The Hot Hand

When he was hired by the company, his bosses had begged him to make a “Ville” game. But once again Turmell had another, more ambitious idea.

The first game he released was called Bubble Safari. It had all the makings of an arcade classic and would’ve fit right into Dennis’ Place for Games. It was also stupendously dumb. The main character was a monkey named Bubbles, and he was on a mission to rescue his girlfriend, who had been captured by poachers. The only way that Bubbles could sustain himself on his chivalrous expedition was by gathering fruit, and the only way he could gather fruit was by matching pieces that popped the protective bubbles around the fruit. And that was basically it. That was the entire game.

Bubble Safari went live in May 2012. It was the fastest-growing game on Facebook by June. It was more popular than FarmVille and Words with Friends by July. It spawned Bubble Safari Ocean—which was like the original but set in an ocean instead of a jungle and with baby crabs instead of monkeys—and by January that game had become equally addictive. There was a time when more than thirty million people were playing Bubble Safari.

That the most popular game on Facebook was about a monkey gathering coconuts and strawberries on his way to rescue another monkey wasn’t as fanciful as it sounded—at least not to Turmell. It reminded him of an experience from earlier in his life. Bubble Safari had a surprising number of things in common with NBA Jam.

“The mechanics are the same,” Turmell says. “The key to being successful in this type of market that’s so saturated is to have innovation, surprise, and delight around every corner.”

NBA Jam had secret characters and crazy dunks. Bubble Safari had sticky bombs, paint splats, and double rainbows. And there was one more thing they had in common.

When a Bubble Safari player made three matches in a row, Bubbles’s ammunition turned the color of a basketball. He was no longer shooting fruit. Now he was spewing flames. Boomshakalaka! Bubbles the monkey was on fire. Turmell swore to himself after the success of NBA Jam that he would use the hot hand in every game he developed for the rest of his life. This childhood pyromaniac was still playing with fire.

Was there more at stake for the Golden State Warriors than the kids inside Dennis’ Place for Games? Of course there was. But the great insight of Mark Turmell was that Stephen Curry and some pimply teenager with a few quarters in his pocket were really chasing the same thing. They both wanted to take advantage of the rules that controlled their environments to transcend their places in the world. The reward for the NBA Jam player was a brief feeling of invincibility and the sound of Tim Kitzrow saying a bunch of funny words. The reward for Curry was an NBA championship.

There was a whole universe of people who had devoted their careers to understanding why NBA players and NBA Jam players behaved in similar ways. Mark Turmell had been too busy making video games to know this. He actually didn’t know much of anything about this idea called the hot hand. And he didn’t know exactly how much he didn’t know.

Two

THE LAW OF THE HOT HAND

“Unhappy fortune!”

1.

It was January 1605, and the queen of England was looking for a good time. When she decided to entertain a foreign visitor with a night at the theater, it seemed like a foolproof plan. The queen was a devoted patron of the arts with a keen appreciation for the playwrights of her day. She was also the queen. One of the perks of being royalty was a seat in the front row of any theater on any night—except for this night.

On this particular evening, there was nothing for her to see. The queen had already seen everything.

There was a reason that even Her Royal Highness was stuck with revivals at this particular moment in British history. It was because the most dependable playwright of her era hadn’t written many plays lately. William Shakespeare was in a rut.

But not for long. His fallow period was about to make way for the single most incredible run of Shakespeare’s life. Within the span of one year, he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Some literary critics believe three of his most enduring plays were released over the course of two short months. Two months! There are juice cleanses that last more than two months. Even if it took him slightly longer, there is no doubt that the period from the beginning of 1605 to the end of 1606 was “a concentrated efflorescence of creative power as strong or stronger than any other in Shakespeare’s career,” as the scholar J. Leeds Barroll wrote.

Or, as Mark Turmell might say, Shakespeare was on fire.

