Spencer Grammer, eldest daughter of actor Kelsey Grammer, is an artist and pioneer in her own right. Her credits include the female lead in the ABC FAMILY show GREEK and the voice of Summer Smith in the ADULT SWIM animated Science-fiction series RICK AND MORTY. She is also finishing her Masters at Columbia, honing her craft as a writer and director.
Jennifer DeLia is also a pioneering artist, advocating for artists of all colors and genders who have a strong creative vision and sense of personal narrative. She channels the Mother of Hollywood, Mary Pickford, as her role model. Pickford was the first Artists’ Rights Activist, having founded United Artists in 1919. She created the Motion Picture and Television Relief Fund and was the only female founder of the Academy. She also happens to be the subject of Jennifer’s newest film, Why Not Choose Love, A Mary Pickford Manifesto. This film is an homage to the avant-garde style of Pickford’s era but an unconventional biopic by to today’s model.
Spencer and Jennifer met in New York City a few years back, introduced by a mutual friend. The two found a connection in that they realized the landscape for original storytelling, specifically from a strong feminine point of view, was not so prevalent or maybe not even accepted. Jennifer was shocked by the resistance that honoring Pickford’s story and legacy was meant with, as well as, the resistance to telling the story in a way that would bring the Spirit of Pickford and her fellow United Artists into the creative process, as a piece of artistic and bold content…. Unsure if this sense was true, Jennifer and Spencer delved into a conversation to explore the themes around why certain stories would have such a hard time and specifically why visions that push the medium would also be challenged and maybe even more so being from a female filmmaker with a female protagonist… And in this case, the story of the woman who birthed Hollywood….
SG: I don’t really know much about Mary Pickford…
JD: I know, which is cool…
SG: I haven’t done much research on her, even though I know that she started her own production company and that she was a force in Hollywood as a woman… But our subject is so interesting, as in, why are people scared of such a strong female….
JD: Exactly. And I don’t know what you know already but I can give you a two minute synopsis of what she pioneered… Even though, the essence of her is much more than that… So, she started acting on camera in 1909 and that was before Hollywood existed, in New York, and they were earning five dollars a day and actors names weren’t in the credits at all… It was immigrants and poor people taking jobs to support their families…. Mary was the first one that audiences actually wrote to and sent in letters to ask ‘whose the girl with the curls’ because they wanted to know her name. She was known to do the most relatable style of acting at that time, the least exaggerated…
SG: Right…it was Vaudevillian…. Like over-the-top and slap-sticky….
JD: Yes… And, long story short, she was the one who actually spearheaded actors to have their names in credits…. So, that was in the early 19-teens to 1914…. She was being born as the first star, as it was still coined ‘cheap entertainment for immigrants and poor people’… Again, this was pre-Hollywood… So, she got actors their names in the credits, eventually was the only female Founder of the Academy; founded United Artists, had the idea for the Oscars, was the first philanthropist in Hollywood… She was earning more than her male counterparts in 1919, negotiating all of her own contracts. She transcended age, ethnicity, and gender in the roles she played… So, it’s literally resonant with all the things coming up today…
SG: Yeah…. 100 years later!
JD: I know… Like for her, there was no gender pay gap…. She negotiated her own contracts… So, if we forget about the amount of money and just think about the idea of men making more because they’re supposedly more marketable or….
SG: Its funny… I learned about this new phrase called bio-cultural…. I am reading about obsession …. and the origins of the historical movement of obsession…
JD: I am so into that!
