Trenton ReynoldsIt is Saturday, June 11th, 2016. This is Room in the Trees, a podcast about you and me and our doings.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonNo, it's not about you and me.
Well...
Trenton ReynoldsIt's a podcast about... What is this about?
Sabrina Ward HarrisonThis is a podcast about creative living and questions and as is and navigating the world as we are living it. And you, the listeners, and collaborating and talking. The people we are inspired by and keeping the tradition alive with storytelling.
Trenton ReynoldsThe following was recorded on June 2nd, 2016. This is episode number eight. John Kent Harrison returns, part one. Room in the Trees is hosted by Sabrina Ward Harrison and me, Trent Reynolds. If you like what we do here, you can support us by becoming our patron at patreon.com backslash room. As we mentioned last week, we drew a name this week from our list of Patreon subscribers and Michelle Johnston will be receiving the original line art from one of our Room in the Trees episodes. You'll also be receiving a piece of original work from me and our appreciation for supporting Room in the Trees. You are loved and welcome here.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonAnd go build a fort. We are excited to collaborate with you. And I love the idea of recording voicemails on your phone and then just sending them to us at roominthetrees@gmail.com with any ideas for conversations and creative questions you have, any random story adventures you have been on recently, any Room in the Trees type of material for us. Please send them our way. and we'd love to bring it to the show. We've had wonderful feedback about internships and we had lots of responses from people that lived outside of the United States in England and Australia. If you are interested in collaborating let us know what you're kind of interested in collaborating with us with.
With us with.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonWhat do you want to with us with? Support us. Join us. Collaborate with us. My dad is John Ken Harrison, and he is... been a wildly wonderful and influential mentor, father, and inspiration to me growing up. My dad is a writer, director, and extremely cool, interesting guy who's had some fantastic adventures. in his life. We had a great conversation about exploration, fear, failing, criticism, rejection, filmmaking, storytelling, spelling Los Angeles, art as a healing mechanism, hissy fits, and 71 days paddling down the Mississippi. So,
Trenton ReynoldsWell, the heartbreaking thing for me about losing our first conversation is that there were two or three parts of it that I had thought a great deal about after we had the conversation. And I was looking forward to going back and re-listening. And not only that, I had shared some of that with my parents and with my wife. and I wanted to you know, get what you're, have them hear what, what had been talked about specifically, because I didn't feel like I was explaining it well. So selfishly, I, I am really sad that,
John Kent Harrisonthat we lost that conversation. So. Yeah, well, yeah. And I didn't remember anything I ever say, so we'll have to start fresh. Well, it was interesting that we have this little problem. I was saying to Sabrina, it's like a typical artistic problem. I remember we lived in Toronto and I was, I think I had my first Apple computer or, no, I had an IBM I think. And I lost 20 pages of original script or something or other. And I just had one of those freakish screams. lost it. And then I just, I paced around and caught my breath and I realized, okay, it's all in there somewhere. You spend a whole day doing it, it's in there somewhere. I sat down and I started writing it again. And I got over the feeling of bitterness and anger and self-loathing because what I was writing was actually better than what I'd had. It came back, it didn't come back the same way, but it ended up being better. So I don't want to do that every time, but...
Trenton ReynoldsIt's been long enough that I don't know if I can remember all the things that I, you know, was going over and over in my mind after our conversation, but there were a couple specifically that I definitely still remember, and one was the distinction you made between adventuring or an adventure and traveling. And that related specifically to your experience on the Mississippi River.
