I find that quote interesting.
I have wondered about that kind of thing a lot.
I look at a guy like Tom Hanks who wins an Oscar for Forrest Gump, and…he was great. He was.
But I have to think that there’s a thousand actors out there who could have given a performance as good as that. Maybe not better. But as good. 1,000 actors you never heard of.
Kurt Vonnegut once said something along the lines of, “It’s a great tragedy we have mass media because it makes the pool of ‘greatness’ so much smaller. If we didn’t have recordings, the best singer in your village would be the equivalent of Elvis Presley. But because we have recordings and video, one person serves as Elvis Presley for the whole country. So instead of 2 million singers highly revered, each in their communities, we get one guy revered by all the communities, and all those other people live their lives not mattering.”
That is a verrrrry loose paraphrase of what he said. But, you know, I think about that a lot.