SG: People who were possessed were considered obsessed and both words have the same Latin root…. I am writing this piece right now and doing psychological research, observing how the patterns change form over time…. When artists and filmmakers are obsessed, they are doing the greatest thing in the world, right? Like they need to be obsessed to do good work… The idea is that when a culture changes around a subject, whether it is pharmacological or psychological or based in a religious aspect, then our idea of what it is changes, as well…. Like OCD or obsessive thoughts may be considered bad now, but these others ones aren’t so bad because they actually make you work hard… Later on, in like another 100 years, maybe any obsession isn’t that bad of a thing because now it’s something else… We are influenced by our biological, as well as our cultural nature… So, I wonder if part of the gender pay gap also relates to the idea that, just culturally speaking, men and women aren’t equal or biologically speaking, men and women aren’t equal…Sociologically, we look at it from a different perspective …. Some people argue that when you have a child, you are no longer feminine and you are no longer going to be prioritizing work over family… Well, that maybe true for some women and maybe not true for some women… My argument is like ‘sure, women might prioritize their children at times because that just makes sense… So should the fathers but whose to say that Harvey Weinstein doesn’t prioritize sexually assaulting women over doing better work? Whose to say that distraction isn’t equally as distracting from actually making content, than being a mother and why would we say that being a mother is not as good as a guy whose trying to have sex with a lot of women? Maybe don’t quote me on that but I’ve struggled with the idea that one is inherently more accepted only because I find that I am balancing a lot of things in my life and sometimes one falls over the others but so would me balancing some weird sexual behavior… It would be equally as destructive and instead, I am going to be more responsible because I am a mom and I am going to actually prioritize things that are important like family and education and influencing a person growing up who is going to maybe be intelligent and care about humanity in a different way as opposed to me trying to acquisition more and more people to sleep with me because it feeds my ego… So, thats my opinion on that because I get so frustrated that for some reason being a kind and loving person isn’t considered also powerful… I don’t know why that is… well, cuz you’re not scared of them, I guess…
JD: You just said a lot interesting things, actually…. On the topic of equality, like we just actually are not equal in certain ways…Are you and I equal? Just because we happen to be in a woman’s body doesn’t mean that we are…. But are we talking about equality in terms of our individualities or are we talking about equality in terms of how we’re treated by the regime or by society, as humans … So, what Mary Pickford did, and this is where I am sure that my thoughts and feelings will evolve over time… But, where I’ve gotten to that I’ve found so interesting (by being in the rabbit hole with Pickford): What’s the fundamental difference, as in, is the issue not really about money, is it about equality? Why did Pickford earn more than her male counterparts?
SG: Because she was the most liked? And she fought for it… She asked for it…?
JD: … And…. She negotiated her own contracts… So, I started wondering about how many of the people who are speaking out about this gap are even aware of what is being negotiated, what their costars are going to make, and how much is that actually important to them? These became genuine questions in my mind…Because you’re right, like if you’re making $20M, how important is it to you to make 25 million because your male co-star is making 25 million? That said, are we talking about an issue of humanity? I know that I was asked for my male supporting actors who happened to be slightly more known names to make more than my female lead who played Mary and who was going to be in every single scene, so for me this wasn’t about male or female… That was about it being the Mary Pickford story and that actress being in nearly every frame.
SG: haha… You’re like ‘NO!’…
JD: Would our actress have known? Would anybody ever have known on her side if we had agreed to let those guys make more than her?
SG: If a lawyer is doing the contracts, then no, because its private, its confidentiality.
JD: That’s the thing about how involved you are in your deals and negotiations… Did I have to do that? No. I risked losing them but then…
SG: There’s a million other actors who can take their place… It just depends on how much they care about the project and where their priorities lie.
JD: And meant that I actually ended up calling the actors directly and saying that this is what your agent is pushing for and they wrote to the agent to express their commitment to the project… It wasn’t even coming from them…
SG: No, it’s usually not… The agent wants to make their percentage… They’re also protecting their clients… It’s sort of like the idea of dating a king and then going to date the court jester, right? I guess they are trying to protect the integrity of their commodity… So, lowering their rate would have to be for a very, very specific, special project, otherwise, it doesn’t necessarily make sense. It has to be about caliber, from that standpoint, from the agent’s side…. I guess I am arguing for the agent (LOL) … They are trying to protect their investment into this person by making sure that they are continuing to be paid at the level that they are, otherwise, it’s almost like putting little cracks into the structure that the commodity has built… But at the same, I haven’t done something because somebody advised me not to do it and I wish I wouldn’t have listened…It is really hard to trust your own gut about things at times… when you like roles…I mean, everyone has their own journey in this career, but….yeah, I have definitely had some advice that wasn’t great and then had to learn from that…
JD: So, does this have anything to do with being male and female?