The same queen who couldn’t bear another revival at the beginning of 1605 suddenly had the pleasure of sitting in the front row for not one, not two, but three of Shakespeare’s greatest plays by the end of 1606. It was such a resplendent stretch of unexpected literary success that it was only natural to wonder exactly what changed.

Was it him? Or was it the world around him?

2.

This is a chapter about how you get hot. It happens to different people in different professions for entirely different reasons. But the process of turning a blip of success into a sustained period of success depends on those same questions about Shakespeare. Was it him? Or was it the world around him? It can be one or the other. But ideally it’s both. And that’s because the hot hand is not a random occurrence. It’s the collision of talent, circumstance, and even a little bit of luck.

Rebecca Clarke certainly had the talent. What she couldn’t have known—and what she wouldn’t know until it was too late—was if she would get lucky with her circumstance.

Born in the late 1800s in the suburbs of London, Clarke was a viola player who pursued a career as a composer, a radical decision for a woman at the turn of the century. But she was so obviously precocious that one legendary professor went out of his way to cultivate her talent even though he’d never mentored a female composer. She moved to the United States in 1916, and it wasn’t long before Clarke had the first hit of her fledgling career. On the afternoon of February 13, 1918, she held a recital in New York’s Aeolian Hall. Clarke played three works, including the premiere of a piece for viola and piano called Morpheus by a British composer named Anthony Trent, and two duets for viola and cello that she had written. One critic singled out her chops on viola before raving that “as a composer, the young woman likewise shone.”

Rebecca Clarke’s future was clearly bright. But it was even brighter than anyone in Aeolian Hall could have imagined. That was because there was something they didn’t know about her: Rebecca Clarke was also Anthony Trent. She hadn’t composed two pieces for the recital. She’d composed three. “I thought it’s idiotic to have my name down as composer three times on the program,” Clarke said. She chose to invent a pseudonym rather than accept the credit that she deserved.

There was one thing working to Anthony Trent’s advantage that Rebecca Clarke would never get to experience for herself: he was a he. Clarke was not especially proud of the piece that she wrote under a man’s name, which only made the reaction to Morpheus more puzzling to her. “It had much more attention paid to it than the pieces I had written,” she said, “which was rather a joke.” There was even an article in Vogue—a women’s magazine!—that mentioned him as one composer worthy of more recognition. A photo of Clarke clutching her viola appeared in the same Vogue story, which cautioned that “one should not overlook Miss Clarke’s own picturesque compositions.” But she wasn’t photographed because of those picturesque compositions. It was because she had the great honor of performing an original piece by Anthony Trent. Anthony Trent got the benefit of the doubt because he was not a she.

That kind of slap in the face would’ve made anyone in her situation want to crawl into a sinkhole. But there was also something undeniably encouraging about this development for Clarke—even if she could see the silver lining only by squinting. The rapturous applause for Anthony Trent was really a confirmation of her major talent.

Her next success was the result of a fantastic opportunity that should have changed her life forever. Clarke was friendly with Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a generous benefactor of classical music, who held a chamber music festival every year and sponsored a viola sonata composition contest with a grand prize of $1,000. She encouraged Clarke to enter. It would be a blind competition evaluated solely on the merits of the work and not by the sex of the composer. This seemed like it was almost specifically created for someone with Clarke’s musical pedigree. Coolidge was familiar with the inherent disadvantages of being a woman in classical music in the early 1900s. She didn’t want anyone else to be. Clarke hadn’t yet composed a full sonata, but she couldn’t pass on this opportunity, especially not after getting a nudge from Coolidge herself.

The sonata that she wrote was one of seventy-three entries from some of the world’s most accomplished composers. That list was whittled down to two finalists and presented to the judges for voting. The musicians on the jury were split right down the middle, and they asked Coolidge to cast the deciding vote. When the jurors opened the envelope to reveal the winner, they read a familiar name: the famous composer Ernest Bloch. But just when the identity of the second composer would have been lost to history, the judges requested that Coolidge open the second envelope, too. They were curious about this composer whom they had determined to be Bloch’s equal. They wouldn’t have been surprised to see a name like Anthony Trent. What they were not expecting was the name Rebecca Clarke.