John Kent HarrisonIndians and they would go deep, deep, deep into the wilderness, you know, to the point where civilization, not civilization, but known exploration ended and he'd go past that. Then they'd have to get back to the, then they have to go back to get home to Montreal before the rivers froze. And one year he went out right to the very edge of this frontier and his partner got sick. And so we had three months to to travel on his own, to adventure on his own. And he called it his voyage of pure discovery. And he went out into beyond the frontier, beyond where any white man had ever gone. And he was a jolly, he was a very tough guy who'd been tortured by Indians twice. and who'd survived by his wit, who knew dialects of all the different tribes, and was very strong, and he was a fun guy, and he sang all the French Voyageur paddling songs. He had a guitar, and he was just a cool dude, and he made separate treaties just for himself with Indian tribes and all this, and had the most amazing -- and he loved being in the forest and being in the wilderness, and he was thinking about people back in Europe, his peers who were in Europe still fighting wars over religion and to try and save a stinking rock in the ocean. And here he was in the most magnificent country on the planet. And he met so many of these of the tribes and things. And he said, we were Caesars, being there was no one to contradict us. And that is adventure. That is where you are who you are. And what happens happens. And you're a Caesar in the sense that there's no one to tell you not to do something. And that's the excitement of adventure versus travel, which is you set up your hotel, you rent your car, you go to a place, you visit a church, you go to an art gallery, you have a nice dinner, and then the next day you get on the train, you go to this and that. And there's not a lot of spontaneity in travel and not so much excitement either. But in adventure, every single day is different and you own it. completely.
Trenton ReynoldsAnd would you say that that is a way, it's a mindset, it's a way of living so that one person, two people could go on an identical vacation, say, or trip, and one could be traveling and the other could be adventuring?
Hard to imagine.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonThey split up for the day.
John Kent HarrisonThere's a lot of risk involved. There's very little risk involved in travel.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonRight. And my thought about that is exploration. You have the challenges. I love how you said that. It's who you are because you have the challenges, but you're actively solving them. When travel, you're just let down like, well, I didn't like the linens on the bed. But when you're like, I'm on an adventure. I found a place to sleep tonight in this little tiny pension. And I met the people who run it. And we had this wonderful homemade dinner. And you own the experience so much more. And that's to me really what resonates and the symbolism of that experience.
John Kent HarrisonYeah, I know I have a friend in Europe who goes on holidays to India, for example, to India, to Italy, Germany, never gets a hotel reservation. You know, just lands there in a plane and finds some place to stay.
Yeah.
John Kent HarrisonRight. And, you know, you never thought of that.
Right.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonI kind of did. I think my trip to Italy back when I did that backpacking thing, I kind of felt like it.
John Kent HarrisonYeah, well, I think that's true. I think that was. Because you find out, I think you find out what you're made of.
Yeah.
John Kent HarrisonAnd you surprise yourself when that happens. Adventure makes you grow. Travel does too, educationally, but adventure makes you grow in character.
Yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsRight. I think it also just sets up a different expectation between you and the experience that you're having. I just think of growing up, my parents, they liked to travel. They would take us all with them. I don't know how they did that. but they would take us on to another country and my dad would have a very outlined, regimented trip plan where we had to go see all the sites. And I remember growing up and starting to travel on my own, realizing that I didn't have to do it that way and that I could just walk out the hotel and-- start walking down the street. And that kind of relationship where there wasn't a predetermined destination or predetermined game plan changed my relationship to the city, to travel in general, and then it was ultimately much more satisfying to me.
John Kent HarrisonYeah, I think so. I think it sharpens your sense of inner self and your sense of awareness of the exterior. The two things really get sharpened by that kind
Trenton Reynoldsexperience it. So how does that idea relate to your creative process or does
John Kent Harrisonit? Absolutely does, yeah. Well I think Sabrina and I always talked about, we talked about fear a long time ago. Fear and danger are really important tools to have as an artist I think. You have to My opinion has always been, somebody asked me, one of the first films I made for CBS and the producer, I was running around doing the usual stuff, and she said, "What motivates you, John?" And I said, I didn't even think about it, I said, "Fear." Because basically I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm trying to figure it out as I go, and I don't want to fail. So I'm driven by this inner sense of... And then a project comes along, I remember thinking, "I'm doing all these films at Hallmark Hall of Fame. They give me these bigger budget films that have deep emotions. And I know where I'm headed because I've made probably five of them now or six in different networks and there's highly emotional. I said, I'm headed for the Holocaust. I just know that ultimately I have to do a film in the Holocaust. Cause how can I, then how do you make an entertaining movie about the Holocaust? That's pretty tough. And sure enough, that's where it went. And I had this danger in my, you know, as soon as I knew, heard the story, as I knew I had to do the story. And then I was terrified because that's one thing I did not want to screw up.