SG: Ummm…Interesting…. On some level, it does…. So, the idea of the gender pay gap also has to do with the idea that women view themselves as secondary in society.
JD: Exactly!
SG: And I don’t think its just something given to you culturally but I think its something you accept culturally…Why don’t women get paid as much? I think I saw in a TED TALK or somewhere that we don’t ask for raises. We are not taught to say ‘I want more money for this job’ and we also don’t apply for as many jobs as men do… Men will apply for jobs that they are sixty percent qualified for and women will only apply for jobs that they are mostly 100% qualified for…I guess the idea was that women have always been cultured and cultivated in life to be perfect, to be good, always beautiful, make everything pretty… And men are encouraged to be brave, to be courageous, to take risk, to claim territory, so women by default, being raised in that world, we don’t ask… We feel bad when we don’t measure up to 100% and I don’t think men feel that way, at all…. I am sure they feel inadequacies at times but they are not really told that it is bad and they just move through it and they don’t really care about the person that didn’t hire them because they knew they were 60% qualified, so I think that if women took that attitude more, which I think is beginning to happen, then maybe we would by default decrease the pay gap because we would be asking to be paid equally…
JD: And actually so what you are talking about is a self-worth thing…
SG: Yeah!
JD: Is this a reflection of the male becoming the more valued commodity, in the sense of straight up numbers-wise, as in more people were tracked to go see the male actor, the male performer…?
SG: Women wanted to see them and men wanted to be like them…
JD: Yeah…So, I think it boils down to self-worth and that is what I noticed in Pickford was the fundamental difference. She had a sense of her worthiness and she really wanted to make it clear in her memoir and in her statements that it wasn’t about the dollar figure, it wasn’t about the money … She gave so much of it away…
SG: It was like “this is what I worked for…”
JD: Exactly… This is the value of the creative process… It was about artists’ rights for her… She wanted artists to be valued in society and that was why she started United Artists … We so easily forget because it became a big studio … People forget that it was avant garde and it was about creative integrity and it was wild and pushing boundaries and the playground of experimental cinema … So yeah, the fact that she could be avant garde and be the highest paid… that meeting of art and commerce – where are we at with that with the type of content that we are putting out into the world?
SG: I think in some ways Pickford was pioneering a world, creating a world in which she wanted to create artists as members of society by banding them together…
JD: That’s a good way of putting it…
SG: America has always cared more about commerce and hasn’t necessarily respected what artists do for society… I know in California, they took away art in schools — took away budgeting for it in the public schools – and to me art has always been the way society copes with trauma and copes with emotion… Art is therapy in a lot of ways, whether it is drawing or painting or writing what we are experiencing in our lives and not everybody’s maybe an artist but everyone can use that as a tool to express themselves… When you take that away, humanity becomes collapsed… And in a weird way, social media sort of becomes a form of art, like each person’s essay basically…
JD: And that’s when you also get into iconicsm… Everyone’s an artist in the sense that they are designing their own reality and their perception is only their perception… Every individual has their own unique experience of life. It doesn’t matter what your “role” is – if you are an accountant or a performer… you are still designing your reality…
SG: You’re curating…
JD: Exactly…. Just in the way you move through the world…take away all forms of media and its like … well, I even read it in like TIME Magazine or something and it was so validating to me because I’d always seen life like this and I was so excited they were talking about it…How essentially when you are born into world, you get a script…So, we’re all role playing…this world is a stage and we are all acting out and embodying archetypes – “you’re gonna be born into an abusive family or be spoiled… this is your name, this is your religion…. “ You’re basically given a script and its about how you identify with those things. Do you rebel against them? Do you embrace them? How does it influence you? What is your nature coming into the world whether it is from your astrology or whatever energy force is your unique vitality but then you have all these environmental things and there is no one that can see the color red the way that you see the color red, so you’re painting things with your senses… You’re experiencing things in the hologram of life based on how Spencer sees the world….
