主题：凯文.史派西：论电视行业与创意人才 -- 万年看客

Good evening. I’m delighted to be here. First, I can honestly tell you that no event in my life this year has given me more heartfelt pleasure to prepare for than giving this speech today. As an Edinburgh Festival virgin I really didn’t know what I was letting myself in for so you will be pleased to hear I did my homework before sitting down to write a word. And the relief for all of you is that I’m not someone with an important job in broadcasting using this speech to audition for an even more important job in broadcasting. Since, in the history of the MacTaggart Lecture, no actor has ever been asked to give this speech, I also won’t be spending any time justifying why I’m giving this speech. If what I say today is responsible, then I alone am responsible for saying it. And if the MacTaggart were a political office that you actually had to run for, then the banner hanging over this lectern would be my campaign slogan and theme for today and it would read . . . “It’s the creatives, stupid.”

Now when I think of what it must have been like for this industry when the MacTaggart was first given almost 40 years ago, I imagine that the audience then probably went home at the end of the festival and shared that time honored tradition - when the entire family would gather around the television set – tuned to a certain channel, at a certain hour and watch a favorite movie (like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’). They probably felt blessed to be living in such a modern age with a 21-inch television that brought the family together.

Today when I think about how all of you might go home at the end of this festival, you can sense things are a bit different now than they were then: It's more likely that you have already recorded ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ on your DVR, as you gamely try to gather the family around the giant movie screen you’ve installed in what used to be the basement; then you can try to find out where your children are on Facebook, and might ask your partner to stop Instagramming photos of the meal they’ve just ordered from the delivery service - during the film - while Grandma desperately pins even more pictures of cats on her Pinterest page, as your son quietly and surreptitiously clears his entire browser history, and your daughter Tweets how boring ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ is because its not in 3D or even in color . . . you too will feel that warm glow of precious family time when we all come together to . . . ignore each other.

It is indeed a more complicated, modern and wonderful life, isn’t it?

A bit of cautious humor as I begin my comments today. And I want to start by sharing with you a couple experiences I have had in television that profoundly changed my view of this medium and are perhaps some of the influences that led to my doing ‘House of Cards’ with Netflix – one of the primary reasons (if not the only reason) I was asked to speak today.

Now I was lucky, my parents loved literature and the arts so we had a house full of books and I was taken to the theater often as a young child. But I was also captivated by television. We loved to sit down as a family and watch Upstairs/Downstairs or The Wild Wild West, crowded round our set for the latest episodes. Television showed me a world beyond my neighborhood, people I had never met, places I had never seen. It fired my imagination, just like theater and books had. I was not a studious kid and I struggled to find things that would command my attention and engage my ideas and energies. But I knew I loved stories and drama. I had even sat down with a school friend and drew on a napkin in a restaurant the plans for the theatre we dreamed of opening one day – a theatre we would name Trigger Street after the street my friend lived on. Well, as it turned out I did eventually get to run a theatre, the Old Vic but I saved the name Trigger Street for my production company; so I am one very lucky guy because I have been able to live out my dreams almost so perfectly now as I look back on it, that you’d think I’d made it up. But in fact, it was a teacher who had an idea how to engage with young people who saved me. You see, it turns out I was drawn to acting at a very young age and this smart drama teacher pushed me towards a workshop, where I was blessed to meet the man who would become my mentor, the great actor Jack Lemmon.

At this workshop – that was being run by Mr. Lemmon in 1974 – we had to do scenes from Juno & The Paycock, which he was performing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. And after I finished my scene, Jack Lemmon walked up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “That was a touch of terrific. You should go to New York and study because you are born actor”. Mind you, I was just 13 years old.