“You should have seen their faces when they saw it was by a woman,” Coolidge said.

Clarke soon entered a piano trio into another one of Coolidge’s blind competitions. When she once again placed second, Coolidge was so impressed that she became Clarke’s patron. When circumstance shined on her, her talent had sparkled.

There is no doubt in retrospect that this should have been the tipping point of her career. But after the Anthony Trent piece, the viola sonata, and the piano trio, Rebecca Clarke would never have another hit. She basically stopped writing music altogether. Instead she disappeared from public view and kept busy knitting and playing bridge. “I put my things away in a drawer and I got rather embarrassed at even talking about them,” she said. Clarke would later refer to her towering achievement in Coolidge’s anonymous contest as “that one little whiff of success that I’ve had in my life.”

So what went wrong?

That was more or less the question on Robert Sherman’s mind when he made the trip to Clarke’s apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City in 1976. It had been nearly six decades since her “one little whiff of success.” But if there was anyone who should have known who she was, it was an eminent critic like Sherman, who hosted a radio show that required him to play two hours of classical music every morning. He’d never heard of her.

It was only while putting together a program on a British woman pianist that he learned, to his great shock, that another British woman who had worked with this pianist was still alive and living not too far away. By the time he called Clarke, she was eighty-nine years old and used a walker to get around. She shuffled over to her closet and reached for a program commemorating a performance she’d given with this pianist whom Sherman had come to hear about. He couldn’t help but notice there were pieces on the program written by the woman who was now sitting across from him. He’d known that Clarke was a violist. He hadn’t known that she was a composer, too. “Oh, long ago,” Clarke said. “Nobody remembers.”

Only when he prodded did she proceed to tell Sherman about her forgotten past. He very quickly realized that there was an even better story staring him straight in the face. He scheduled another meeting with Clarke—and this one would be solely about Clarke.

“Why did you stop writing songs?” he said.

“Well, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?” she replied.

Clarke had the talent to be one of the great composers of the twentieth century. But her circumstances never coincided with her talent. Clarke was alive at the wrong time. She wasn’t in an environment that allowed her to capitalize on the hot hand. Her family members resented her line of work and mocked the very creations that would one day be celebrated. “There was a lot of giggling underneath the surface about her music,” said one relative. “In the family, it was considered to be absolutely ridiculous.” But really their objections boiled down to the fact that Rebecca Clarke was a woman, and composing beautiful music was thought to be a frivolous activity for women. She was never able to maintain a singular focus on her work, even with the support of a wealthy patron like Coolidge, because of these detrimental conditions that she encountered. Her career stalled at the moment it should have exploded, and she begrudgingly accepted her circumstances.

“I didn’t—I seemed to lose my interest in—I—” Clarke attempted to explain to Sherman. “I can’t really quite tell you all about it.”

But there was once a time when she could. She even described the enigmatic phenomenon of the hot hand in her unpublished memoir. “Every now and then, in the middle of struggling with some problem, everything would fall into place with a suddenness almost like switching on an electric light,” she wrote. “At these moments, though I had no illusions whatever about the value of my work, I was flooded with a wonderful feeling of potential power. A miracle made anything seem possible. Every composer, or writer, or painter too for that matter, however obscure, is surely familiar with this sensation. It is a glorious one. I know of almost nothing equal to it.”

Clarke was still clinging to that memory decades after she’d felt it for the last time.

“There’s nothing in the world more thrilling,” she told Sherman. “But you can’t do it unless—at least I can’t; maybe that’s where a woman’s different—I can’t do it unless it’s the first thing I think of every morning when I wake and the last thing I think of every night before I go to sleep.”

“You need that intensity and that concentration,” he said.

“Yes,” she explained. “I can’t do it otherwise.”

Her feelings of deficiency ran so deep that instead of being revered for her accomplishments she wanted to forget them altogether. What she hadn’t accomplished hurt too much. “Most people don’t even know that I ever did any composing because I didn’t like talking about it,” she said.

