One of my all time favorite quotes comes from noted screen writer William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) which goes:
“Nobody knows anything…Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
While the quote was intended to offer insight into the movie making process, it relates to almost every artistic endeavor out there.
One could make a very long list of writers, for example, who lived their lives in poverty and/or obscurity, releasing works that would, unfortunately for them, be considered classics long after they were dead (offhand, people like Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard are but three examples).
It amuses me to read the latest negative reactions to Suicide Squad and see people write something along the lines of “Why can’t DC make a good movie?”
As if they’re trying desperately to make a bad one? If anything, Suicide Squad may prove a great example of a studio trying desperately -and with too little time to do so- make a film based on the negative reactions to a previous one, Batman v Superman.
Moving away from that, there are plenty of examples of artistic creations the artist making them didn’t think all that much about but which blew up on them and became signature works.
For example, its been stated the members of Nirvana were not happy with the released version of their seminal album Nevermind, that they felt the production made the album sound too vanilla.
I point these things out because I’m absolutely fascinated by these stories and, while listening to the radio the other day, I found another delightful example of just such a thing.
On the radio station I was listening to they played a snippet of an interview with Rod Stewart. Now, I’m not a huge Rod Stewart fan. I know plenty of his songs and consider some of them quite good but his work never really thrilled me enough to pursue.
Anyway, in that snippet of the interview Mr. Stewart talks about what is perhaps his biggest, most well known hit, Maggie May, which first appeared on his 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story. Here’s the song for those who don’t know it:
Anyway, I can only paraphrase what Mr. Stewart said, but it went something like this:
Mr. Stewart noted that when he was making Every Picture Tells a Story, he recorded the song Maggie May last and was ambivalent as to whether to include it in the album. He presented it to friends to get their opinion as to whether to include it or not and these friends said he shouldn’t include the song, that it “meandered” and didn’t have a “hook”.
(Interestingly, I believe his friends were correct, the song does indeed not have a “hook” and it does meander. Yet even I, an admitted not-very-big fan of Mr. Stewart, nonetheless believe it is a terrific song anyway.)
Mr. Stewart then states that because the album was so very close to being released and he had no other songs ready to put into the album to replace Maggie May, he wound up including it in the album.
In that snippet of the interview Mr. Stewart then laughed and said something along the lines of “Good thing too as I wouldn’t be here today if I had cut the song out!”
As I said, nobody knows nothing.
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