The Hot Hand

There is so much that has to go right to make a movie that it’s a miracle any movie ever gets made. In theory it should have been easier for Rebecca Clarke to compose an entire symphony than it was for Rob Reiner to direct The Princess Bride. After all, if composing music is an individual pursuit, then directing a movie is a collective endeavor. But this is when it came in handy that Reiner was aware that he had the hot hand. He used it to bend circumstance his way.

When he decided to make this movie, to risk his directing career and spend the capital that he’d earned making a few hit movies, Reiner went to convince Goldman that he was worthy. He was petrified to ring the doorbell of his apartment. “The Princess Bride is my favorite thing I’ve ever written,” Goldman said after he opened the door. “I want it on my tombstone.” Reiner discussed his vision for the film and showed Goldman cuts of his previous movies. He would later call the meeting in which he earned Goldman’s blessing the greatest moment of his directing career. Once he had permission, there was one more thing Reiner needed: money. The Princess Bride’s screenplay called for swordplay, gigantic rodents, and torture chambers, as well as a cast of characters that included a Sicilian hunchback, the most beautiful woman in the world, and a giant. This was epic stuff. The problem with epic stuff was that it was also expensive. Reiner finally convinced Norman Lear, the All in the Family creator who happened to be a friend of Reiner’s father, to open his checkbook and lend him enough cash to make the movie. Only then did Twentieth Century Fox come along and agree to distribute Reiner’s project—even if that project was The Princess Bride. Reiner still laments how difficult it was to make The Princess Bride. The hot hand was the only reason that it was even remotely feasible.

We’re all lucky for it. If there were some way to quantify the number of people who have seen and enjoyed any given movie, The Princess Bride would rank at the top of the list. One of the closest approximations to that metric is a movie’s CinemaScore grade. CinemaScore is a research firm with movie data going back several decades, and this combination of longevity and reliability gives its grades a certain weight. If a movie has a good CinemaScore grade, it’s probably good. If a movie has a great CinemaScore grade, it’s almost certainly destined for greatness. But if a movie gets an A+ grade, it’s an instant classic.

It’s a profound achievement to make even one movie worthy of the A+. Only ten directors have two A+ movies. But there is one director with three A+ movies. They were released within a span of five years and have almost nothing in common except for the man in the director’s chair. Rob Reiner made A Few Good Men in 1992. He made When Harry Met Sally . . . in 1989. And his run of A+ movies started in 1987 with the making of a movie that no one wanted him to make.

That movie? It was The Princess Bride.

4.

To understand what Dashun Wang and his collaborators found, it helps to understand how they found it. Wang’s team wanted to put some numbers behind fuzzy concepts like artistic taste, scholarly impact, and whether a movie is good, and they went searching for objective data that could help them quantify the subjective. The point of their research was not to compare academics to directors. It was not even to compare academics with academics or directors with directors. It was to compare the works of Einstein with the other works of Einstein. They wanted to pinpoint when creative types peak. The only way they could do that was by comparing their subjects with themselves.

The data they collected was sufficiently large to make some interesting conclusions. They looked at the auction prices for three thousand artists, the Google Scholar and Web of Science citations of twenty thousand academics, and the IMDB movie ratings of six thousand directors. Once they looked at those numbers, they found themselves staring at a surprising pattern: 91 percent of financially successful artists, 90 percent of published scientists, and 82 percent of directors whose films reached theaters had at least one hot-hand period in their careers. They had caught fire. The most expensive paintings, influential research, and beloved films were not independent events. They were the by-products of creative streaks.

While he found evidence for the hot hand only among artists, scholars, and directors, Wang is convinced that he would find it in any other industry. He believes it’s universal. When people had the hot hand, their quantity of work might have been the same, but the quality of that work was empirically higher. These were prolonged stretches of professional success in which people outperformed even their own expectations. They took advantage of their resources when they were hot to get hotter. These cultural luminaries and scholarly dignitaries were the best versions of themselves when they had the hot hand. This was fundamentally different from the fleeting rush of the hot hand in basketball. It wasn’t a matter of short-term momentum. The peaks of their careers lasted anywhere from three to five years, and the way their hits built on one another meant there were long-term effects to getting hot.

