If you ever want to learn economics, just purchase books about entertainment and sports. It’s that simple. Considering antitrust alone, the whole profession could be put out of business by the memoirs and biographies written by actors and entertainment journalists.
All of this came to mind while reading Tim Matheson’s (Animal House, Fletch, The West Wing, Virgin River, etc.) excellent new memoir Damn Glad to Meet You: My Seven Decades in the Hollywood Trenches. While Hollywood swings left politically, its economic reality as revealed through the recollections of its leading lights makes a case for free-market libertarianism in ways that few professions do. And while Matheson happily keeps his politics out of his memoir (while perhaps giving a few hints?), his story doesn’t disappoint when it comes to informing readers in ways well-beyond what they didn’t know about Matheson.
In light of the introduction, it’s probably best to start with some of the antitrust truths that Matheson’s career provides. Depending on your age, you know of him for different reasons. In my case, Animal House was my introduction. He was so perfect for the role of Eric “Otter” Stratton, and the powers-that-be in Hollywood agreed. After the fact.
Matheson indicates that seemingly everyone in the industry wanted to meet with him or have lunch with him after Animal House became a huge hit, and it sustained him. In his words, “My dance card was filled for years, after Otter.”
It all makes sense, but what’s most interesting about it is that while newby director John Landis very much wanted Matheson for the role, the much-more-established comedic talent Chevy Chase had the inside track. Matheson indicates there was some manipulation on Landis’s part in steering Chase away from the role, but the bigger truth is that few (including Landis, Chase and Matheson) saw huge box office when they contemplated Animal House. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in the fact that Landis got the director’s job after a slew of bigger names passed, Matheson got the role he coveted, not to mention that Chase himself passed on “Otter.” Well, of course he did. Had he not, he would have missed out on a lead role in Foul Play. Get it?
In business, the future is wildly opaque. This is what the anti-monopolists and antitrust supporting don’t see. They imagine that the business powers of the present will always be on top, except that they won’t be. And they won’t be simply because all business decisions are a speculation about a future that is incredibly challenging to grasp. Matheson explains all of this well through his own stories.
While Otter surely filled his dance card for years, choosing whom to dance with proved very challenging. Animal House was released in 1978 and propelled Matheson to stardom, but by 1982 he was starring in forgettable films like A Little Sex. As Matheson remembers it, the latter “was the start of a string of failures and disappointments I’d be a part of.” Much more important is what follows the quote you just read. Matheson adds about movies like A Little Sex that “going into a project, you rarely know it,” with the “it” being whether or not a film or TV show will succeed or fail. And it wasn’t just A Little Sex.
Those who remember 1980s television can easily see where Matheson would have been great as David Addison in Moonlighting, but he passed. Matheson could have been Ted Striker in Airplane! too, but chose Steven Spielberg’s 1941 instead. Matheson did as anyone would have. How to turn down Spielberg? What requires stress in all of this is that Matheson’s story is the story of every actor in Hollywood. So many wrong turns that seem so right at the time, and vice versa.
The obvious absurdity-of-the-antitrust angle to all this is that we see how routinely giants stumble. What’s true for actors, directors and producers is true for the business greats in all walks of life.
All of which brings to mind the political class’s rising obsession with China. Supposedly the Chinese are stealing our intellectual property, and much more laughably, they’re using social media apps like TikTok to spy on us? And they would find what? To read Matheson is to be reminded that so-called intellectual property and other trade secrets turn out to be duds quite a bit more often than not, at which point it should be said that the greatest business leaps aren’t borne of understanding the consumer, rather they’re a consequence of leading the consumer in directions he or she never imagined. Think Steve Jobs and the iPhone versus the formerly dominant Blackberry that it unexpectedly replaced. Applied to China, the alleged IP thieves would have been spying on Blackberry and its market-leading phone, not the iPhone that few (including Blackberry) expected would succeed beyond niche status.