Trenton ReynoldsBut you're driven by it, that's the focus.
John Kent HarrisonYeah, it makes me more awake somehow. And it makes me see things and look for things that maybe I'd otherwise just look over. If you do the same movie a second time, it couldn't be as good. A sequel can never be as good as the original.
same person.
Sabrina Ward Harrison- I think about that Trenton with your painting, the way you paint, you know, there's a...
John Kent Harrison- Don't Trenton, you must have that experience too. Sabrina too, that where you get in the middle of something, it's the classic art thing where you get in the middle of it and you just got to keep going. You think, oh, this is a waste of time. What was I thinking? And you got to keep going. You can't buy into that monkey voice.
Trenton ReynoldsFor sure. I'm thinking that that fear doesn't enter too much into my, into making a painting because the stakes are pretty, ultimately pretty low unless I've got, you know, unless I'm working for a client or have a deadline, but Maybe he upgrades the stakes. Exactly. I was thinking of that too.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonOne day he'll tell you the story about the commission he had to do for this dead dog.
Trenton ReynoldsThat was not fear as much as it was self-hatred and loathing of my life situation. But I was thinking when I teach, I very much approach it in... I purposefully don't try to over-prepare and I purposely go into it with a little bit of fear, not knowing exactly what's gonna come of it because I know that that creates the opportunity for conversation that wouldn't happen if I went in with a predetermined idea what I was going to come out the other end with.
John Kent HarrisonRight. That's the same. Never memorize a speech. Same thing. It's got to be open.
Trenton ReynoldsRight. So it's not that you have an appetite for fear, or maybe you do, but you just...
John Kent HarrisonI don't at all. I really don't. I just said, oh, no, not again. Right.
Trenton Reynoldsbut you know that that's just a necessary part of the process.
John Kent HarrisonYep, it is. If I don't feel it, I shouldn't do it.
Trenton ReynoldsAh, see, I guess that's the corollary, right? Like if it's not there, then that means that something's wrong. The stakes aren't high enough.
John Kent HarrisonYeah, it's not worth doing. It's not worth doing. You've done it before. You know the pattern, whatever it is.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonAnd it's sort of you don't plan on being driven by that, but because I relate to that feeling too, here I am going, I cannot pay rent. Oh my gosh, I can't pay rent. I could have changed this pattern.
There's something.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonMaybe that's not a great example.
John Kent HarrisonIt's a great example. It's a great example because that gives you the motivation to get the money.
Yeah.
John Kent HarrisonThat's like, you know, Sabrina, when we went down to LA from Canada and we ran out of money and didn't have a green card and I wasn't going to go back to Canada. There was nothing in Canada. There wasn't any big filmmaking community and the world of film television was in LA and so I knew I had to make it there one way or the other, but I didn't have enough money, didn't have any money and I didn't have a green card. So my lawyer, we talked this last time I think too, was he's kind of a mole because he worked for the INS and then he was a lawyer. So he told me the only way to get into the country is to be someone of exceptional merit and ability. I said, I'm like a nuclear physicist, you know. I said, are you kidding me? I mean, well, you'd be surprised. All you have to do is get letters from the heads of the studios.
Well, I'm a...
John Kent Harrisonyou know, a Canadian farm boy, and I'm going to go to the head of Paramount, the head of Columbia, the head of UA, and ask them for letters. And I ended up, I had to do it. So I called them up, and of four studios, I got into the CEO of three of them, and I just got on the floor, I got in the room, and I just did my song and dance about filmmaking, what I thought about what it was to me, what it meant to me, what I thought I could bring to the community and all of that and three of them wrote me letters and I got a green card and then I got a job and eventually we scraped our way into living a life down there but I never would have done that without that fear of having to go back having to go back in the shame in the whole thing I just wasn't gonna do it
Trenton ReynoldsSo you had to put yourself in...
John Kent HarrisonI had to put myself out there in a really uncomfortable place. Right. But it also focused my attention on why I was there and what I wanted to do, which I don't know that I'd had before that.
Right. Right.