“If I know your best work, I know when your second best will be and when your third best will be,” Wang says. “That’s your hot-hand period.” But it’s not linear. It’s jagged. “You’re progressing along with a certain level of performance, and then all of a sudden your performance elevates to another level,” Wang explains. “You’re not yourself anymore. You’re not producing more than you expect. But what you produce in that period is much, much better.” Maybe the most riveting thing he found was actually something he didn’t find: there is no way yet to predict when someone is on the verge of such a streak. “Your hot streak can come at any time,” Wang claims. “What I learned from my own research is actually rather uplifting. Because the hot streak can start with any work, the only sure way to prevent it is to stop publishing. If you keep going, your hot streak may be yet to come.”

But how do you know if you’ve already had your hot hand? You don’t. You can’t! If you were to ask Wang for advice, he might tell you that it doesn’t matter what your circumstance is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Rebecca Clarke or a Rob Reiner. It doesn’t even matter if your hot-hand period is on the horizon or if it has already passed.

“The answer is the same,” Wang says. “You should keep going.”

Wang is such an unfailing optimist about the hot hand that he makes it easy to forget that behaving in this manner can backfire. It’s a supremely risky philosophy. Confidence can become arrogance. Arrogance can become ignorance. Your internal ability can get you only so far. That doesn’t mean you should quit your beer-league basketball team just because you won’t make it to the NBA. But it does mean that you shouldn’t delude yourself. Stephen Curry recognized the conditions were ripe for a hot hand. Rebecca Clarke realized they weren’t. That is the loophole in Wang’s law of the hot hand. There are many industries where your internal cadence is at the mercy of external forces. Sometimes those external forces break your way and the result is magic like The Princess Bride. Sometimes those external forces crush ambition. Talent is important, but circumstance is imperative, and circumstance beats talent when talent doesn’t have circumstance.

But the reason to put some faith in Dashun Wang and trust the law of the hot hand is that it’s not out of the realm of possibility for circumstance to appear when talent least expects it.

In fact it’s happened before.

5.

One summer day in 1564, before Dashun Wang, before Rob Reiner, long before Rebecca Clarke and even before Queen Anne, a small village in the English countryside was rattled by the sudden death of a weaver’s apprentice. The local tragedy was immortalized in the margins of the town’s records. Next to the name of the weaver’s apprentice were three ominous Latin words: Hic incipit pestis.

“Here begins the plague.”

The plague wiped out a sizable portion of this particular town. It was an indiscriminate killer. The weaver’s apprentice was the first of more than two hundred people to die over the next six months. Who lived and who died was seemingly a matter of chance. The plague could decimate one family and spare the family next door. In one house on Henley Street was a young couple who had already lost two children to previous waves of the plague, and their newborn son was three months old when they locked their doors and sealed their windows to keep the plague from invading their home again. They knew from their unfortunate experience that infants were especially vulnerable to this morbid disease. They understood better than perhaps anyone on Henley Street that it would be a miracle if he survived. Seven of ten babies died in plague years. It was as if every family were flipping a coin unfairly weighted toward heads and betting a child’s life on tails.

But when the plague was done with this small village in the English countryside, a little town called Stratford-upon-Avon, the couple breathed a sigh of relief that their young boy was still alive. William Shakespeare was a miracle who grew up to do miraculous things.

There’s a possibility that Shakespeare developed some kind of immunity to the plague because of his exposure when he was an infant, but that speculation began only centuries later and only because the plague was a constant nuisance to Shakespeare. “Plague was the single most powerful force shaping his life and those of his contemporaries,” wrote Jonathan Bate, one of his biographers.

Shakespeare was around the plague enough to recognize its symptoms. First the body temperature would spike. Next came the headache that would spread to the back, the legs, the groin, the armpits, and the neck. Before long everything would hurt. Anyone who tried to walk at this point would have looked and sounded like he’d chugged a bottle of tequila. His breathing would have been so labored that he wouldn’t have been able to talk without slurring his words. It would only get worse from there. The skin would become a patch of carbuncles—even the words associated with the plague were gruesome—and by that point the outcome would be inevitable. The last stage of torture was the brain crying uncle. The victim endured the last few hours of his life in a state of madness. The whole thing was wretched enough to spend your life worrying about how you might die.

The plague was naturally a taboo subject for much of Shakespeare’s writing career. Even when it was the only thing on anybody’s mind, nobody could bring himself to speak about it. Londoners went to the city’s playhouses so they could temporarily escape their dread of the plague. A play about the plague had the appeal of watching a movie about a plane crash while thirty-five thousand feet in the air.

But the plague was also Shakespeare’s secret weapon. He didn’t ignore it. He turned his enviable talent and his lamentable circumstance into the hot hand.

And that brings us to the macabre history of Romeo and Juliet.