Beyond the giants of business invariably stumbling, there’s the reality that everyone’s after your spot at or near the top. This is particularly true in entertainment. Matheson is clear that fame is addictive, and it soon revealed its addictive qualities to him if he was placed at the “wrong” table in a restaurant, or when while dropping off his daughters at school, he lost track of them while making sure to connect with a notable studio executive. The main thing is that everyone’s competing for that table, and everyone wants to be having that same conversation with the powerful executive.
In Matheson’s telling, “sometimes it feels like this place, and everyone in it, is working 24-7 to get rid of you.” Well, yes. See above. In Matheson’s case, he, 2nd wife Megan, and their three kids ultimately moved up to Montecito to get away from the relentlessness that was Hollywood, but as Matheson notes, much of Hollywood wound up moving to Montecito. Matheson’s back in Hollywood, up in the hills. But that’s a digression.
What Matheson’s lament about them trying 24-7 “to get rid of you” should tell the anti-monopolist crowd is that if they really want to see a business cut down to size, the single best way to have it happen quickly is to allow the dominant business to prosper without governmental restraints. Success attracts investment like nothing else, and the investment is directed toward the entrepreneurs pursuing the “impossible” whereby they try to get rid of the businesses on top.
Notable about all of this for Matheson is that he was always working or trying to work as though he was Wally Pipp to Lou Gehrig. With the possible exception of memoir’s end during which he went from Hart of Dixie to Virgin River, there’s seemingly never a stretch when he’s not worried about money and not fearful of being forgotten. About the latter, Matheson is clear that there are very few Daniel Day-Lewis types that can choose to step away. He was never of the view that he was one of them.
All of which brings up a useful tax angle. Seemingly everyone on the left, and more than a few on the right express great comfort with tax increases largely directed at the rich. Matheson’s description of his up-and-down career, and the fact that what he describes is the norm for the vast majority of established stars, exists as a reminder that “rich” is very much a moving target in the entertainment space. Put another way, the fact that actors can be paid so well speaks loudly to how uncertain (and infrequent) the impressive pay is. Which raises the question of why we’re so eager to burn the successful with nosebleed tax rates. Not only does it shrink the investment without which there are no companies and no jobs in the first place, the income that politicians are most eager to tax has rather ephemeral qualities.
Does Matheson talk about taxes? No, and it’s once again good that he didn’t. There’s too much politics in Hollywood. What hints does Matheson offer about his politics? Well, he’s a Marine, having served during a Vietnam War that he was luckily spared. Sadly, many weren’t spared the tragic conceit of politicians. Matheson is clear that his grandmother from Richmond was a big believer in freedom of speech and against racial discrimination. Matheson played JFK, but also Ronald Reagan, and notes about Reagan’s legacy in the book’s photos’ section that it “looms larger and larger as time goes on, and I hope I did his legacy proud.” Your reviewer’s honest guess is that Matheson is a libertarian, which those who read my writing will contend is me engaging in wishful thinking.
That’s probably true. As an admirer of Matheson, I find myself wanting to imagine he puts freedom of choice in all aspects of life at the highest of pedestals. All that, plus Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane concedes now that Reagan was basically a libertarian. All that, plus Matheson is good friends with Kurt Russell to this day, and Russell has long associated himself with Cato. He even threw a fundraiser for Crane et al long ago.
About Russell, Matheson writes that he “became the mentor and, in many ways, an older brother to me.” Matheson indicates that Russell knew how to act, but of arguably greater importance, he knew the movie business and conveyed the knowledge to Matheson. Plus he was loyal. When the PR team of a project the two were working on (The Quest) secured a cover story for Russell (the TV magazine for the Sunday Los Angeles Times), Russell made it clear that it was never to happen again, that regardless of Russell’s greater stature, the two were a team.
It turns out The Quest, like so much that’s created in Hollywood, only lasted a season. What’s high risk is high reward regardless of the business. If 90 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups fail, and do so quickly, something like 90 percent (or more) or Hollywood pilots never make it to series, let alone last. Matheson notes that The Quest’s problem was the arrival of Charlie’s Angels at the same time, though somewhere there’s a book or memoir revealing just how few Hollywood suits thought Charlie’s Angels had a chance. I’ll be quoting Matheson for a long time with his line about how “you rarely know it” when something will succeed or not.
