Remarks of Steve Tisch Loomis Chaffee Commencement May 28, 2017 I
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REMARKS OF STEVE TISCH LOOMIS CHAFFEE COMMENCEMENT MAY 28, 2017 I. Introduction Thank you: • To Sheila Culbert for inviting me … and to my daughter Elizabeth for allowing me … to address the senior class; • To the Chair of the Board of Trustees, Chris Norton, and his fellow Trustees on this platform; • To the faculty who have taught Elizabeth and her classmates; • To Rachel Walsh for her witty and insightful remarks, reminding me that it is always challenging to follow a student speaker; • And welcome to family and friends. We are here today to honor these students as they enter the next act of their lives. Exactly 50 years ago, I was graduating from high school and listening to a commencement address. • Like you, I was entering a world that felt scary and exciting at the same time, with conflict overseas and controversy at home over race, politics and gender. • Like you, I felt surrounded by movies, music and art that was about more than just entertainment. It was about making a statement. In 1967, the hot movie was The Graduate. I remember that movie poster like it was yesterday: Dustin Hoffman was in the background with his hands dug in his pockets staring at Anne Bancroft’s leg; a mix of excitement and confusion on his face. The tagline read: 1 “This is Benjamin. He’s a little worried about his future.” II. The Producer of Your Own Life Story Here’s the thing about the future. None of us can control it. But all of us can shape it. That’s especially true for you, Loomis Chaffee graduates. The education you received here is excellent. The friends you made and relationships you built can last a lifetime. Loomis has given you many tools to be the producer of your own life story. In my business—the movie business—the producer is the quarterback. He or she must find the story, choose the director and the cast, line up the financing and oversee a hundred other things that get a film made. You have the same responsibility as the producers of your lives. But you don’t just have to find a story: • You have to write it, star in it, and cast it. • Soon enough, you will need to figure out how to pay for it all too. Until today, your life has been a studio production, with your parents and teachers in the role of studio bosses. But beginning tomorrow—or right after lunch—you are producing an independent film and it will be a true story. 2 And those are the best kind. Four of the last five movies to win the Academy Award for Best Picture are based on true stories. Moonlight, Spotlight, 12 Years a Slave and Argo: • Each film is based on a life someone has lived; • Each drawing on experiences someone has endured; • Each dealing with the timeless human battles against injustice or oppression; • Each with heroes who had to overcome their own personal flaws as well as the flaws of the world around them. Many great stories feature a moment where the main character has an awakening—where something causes them to look at the world differently than before. III. Dylan and Lemke: Rebellion and Responsibility For me, my awakening wasn’t a something. It was a someone. Two someones actually. A singer named Bob Dylan. And an English professor named Norman Lemke. From Dylan, I learned you don’t have to conform to others’ idea of what you should be. From Mr. Lemke, I learned how to be the very best I could be. On July 25, 1965, I attended the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan was the featured performer and his first set was like every other Dylan set: 3 • A folk singer on stage with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. But when Dylan came back for his second set, he did something unthinkable. He went electric. Dylan had a band, amplifiers and soon enough he was playing his electric guitar and singing the lyrics that would become an anthem for my generation: How does it feel? To be on your own, with no direction home A complete unknown, like a rolling stone Half the crowd cheered. But the other half booed, disgusted that Dylan would destroy a folk festival with rock music. This may not seem like a big deal today, when Lady Gaga can do three outfit changes in one song. I mean: who cares if Bob Dylan left the stage with an acoustic guitar…and came back with an electric guitar? But in 1965, this was a seismic event, one that changed the course of music forever. One music historian called it the “night that split the sixties.” See, some people thought Bob Dylan was just supposed to be a folk artist who sang political anthems. But Dylan wasn’t going to let anyone put him in a box and define him. Nobody was going to tell him he couldn’t turn up the volume and play rock and roll. 4 The 16-year-old me liked this act of rebellion very much. MAYBE a bit too much. Because when I went back that fall to the Gunnery, I was acting up and acting out. In fact, I almost got expelled. Over the summer of 1966, the faculty held a vote on whether to even invite me back for my senior year. I knew my future was hanging in the balance. So did my parents, who learned how far I had strayed from the path they hoped to put me on. Luckily, I had an incredible English professor, Norman Lemcke, who believed in me, and went to bat for me. The headmaster signed off on bringing me back only because he knew I’d be on a short leash with Mr. Lemke watching over me. Mr. Lemke was first and foremost an amazing teacher, with a dedication to his craft that was inspiring. There are many teachers at Loomis about whom you could say the same thing. But Mr. Lemke also had the patience and commitment to help me see in myself the potential I had, but had never been able to acknowledge. He treated me with respect and he demanded it in return. Every kid knows the feeling of an adult talking down to them. But that wasn’t Mr. Lemke. He treated me not as a boy but as a young man. A young man who just had some growing up to do. • Thanks to him, I went from having grades in the dumpster to graduating fourth in my class. • Thanks to him, I stopped acting like life was a joke and started acting like it had a meaning and I had a reason for being here. • Thanks to him, I could finally put that Dylan concert in the proper perspective. 5 I realized a little rebellion can be a good thing, so long as it’s grounded in a sense of responsibility to yourself, your family and your fellow citizens. In other words, you need to be you—but never forget what you do matters to those close to you. So much of what we do has consequences even if they aren’t always apparent to us. IV. The Shape of Your Story From this day forward, you will be—you must be—the producers of your own lives. But that does not mean you will always have full control of what happens. In 1994, I produced Forrest Gump—a movie that supposes human beings are like feathers in the wind, drifting through big moments in history until they figure out what their life means in relation to the world around them. In the movie, Forrest is in the middle of almost every major event in the second half of the 20th century: • Forrest teaches Elvis how to shake his hips. • He’s there when they desegregate schools in Alabama. • He fights in Vietnam. • He witnesses the break-in at the Watergate hotel. • He even opens diplomatic relations to China with his ping pong skills. And it’s all a true story. Google it. 6 Forrest Gump is the most popular and enduring character of any movie I ever produced. It’s easy to see why. Forrest lives a life of adventure and excitement. He goes everywhere and sees everything. But he also deals with tragedy and loss. He loses: • Bubba, his best friend; • His mother; and • Jenny, the love of his life. The world changes so much around him. Forrest changes too. He matures. He grows. By the end, he becomes a father and begins the journey of his raising his son. But Forrest never loses his fundamental goodness, his sense of wonder and optimism, his almost childlike excitement about the world. That’s what people love about him. At one point, Forrest says, “I don’t know if we each have a destiny or if we’re all just floating around accidental like on a breeze, but I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.” I think Forrest had it right. 7 Each of us is here for a reason. Each with a destiny even if we don’t know what it is yet. And that’s OK. Trust me, the fun part is figuring it out. On his last album—Double Fantasy—John Lennon had a song called Beautiful Boy, where he sang, “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” So don’t obsess over what you can’t control—the ups, downs, twists and turns that inevitably come at us all.