Respond To The Conditions
In the early 1970s, the record industry was struggling. There was an economic recession. Production and distribution costs were increasing. The rise of FM radio was changing how people discovered and consumed music. With declining record sales, labels made big budget cuts, leading to widespread layoffs. As a result, designers like Paula Scher were left without illustrators they had traditionally relied on. Forced to adapt, Scher focused on her strength—typography—and began making the type on album covers bigger and bigger. Over time, this approach became her signature style, the work she became known for, the foundation of a career that extended far beyond the music industry. She went on to redefine branding, advertising, and public spaces, designing big, bold, type-centric identities for companies and institutions like The Public Theater, MoMA, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Shake Shack, the Metropolitan Opera, and the High Line. Reflecting on the origins of her legendary career, Scher said, “I began to find my graphic language in the early 1970s as a result of the economy and what was happening in the record industry, not because I had some grand plan. There was a condition, and I responded to the condition…In the end, a person has to be able to adapt to the conditions of their present circumstances.”
A person adapting to the conditions of their present circumstances—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Foundation Of An Empire
Dr. Seuss is the bestselling children’s book author ever. He got into writing children’s books because of a condition. Before publishing his first book at 33, Seuss was a freelance artist. In 1927, Geisel was working on a cartoon to be published in a satire magazine called Judge. In it, a knight is sitting upright in bed as a menacing dragon approaches. The knight uses Flit insect spray to fend off the dragon. That issue of Judge was picked up in a beauty saloon by the wife of Lincoln Cleaves, an executive at the Standard Oil Company, which produced Flit. Mrs. Cleaves loved the cartoon. She showed it to her husband and soon after, Geisel signed a contract to produce Flit ads, which he would do for the next seventeen years. The job paid well, but it was creatively limiting. “For seventeen years,” Dr. Seuss explained, “[I used] exactly the same caption by drawing a different picture each time.” So eventually, “I was really wanting something more to do.” The conditions of the Flit contract “forbade me from doing an awful lot of stuff,” he said. But writing children’s books wasn’t forbidden. “I would like to say I went into children’s book work because of my great understanding of children,” he’d later say. But, “I went in because it wasn’t excluded by my [Flit] contract.” “What would eventually become the Dr. Seuss empire,” biographer Brian Jay Jones writes, “would be laid on a foundation built and paid for with Standard Oil money.”
The Parameters Of Life
Eight days into directing his first movie, “Piranha II,” James Cameron got fired. “Twenty-seven, broke, and depressed,” Cameron said, “I couldn’t get my phone calls returned. I couldn’t get a call back from anybody. I was absolutely dead in the water. I knew that if I was ever going to direct a movie again, I was going to have to create something for myself. I had to contour whatever I wanted to do into the kind of parameters of my life and how I could sell myself.” Cameron began thinking about writing his first screenplay, shaping every creative decision to fit within the limitations of his circumstances. “Since I have a strong background in special effects,” he explained, “my natural inclination was to go toward science fiction. But realistically, I knew the most money I could probably raise to make a picture would be $3 million or $4 million. So I knew it would have to be a contemporary location…So I started putting things together: I’ve got effects, I want it to be science fiction, but it has to be a contemporary story. So I thought, ‘how do I inject the fantastic element into a contemporary setting? Well, there’s only two ways to do that—either set it in space or somewhere else in time. Boom, okay, it’s a time travel story.’” Shortly after settling on a time travel story, sick with a fever one night, Cameron woke from a dream of a chrome skeleton emerging from fire, dragging itself forward with a knife. “I thought that was a really horrific image,” he said, “and I got up and sketched it.” From this nightmare image, Cameron began crafting a story that would work within the other parameters. The chrome skeleton would be a deadly robot arriving from the future into present-day Los Angeles. The robot’s cold, emotionless nature meant he didn’t need a big-name actor—he could cast someone based on their physical presence rather than their acting pedigree. Grounding the film in what was familiar, he pulled from his own life, setting scenes in places he knew—even turning the Bob’s Big Boy where his first wife had worked into the movie’s Bob’s Big Buns. When the script was finished, rather than sell it to a major studio where he would likely be replaced as director, Cameron made the strategic choice to sell the rights to a producer named Gale Anne Hurd for one dollar on the condition that she would let him direct it. They secured financing from a small independent company, and with a modest $4 million budget—“probably about our catering budget on Avatar,” he would later joke—Cameron made his directorial debut with The Terminator, starring a relatively unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger as the ruthless cyborg assassin. Released in October 1984, the film opened at number one at the box office and went on to gross $78.3 million worldwide. Since he had sold the rights for just $1, he never made any money from The Terminator sequels, nor from the video games, action figures, or theme park rides that followed. But, he said, “I have a career as a result. So I’ve never really regretted that decision, although it was costly financially. I chalked it up to the cost of a Hollywood education.”
Had The Shark Worked…
In Jaws, you don’t see the shark until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the movie. That wasn’t the plan. It was the response to a condition. The script called for the mechanical shark, affectionately nicknamed “Bruce,” to be featured prominently throughout the film. When Bruce was tested in a Hollywood fresh water tank, it worked. However, when the production moved to the Atlantic Ocean, Bruce broke—the salt water corroded its electrical components. So director Steven Spielberg had to film the movie without his main character. Adapting to the circumstances, Spielberg reimagined the movie, shifting the terror from direct encounters with the shark to the unseen menace lurking beneath the waves. He relied on the audience’s imagination, using clever camera angles and the ominous presence of the ocean itself to build suspense. Spielberg later reflected, “That’s what turned the movie into more of an exercise in suspense than just a horror film…Jaws is scary because of what you don’t see, not because of what you do.” When asked if the movie would have been different had the shark functioned properly, Spielberg said, “I would have made a movie that wouldn’t have been as successful…think the film would have made half the money had the shark worked.” Jaws had a record $7 million opening weekend and grossed $100 million in its first 59 days, passing The Godfather as the highest-grossing film in history.
The World of 3 1/4 Seconds
At a time when he was “completely bereft of ideas [and] quite lost, actually,” Brian Eno—who coined the term “ambient music” and produced albums for David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads—was commissioned to compose what would become The Microsoft Sound, the startup sound for Windows 95. In the project brief, there was a long list of adjectives—the piece of music needed to be inspiring, universal, futuristic, optimistic, emotional, sentimental, and so on—and then at the bottom it said, “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.” Immersed in the challenge of distilling a complete, evocative idea into just a few seconds, Eno was forced to break from the familiar patterns that shaped his own music. The conditions of the project required him to step away from his usual creative habits, pushing him to experiment with new, unconventional approaches. In the process, Eno broke through the creative block that had him feeling lost. “In fact, I made 84 pieces,” he said. “I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”
The Fittest
After reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, in 1864, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” as a shorthand for Darwin’s theory of evolution. The phrase has since been distorted to justify corporate takeovers, wars, genocides, and ruthless power struggles. What Spencer meant, James Suzman writes in Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, “was not that the strongest and the smartest [are] destined to succeed, but rather that those organisms that are best adapted [to] ‘fit’ into any particular environmental niche will thrive.” More than strength, intelligence, or a grand plan, surviving and thriving requires the ability to recognize a condition and respond to that condition, to adapt to the conditions of your present circumstances.