Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Bookmarks

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

Another favourite from our Season 12 Archives.This week it’s our annual Bookmarks episode.I read a lot of books to research Under The Influence. But every season, there isn’t enough room to include all the great stories I find.So this episode is dedicated to those stories that didn’t fit into our regular episodes. But are so good, they are worth telling. We’ll tell an amazing story about the book Goodnight Moon. We’ll tell you why David Bowie seemed to have two different-coloured eyes. We’ll talk about why inspiration is 90% perspiration and the inside story of the historic music score from the movie Jaws. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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tisk, tisk, and by subscribing, you support our podcast. Just go to Apple Podcasts, and subscribe to Under the Influences, but wait, there's more. This is an apostrophe podcast production. You're under the influence You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. If you're a parent, or if you've ever purchased a gift for new parents,

there is a good chance you chose a book titled, Good Night Moon. It's a simple book containing just 131 words. It tells the story of a rabbit getting ready for bed and saying good night to all the things in his bedroom. A little toy house and a yellow house. mouse, a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush, and a quiet old lady who is whispering hush. That old lady was a mature rabbit sitting in a rocking chair knitting while the baby bunny does his rounds. There is something about that book that makes it wonderful. It only

takes two minutes to read, and it has lulled children off to sleep for over 75 years. The pages of Good Night Moon are cardboard thick so they can withstand sticky fingers and drooling bambinos. The images are vibrant and the colors slowly dim as the book progresses. Good night kittens and good night mittens, good night clocks and good night socks. Our daughters loved that book when they were young. We would read it to them and they would always whisper again.

One of the little nuggets in that beloved book is a mouse, who hides in a different spot on every page, and our daughters delighted in finding it with every page turn. Good Night Moon was written by Margaret Wise Brown back in 1947. She was a writer that wasn't having much luck getting published. She wrote many short stories and sent them into the New Yorker magazine, but they never got picked up. So Brown took a children's literature class and learned,

learned that a young child doesn't really care about plot. They are much more interested in rhythm and sounds and patterns. Good Night Moon was a small revolution in children's books, as it had no real plot and wasn't rooted in a fairy tale, as virtually all children's books were at the time. As a matter of fact, the New York City Library refused to carry the book for that very reason, calling it an unbearably sentimental piece of work. The library didn't reverse its decision until 1973,

26 years after Good Night Moon was first published. Margaret Wise Brown had a gift for communicating to children, even though she never married and never had children of her own. Brown had a method for writing. She would pen an entire children's book in about 20 minutes, scribbling it on the back of envelopes or grocery lists. Then she would spend two years polishing the pacing and timing. Margaret Wise Brown would go on to write over 100 books.

One day, in 1950, in the south of France, she fell ill and had an emergency operation to remove a cyst. The day she was discharged, to prove to the doctors how well she felt, She kicked her leg up high like a can-can dancer, dislodged a blood clot, and died instantly. She was just 42 years old. In her will, she left the royalties from all her books to the nine-year-old child of a friend. At the time of her death, Good Night Moon had only sold a few thousand copies. 75 years later, it has sold over 48 million.

Welcome to our annual bookmarks episode. I love books, and I read a lot of books to research under the influence. But every season, there isn't enough room to include all the great stories I find. So this episode is dedicated to those stories that didn't fit into our regular episodes. Often a nugget found in the most unlikely book has made all. all the tumblers click into place for me on a given subject. Sometimes the insights are mouse-sized, and sometimes they're as big as the moon.

You're under the influence. There are a lot. a couple of themes in today's book show. The first is iteration. In the book, How to Fly a Horse, the Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, by author Kevin Ashton, he talks about the critical nature of hard work. He stresses this point. There is no thunderbolt of sudden genius that strikes from above. There is no magic moment of creation that people like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs and Paul McCartney experience that the rest of us don't. Creators spend almost all their time creating and persevering

despite doubt, failure, ridicule, and rejection until they succeed in making something new and useful. Put another way, creating is not magic. It's hard work. Ashton maintains that all great discoveries are short, hops. That creation comes from a succession of ordinary acts. There is no trick, there are no shortcuts, no alternatives to hard work. Imagination needs iteration. New things do not flow finished into the world. Creation is a continuum. When Thomas Edison was asked what rules his laboratory

had, he said, we have no rules. We're trying to accomplish something here. That meant he was open to failure, and the iteration that comes from failures. Who knows how many song fragments Lennon and McCartney abandoned, or how many theories Einstein had before he hit on E equals MC squared? Ashton says it's not the size of your strides that determines your success, but how many you take. The path to creation is one of many steps. It's a never-ending list of wrong turns and dead ends.