Sherman shared Clarke’s story with a violist, pianist, and chamber trio who looked at the scores that she’d fished out of her closet and performed her three known pieces on the radio. When the interview aired on August 30, 1976, it was accompanied by music that almost nobody alive had ever heard. “It was nice, and her friends enjoyed it, but the important thing was that it went beyond,” Sherman says. “It went beyond in a way that none of us could have ever imagined.” The violists and pianists and chamber trios listening at home were astounded. They didn’t know who she was. They didn’t really care, either. Enough time had passed that they were listening to her music with the same lack of bias as the judges in a blind competition. They soon came to a similar conclusion: Rebecca Clarke was an exemplary composer.

The pieces that had been sitting at the bottom of her closet for decades came back into circulation. Soon there were fresh recordings of her sonata and trio. Less than a year after the radio show, Clarke’s viola sonata was performed in Lincoln Center. “Had she not been a woman composer when such phenomena were not taken very seriously, Miss Clarke might be heard more today,” wrote a New York Times critic in a glowing review that called her sonata “a lovely piece full of arresting melodic ideas that often strike a note of genuine passion and originality.” There would eventually be a collection of interviews with her and essays about her called A Rebecca Clarke Reader, edited by a musicologist named Liane Curtis, the president of The Rebecca Clarke Society. What had begun as a good deed for a nice old lady had become a full-blown comeback for a deeply misvalued artist. “Before she died,” Sherman says, “there was a total revival of Rebecca Clarke’s pieces.” The most amazing part of all this was that he’d inadvertently sparked the resurgence of a forgotten composer all because he needed tape to fill a radio show that wasn’t even supposed to be about her.

“It was a confluence of accidents,” he says, “and fortuitous circumstances.”

There’s that word again: “circumstance.” Only right before she died in 1979 did Clarke begin to take her rightful place in the canon. It was through no fault of her own that she wasn’t able to take advantage of her hot hand. Who knows what might’ve happened if conditions had evolved in Clarke’s favor instead of conspiring against her? There are composers who spend their whole lives toiling in obscurity and die without anybody knowing their names or hearing their music. Their lack of circumstances is less tragic because most of them don’t have the talent. She did. And the inevitability of her fate was the sort of thing that she couldn’t help but think about. She even indulged herself by dabbling in tarot cards. She even read her own fortune every now and then.

“I did my own a number of times,” Rebecca Clarke said. “They came out different every time.”

3.

A century after Rebecca Clarke performed her first concert in the United States, a statistical physicist named Dashun Wang found himself thinking about people like her, even though he had no clue who she was. He was more interested in someone whose name he did know.

Wang focused on the year in which Albert Einstein managed to produce his research on the photoelectric effect that would later win him a Nobel Prize. At that point Einstein could have called it quits and taught himself how to yodel. Instead he published his theory of special relativity, a study of Brownian motion, and the most famous equation in the history of science: E = mc2. He packed a career’s worth of intellectual achievements into a few months. What he did in 1905 is now known simply as “the year of miracles.”

But as he contemplated this run, Dashun Wang began to wonder how miraculous that year really was. By thinking about Einstein, he made an important scientific discovery of his own.

Let’s call it the law of the hot hand.

Wang believed it was not a coincidence that Einstein’s best work came in bunches or that Clarke had three straight triumphs. That’s how creativity works. Success is streaky. Hits are clustered. And this heightened state of ability is the key to understanding the lasting contributions of everyone from scientists to movie directors. Their careers are defined by their hot-hand periods. “What happens in the hot-hand period,” Wang says, “is what we remember.”

