Harry Shearer – HuffPost 8.31.12

MR: Harry, what is your advice for new artists? I’m talking about musical artists at this point.

HS: Stupid stuff like practice your instrument, if you’re still old-fashioned enough to be playing an instrument. But the advice I give to anybody who is thinking about show business, if you don’t have to do it, don’t do it, because you’ll get flushed out, they get rid of the people who are just trying it out real quick. But, if you have to do it, luck is good, talent is better, and nothing beats sheer brute persistence.

Mike Ragogna: Is that how you did it?

Harry Shearer: Yeah, luck is such a major part of it. I know so many really talented, wonderful people who just don’t have that luck. If you forget that’s a big part of it, you’re kidding yourself. Successful people sometimes forget that. “Oh, I did it myself.” Yeah, well, you and the eight lucky breaks you had. So, you really have to be great and you really have to be talented and you really have to be persistent. All of those are necessary, but without luck, you will still be at Wendy’s. So you need that break. But the way you prepare for that break, you need to be talented and really persistent.

MR: Because there’s always a Spinal Tap.

HS: That’s a perfect example of luck. If Rob Reiner hadn’t been on All In The Family… There was nobody else in Hollywood would have let us make that movie. That’s a perfect, perfect example. And then, when we got to the end of the process, another example, Norman Lear had left the studio in the hands of somebody who didn’t like our project and he said if the first two reviewers didn’t like our movie, it wasn’t getting released. That is the slender thread that we were hanging on, at that moment. Without those two breakpoints, the movie would never have been made and if made, it would never have been seen.