SG: If you’re aware of that, then you can just say NO….
JD: And… you can change it anytime… this is our power… this is what we’ve forgotten, they say in consciousness – we’ve decided to play these roles … we can play a different role, we can decide to play a different role … you can decide “I am not going to see that thing as trauma. I am going to see it as opportunity to grow”… you can decide whatever your perspective is going to be at an given moment. You can play the victim, you can play the martyr, you can play the hero… But, you actually get to decide …
SG: Amazing… Well, I was actually talking about this too – the idea of filtration of information … I have experienced a lot of trauma in my life so my way of handling the world has always been relating to an experience of the past and not always relating to what I am going through in the moment – that is sort of reserved for the safety of a script or the safety of a character that I play – real feelings come out there – and then in the rest of my life, I’m feeling things but I am filtering them through a lens of information and questioning if it is a good story and how I can use this feeling to create a character or how it relates to the one I am working on … I am never just experiencing the feeling but that being said, most people aren’t thinking that way about their lives, right? They’re just going through their lives…
JD: Unconsciously… (LOL)
SG: Even if you’re attempting to be conscious, then you might accidentally be unconscious because we are so conscious of being conscious that we’ve sort of lost it… So, now you’re thinking about something totally different, so you haven’t allowed yourself to be present…. I mean, I don’t know, it’s difficult… Life is hard to sometimes focus or find the right path… Its full of ups and downs and generally hope feels very attainable in certain ways, right, unless freedoms are restricted and I think we can relate this back to gender pay gap, if we want to, but the idea that somebody else is controlling your ability to make the amount of money that you believe you’re worth based on whether or not you have a penis feels a little crazy and feels like there’s not a lot of hope in the world if you’re going to say this person is a more viable person because they possess these qualities that are completely out of my control to be….
JD: But then you’re just handing the power over versus what you were saying earlier…
SG: yeah…Earlier….
JD: Which is about stepping into our own power and knowing that we’ve contributed to why we are in this place …
SG: Right… We’ve set the narrative by believing whatever construct we’ve been given ….
JD: And then we are into a whole different layer of this topic, which is transparency… Like, who even knows what everyone in the situation is getting paid and so if you’re someone speaking out publicly about this, have you ever asked or been involved in the process? Now, it is a social topic… This isn’t to judge anyone. I just find how things become relevant to a particular time, so fascinating…
SG: I feel like as an actor there is always this sense that you are replaceable, constantly, it is just part of it…. I don’t know. You’re like looking at yourself in the mirror and saying “I’m famous… I’m lovable” or whatever the hell your mantra is gonna be. But, you are constantly replaceable in certain aspects of the nature of the business so you just don’t ask certain questions because in the beginning, you’re just happy to have a job.
JD: I totally get it. I have absolutely struggled in my own negotiations to command the value of the work and it’s time and energy output.
SG: So, when do you start putting your foot down, saying ‘Hey, no, I should be getting paid this much…” When you know there is somebody else who will be cheaper? I also think it goes both ways…. Like when you say Mary Pickford asked for the amount of money she did, she got paid for it…Because she did the work that she did … I think when I get paid more money, I am like “I Gotta show up and be worth this money’ – it is important that its not an arbitrary, random number, but there’s gotta be a reason. I don’t know – the sacrifice is what you’re getting paid for, the sacrifice of a normal life?
JD: Sure… And you’re also getting paid for your ability to command your worth, because money is…what? Then, you’re getting into something else – it only has the value that we place on it anyway – its not a real thing … So who gets to decide? A Warhol could just be blue splashed on canvas but because its a ‘Warhol’ its worth however many millions, so it is an arbitrary thing in a way…. So we do have to establish our brand so-to-speak somehow at some point in time without just handing our power over to agents or these other constructs where ‘whatever’ goes – or they’re commanding things that are out of the question like we were talking about with those male actors I was working with… It can work in all different ways – where they are like ‘no, it is worth it for me to do this thing, I don’t need to make that much money… the Pickford actress should make the most ‘ That was a collective agreement in the end.