The most important thing creators do is that they don't quit. You can't wait around for divine inspiration. You've got to force it. Ashton tells a story about a baseball player named George Shuba who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. He was being interviewed by a sports writer. The writer said he thought Shuba was the most naturally gifted batter he had ever seen. Shuba laughed at the thought of that.

Then, he went over to his desk and pulled out a chart filled with X's. He told the sports writer that, for 15 years in the winter off-seasons, he would swing a bat 600 times every single night before he went to bed. He would mark an X on a piece of paper after every 60 swings. After 10 marks, he had his 600. If you do the math, he swung a 44-ounce bat 600 times a night, 4,200 times a week, 46,200 swings every winter for 15 years. He wasn't a natural.

He was a great hitter because he put in the hard work. If you're a David Bowie fan, there was a good book titled David Bowie A Life by Dylan Jones. I was a huge Bowie fan in my teens in the 1970s. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was an epiphany to me and my friends. We were fascinated by his strange look, his shaved eyebrows, his dyed hair, and his chameleon-like ability to change with every record. We were also fascinated by his eyes, which appeared to be two different colors. Take a look at a close-up photo of Bowie, and you'll see what I mean.

But in the book, those eyes are explained. When Bowie was 15, he got into a fist fight with a friend of his over a girl. Bowie was punched in the eye. He had to be rushed to hospital. His eyes aren't different colors. The pupil of one eye was permanently dilated, thanks to that punch. On the cover of his 1973 album Aladdin Sane, there's a photo of Bowie with a light,

bolt painted across his face. That was inspired by Elvis Presley. Bowie was a huge Elvis fan. Presley gave out necklaces and rings to his inner circle that had a lightning bolt and the letters TCB on them. TCB stood for taken care of business. Even though Elvis and Bowie seem like they're from different planets, you can't underestimate Elvis's influence on rock and roll

and how revered he was within the rock community. When Springsteen was on his born-to-run tour in 1975, he was in Memphis and actually jumped over the wall at Graceland to try and meet Elvis. It was 3.30 in the morning, and Elvis's security team escorted Mr. Springsteen back out onto the street. When the Beatles met Elvis in 1965, they were so nervous they didn't know what to say to him.

One last funny aside from the Bowie book, he was to go out to an event with his teenage son who came bounding down the stairs with green and red-died hair. Bowie said, You're not coming out with me looking like that. Too funny. Bowie confronting his legacy. Another book I enjoyed is titled Dream Teams.

by Shane Snow. Of the many themes in his terrific book, one of the most interesting, to me, is the notion that creativity needs to be fluid. Snow maintains that successful organizations often get to a point where they're afraid to change or evolve. He has an interesting insight.

The longer people work together, the more they think alike. And the more that happens, the more groups get stuck in the same patterns. At so many of the conferences I attend, the main theme is often best practices, where an organization wants everyone to start using identical best practices. But I've always been wary of that. Author Shane Snow feels the same way,

that best practices is a form of groupthink. Groupthink eliminates friction, and creativity requires friction. And our production, company several years ago, we had a creative department full of smart thinkers. One of our writers always took the position of devil's advocate. He always seemed to instantly take an opposing view when discussing ideas. It used to irritate me, and I often wondered if he was a good fit in our writing room, or not. His opposing views often led to heated debates, disruption, and time loss. But I came to see the benefit of a devil's advocate.

It created friction. It triggered not just debate, but productive debate. It took us down another path that would result in an even better idea. The devil's advocate didn't have the better idea, but his resistance to our idea led us all down a fresher path. Not always, but enough that I came to appreciate it. There will be plenty of time to whittle the rough ideas down to the best ones. As adwoman Mary Wells Lawrence says in her,

her terrific book, A Big Life, Big Waste Paper baskets are advertising's most important accessory. Mary Wells Lawrence and Shane Snow both believed leaders have to have intellectual humility, which is the willingness to change your viewpoint without freaking out, to correctly judge when it's time to change. Even though Mary Wells Lawrence was steadfast in her convictions, she was always willing to be convinced of a different idea if the logic was there. In a book titled The Art of the Idea,

author and ad man John Hunt says, if you want something new to emerge, you need sparks caused by the happy friction of two people thinking over a problem from opposing angles. That way, you don't end up in an idea cul-de-sac. And part of that ability is to pay attention to people with unorthodox ideas to what Snow calls weirdo outsiders. The important thing is to suspend your reflex to ignore them.

