TENACITY

“Tenacity”

Definition - not easily dispelled or discouraged; persisting in existence or in a course of action.

Several years ago, someone told me I was “tenacious”, and my first response was to be insulted. I wanted to believe that things come easy for me. I thought being “tenacious” meant that I wasn’t talented enough to get work easily.

But I thought about it, and then realized, that “tenacity” is what it takes to have a career as an artist.

It’s not shameful to be tenacious, in fact it’s to be highly respected. It is necessary.

There are plenty of talented people who are not pursuing their art. But, you can’t be an artist unless you participate in your craft.

I graduated from a highly respected undergraduate acting program, and at the end of the four years we did a showcase in New York City for agents and casting directors. You might be shocked to hear that a lot of the kids who got the biggest responses from agents, one of whom even immediately landed a role on a soap opera, are no longer even acting.

Therefore, it is not talent alone that decides whether you will have a career as an actor. You must also have persistence, determination, strength of purpose, and resolve. In other words, you must have tenacity.

Now, let me tell you the story of another girl I went to high school with. She was a good actress, but her theater experience was strictly of the high school variety. She went to an “okay” theater school. She then moved to New York City to pursue an acting career, and then, years later, she moved to Los Angeles. She struggled on and on to get acting work, but nothing came. I have to admit, I was surprised that after all those years she was still pursuing it, when she had seen so little success. But, clearly, there was something inside her that kept her going. There was something that made her believe that her pursuit was worthy.

In Los Angeles, she began taking classes at The Groundlings Theater, a well-respected school for improvisational theater. I had never thought of her as a “funny” person, but she must’ve known somewhere inside that she had the capacity for it.

She worked her way through the program, a total of four years of training, and actually made it into the Groundling’s Main Company. An honorable feat.

Because she had focused so well on creating her “structure”, jobs began coming. Christopher Guest saw her in one of the Groundlings shows, and began putting her in his films. She became a highly recognizable personality on VH1, and is currently a regular on a Showtime series. All of this and she’s still in her 30’s. Now this is what I call a success story.

And she accomplished it because she was “tenacious”.

Obviously you gotta have the chops to be a working actor, but it’s not enough to just be talented. You have to be actively involved in your craft in order to be a successful actor. So many actors just wait around for the next audition to come. And when it doesn’t, as it is bound to do once and awhile, they can become disheartened and appear more and more desperate at auditions which assures them of even less work.

You must remember that when you feel defeated, the jury is still out as to whether you actually are. It remains to be seen.

So many actors who don’t see immediate success, will let that stop them from growing, or just throw in the towel altogether. You can still be a “success story” at any age.

If a person were to kick their drug habit, and remain sober for the rest of their life, wouldn’t that be considered a success story? It doesn’t matter what failures you’ve had on your journey. What matters is how you overcome them.

There is a screenwriter who wrote a female buddy flick. It was turned down wherever she went, but she believed in the script enough to not give up on it.

Eventually she got the movie made. That movie was THELMA & LOISE. I’m told the writer now has a framed copy of the script hanging above her desk, and on the front of that script, in big red letters, is an agency’s stamp which reads, “Rejected”. She got the last laugh.

It’s like that Cy Coleman song:

“It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish.”