What You Should Know About the Movie Rocky: A Lesson in Creative Constraints
One of the most iconic scenes in the movie Rocky involves the first date between the main character (I forget his name; he's played by Sylvester Stallone) and his love interest, Adrian (Talia Shire). The pair visits a hockey rink, and Adrian goes skating while Rocky (right that's his name) jogs alongside her on the ice. He talks breathlessly about boxing while periodically catching Adrian when she slips. It's not an overly dramatic scene, nor was it filmed in our modern era of gratuitous editing and music scoring. But the scene just works. In fact, it's one of the film's more famous moments.
You can watch it here.
The thing is, in the original script, the scene was supposed to take place in a very different place: the rink at Rockefeller Center in New York City. (If you're unfamiliar, it's a popular tourist attraction thanks to both the rink and the giant Christmas tree erected each year. It's also a popular movie setting, appearing in films like Home Alone 2 and my personal favorite holiday story, Elf, among many others.)
Unsurprisingly, the writers of Rocky wanted to shoot the ice skating scene at Rockefeller Center.
Except they couldn't afford it.
Additionally, the date-night scene between Rocky and Adrian was supposed to feature dozens of extras -- background actors swirling around them as they skated and talked.
Except they couldn't afford them.
In the end, they were forced to shoot in a local hockey rink so decrepit, it was closed to the public -- without any extras aside from one guy shouting to the characters to warn them when they needed to get off the ice. ("Seven more minutes!")
The original script called for a big, intricately decorated location pulsing with people. The actual scene was shot in a sad, dinky rink with just one other bit character. But this unexpected turn led to one of the most iconic scenes from one of the most iconic movies in history.
I'm reminded once more of a truth we seem to fight in our work:
Creativity requires resourcefulness, not resources.
Resources are nice. But resourcefulness is necessary.
It's not HOW MUCH time and money we have that determines whether or not the work resonates but rather HOW we choose to invest it. As John Cleese loves to say, "Creativity is not a talent. It's a way of operating." We bring that way of operating to our work whether we have 5 hours or 50, 10 dollars or 10 million. We might consider ourselves opportunists or maybe even idea "junkers." We go picking through all kinds of scraps, searching in the nooks and crannies of our surroundings. We dumpster dive for any and all material we can test out, and what others overlook, we put to good use.
Would it feel nice to have more budget and time? Of course. But an increase in resources also means an increase in stakes. The only way we'd feel more at ease is if, magically, we receive more money and time WITHOUT increased expectations. Has that ever happened in the history of making stuff? I can't be certain. (I don't have the budget for a time machine and the necessary research team to parse the data). But I'm pretty sure the answer is a resounding NO. Zero times in history has "more resources" meant "lower stakes."
That's why nobody, ever, at any organization, thinks they have plenty to work with. Not the makers of cult classics while they shoot (yanno, before the cult and before they're classics). Not the team over at Marvel. (Turns out a mountain of money feels inadequate when you're asked to dominate the globe.) As creative people, we will always feel like idea junkers -- creative scrappers forced to do too much with too little. Even if we have a fancy logo on our company HQ.
The story of great creative work is the story of how an individual or team deployed their brains, not their budgets. They relied more on resourcefulness than resources. Despite constraints they often felt were unreasonable or unjust, they found a way.
Even if you don't want to embrace this idea, I'd ask you: What about your work might get better if you did?
Want to write amazing stories in our blog posts, but stuck shipping basic, How-To posts? Fine. Can we open your next article with a delightful short story or memory? What if we did that every time for weeks or months or years? How might that evolve the work towards something better?
Want to shoot videos in a professional studio, but stuck in this dingy office? I get it. Is there any unintentional humor we see in our own situations that, if we leaned into it or even parodied it, would help the audience feel seen or relate to us on a more human level?
Want to produce immersive narrative podcasts, but stuck without any production support or editing time? Totally hear that. What if we segmented our interviews so they transformed from basic to beautiful? What if we narrowed our show premise so that each moment we DID have to capture audio yielded something far more original and moving?
What can we steal from others? How can we play with form and function, style and tone, segmentation and story, such that the resulting project requires the same number of hours to produce something that feels much better?
* * *
I'm reminded of working at a small software startup of 13 people in 2011. My job was to create gameified content -- quizzes and puzzles and other low-fi interactive experiences. To do so, the engineering team had built a handful of simple modules we could control in an internal dashboard to build the content. What we wanted was to feel like Neo in the Matrix, controlling the very fabric of our website's reality. What we GOT were a couple of plastic bricks to build with. They didn't even have those little LEGO teeth that let the blocks connect. Just a bunch of smooth digital bricks, and us sitting there banging them together.
We R cReAtiVe!
But honestly? Once we stopped fighting against our limited engineering resources and turned our sights to the mess of crude pieces, it was amazing what my team and I could build. We turned quizzes into dialogues with the audience. Simple drag-and-drop puzzles became narratives. We made the games shorter and longer, changed the themes and topics. The copywriting turned from basic instructions into a character, like an expert Dudgeon Master during a game of Dungeons & Dragons.
Limited resources plus optimistic resourcefulness yielded unlimited creativity.
Viewing our work right now, the cynic might say we polish turds. I think we pan for gold. We sift through piles of dirt to find these little golden qualities previously hidden from view. Then we put those on display. Lord knows, I want us to be paid what we're worth, but beyond that, when we turn our sights to our budgets, our timelines, and our people power, and we feel disappointed, what then? Does that mean we're destined to create worse work?
I don't think so. I think we can iterate our way towards something deeply resonant.
Sometimes, iterating on ideas, drafts, or actual shipped work can lead us in an entirely new direction. The filmmakers behind Rocky undoubtedly made other choices thanks to the rink scene that led to entirely different movie in look and feel. In this way, iterating off a constrained base can be like uncovering new, fruitful paths we never would have considered. So the rink is crappy? Ugh, that sucks. Well, let's make the best of it ... then see where this can take us.
Other times, iterating on our ideas and projects can march us incrementally closer towards our original vision. We start feeling too constrained, like the driven writer stuck drafting yet another basic, How-To blog post. But then the next article turns into a basic How-To blog post with a better opening anecdote. The better opening anecdote leads to future, better openings. Before long, the writer is known for having the most delightful ways of teaching these basic How-Tos. Extrapolated further, and they're an inspiring voice in a saturated space, presenting ideas in gripping ways that fundamentally change people across the world.
Call me an idealist (because yes, I'm an idealist), but I think we can manifest the work we want to create in this world. But that process begins with public action, not private brainstorms and definitely not privately stewing in our own frustrations. Yearning for better things is far less effective than creating them.
We both wish we had more or better, right now. You feel it, and I feel it too. I really do. But the more we're willing work within the confines we're given or that we experience today, the better we create a better tomorrow. We can cook something amazing, despite the ingredients. After all, some of the best food in the world is what's considered "peasant food" -- simple, cast-off ingredients, cooked just the right way, such that the flavor of the bones and the scraps of meat and the overlooked vegetables cook into something surprising. The whole tastes far more delicious than any of the parts.
THAT is our work.
We don't need to run fine dining restaurants to cook food that's fine. (And that's "fine" as in "damn, you FOYNE" ... not "fine" as in "meh.")
Our work is about iterating -- making improvised improvements based on the constraints we experience and the aspirations we have.
Jump in the tiny box.
Then innovate inside it.
Make a version.
Then make the next one better.
Accept that the setting doesn't match the script.
But shoot the hell out of it anyway.