Which leads me to another theme I want to touch on today, the delicate art of storytelling. I read a fascinating book titled Where Good Ideas Come From by author Stephen Johnson. In his book, Johnson tells the story of the infamous Phoenix Memo. Back in July of 2001, an Arizona-based FBI agent named Ken Williams noticed bin Laden was sending students to American aviation schools. Williams identified these students as having strong ties to Islamic radical movements. It just seemed odd to him that each of these students was specifically studying aviation

and conducting those studies inside the U.S. He had a hunch Bin Laden was planning to conduct terror activity using aviation somehow. So on July 10, 2001, he wrote the Phoenix memo outlining his hunch and sent it to FBI head office. That very day, the New York Times ran a big article saying terrorist threat, were declining. One month later, in August, another of Bin Laden students enrolled in a Pan Am Flight Academy in Minnesota.

He had paid the entire $8,000 tuition in cash and had an inordinate interest in the operation of cockpit doors and flight communications but had little interest in flying the plane. The instructors became suspicious and mentioned it to a local FBI agent. That agent had a wild hunch. What if this student might try to fly something into the World Trade Center? The FBI, at that time, was consumed with other terrorism cases. The Phoenix memo was reviewed by mid-level supervisors,

but was not sent up the chain of command because it was not based on intelligence, but rather conjecture and assumptions. In other words, it was just a hunch. Because it was considered a hunch, it wasn't allowed to connect with the hunch from the other FBI agent in Minnesota. Imagine for a moment if those hunches had been taken seriously.

It would have possibly changed the history of the early 21st century. Johnson's point in his book is that hunches are valuable. Great ideas usually arrive half-baked. They often contain the seeds of something profound. You have to keep slow hunches alive and let hunches mingle with other hunches. In other words, never let a hunch grow cold. A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. In the book

titled Laughing Matters on writing Mash, Tootsie O'Gar, and a few other funny things, by Larry Gelbart. His wise eyes make several key points. For starters, even though MASH was set during the Korean War, it was made as a commentary on the Vietnam War. Mash was anti-war, even though it was about war. But Gellbart says that he would get so many letters from viewers saying, God, I love the show, can't wait to join the Army.

To his dismay, MASH became a recruitment tool, for the armed forces. So many people didn't hear Gelbart's message that war only destroys. As I've learned doing this show, what you say and what people hear are often two different things. Mash was the first program

that was able to mix comedy with searing drama. Gelbart and his team were magnificent storytellers. As he says in his book, A good story cannot go from A to C without having a B. Once a story misses a crucial beat, the audience won't invest any more time in it. Often, when I was presenting commercial ideas to clients,

they would want to pull out a B and happily go from A to C, which would hamstring the idea. As Gilbard says, once the story springs a leak, the audience falls out of the boat. Story structure is crucial. One more interesting side note from Larry Gelbart's book. The Korean War lasted three years. MASH lasted 11 seasons. So it's often said that MASH lasted almost four times longer than the Korean War.

But that's not accurate. As Gailbart says, the Korean War wasn't only 30 minutes long once a week. And it didn't have commercials. Don't go away. We'll be right back. I read a book recently titled 100 Greatest Film Scores by Matt Lawson and Lawrence MacDonald. Because music is storytelling. The authors chose what they believe are the best. music scores produced in cinema history, they include background information on each film,

biographical details about the composer, a concise analysis of the score, and a summary of the score's impact on the film and cinematic history. I've always found the score from Jaws to be endlessly intriguing. In my last book, titled My Best Mistake, about people who made catastrophic career mistakes that ended up being the best thing that ever happened to them, I begin the book with a chapter on Jaws. As everybody knows, the mechanical shark stopped working on day one of filming, so Spielberg had to quickly figure out a way to rescue his film.

That brilliant solution was to not show the shark, which ended up being the best thing that happened to that movie. But a big part of not showing the shark was implying the shark. And that's where composer John Williams literally saved, the movie. When John Williams played his ominous two-note motif to Spielberg for the first time, Spielberg laughed out loud and said, You're not serious.

