Creativity Quote by Donald O'Connor

O'Connor is mourning the death of the runway. In the studio-era world that made him - a system of shorts, B pictures, vaudeville circuits, and steady contract work - performers could fail in public, learn in public, and keep their jobs long enough for talent to harden into craft. Television, as he frames it, compresses that messy apprenticeship into a brutal binary: you are instantly legible as a "hit" or you are erased.

The line "no place to hit and miss" is doing double duty. It sounds like a performer talking about blocking, timing, the physicality of comedy - the literal space you need to land a joke, take a fall, recover, try again. But it is also about the marketplace. TV's demand for immediate ratings turns experimentation into a liability. The medium that brought entertainment into every living room also brought the audition into every living room, every week, with a scoreboard attached.

His "three pictures in a row" jab points to a business logic that pretends to be meritocratic while actually being risk-averse. It's not that the artist isn't good; it's that the system can't afford for them to become good. O'Connor, a dancer-comic who built a career on precision earned through repetition, is warning that we are mistaking instant polish for talent and confusing visibility with value. The subtext is anxiety, yes, but also craft pride: greatness is often just survival long enough to get better, and television doesn't like to fund the awkward middle.