It’s basically impossible to appreciate the truly bonkers nature of this play when you read it for the first time. You probably remember the basics of the plot: Romeo and Juliet are born into rival families; Romeo and Juliet fall in love; Romeo and Juliet die. But do you remember how any of that happens? Maybe not. And did you know the plague is what ultimately drives Romeo and Juliet apart? I bet you didn’t. Perhaps you vaguely recall the only explicit mention of plague in the entire play: “A plague o’ both your houses!” But the plague is actually everywhere in Romeo and Juliet.

Let’s refresh your memory of Shakespearean dramas. In case you don’t remember, there’s a death in Act III of Romeo and Juliet. A murder! Romeo has killed his rival, Tybalt, who happens to be the cousin of Juliet. At this point she’s supposed to marry Paris, but she’s actually in love with Romeo, which is a problem because Romeo’s family is the sworn enemy of Juliet’s family. It’s also a problem because Romeo is now banished after killing Tybalt. Juliet doesn’t know what to do. She turns to her spiritual authority, Friar Laurence, who has already decided there is one way and only one way to bring the Montagues and Capulets together. To end their blood feud, he will have to marry Romeo and Juliet. Friar Laurence’s new plan requires Juliet to drink a potion that will put her to sleep for so long that her family will have no choice but to conclude that she is dead. At the same time, Friar Laurence writes a letter to Romeo explaining the harebrained scheme, and Friar John will deliver it to the town of Mantua. The letter instructs Romeo to sneak back to her open coffin and steal Juliet so they can live happily ever after.

It was a pretty terrible plan that worked out pretty terribly—but not for the reasons you might expect. Juliet drinks the potion. Her family concludes she’s dead. Romeo sneaks back to see her. So far, so good. But the whole thing unravels because of what should have been the most reliable part of this ridiculous plan: Friar John never makes it to Mantua, and Friar Laurence’s letter never makes it to Romeo.

What happens next is a series of highly unfortunate events. Romeo thinks Juliet is dead. He kills himself. Juliet wakes up from her fake death and learns that Romeo is dead for real. She kills herself. For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

But let’s rewind a few scenes. Let’s read how Friar John explains to Friar Laurence why he never reached Mantua. Let’s figure out how the whole foolish scheme fell apart.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Welcome from Mantua. What says Romeo?

Or, if his mind be writ, give me his letter.

FRIAR JOHN

Going to find a barefoot brother out,

One of our order, to associate me,

Here in this city visiting the sick,

And finding him, the searchers of the town,

Suspecting that we both were in a house

Where the infectious pestilence did reign,

Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth.

So that my speed to Mantua there was stayed.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Who bare my letter, then, to Romeo?

FRIAR JOHN

I could not send it—here it is again—

Nor get a messenger to bring it thee,

So fearful were they of infection.

FRIAR LAURENCE

Unhappy fortune!

Look again: Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Sealed up the doors . . . / So fearful were they of infection.

Why didn’t Friar John deliver Friar Laurence’s letter to Romeo? Because of the plague. The plague is the plot twist that turns the most famous love story ever told into a tragedy.

Friar John never makes it to Mantua with the letter for Romeo because he gets stuck in quarantine, and no one in Shakespeare’s time would have dared to question such a restriction. They knew that defying quarantine made you eligible for a whipping and walking around town with plague sores could be punished by execution. It was a regrettable way to die: you survived the plague only to be killed for it. This is why Friar John doesn’t understand how Friar Laurence could be so upset with him. Of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t realize it’s because the plague is about to kill Romeo and Juliet.

The exchange between the friars amounts to twenty-four lines. It’s one of the shortest scenes in the entire play. It’s over before most kids reading it in high school realize what has happened. And yet it’s essential that we do. The whole play turns on this one scene. You might be wondering how the plague could be pulling the strings of a Shakespeare play and you might not have known until this very moment. As it turns out, that was the point. Shakespeare was being purposefully obtuse. He wrote in veiled language because the subtext would have been obvious back then. He didn’t have to belabor the point. The plague was the Shakespearean equivalent of ending a tweet with “Sad!” There was no need for any sort of further explanation. “It was omnipresent,” says Columbia University professor James Shapiro. “Everybody at the time would have known exactly what those one or two lines meant.”