So after graduating high school, I took Mr. Lemmon’s advice and went to NY to study at the Juilliard School of Drama. And then I later got the chance to audition to play Jack’s alcoholic son in the Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Days Journey into Night. So in 1986, 12 years after I first met him I found myself in a room (once again with Jack Lemmon) and after I finished my audition, in which we did four scenes together, once again Mr. Lemmon walked up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I never thought we’d find the rotten kid, but you’re it. Jesus Christ, what the hell was that”? I spent the next year working every night alongside Jack – including our run in London at the Haymarket; and he became the most important mentor, friend and father figure I could have hoped to find. We did 3 films together, ending with Glengarry Glen Ross.

Fast forward to 1990 when I was invited by Jack to sit at his table at the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award to Sir David Lean. And for those of you who haven’t heard of Sir David Lean, two things you should know; one - he directed Lawrence of Arabia and two - if you don’t know who David Lean is – you’re in the wrong business.

Anyway, I remember being on the edge of my seat as Mr. Lean dedicated his entire acceptance speech to the idea of promoting and supporting emerging talents. It turns out he was concerned, perhaps even frightened, about the film industry’s lack of commitment to developing talent and the greater and greater number of films that the studios were making that appealed only to the pulse and not to the mind. This is part of what he said that night in 1990 in front of all of Hollywood:

“I find myself thinking that nearly everything Noel Coward and I used to talk about in doing new things and nearly everything I learned in those early days seems to be contradicted today. We don’t come out of many new holes anymore. We try to go back and come out of the old ones. Parts 1,2,3 and 4 and I think its terribly, terribly sad. Okay, do the old things - Parts 1, 2 and 3 - but don’t make them a staple diet. This business lives on creative pathfinders. I terribly miss; we all miss, I think, somebody like the great producer Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps: He understood us creative people. And he understood the money people. And we’re in terrible danger. I think there are some wonderful new storytellers coming up now. They are going to be our future. Please you chaps in the money department, remember what they are. I think the time has come, where the money people can afford to lose a little by taking risks with these new filmmakers”. And then Lean said the following… “I think if they give these new storytellers encouragement, we’re going to come up and up and up in the film business and find the new ideas. But if we don’t - were going to go down and down and down and lose it all - to television. Television is going to take over”. Hold onto that thought, because I’ll come back to it.

The second experience I want to tell you about is when I took my first trip to Los Angeles as a working actor in 1987; after studying at Juilliard and having begun my career in the theatre, I was offered a re-occurring role on the CBS series Wiseguy, which I immediately turned down. At this point I had only experienced two guest starring parts in episodic’s: one on The Equalizer and the other on Crime Story. The experience and the performances I gave in both these shows was, frankly, forgettable. I was an unknown theatre actor, who’d never worked in front of a camera, but I understood story, I understood arc and how to create a character and I wondered who all these guys were standing around the camera in suits; asking why my hair was that way, or why I was wearing that tie or why I was acting “that way”. These weren’t the directors or writers; they were . . . network people. “I see network people”. Sticking their fingers in creative decisions and having opinions about everything. Even though I was just starting out, I already knew that I didn’t want to have that kind of experience as a steady diet. So I turned down this offer to do Wiseguy. When my agents began to scream at me - who the hell did I think I was, etc., I picked up the phone and called Jack Lemmon.

I remembered during Long Day’s Journey Jack used to talk about when he first started out as an actor in the early days of television in the 1950’s. He often talked about those days as the “Golden Years” – we’ve all heard that term – the Golden Age. As I was being pressured to accept this role, I wondered what did he actually mean by that phrase. So I called and asked him; were you just being nostalgic or was there something different about the way television was back then? And he said to me . . . “You have to understand, kid, that television was brand new back then. It was a new medium and nobody really knew if it was going to last - so you could try anything – comedy one week, drama the next, a soap, a musical, it was terrific. It hadn’t been commercialized yet and no one knew if it was even going to be around long. There was a sense of total abandon”.