SG: The lead of the movie!
JD: Yeah, so its an intuitive thing but then you point to something interesting which is fear – being afraid that if I don’t accept something, I may not work …
SG: Somebody will replace you.
JD: But knowing that if that happens, its all meant to be, right? If you really stand up for yourself from a pure place, its not about doing it just out of ego… If you’re happy with the terms, thats cool, but if you’re really like ‘no, this doesn’t feel good to me’ and you stand up for that and then you don’t get the job….
SG: Eh, you, don’t get the job….
JD: yeah…. and being okay with that… Trusting…
SG: Thats the other thing… There are things I just didn’t do…. And I didn’t get a job – but that goes into a more broad sweeping topic… There is a power dynamic that exists that people who are in power have collateral and have strength over someone who doesn’t have that…you want something. They have something you want. You have to make concessions to get what you want. And thats, I think, real across the board … Lets say you have ten people and nine of them say no to something but one of them does say yes. The other nine don’t matter. The person that said Yes, they have the job or they did what they did to get the job…. It takes like a collective group of people to feel empowered enough to say ‘NO, I am not gonna do that anymore’ together and to have the strength to do that … Like Rosa Parks on the bus, right, she wouldn’t stand up, right? So, that changed the nature of things….One person is able to do something and the more people that get behind that, the stronger and the more opportunity people will have to actually be able to possibly get paid more for what they do … There’s conspiracy theories about the women’s movement and women in the work place that it was totally the U.S. Government – they planned it because they were like ‘Dude, like half the population are not working in the United States and we could be taxing twice as many people if we would just get women in the work place…Plus, we’re gonna make the government more powerful by basically deconstructing family systems”…. Women and men both have to go back to work… Women go back to work after like 3 months now and men maybe take their paternity leave but that didn’t start until the last like 10 years… So, in some ways, it created this big machine in the United States, that allowed us to not have a sense of community and has disrupted families, even to the extent that its also the reason that women struggle with their mothers, which was another thing I heard as I became a mother… There is so much literature about who and how a woman is supposed to be a good mother that has changed so drastically over the last fifty and sixty years, that each generation of mother has been forced to reinvent what it means to be a mother, that it creates complete disconnect between the generations…. Any feminine qualities that I grew up seeing, I just didn’t like, cuz I didn’t see women as strong and I didn’t have a viewpoint of women being empowered with those qualities. It will be interesting to see how women can maintain authority and power without having to exert masculine energies.
JD: That’s super interesting… I am interested in cultivating that new mythology and new archetypes, or uncovering the root of things that have always been there as I have found that Pickford represents, like she seems to represent this integration of the masculine and feminine. She represents this overarching Mother and Masculine energy that was literally running the business but was also so vulnerable in her art and really nurturing to artists and I feel like if we support artists with vision, you start having people that are every gender and every color without having to check boxes. It’s not like ‘I am a company now that has 51% female directors… I heard that at a premiere recently… This organization got it just to that 51, in order to say they have more women….
SG: The films could even be terrible….
JD: I am not making commentary on whether its good or bad but you can just feel …. You know in a film when you are being emotionally manipulated and you just know that if the visionary stuck to the vision without going into those manipulative techniques to try to control the masses, it would be so much more powerful and so much more raw and real…..