Thankfully, John Williams was deadly serious. The Jaws theme intensifies when the shark is close and minimizes when the shark swims away. Maybe the best example of the power of Williams' theme is the scene where two fishermen, attempt to catch the shark to claim the bounty money. When part of the dock they are standing on breaks away because the shark is literally pulling the dock out to sea,

the music is dramatic, but gets softer as the dock floats out into the distance. But when the fishermen start swimming frantically back to shore and the dock begins to turn around, the music becomes more intense. It's a frightening scene. And a remarkable scene, because we never see. the shark. But we feel it, all because of William's visceral score. The authors of the 100 Greatest Film Scores point out another interesting Jaws insight. Along with the ominous two-note motif, there is a counter melody. Williams included that

to convey the heroism of the three hunters, Quint, Brody, and Hooper. Many think the instrument is the French horn, but it's actually a tuba, played at the very top of the instrument's range. Williams felt the strained upper register of the tuba gave the solo an otherworldly tension that the French horn, which was the logical choice for that range,

couldn't replicate. It's hard to believe, but the shark doesn't make a full appearance until the one hour and 21-minute mark of the film. And even then, it only has about four minutes of screen time. But we see it in our minds for the entire film

thanks to John Williams remarkable musical storytelling. The authors also tell the story of the theme from the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven.

It's the story of a village that is under constant attack by a group of Mexican bandits. so a gunslinger played by Yule Brinner convinces the villagers that he can hire a group of expert gunfighters to protect them. Brinner rounds up the men,

each with a specific skill. They are, the Magnificent Seven. The composer of the score was Elmer Bernstein. Bernstein was actually the fourth choice for the film. Three other composers were either not available or didn't gel with director John Sturgis. So Bernstein got the job by default. When Elmer Bernstein saw a rough cut of the film,

he was struck by how plotting the pace was. He decided his score had to drive the film along, give it energy. His remarkable theme certainly did that. Bernstein's score is considered a landmark in movie history, as it broke away from the European movie scores that had dominated the golden age of Hollywood. Bernstein's theme was pure Americana. It was a contemporary form of composition.

It was new and exciting. Bernstein's theme from the Magnificent Seven was considered the most remarkable movie theme in film history until Jaws and Star Wars appeared in the 1970s. His score also caught the imagination of Madison Avenue, When the Marlboro Man jumped from print to television, there was only one piece of music the brand wanted to underscore the image of the rugged cowboy. Come to where the flavor is.

Come to Marlborough country. A music writer I worked with once said to me that, music tells you how to feel. Listening to the work of John Williams and Elmer Bernstein, you understand that concept completely. If you want to be a good writer, read. I was given that advice years ago when I was a young green ad writer, and I believe it more than ever now. Kevin Ashton's book about creativity and hard work is so inspiring. His great insight is that success doesn't strike, it accumulates. So important when you're feeling intimidated by other people's brilliant work.

High creativity requires 46,000 swings of the bat. Hard work equals iteration, and iteration equals creativity. One bad idea leads to a less bad idea, that leads to a good idea that can lead to a brilliant idea. As Shane Snow and John Hunt said in their books, creativity needs friction. You need the sparks caused by two people

thinking about a problem from opposing angles, and you have to value hunches. That's when ideas become powerful, and powerful ideas build memorable storytelling. That storytelling can happen in the wording, in the music, in the silences. When it all comes together,

it's good night writers' block and good night schlok, good night bad clichés, and hello pay days. When you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode was recorded in the Terstream Airstream

Mobile Recording Studio. Producer Debbie O'Reilly, sound engineer Jeff Devine under the influence theme by Ari Posner and Ian Lafever tunes provided by APM music follow me on social at Terry O. Influence

If you liked this episode, you might also like our sister podcast titled We Regret to Inform You, the Rejection Podcast. It tells stories about people who overcome massive career rejection and succeed by never giving up. You'll find it wherever you live, to podcasts. You can also find our podcasts on the new apostrophe YouTube channel. See you next time.

Fun fact. David Bowie wrote the song Golden Years for Elvis Presley, but Elvis didn't like it. So Bowie recorded it himself and sang it like Elvis. Thank you. Thank you very much. But no thank you. Thank you.