“Total abandon” . . . Now that was not a phrase I had ever associated with television: “abandon’. But now it makes sense to me when I discovered that James MacTaggart, in addition to being a dynamic creative force, was also in his personal life a volunteer parachutist in the Scottish Battalion. He chose to jump into space, willingly and bravely – literally taking a leap of faith - and his work reflects that sense of ‘abandon’, which is why we honor his memory today.

And so it struck me that this was exactly what I needed to apply – ‘total abandon’ - in order to tackle a character that would be memorable and have an experience that would be lasting. So I sat with Stephen J. Cannell and he promised I could have total freedom to create this role of Mel Profitt. So I took the part and it turned into a very satisfying experience. I did 7 episodes. And then they killed me off.

Brett Martin, in his new book ‘Difficult Men’ - a behind the scenes look at the past 15 years of what he calls the 3rd Golden Age of television - cites a very revealing story about what many creatives have had to deal with since the beginning of this medium. When the hit series Hill Street Blues was about to premier in 1980, NBC sent an internal memo to writer & show runner Stephen Bochco with a list of their concerns following a focus group testing of the program: “The most prevalent audience reaction indicated that the program was depressing, violent and confusing. Too much was crammed into the story. The main characters were perceived as being not capable and having flawed personalities. Professionally, they were never completely successful in doing their jobs and personally their lives were in a mess. Audiences found the ending unsatisfying. Too many loose ends…” - etc;

In other words, this memo was an entirely unwitting blueprint not only for what made Hill Street Blues such a historic program, but for all the shows that make up this Third Golden Age.

If those executives had had their way the road would have never been paved for The Sopranos, Rescue Me, Weeds, Homeland, Dexter, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Damages, Sons of Anarchy, Oz, The Wire, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and House of Cards.

If the list of programs I just read isn’t the most powerful and inescapable evidence that the King of television is the creatives – then I don’t know what would convince you. And our challenge now is to keep the flame of this revolutionary programming alive by continuing to seek out new talent, nurture it, encourage it, challenge it, give it home and the kind of autonomy that the past and present – of our three Golden Ages of television - has proved it deserves.

I don’t think we do enough. And like David Lean, I’m disappointed. Disappointed this industry doesn’t do more to support new talent. And just because I have achieved success in my career doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed in myself. Disappointed that I haven’t done better – that my work hasn’t always stood up to the challenge or the time. I want to do better. I want to produce better stories. I want to do better plays. I want to encourage the best of the storytellers coming up in this industry; because I believe ‘sending the elevator back down’, Jack Lemmon’s philosophy he handed down to me, is a great way we can all use success to benefit others.

And because I feel this way I wonder how many of you sitting here today also feel this way; despite how well things might be going for you, despite your success. Are you still disappointed - in your own reach, your own bar of excellence, your own ambitions, your creative courage, your own ability to use this medium - these platforms - so they bring out the best in yourself and in those you work alongside? And I wonder if you are - as I am - disappointed that this medium doesn’t reach for the highest of excellence as much as it should, or could?

I suspect more will be said about talent this weekend than anything else. We all know that it’s always been about creative talent, right? And I’m not just talking about emerging talents, because talent can come from anywhere and anyone. Although there is usually a focus on young talent, age is not a barrier to great ideas or good stories. Talent comes in all shapes and sizes; we should be open to discovering those with alot of experience and those with no experience. Now, granted it is also true that there is a good deal of undiscovered talent - that remains undiscovered for a reason. But we all know when we come across a talent who does have the ‘it’ factor and that’s what I’m talking about. Until now, those of us in the television and film business have been able to wait for the talent to find us. We had the keys to the kingdom and folks needed to bring us their stories if they wanted to find a route to an audience. But now things are changing and changing fast. Kids aren’t growing up with a sense of TELEVISION as the aspirational place for their ideas; all they know is the incredible diversity of entertainment, stories and engagement that they can find online and if they do love a show on Netflix or Apple TV you can bet they probably don’t know which network it originally aired on. So how do we find these kids?