Then, “If you’re good at it, work hard. If you’re original…cream rises.”
That’s possibly true, too, I concede. I’ve heard about cream rising before, in workshops and rejection slips. Very likely, it happens.
The implied corollary is that if you can’t make it, you’re not good enough. It’s a bootstraps philosophy.
Then I think about a particular pack of white men in Hollywood, how wealthy they are and have been for so long, and the famously wealthy neighborhood where at least one of them lives, and the single lunch I was fortunate to enjoy with a cluster of actors and one showrunner, before my idea — a successful indie novel — was lifted almost whole cloth, lightly disguised, and the main character’s gender switched to suit their needs. A show’s concept instantly emerged among these men, and their show had more than strong parallels to the work of mine we’d been discussing; I was turned into an unacknowledged muse, crushing a movie deal my publisher and I spent years establishing.
In interviews, the famous men said they’d been in a bind, running out of ideas, with the clock ticking on a deal already in place that they were struggling to fulfill. The idea came to them out of virtually nowhere.
They looked after themselves. It had nothing to do with who was or wasn’t, creatively, “cream.” Honestly, s**t floats, too.