SG: That’s just why Hollywood, I mean…Not that I have anything against Hollywood but it doesn’t allow for more creative options sometimes… I had a Master class at school yesterday about television directing on a show that I love. This storyteller really pushed to get this show made. He was basically a force to be reckoned with to make the show… Those things don’t happen because someone comes along and hands them to you. You have to fight to get your vision put on screen…I was at Cannes last year so I saw Diop’s The Atlantics movie… She was one of the first African women… I don’t want to quote this wrong… She was the first woman of color to have a film at Cannes or shoot, I don’t remember but the first of something important and it was a very interesting film… It crossed genres and is a beautiful film but its also really wonderful to know that there is at least one movie that was directed by a woman there. It’s not easy. Women have to also be stronger about the vision they have and the stories they want to tell and I find that I am having a difficult time… I am co-writing a movie with a colleague of mine, who is also a woman and we are in a third revision and we wonder if we change the female to a guy if people wouldn’t be so angry about the things that she does… Like people do not like women who sleep with lots of different people and who are kind of rude but yet we find these qualities okay when they come from the voice of men and I keep fighting…. I am like we can make her likeable and watch her dissent but I am not really interested in seeing that story personally. I want to see women who can be whatever we want them to be because we are them and we are writing them and so the writing process is really interesting, especially when you are collaborating in a program. There are so many conflicting notes because people see what they see as their perception and not necessarily the story you are telling – the same thing that happens when you make the movie…
Sorry, so yeah, first black female to be in competition at Cannes…. She’s French…
JD: Awesome!
SG: That’s a really exciting thing to experience – to be there to see those changes starting to happen… To see that they even have the platform. I am sure there has been a million other movies that women had wanted to make and never did because they thought they would never have the opportunity and now we are in a world where we might actually have the opportunity ….
JD: Yeah, I was watching the making of Dirty Dancing and how that was considered avant garde and too feminine …. I never honestly would have imagined that Pickford being such the icon, the pioneer, would have been a story that met so much resistance. I was almost thinking it would be easy…
SG: Really?!
JD: I didn’t take it for that reason. I took it cuz I was thinking “how do I not know about her?” And I was so excited doing it as an unconventional biopic, in the spirit of her as a true artist and myself as well….
SG: Yes, you are an avant garde artist yourself…
JD: But I just feel more like an Ambassador for certain messages, than I do even as a filmmaker. The film is just really a tool to be able to open the conversation about what I’m passionate about which is really artists having a voice, from all countries, all walks, all colors, but really a true …..
SG: …true voice….
JD….yeah, true voice, not a watered-down voice…..
SG: I sort of set out to make stories that you’re not going to like because I think that I want people to feel and experience things, not necessarily enjoy them – those are the kinds of films I like to watch. I want to be transformed in a theater. I want to be put into a world and I also want to question the world I am in and look at it though a new lens… What I find so interesting about particular artists like Le Corbusier (the architect)… He came up with a new name… he was one person and then one day renamed himself …. He was like one type of architect and then suddenly, he was this new genre of architect…
JD: There ya go! This is what I am talking about! You design your reality…
SG: Yes! Like, If I am gonna make movies, I will make a new reality! The same way Mary Pickford wanted to make it… In some ways you do sacrifice…You can’t have it all. You can’t be creating a world and trying to live in the so-called real world. Your world is like somewhere in between you and the rest of society and its super isolating but its also a necessary evil, in order to wake people up, like Pickford did…
JD: Yes! So well said!
SG: You and I should do a weekly podcast about art in society or society’s need for art…
JD: And the blurred lines… I love the blurred lines cuz there’s no line between art and life or society…
SG: There’s no lines! The article I was reading is called Artist Technique by Victor Shlovsky… He talks about Tolstoy…I haven’t read War and Peace and all these amazing novels but what Tolstoy used to do, is he would …I just think this is a beautiful thing that I for some reason have never learned… He would subvert the subject. He writes a whole passage and you don’t know where you’re reading it from and you find out you’re reading about human beings from the perspective of a horse and so the subject matter is the same but you have changed the lens in which you are looking through, which is kind of what we need women to do… It is not that women need to be more like men …You know the movie ‘The Irishman’ — people really love it, I probably shouldn’t say this.
