A Quote by Mark Burnett
I came here with nothing, with maybe a hundred bucks in my pocket and had to get a job. And these wealthy people who had made their money themselves, I worked for. It did show me what could be achieved in America, what's possible if you have some vision to take big risks.
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I've never had much and I've never needed much. If I had only two bucks in my pocket, I knew I could spend it because I could always do another show of some kind, even on a sidewalk.
From age 23 to 44 - I'm 45 now - I was always in need of money, and I was especially in need of it from 23 to about 34, and my great aunt would always give me money, a hundred bucks, every two months or so, and a lot of times that hundred bucks made a huge difference - I could eat or pay a small bill. It kept me going. She gave me money. It was very loving.
My siblings and I had to earn our own pocket money so from the age of about 10 I had a job. I did a paper round, helped with the farmer's delivery at the weekend, cut hedges for neighbours and worked on a market stall. Then I'd go and buy a record with my hard-won money.
I came from nothing and achieved humungous fame and fortune. But I worked hard. I had discipline and determination. I had that ice in me.
I wanted to just get a job so I could have enough money for my own apartment and be able to get drunk. And I did. Back then, on $125, you could do that in Manhattan. I was 19 years old the first time I got published and paid. I think it was a hundred bucks. I stared at my name on the check for 20 minutes.
I've been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn't starving, I was going to eat the next day. I came to Hollywood wanting a career that had longevity, and I wasn't afraid to take risks because I had a dollar in the bank. I wasn't driven by money as much as I was driven by making a successful transition. And I was smart enough to know that I certainly didn't have all the answers and I needed to surround myself with smart people and be willing to take risks and be willing to fail.
The time I spent working in the wild west show in Paris had a pretty big impact on me. A friend of mine had hooked me up with the gig over there and I literally left Texas with a hundred dollar bill in my pocket and one way plane ticket to Paris.
My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn't ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn't know if I would be able to keep my house.
I have a very close friend who is a brilliant clown, and I always wanted to do a show with him. So I did one year at La MaMa Theatre. I had not done stilts before that show, and I had about two weeks to learn how to do that, and they were just made with off-off Broadway money. The ones that I had in Rogue One were made by [Industrial Light & Magic]. So they were really easy. They were made with actual prosthetic feet on the bottom. They were athletic, in a way. I could run in them. There was a bounce to them that I could use.
I remember when I had my show [The Chris Rock Show on HBO], I used to run my show. It was so hard to get people to bring sketches to me. No one had ever worked for a black person before. Even the black people hadn't worked for a black person. It literally took a month or two for everybody to know: I'm really running the show.
I've had a job since I was 11. I had a paper route, I worked at a video store, I was a toy doll at FAO Schwartz when I was in high school. And I think that it's made me really disciplined when it came to pursuing acting, because I had no clue how to go about it.
I really enjoy work to a purpose. Maybe that makes me kind of strange. In some ways - and this is going to sound awful - it could be that writing is the worst job that I've ever had. Because it's so much more important to me and there's so much more opportunity for failure and I have so many people depending on me. In some ways it's the most satisfying, the most gratifying, and the most rewarding job I've ever had. But I actually would say it's probably the worst job I've ever had too.
You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.
Somebody's real voice is probably the hardest one that somebody could attempt. The characters are all, believe it or not, rooted in a reality of some sort. I've met and talked to people, and they're also fusions of showbiz periphery. But the best thing was, if you did your own voice and you were the star of the show - if it came to blows and they had you on the ropes and you had to leave, then they could just get someone to sound exactly like you.
I kinda came into my manhood, or what I thought was my adulthood, early. I had to show up, and I had to make sure I had gas money, food money, rent money, clothes money - everything was on me, startin' at that age, so that's what led me to start hustlin', that's what led me to start to try to find ways to fend for myself. And once I did that, I was full-time, bein' in the street, and, bein' in the street, it's cold. It's the way the streets operate, and you have to adapt to that.
I've had days here and there where I would get discouraged because I wasn't a big star, but I've made a living ever since I was 27. Not a great living, but enough for me. I think actually being able to pay my rent and eat and perform is enough, and I did that for many years. Then I had some good years in there, too, where I made pretty good money.
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