Trenton ReynoldsI've noticed, you know, just in terms of creative process, that when I paint, I have a tendency to really get things super resolved and defined. And, like, I have a comfort zone of kind of equalizing everything. And I know when that starts to happen, the life of the painting goes right out. And it's in those moments that I have to, like, take the thing that is most resolved and just destroy it. Because... you know, that's how I bring the life back in, you know.
John Kent HarrisonI know. That happened to me when I started off in pastels, and I was smoothing everything out, you know. No, that's not what you do.
Yep, yep.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonDad, I want to touch base on the part that... that I really have admired and I kind of am fascinated by is you know, when back how old were you when we moved to California? You were 36? 37. 37. Trent, how old are you?
Trenton ReynoldsI'm You shouldn't ask me that. I have no idea, actually. I was born in 1977. What does that make me? 38. 38? Am I 38? Yeah, 37, 38.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonBut you going down, getting the bravery to go down in the little cabriolet and pitch stories and go in with a briefcase and... where I really am curious about that pitching something where I think Trent and I have differently have different ways we want to speak up for ourselves.
John Kent HarrisonI didn't even know I was like once I got to you know it was one of the we got to once we moved into our place near Pasadena what I I took me six months to get down to Beverly Hill I was I get sick to my stomach driving down there I'm very sensitive man. See, and so I'd feel awful. And I'd say, no, not today, not today. And I'd drive back again. Well, that was about six months before I got down there. And when I got there, I remember standing on, I don't know where it was, in Beverly Hills somewhere. And I was standing there looking around saying, where do I start? What do I do? And so there was this magazine called The Learning Annex. and
so I
John Kent Harrisonsaid well I oh no it wasn't that somebody gave me a name for an agent I went to see this really really powerful agent that somebody gave me and they said well I can't be your agent but you should find an agent who really is hungry who lives in his apartment and is desperate to get out and you need somebody like that who's going to be really aggressive I said okay and so I don't forget how but I did find a woman who worked out of her apartment remember Stephanie Mann and she said, well, I said, well, what do I, how do I, what do I do? She said, well, you get a good idea for a story and then you pitch it. And I'll say, so that means you go pitch it. Well, how do you, I said, how do you pitch? I said, well, she said, you got to learn how to do that. So I said, okay. And, uh, that's when I found this learning annex magazine and they had pitching courses. So you went to something, you know, you paid 35 bucks and you went for two days to somebody's house and, and there were 12 other people there. And there was a pitching, class and what we did was we pitched fairy tales everybody pitched that's so great yeah you pitched whatever it was Goldilocks or and uh you just learned to pitch these one after another we just kept trying to pitch these stories and they would tell us how to shape the story how to pitch it And then when you get in the room, I remember, you know, I fell off a couch once pitching something. I got so excited. I was trying to demonstrate how this guy surfed, and then he fell, and he got back on his board, and I fell off the couch on the floor. And it was normal. I remember hearing a story about some guy pitching a story, and he had a mock-up version of this actor, and he took it out of his briefcase and said, then Steve Martin does this, and then Steve Martin does that. And before they knew it, the producers are believing that Steve Martin's in the movie.
It was a great pitch.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonOh, they brought like a life-size... Yeah.
John Kent HarrisonLike a little, not a life-size, but like a puppet. Like a Steve Martin puppet and moved it around the room.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonI also commend you for, because you all, all my life, you really have gone out and taken classes and just learned stuff.
John Kent HarrisonYeah. There's always stuff to learn. I found out there's always stuff. This is the curse of being a bad student.
Yeah.
John Kent Harrisonbecause I have to do endless homework all the rest of my life.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonI think it's a very humbling quality, too, about that, which I really admire.
Yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsBut I think there's something in that, too, of also that same spirit, I guess, that we've been talking about is... is just the acknowledgement or at least the recognition that you can learn these things.
Yeah.
Trenton ReynoldsI think some people come to an art class or they don't come to an art class because they feel like, well, I just don't have any artistic talent. I don't have like they just like this is me and that's not me. and there's not the realization that this is just a skill. These are problems that can be solved, and you can learn how to solve them.
Yeah.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonAnd getting out of your own way, just getting out of your own. Remember, Dad, driving on the freeway and telling ourselves all the things we hated about ourselves?
