another cinema – the smaller, quirkier Chinese Theater. Probably you have not heard of it, I know I hadn’t. Its tall and spiky building is slightly inward, a small forecourt zooming it out of the random lights of the boulevard. I would have missed it, had a local friend not clued us in. There, the concrete of the forecourt holds the imprints of some of cinema’s greatest, mostly feet and hands, but also:  the cigar of Groucho Marx, the magic wand of Harry Potter, the face of John Barrymore , the legs of Betty Grable, the fist of John Wayne, and the noses of Jimmy Durante and Bob Hope. Each of them unique and personal, not a standardized star, with your name in Gill Sans. And there is something very humbling (and whimsical) about making the "bigs" bend over, take a knee and press their feet, hands and/or face into the cold cement. The imprints date from the 1920’s until today. And there is barely any space left. What really intrigued me was that most of them hold a hand-written dedication, too: "Sid, you are the best"; "Sid, you are my hero". "To Sid, thank you for everything" - Marx Brothers, for example. So I started wondering who Sid was. I didn’t want to google it, because I suspected he might be a mobster patron, or the mayor, or something of the sort. I didn’t want to spoil it. When I told a friend back in Sofia, he later wrote to me: “have no fear and check it out.” It’s really strange when you look at photos of L.A. in 1920, you see just a few main streets, a few blobs of buildings here and there, the rest is desert. Photos from 1927 show L.A. as L.A. – one of the biggest swarms of human congregation. In just seven years. After fruitlessly crisscrossing Alaska on a gold rush in the late 19th century, Sid Grauman went to L.A., took a loan and opened the first big cinema in Hollywood, which would later host many premieres, including Star Wars, and be the first cinema to hold the Academy Awards Ceremony. During the finishing touches, before opening the Chinese Theater, Sid accidentally stepped in the wet cement. Shortly after cursing at his own clumsiness, he came up with a “what-the-hell” type of idea. He invited the actress accompanying him to also step in the cement and thus created still one of the biggest attractions in L.A. almost a century later. [caption id="attachment_18170" align="alignright" width="198" caption="Sid Grauman source : www.americancinematheque.com"][/caption] Sid Grauman is the creator of Chinese Theater – a tiny spot of color in the 1920’s gray of L.A. Today, this can hardly happen in a place like L.A. It is so colorful, you get seasick. If you go to Hollywood and are a brilliant up-and-coming actor, director, writer, maybe 50 years from now, you’ll get your Gill Sans star on the Walk of Fame, right in front of the McDonald’s, between Shrek and Britney Spears. But there is no more space in the concrete forecourt. And even if there was, you could never be Sid Grauman, the guy who started it all. But in most of the countries where AUBG students come from, you still could. When I reflect on my professional experience so far, I always seem to be dwelling on this particular piece of impression – L.A., Chinese Theater, Sid Grauman. One obvious point is that there are opportunities to leave a mark in the gray of Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, Tirana that are no longer available in L.A., London, Paris, Berlin. But now I am somehow more interested in this accident of stepping into the wet cement. There’s nothing scary about making the wrong step once in a while. But being aware where this step is taking you is important. Look for the opportunity in the screw-up. It’s surely better than visiting the same places over and over again, no? As I spend some time in an industry/field/subject, I start to think we are at the peak of times, with compulsories to be learned, rules to be followed, authorities to be respected. At AUBG this used to make me feel inadequate and having to catch-up all the time. But most of the industries we end up working in are baby-new. We are still in the first 100 years of cinema, television, advertising, video games, marketing, video-on-demand, cross-media, what else? When compared to literature, music, theater, growing potatoes, herding cattle or building roads - let’s face it, we know nothing about it yet. Would Bach foresee dubstep? If Homer was a music producer, would he green-light an Eminem album? Dunno. I get more and more convinced that you do what you do whatever you do. With time you figure out the things that are important to you and that you bring in, and figure out ways to focus on them in any particular job or task. As you work some you find your value on the market, but as you work some more you (hopefully) find your worth doing what you do. And as you work yet more you develop this instinct to use it on cue. Completing your everyday duties gets easy and what you really focus on becomes this added value you bring into the process. You invest yourself. You are this specific collection of knowledge, experience and ideas, stringed together by your personality, and it is up to you to compress this into a vocation and use your area of work as a vehicle for exploiting yourself. Then it becomes yours. And when it works, it feels great. And when it doesn’t, it still is time well spent. Arthur Schopenhauer famously wrote, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Now, I hate to be paraphrasing one of the ""greats," but (a) I am a lot more optimistic than Shopenhauer, (b) to be fair, markets were very different in the early 19th century. So, I would say this: you don’t have to be a genius to keep your eyes open for the target no one has seen yet. Whether it’s a hit or a miss you sometimes owe it to yourself to give it a shot. [caption id="attachment_18173" align="alignleft" width="365" caption="Georvi Ivanov's personal archive (photo by Jaro Ridzon)"][/caption] Just briefly I’ll come back to that evening walk on Hollywood boulevard. Our Oscar campaigning was a venture into the pointless, cost us much more money, effort and nerves than expected. But it also provided a bit of wet cement to step in. I think for all three of us there, director Viktor Chouchkov, producer Borislav Chouchkov and myself, it was an important experience, but I can only know (sort of) about myself, so here it is: I don’t need a validation of my abilities from a jury of 65 year olds that I share nothing in common with. I can do what I want in any industry, at any position, and anywhere I am, so no need for cognitive dissonance. If I don’t find the perfect job for myself, I’ll try to create it. Disclaimer: I am only trying this out now myself, so I have no idea if it works yet. *In May 2012 Kodak Theater was bought by Dolby Laboratories and is now named Dolby Theater. Chinese theater is now named TCL Chinese Theater, since TCL Corporation bought the naming rights in January 2013. The imprints in front of TCL Corporation’s Chinese Theater still read “Thank you Sid.” Georgi Ivanov graduated from AUBG in 2006, majoring in Journalism and Mass Communication and European Studies. He worked at the Chouchkov Brothers film production company in Sofia from 2006 to 2013. He is now willingly (and temporarily) unemployed.