The first movie that one of those movie directors actually directed was a satirical documentary about a fictional, mediocre British rock band. Rob Reiner dragged his twenty-minute demo cut from studio to studio and kept being told that his mockumentary called This Is Spinal Tap would never work. He finally got the minimal amount of funding he needed from one of his father’s oldest friends and shot the whole film in five weeks on a shoestring budget. The movie was at best a modest success at the box office, but it was a smash with the critics. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called This Is Spinal Tap “one of the funniest, most intelligent, most original films of the year.” That review alone made Rob Reiner a movie director. All he had to do next was direct another movie.

The logical next step for someone in his position would have been to play it safe and ease his way into the mainstream. But he decided to make another movie that he wasn’t supposed to make. It was built around a bolder premise: a romantic comedy that dared to treat teenagers like adults. The Sure Thing was also a critical hit, and this time his film made some money. He’d earned the runway to make a third movie. And what did Rob Reiner do? He picked another movie he wasn’t supposed to make. The collective wisdom of the show-business crowd suggested that Stand by Me was bound for disaster. It was based on a story by horror novelist Stephen King, but it wasn’t a horror movie. It was almost as if Reiner and King were intentionally trying to alienate their most loyal fans. As if that weren’t enough to sink the film, Reiner basically cast a bunch of unknowns. And still the movie became a monster at the box office.

Now there was no longer any doubt about his directing ability. Rob Reiner was critically successful and commercially bankable. That was as powerful a Hollywood combination as peanut butter and jelly. This was finally starting to become clear to the movie studios that kept passing on Reiner’s projects only to watch the positive reviews and piles of money come pouring in afterward. But who could blame them? His movies were delightful contradictions. “He is successful not because he made movies that everyone expected to be a hit,” a newspaper reporter once wrote about Reiner, “but because he made movies that no one expected to be a hit.” So you might think that some enterprising producers would have sold their kidneys to put their names on a Reiner movie. But no. One of Reiner’s exchanges with a studio executive went like this:

“We love your films,” the studio executive said. “What do you want to do next?”

“You don’t want to do what I want to do,” Reiner replied.

“No, that’s not true. I want to do what you want to do.”

“No, you want me to do what you want to do.”

“No, I want to do what you want to do.”

The studio executive finally asked Reiner to name his next film.

“The Princess Bride.”

“Well, anything but that.”

Let’s go back to what happened when Stephen Curry had the hot hand. His team started running plays to get him more shots, and his coaches demanded that he keep shooting. The result of his scoring was that it became more likely that Curry would score. A similar thing happens if you’re a director with the hot hand. Screenwriters, actors, and studios want to work with you. They want to assist you. They want to make sure you shoot. You get better opportunities because you’re hot. Success begets success. That is the simple power of the hot hand.

Remember what Curry said about the hot hand? Once it happens, you have to embrace it. Rebecca Clarke didn’t have the means to embrace it. It would turn out that Rob Reiner did.

Curry was a different player when he was on fire. He took longer shots. He took harder shots. He took shots that he never would have taken if he didn’t have a hunch that he was hot. There was even a name for these absurd shots that Curry took knowing that nobody could fault him if he missed. They were called “heat checks.” Rob Reiner’s heat check was The Princess Bride.

The Princess Bride was Hollywood’s great white whale. It was a fairy tale with fight scenes and true love, a children’s movie for adults that was silly and sweet, a film that managed to fuse romance, suspense, comedy, and drama. It was also a riddle haunted by a curse. Even after his three successes in a row, Reiner knew it would be tricky to make The Princess Bride. He didn’t know that it had proven impossible until that point, and he might have chosen a different project altogether if he’d been aware of the movie’s daunting history.

François Truffaut and Norman Jewison had tried to make The Princess Bride. Robert Redford tried to make and star in The Princess Bride. The legendary screenwriter William Goldman liked to tell people that multiple studio heads had been fired immediately after promising to make his film. This was odd. Any studio that wanted to be a hit factory would have been wise to follow a simple formula: make Goldman movies. This was the guy who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. His material was so valuable that by the early 1980s no one would have blamed Hollywood executives for rifling through his trash and buying the rights to his grocery lists. But his stature only made the convoluted saga of The Princess Bride more baffling.