At the age of eleven, Zachary went to summer acting
camp. It was the first place he’d ever
been where it wasn’t unusual to care more about acting than sports, and he
loved it. There, Zachary was noticed by
a talent manager who encouraged him to begin auditioning. He only landed one small role during his
teens, but learned a lot about the process of putting on shows and organizing
film and TV productions.
Zachary studied film in college, during which
time he also got his first role in a major movie. He was wide-eyed and terrified to be in a
scene with several big Hollywood figures, but made the most of the experience. He
also earned a significant role in a theatrical production of Macbeth, but acting
work was so scarce that he eventually decided to try his luck out west.
Zachary relocated to Hollywood, and got a job
waiting tables in a French-Vietnamese restaurant. That year, three very small independent films
in which he appeared were released, the last of which got him some positive
attention. Restaurant guests would say,
“We just saw your movie!” to which he’d answer, “Thanks… now let me tell you
about our specials.”
After several years of waiting tables and
auditioning, Zachary landed the starring role in a major TV series. He immediately quit his serving job, then
learned that the series wouldn’t start filming for several months. With almost no money, he panicked, realizing
he may have quit too early. Ultimately, though,
he decided it was a sign that he needed to stop procrastinating, and finally
work on writing the movie script he’d been thinking about for some time.
His script focused on a mostly out-of-work Los
Angeles actor who returns to his New Jersey home for his mother's funeral. It garnered little studio interest. Zachary’s TV show was doing well, but almost
every production house he pitched passed on his movie due to his unwillingness
to change what they felt were basic structural problems. Finally, Zachary managed to find a financial
backer for his project who had no experience whatsoever in the entertainment
industry. It was perfect, because the
novice producer did something no major studio would have done: he agreed to let Zachary star in the movie,
direct it, and have final approval over the finished film.
Zachary “Zach” Braff’s first movie, Garden State, transformed his life. He had become recognizable as the
likeably-bumbling star of NBC’s Scrubs,
but the positive reviews and enormous financial success of Garden State marked him as a filmmaker to be taken seriously. Moreover, he had done it without sacrificing
his vision for the movie, something few first-time filmmakers get the chance to
do. But even so, repeating the success
of that process wouldn’t be easy.
Over the next eight years, Zach pursued numerous
filmmaking projects, and learned that getting a movie made the normal Hollywood
way wasn’t easy. In one case, he had a
commitment to direct one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, until that star
called back to say that his wife didn’t want him to work that year. On another occasion, Zach was scouting
locations for a film and got word that he had lost his star to a bigger, more
famous director. Two other times, he was
set to make movies at major studios, but his champion at the studio was fired. Without a champion to fight for a project and
studio resources, a production was as good as done before it began.
In 2013, Zach decided to stop trying to do
things the Hollywood way, and went back to what had worked for him the first
time: going outside the system. Instead of looking for major film studio backing,
Zach appealed to all the fans he had made with his first movie, inviting them
to help fund turning the new script he and his brother had written into a
movie. It was an overwhelming
success. Surpassing his funding goals by
over a million dollars, Zach was able to direct and star in Wish I Was Here, a movie that would have
hardly been recognizable if he had let Hollywood do it their way.
Sometimes we let other people dictate how our dreams
are supposed to turn out. I hope Zach’s
story will remind you that your future is yours
to write. If nothing could get in your way, what dream would you pursue next? Lights… camera… action!
Until
Next Week,
Live Your Dreams!
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