Al Pacino stood beside a table at the Ginger Man, a restaurant near Lincoln Center in New York, and Francis Ford Coppola did not ask him to sit down. A few weeks into the shoot of The Godfather in 1971, the director had one line for his Michael Corleone, "You're not cutting it," and he sent Pacino to look at the rushes, the raw footage from the days before.
The next day Pacino sat in a screening room and watched scenes from the start of the story. He found nothing spectacular in them, which was his plan. He had built early Michael as a young man who "was unaware of things." "The effect was certainly what I wanted," he wrote in his memoir, Sonny Boy. "I didn't want to be seen."
Paramount's executives watched the same footage in Hollywood, and word spread that Pacino would be fired. The studio had fought his casting from the start. Robert Evans, its head of production, had told Coppola, "A runt will not play Michael." Evans pushed for Ryan O'Neal, and Coppola later said the executives preferred blond, blue-eyed stars. The film historian Jon Lewis writes that in his three screen tests Pacino "comes off more like Woody Allen than Michael Corleone." Coppola, by his own count, came close to being fired "maybe on three or four occasions," and Robert Duvall recalled a backup director waiting in the background.
Then the schedule changed. The scene in which Michael shoots the gangster Sollozzo and the police captain McCluskey across a restaurant table moved up in the shooting order. Pacino says the jury is still out on whether Coppola did it on purpose, and Coppola has denied arranging it for Pacino's benefit. The executives saw the scene. "Because of that scene I just performed," Pacino wrote, "they kept me in the film."
The Godfather opened in March 1972 and became the biggest-grossing film of its time. It won Best Picture and a screenplay Oscar for Coppola and Mario Puzo, and the actor Evans had called a runt was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
Every objection the studio raised was accurate about the footage in front of it. The executives judged each reel by that reel, and the film paid out in reels they had not yet seen. The young man who hid through the early reels was the charge the restaurant scene fired.
The Why
Second-Order Thinking follows a decision past its first effect to the effects that effect sets off, and many of those travel through other people's responses. The first-order effect arrives at once and in plain view, a weak test or an angry studio. The later effects arrive on their own schedule, and they often run the other way.
The French economist Frédéric Bastiat put the idea on paper in July 1850, in an essay called "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen." Every act, he wrote, sets off "a series of effects." The first "is seen," the rest "are not seen," and "we are fortunate if we foresee them." Then Bastiat wrote the sentence that explains the fight over Pacino: "it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa." A blond star would have ended the argument in a day. Pacino bought Coppola months of trouble, and the trouble was the vice versa.
The ecologist Garrett Hardin cut the habit down to one question in his 1985 book Filters Against Folly: "And then what?"
The question sounds like an order to look further ahead, and the research on chess experts points somewhere else. In work published in 1946, the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot had chess players up to world-champion strength speak their reasoning aloud over positions. When William Chase and Herbert Simon summed up his findings in 1973, the strongest players searched "through about the same number of possibilities as weaker players." They spent that search on better candidates, while "weaker players spend considerable time analyzing the consequences of bad moves." The grandmaster's edge lay in choosing which chain to follow before following it.
The record shows Coppola working from one image. He read the novel, saw Pacino in the part, and found it, in his words, "very hard to get that out of your mind." Then he defended that one branch through every fight that followed. The working problem is to get the branches onto paper fast enough to pick one before somebody picks for you.
The How
Put one creative decision you face this week through Second-Order Thinking on a sheet of paper with three columns. Each step fills one column.
- Map the immediate effects of your decision or solution. Write the decision across the top in one sentence. In the first column, list what happens within a month, one line per person it touches, and include the costs you can already name. Coppola's first column for Pacino comes straight from the record: a hostile studio, three weak screen tests, a backup director standing by, and his own job at risk. A songwriter who opens the album with the slow ballad would list a nervous label and a manager who calls twice.
- Trace the ripple effects. In the second column, write what each person does once the first reaction wears off, and circle the responses you can shape. When Paramount's president, Stanley Jaffe, told Coppola that Marlon Brando would "never appear in this motion picture," Coppola pretended to faint onto the carpet. The studio then set three conditions: Brando would work for no money up front, post a bond against any delays he caused, and submit to a screen test. Mark Seal calls the test the most shocking of the three, and when Coppola contacted Brando, he did not call it one. He arrived at Brando's house on Mulholland Drive with a small crew, a camera, Italian cheeses, and cigars, and asked to shoot some trial footage. Brando blackened his hair with shoe polish, stuffed Kleenex into his mouth, rolled back his collar, and turned into Vito Corleone in front of the lens. Paramount signed him, and he won Best Actor. Then plan how each person you circled first hears the news.
