Today is June 24 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “When one door closes, how often do you see a new door that has opened for you?”
Author Kathryn Stockett and screenwriter Tate Taylor needed to keep their eyes on open doors after so many were closed on them in the writing and creation of the 2009 bestselling book and movie The Help.
With a friendship that started in preschool, Stockett and Taylor survived the bumpy road to Hollywood success telling the story of relationships between black maids and their white employers in Mississippi in the 1960s, and of the three women who form an unlikely alliance in the name of social change.
Taylor was among the first to read the unpublished manuscript for The Help after Stockett left her advertising job in New York City to try her hand at fiction.
He urged her to continue even as the book was rejected again and again — more than 60 times in all. Stockett spent five years working on The Help, revising it every time it was rejected.
She waited until she had a pretty complete story and felt pretty good about it before she gave it to Taylor.
He convinced Stockett to give him the film rights and immediately went to work on the screenplay.
But with little experience, Hollywood shut one door after another in Taylor’s face as no one would agree to produce the film with an inexperienced director.
He eventually turned to his friends and support system to find the right people to help produce the movie. The film, starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Bryce Dallas Howard, would go on to gross over $200 million and be nominated for dozens of awards.
Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell noted “when one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
Stockett and Taylor had many doors closed on them along their journey to making The Help into a book and then a movie but they kept looking for the doors that were open for them. Do you?