John Kent HarrisonOh, yeah. Well, I mostly made you do it. Yeah. It was so funny. That was one of the funniest car rides ever. Sabrina was just feeling just really blue. She was leaving. She went back to Berkeley. And she said, I'm just no good at, I forget what it was you mentioned. And I said to her, well, what else are you no good at? And then she made a list. I said, well, what else? It must be something else. What about spelling? What about? And we made this list. And by the time we got to the airport, Sabrina was hysterics. She couldn't believe how many things we were doing.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonWe were laughing so hard.
Yeah.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonIt's kind of liberating to do that.
John Kent HarrisonI think that, but I do this, going back to this fear thing, I think you have to have a dream that has high stakes to it and that's impossible to get, and then just go for it. What the hell? Just go for it. And then the stakes are raised high because you don't want to let yourself down, so you take yourself to a higher level. You've got to find ways to take yourself to a higher level other than just... you know wanting to do it you want to go to a higher level because you want to go to this next
Trenton Reynoldslevel right that being said that you do have that fear for a very good reason that reason is because it's a very real possibility that you fail absolutely yeah what what what is what do you do when you fail like at large scale. - I feel terrible.
John Kent HarrisonFeel really embarrassed and humiliated. And then start again.
Trenton Reynolds- Is that important, you think, those failures?
John Kent Harrison- Absolutely. I think it's really important to get to zero. I think it's really important a couple of times to really bounce off the bottom I mean, it's humbling and that you just pick yourself up and go again, knows when you do that, then you can do it every time. And so failure becomes less important and less of a big deal because you've done it a couple of times and you've survived it. You know, that's what I found when I went to Hollywood and doing these pitching, all this kind of stuff and I, I found that I was, you know, criticism was a difficult thing for me. I grew up in a critical family, so I didn't get much encouragement other than to sit up straight in my chair at dinner. But there was never any encouragement to do anything. It was just mostly criticism. And I'm not whining about it. I was a good thing because it helps me get over that. Because when I went to Hollywood, the criticism, what you get with criticism is rejection. And a good friend of ours, David Bach, who's a therapist, he and I played tennis together and we always talked afterwards about this and that. And he had a new job, a new bunch of clients who were men and women in middle age who'd made career choices in their 20s that they regretted and they wanted to do something to change their life and do something, and they're in their mid-40s, and they wanted to change and do something else. And I said, well, is that difficult? He said, no, it's not difficult. You just find out what their life issue is, and then you find them a job that forces them into their life issue, and they'll be happy for the rest of their life. I said, well, what do you mean? He said, well, look at you. You come down from Canada, from your family, your background, and your issue is rejection. And you go in and you're trying to sell them. You're writing, directing movies in Hollywood. And you're rejected. When? How much? Oh, I said 99% of the time. And you just eventually just rejection doesn't mean anything anymore. I mean, that's what I mean about art as a healing mechanism. You're an artist, you kind of have to do it for your own sanity. There are lots of people who do it for the wrong reasons, especially film directing.
Yeah.
John Kent Harrisonunless you're really happy doing it for the right reason, it's not gonna work.
Trenton Reynolds- And do you think that there's a, have you arrived at healing that way, or is that just a continual process that is your--
John Kent Harrison- Oh, yeah, I've arrived at that. I have hissy fits like everybody. - Right. - Well, not like everybody, but like me anyway. But they pass. over a year or two, I get over it.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonMany thanks to my fantastic father, John Ken Harrison, for this. conversation.
Trenton ReynoldsYou can support us at patreon.com backslash room and by rating us on iTunes and by telling your friends. My brother Brent Reynolds provided the music for this podcast and you can hear more of his music on SoundCloud by searching for Venters Stag Motel. If you're interested in working with Sabrina and I as an intern, you can find out more at roominthetrees.com backslash intern. Join us next week for part two of our conversation with Sabrina's father, John Kent Harrison. You can find show notes for this episode at roominthetrees.com.
Sabrina Ward HarrisonPeople are listening on iTunes. Remember, just go to the site because there's some great random little gems in there. Talk to someone. Hear a family story.
Come on.