- Identify the system-level shifts. In the third column, note every place where a response from the first two columns feeds back into the thing that caused it. Loops turn small moves large. In 2003 Barbra Streisand sued a photographer over an aerial picture of her Malibu house, taken for a project that recorded erosion along the California coast. Before the suit, the image had been downloaded six times, twice by her own lawyers. The suit made news, and the news sent more than 420,000 people to the site in the following month. A judge threw the case out that December, and in 2005 the blogger Mike Masnick gave the loop a name, the Streisand effect. Before you send the takedown notice or answer the angry review, write down who else hears about it and what they do once they hear.
Tips and Tricks
- Time-box the chain. Give a small decision fifteen minutes and a large one two hours, then choose. A chain that keeps branching past the timer is a delay with a pencil in its hand.
- Draw the chain. Write each consequence in a box and connect the boxes with arrows. An arrow that points back up the page marks a loop.
- Ask "And then what?" of each person once. Put Hardin's question to the editor, the reader, the client, and the rival who watches your move. Ask it once of every person before you ask it twice of anyone.
- Study reversals. Pick a decision in your field that looked brilliant and ended badly, and map it backward from the damage to the first move.
- Multiply the small choice by a year. A choice you repeat every day carries a second-order effect that no single day shows. One hour of sketching each morning comes to 365 hours in a year, and an hour of email each morning comes to the same 365. Write the yearly total beside every repeated choice on the sheet, and underline the ones whose gains feed next year's work.
- Mark the irreversible. Some consequences close a door for good, such as a burned bridge or a rights deal signed away. Put a star beside each one, and give every starred branch twice the time.
Mistakes to Avoid
- Look past the fee. The fee is the loudest first-order effect of any job. An illustrator who spends a year on well-paid cereal boxes comes out with a portfolio of cereal boxes, and the next offers ask for more of them. Before you sign, write down what the job does to the three offers after it.
- Name the drawer you are being filed in. Every project tells buyers where to file you, and the file sets the next call. A composer who scores two horror films in a row gets a third horror script, and by the fifth the agent has stopped sending anything else.
- Chart the comfortable move before you take it. The easy first move often sets up the hard third one. A novelist who puts off telling her editor that the book will run late saves herself one hard phone call, and three months later the publisher has given her catalog slot away. When a choice brings relief, write its second column first.
- Put the busy day through the question. Busy work pays at once in the feeling of a full day, and the work that builds a career pays late. A filmmaker who spends the morning answering email and renaming files has a dozen checked boxes by noon, and each chain ends at its box. Ask "And then what?" of every task on the list, and give the first hours to the tasks that have an answer.
- Count the opportunity cost. Every yes fills a slot on the calendar, and the second column should list the work that slot kills. The feature you ghostwrite this spring is the novel you do not draft. Those missing projects appear on no statement, so they have to appear on the sheet.
What the Scoreboard Leaves Out
Coppola turned The Godfather down at first. He had set up American Zoetrope in San Francisco with George Lucas to make personal films, and the company was out of money. "Francis, we're going broke," Lucas told him. "They're gonna chain the door." Coppola took the studio's gangster picture for the cash, the paycheck-over-the-work choice creatives get warned about.
The chain ran the other way because of what Coppola held on to inside the job. He fought for Brando and for Pacino, and every fight cost him standing with the people who could fire him. The fee was the first-order effect, and the casting paid out in 1972.
Lucas ran his own version of the bet. After American Graffiti became a hit in 1973, he could have asked Fox for a bigger fee on Star Wars. He passed on the money and took the sequel and merchandising rights. At signing, the scoreboard showed a young director taking the smaller check for a space picture Fox doubted. In 2012 Disney agreed to pay $4.05 billion for Lucasfilm.
The numbers a creative checks every morning, the likes and the first-week sales, count first-order effects, because those are the only effects that exist yet. The long game runs through whatever you still control after the deal is signed. Both men paid to keep control of one decision, Coppola in standing with his bosses and Lucas in cash. One kept the casting of Michael, and the other kept the sequels. Sign that decision away, and the second and third columns belong to someone else.
The reels that alarmed Paramount open on a wedding. Michael sits beside Kay in his uniform, tells her how his father does business, and adds, "That's my family, Kay. It's not me." Later he kills two men at a restaurant table to protect his father, and every consequence after that runs one way. The actor who hid through the early reels ends the film as the man everyone in the room is watching. In the last shot, Kay stands in the next room while his men call him Don Corleone, and one of the capos shuts the door on her face.
