See the Good / Suppress the Bad
Seeing the possibilities without being blinded by them
Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the furthest thing from it.
- Stephen Colbert
Experience is a double-edged sword: it makes you both wiser and cynical. In learning what works, you become skeptical of anything that deviates from the norm. The more successful you become, the harder it is to see what will make you successful in the future.
No one has benefited from this concept more than Jason Blum. His production company, Blumhouse Productions, has gained a reputation for making some of the most profitable films of all time.
Paranormal Activity, his first film, generated $193 million worldwide on a budget of $15 thousand.
Sinister generated $87 million on a budget of $3 million.
Insidious grossed over $99 million on a budget of $1.5 million.
Get Out grossed $255 million on a budget of $4.5 million, not to mention an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
What’s surprising is Blumhouse’s breakout films were those that every other major studio discarded. Blumhouse was the studio of last resort.
You mentioned Get Out, and honestly, no one else wanted to make that movie…It’s the great thing about the movie business. Most of the successful movies we’ve done, no one else wanted to do. Nobody wanted to make The Purge, which was floating around three years. No one wanted to make The Gift, when it was a script called Weirdo. Nobody wanted Paranormal Activity, even after it was finished. Almost all our success stories are like that.
What does Blum see that others miss?
Filmmaking is primarily a numbers game. There’s more supply than you can ever fulfill, so you must thin the herd of spec scripts and rough cuts to find the winners. As a result, movie studio executives rely on their experience of what doesn’t work to filter what comes across their desks.
And that’s the mistake.
Blum doesn’t start with what doesn’t work. He starts with what will. He starts by seeing the good.
The longer you are in the business, the more material comes your way. It becomes easy after a while to get lazy and dismiss everything as garbage. You have to find a way to focus on areas that show promise. Every script is a work in progress — it’s a blueprint for something else.
Seeing the good isn’t enough, though. All creative endeavors carry risk, even the ones with promise. To be truly successful, Blumhouse uses the financial constraints of the budget and contracts to limit the downside.
In big movies, interests are not aligned between those above the line [actors, director, producers, writers] and the financier, because above the line gets paid whether the movie works or not. The financier only makes money if the movie works, and that fundamentally sets up a contentious relationship. What I love about low-budget movies is my interests and the director’s interests and the actors’ interests are aligned. No one makes money unless the movie works, and that informs every creative decision.
Making movies on a fixed budget and paying the above-the-line workers low base with a share of the gross reduces the risk and increases the individual upside. In addition, by making the movie without a release date scheduled, the team has a chance to screen the film and decide whether it warrants a theatrical or video-on-demand release.
In short, Blum starts by looking for the good and then suppresses the bad.
As discussed in They’re Only Chasing Safety, the formula for delivering superior results is unconventionality and accuracy.
Such a model manufactures doubt as a byproduct. Once you’ve strayed from the beaten path, you won’t know for sure where you’re going until you arrive. The longer it takes, the more time fear of being wrong has to take root and sow the seeds of doubt.
The line between faith and folly can seem indistinguishable. This is where experience can do some damage. We start to see all of the reasons why it won’t work. Whether examples from our past or those we’ve heard, we’re inundated with tales from the Ghost of Failures past. The sheer volume of examples causes us to conflate the availability of the anecdotes with the probability that they will occur. What’s eventual is treated as inevitable.
Seeing the good is a way to cut through the noise. By first focusing on the bright spots, we shift our attention to where to go next rather than the dangers that may lay ahead. By suppressing the bad, we can take those first few steps knowing that we can always turn back.
In short, we leverage experience to tell us what to prepare for without being beholden to it.
At what point do you give up?
My wife and I struggled with this question daily. After six years of fertility treatment and just as many miscarriages, the seeds of doubt had grown into a garden of dubiety.
On paper, we were perfect candidates. Young and healthy, there was no discernible reason that we couldn’t have a baby. And yet, we couldn’t. Over and over, we rode the fertility loop de loop - hope, dread, despair - always ending where we began wondering if it was worth riding again.
Bringing a child hadn’t felt like an audacious goal, but it was hard to argue that the path we were pursuing was a reasonable one. As we stared at the possibility of doing another round of IVF, we had to ask ourselves if we had any chance at a different outcome.
Inadvertently, we took a page out of the Blumhouse playbook and started looking for the good. Rather than focusing on what experience told us didn’t work, we focused on what was possible. Not having a diagnosis meant we didn’t know why it hadn’t worked; it also meant that there was reason to believe it still could. We sought second and third opinions, discussed other protocols and treatments, all with the intent of making this the most robust cycle it could be.
We then had a long talk about how to suppress the bad. IVF takes a toll - both mentally and physically. We weren’t ready to give up, but we weren’t prepared to devote our lives to this either. One more round, with all of the bells and whistles, and then we’d shift to a different strategy - adoption, surrogacy, etc.
I still can’t believe it worked. My experience still tells me that it shouldn’t have. That it won’t. That it can’t. And yet, as we draw ever nearer to our daughter’s due date, I can’t help but marvel at the possibilities that experience told me were out of reach.
This is not to say it was destined to happen. It was eventual, not inevitable, and my heart goes out to those who weren’t as fortunate as we are.
That being said, I credit the framework for helping us muster the energy to give it another go. Had we not looked past our own experience, we’d be in a very different place than we are today.
The point of this framework isn’t to guarantee success but to help you decide where to place your bets. Whenever we step up to the plate with the intent to hit it out of the park, we have a higher chance of striking out than a grand slam. Over time, a strong vision paired with disciplined execution can increase those odds in our favor, but you may never see the ball sail over the fence.
The only certainty is you’ll never hit a home run if you never swing with all your might.
