Dear Ed, Thanks For All the Crap - 1/25/2014

In 1951 (or thereabouts), Theodore Sturgeon made the first statement that would ultimately results in what is now known as Sturgeon's Law. Simplified, it is this:

“90% of everything is crap”

Sturgeon was talking about the fact that most products of human creativity, engineering and manufacturing are produced with expedience in mind rather than quality. Or, at least, attempts at quality fail instead of succeeding.

If you want to experience Sturgeon's Law directly, go to a video store (yes, I'm old, that's my analogy). Substitute Amazon Prime, Netflix or Hulu, if you like. Start looking at titles. Count the number of movies or TV shows that you have no interest in watching, for whatever reason (crap), as well as the number of movies or shows you are interested in watching (good). If something puts you on the fence, ignore it.

You will find (as I routinely do) that the ratio is just about 9:1 in favor of the stuff you don't want to watch. And that appears to be consistent pretty much across all media that reach some critical level of production within a culture.

For a long time, I took this as an indictment of creativity and the will toward excellence, and fundamentally a bad thing. I am now looking at it a bit differently.

Oh, the true crap, the stuff that is produced to make money and rip off the consumer/audience, that is still true crap and should be stopped. The next time you buy something that falls apart five minutes after you take it out of the box, or watch a movie that you literally can't believe anyone bothered to make, that's the stuff I'm talking about.

But setting that aside, we're left with the remainder (about 50%, in my experience), where an attempt at excellence is made. 80% of that is still crap, but it is crap that is making the effort. And I have come to realize that without that 80% of the remainder, we don't get the 20% that we love.

So to those of you(us) who make crap, but are trying to make something good, keep at it (as I will). Who knows, if Ed Wood was still alive, he might have produced something that people other than himself would have seen as great. But he never gave up, and for all those failures, for all of the crap that he produced that is very nearly unwatchable, I thank him.

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