JD: I know people that don’t…
SG: There are a couple of things that really disturbed me. One, that women barely speak in the movie. That’s disturbing. Two, that these men that are older – its just so interesting to see them holding on to the vestiges of masculinity but also their youth… Why not cast other people as their younger selves? Because we want to hold onto the technology? Or are we holding on to some fictitious version of masculinity that is really dying … In so many ways, it was like super depressing and also kind of empowering… I thought to myself ‘why didn’t anybody make a movie about the wives in this story?’ I would be so much more interested in knowing their lives than I am about these guys killing and their camaraderie… I feel like we get it. It seems really simple. What about the sacrifices women have made to be with them and I wanted to know how they felt about being on the arms of men who are acting this way and what their role in society is. Lets just change the lens from which we look at things a little bit. You know what? We need to. That’s all… This is coming from a super privileged well-educated white woman in her mid-thirties…
LOL (both)
What perspective am I really gonna have on anything? But, its important that all voices are heard…. I get scared. I feel bad…
JD: You don’t have to over-identify with what you are on paper. You actually have the ability to zoom out and look at things holistically and you’ve stepped into many different perspectives in this conversation, which is really cool…
SG: Yeah, it is very hard for me and maybe thats sometimes why I struggle with writing things because this voice sees all voices, right? Like, your voice is similar, right? We see all aspects so its hard to have one defining perspective. The only one I can think to have is the humanist perspective…
JD: Because then you look back at identity and go how much does it really exist? I mean, you can just reinvent it in two seconds (LOL)…
SG: Just like I Just did, saying “I feel bad for those guys too though!” (Actors in Irishman)
JD: Look, they have a valid perspective. Everybody in the party has a perspective as to why they’re on this path, why they did this thing and if I put myself in one of their shoes, I am sure it makes perfect sense …
SG: Thats what made it kind of sad…
JD: I know… And we can be sad because there is a lot of fear we all have… Fear is very real in humanity – fear of mortality, fear of change…
SG: Change, mortality…
JD: Fear of loss of love… the kind that comes from public adoration – which Mary Pickford was the first to experience… There was no one before her, but what happened when she lost public adoration?
SG: Oh, its rough… So rough…
JD: And, it was cathartic… She wrote books on spirituality and on universal love… Fame is not love. It is more like infatuation or obsession which is also a valid human experience, as you said in the beginning…
SG: Not… Pure, real love…
JD: Yeah…So, there ya go… haha
SG: This goes back to my bio-cultural topic of obsession…It trips me up because I think about it all the time now. I mean you can either be empowered or victimized, right? I feel like if you are of a certain age, then something’s happened to you that was maybe inappropriate, right, like I can’t deny what the business has been for the last 25 years I have been in it… And since the beginning of the business itself. But, that being said, I don’t have a lot of stories, really, because I didn’t necessarily partake in them… Now, that being said, people would say things like “I can make you a movie star.” Like, you’ll go to dinner. But, they also wanna date you. So, you make a choice in that moment and I made the choice “I don’t believe you” … If that is true, then this business is demented, is what I thought to myself. If me sleeping with you or making out with you is how I get famous or become a movie star, then I don’t want to be a movie star, was my thought… And I was so angry about that because it did such disservice to the idea that so many people worked so hard to be great at this business…
JD: Totally…. It goes back to self-worth. This has been a part of humanity a long time – this sort of primordial-almost, idea of the submissive girl and the very tribal masculine, territorial man, that is like ‘I can make things happen for you.’
SG: mmmm hmmm…
JD: It is an internal struggle of how does your masculine meet your feminine? How do you protect yourself and your integrity and continue to create opportunity?
SG: Do you create more opportunity by not engaging? I don’t know – I think that was the thing at that time – I think you did limit your opportunities if you didn’t do that and that was really abuse of power.
JD: Opportunity in a very narrow way, though….
SG: That’s true…
JD: Yeah… Now it is at a point where we are having to talk about it in order to grow and everybody’s involved in it…
SG: Right! The next plateau… Well, the problem is I think women have done things also, like manipulated people in certain situations, so it is hard to judge anyone, although I particularly have my issues with men…
JD: Yes. We all embody pain and trauma and need healing, all of us…
SG: Uh, sometimes I wish I was more naive..