So while Matheson brings excellent clarity to the truth that no one knows anything in entertainment or business more broadly, he very helpfully reminds actors (and workers broadly) that we can always control what we individually do while not controlling the likes and dislikes of consumers. What we do individually matters. Matheson writes that in addition to the actor bringing the character to the screen, “you are also bringing your own self to the job. How you treat the crew, the other actors, the staff. Everyone can come back to help you win a job in the future. Or can help you lose one. Work begets work.” Yes! Precisely because tomorrow is so different from today, so are the stars and business greats so different. It can’t hurt to be good. Matheson makes plain there are rewards to be had from it.
Some probably weren’t aware until the subtitle of Damn Glad to Meet You just how long Matheson’s career has been. He goes back as far as Leave It to Beaver. Not the lead then, Matheson writes that his relatively few lines meant he could “sit back in the shadows and slowly learn a craft.”
Despite being a relative unknown in the early days and beyond, Matheson was working with the big names. They included Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, Debbie Reynolds, and even Lucille Ball. Ball explained to him that “if you really want to be a star, you have to act like a star.”
What’s important is that Matheson wanted to be one, and of greater importance, never took it for granted. He was always looking for work.
Which brings to mind his relationship with his father. His parents divorced when Matheson and his older sister were still young, and it’s difficult to read about. As he recalls, “I was consumed by the unfairness of it all.” His mother was reduced to working all manner of jobs to support her two kids, while Matheson’s father moved to Phoenix. One guesses that Matheson had it easy growing up based on how brilliantly he filled the role of Otter, but he plainly didn’t.
It’s not just that his parents divorced, it’s that they drank. “The Great Depression and alcoholism were the other two members of our family,” while they had a family.
More specifically about Matheson’s father, his son writes at various times of how pessimistic his dad was. In his son’s words, he came out “a victim of the Great Depression.” My own speculation without knowing son or father is that the 1930s only partially explain what became of his father. No doubt relatively slow economic growth (the biggest economic downturns in the U.S. are boom times anywhere else) suffocates the talents of way too many people. Put another way, easily the greatest gift of booming economic growth borne of economic freedom is that exponentially more people get to showcase their unique skills and intelligence in the workplace.
Which brings me to my speculation. Difficult as Matheson’s relationship was with his father, and without minimizing the fights he had to cruelly witness as a child, it’s no insight to say that so many from Matheson’s era had difficult fathers like the one he had. Again, this is not meant to minimize what he endured. Instead, it’s an attempt to find optimism in what Matheson endured.
It’s a long way of saying that the biggest difference between so many fathers and sons then and now is that each new generation of sons (and daughters) has work options that the parents and grandparents of same would have given anything to have. Written another way, Matheson’s father’s pessimism was rooted in his hatred of the work options that he had.
Would his son agree? He’s clear about the journeyman quality of his father’s work, but perhaps doesn’t tie the two together? Marrying and raising kids is hard enough on its own, only to hate one’s job or jobs? No wonder the fathers of old had a tendency to be so unhappy, and no wonder the fathers of today are increasingly the opposite. More and more love their work as Matheson most certainly does.
What’s exciting is that what’s great is poised to get even better. And what will make it better is the very outsourcing of work overseas, and the very job-destroying technology (think AI) onshore that is positioned to erase so many jobs and so much of the work that jobs require. None of this will put us in breadlines as much as it will free more and more of us bring to the workplace forms of genius that for the longest time weren’t rewarded. Finally getting to the point, what made me most sad in reading about Matheson’s home life was what he went through, and the unfairness of it all, so young. A close second is that Matheson’s father wasn’t born later. The bet is that if he’d been born when his son was, or if born when the grandson (Cooper) he never met was born, that his life would be defined by a great deal more optimism.
Matheson’s story on its own would be very interesting, mainly because Hollywood is never a bore. More important, and precisely because the memoirs of film and television stars are so interesting, they’re uniquely situated to instruct about economics and business in ways books by economists can’t and never will. Read Damn Glad to Meet You for a great history of Hollywood, but think deeply about the history as a way of learning all sorts of things unrelated to Hollywood.