Romeo and Juliet would not be the last time that Shakespeare used the plague to his advantage. The rule of thumb until not too long ago was that Shakespeare wrote two plays every year. But when Shapiro began his life’s study of the playwright, he deduced that his fellow literary scholars were not exactly statisticians. They had come to that number simply by dividing the number of plays he wrote by the number of years in which he wrote them. According to their calculations, if Shakespeare wrote ten plays in five years, he wrote two plays a year. The actual chronology of those plays had been mostly ignored ever since Shakespeare’s contemporaries organized his First Folio not by year but by category: comedy, tragedy, or history. This dubious math went unchallenged for hundreds of years. By the time Shapiro became a professor, the notion that Shakespeare wrote two plays every year was close to gospel. But there was a rub. And the rub is that it wasn’t remotely true.

“It turns out Shakespeare always tended to write in inspired bunches,” Shapiro says. “It’s something that took me a while to wrap my head around simply because I always kind of believed the unsubstantiated claims that he was churning out two plays a year. But that’s never what he did.”

Shakespeare ran hot and cold. His plays were not spread over the course of his career. They were clustered. If he’d studied playwrights instead of movie directors and artists, Dashun Wang would have written about Shakespeare. James Shapiro did exactly that. And he paid close attention to the circumstances that resulted in his 1606 renaissance. “Once you start seeing those plays are really bunched, you start asking: Well, what accounts for a lot of plays in a very short period of time?” he says.

There is another way of asking this question: Why did Shakespeare have the hot hand?

Shakespeare’s creative awakening in 1606 came immediately after he’d temporarily disappeared. He’d gone silent as England went through a national transformation under King James. The world as he knew it was a fundamentally different place. But in addition to all the usual fears and anxieties that come with political upheaval, there was something else on Shakespeare’s mind. It was also a plague year.

The horrific disease’s latest deadly assault on the London area turned out to be the greatest thing that could’ve happened to this playwright. Shakespeare was able to take advantage of the circumstances in a way that Dashun Wang would appreciate. He didn’t stop writing. He kept going. And his talent was about to collide with the oddest bit of circumstance. What could have killed Shakespeare really did make him stronger.

The plague closed London’s playhouses and forced Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, to get creative about performances. The players had to hit the road. But as they traveled the English countryside, stopping in rural towns that had not been stricken by the plague, Shakespeare hung back by himself. He was too old to be touring, and he no longer had any interest in acting. He felt that writing was a better use of his time. “This meant that his days were free, for the first time since the early 1590s, to collaborate with other playwrights,” Shapiro wrote in his book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

Shakespeare also benefited from the plague in a most unsavory manner: the plague killed off his competition. By the early 1600s, boys’ theater companies were more popular than adult troupes like Shakespeare’s, and the children were getting the best stuff from Shakespeare’s rival playwrights because talent attracted talent. It was a cycle that Shakespeare couldn’t break. He was writing tragedies for adults. With the possible exception of Queen Anne, the audiences wanted satires starring children. But in the hot summer months when the plague wiped out thousands per week, the people who were most susceptible happened to be the people who’d stolen business from Shakespeare. The King’s Men would eventually take back their theater spaces and their playwrights because of this disease that preyed on the young. The plague created the circumstance that enhanced Shakespeare’s talent. The world had evolved in his favor. All he had to do was adapt.

And that’s when it clicked for Shakespeare. That’s when he got hot. That’s when King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra came rushing out of him.

“Three really extraordinary tragedies,” Shapiro says. “I’m always interested in how and why this mysterious thing happens of understanding fully the world that you are in and being able to speak to it and for it.” It’s often tempting for the scholars to scrutinize certain moments of Shakespeare’s career through the lens of his personal life. The issue with that line of research is that they still don’t know all that much about it. “We have no idea what he was feeling,” Shapiro wrote. “We know a great deal more about how a rodent-borne visitation in 1606 altered the contours of Shakespeare’s professional life, transformed and reinvigorated his playing company, hurt the competition, changed the composition of the audiences for whom he would write (and in turn the kinds of plays he could write), and enabled him to collaborate with talented musicians and playwrights.”

Shakespeare was never a metronomic writer. He was streaky. He wrote in runs. And this run was dependent on forces beyond his grasp. The plague turned out to be the unlikely opportunity of his lifetime. It was because of the plague that he was able to turn a period of great societal upheaval into something else altogether: his hot-hand period.

Shakespeare was talented enough to enjoy some modicum of success no matter his circumstance. Rebecca Clarke was, too. But he made one success into two and three only because those conditions broke his way. His plays were neither random nor independent. One led to another, which led to yet another, which would hopefully lead to another. Shakespeare’s ability to capitalize on his circumstance was a form of power never afforded to a talent like Clarke.

So was it him? Or was it the world around him? It was both.

William Shakespeare changed the world only because the world changed first.

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