Don’t be fooled by his moniker on HITRECORD, the collaborative production company he founded with his brother in 2004. Actor, director, writer, and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt is anything but a regular Joe.
His acting career already spans three decades and includes a long list of popular and acclaimed TV shows and movies: 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Dark Knight Rises, Lincoln, Looper, Inception, Snowden, 500 Days of Summer …
Having graduated from child actor to blockbuster star, it’s hard to imagine that Gordon-Levitt ever struggled to find work. Yet an actor’s life is never certain, and dry spells are not uncommon.
At Content Marketing World 2017, Gordon-Levitt talked about how just such a career dry spell led him to seize control of his creative destiny and to build something few startups and brands ever achieve: a thriving online community that not only pays for itself but also shares the wealth with its contributors.
CCO: How did the idea for HITRECORD come about? Were there moments in your life that formed the seeds for this project?
Gordon-Levitt: I’ve been an actor since I was 6 years old. At 19, I quit to go to college. When I wanted back in, I couldn’t get any acting roles. That was painful.
When you’re an actor, you depend on someone else to give you a role. That couldn’t be how it went in my life. I had to be creative and express myself on my own terms. HITRECORD became a symbol for me taking responsibility for my own creative outlet – for being the one to push that record button on the video camera. It’s also a pun. In the past, media was an object you would consume, like a hit record. Now media is more and more something you do, an action you take, something that you’re a part of.
HITRECORD evolved organically as the (online) community grew over the last 10 years. I think that’s a huge strength. You can feel the homegrown origins in the nature of HITRECORD when you go there. It’s not just a startup that was conceived as a business model. I think people feel that. It’s a big part of why creative people – who are notoriously difficult – really do trust HITRECORD. They come. They contribute. They participate. It’s not just a scheme to make money or to collect your data.
CCO: HITRECORD feels like a community for creative brainstorming and ideation. But the platform also generates finished/monetized projects. Do those projects produce enough revenue to support the community or will there be other ways to monetize?
Gordon-Levitt: For a while, it was purely a hobby I worked on with my brother. We didn’t spend money or make money. And then, starting in 2010, we launched as a production company with our co-founders.
We wanted to do ambitious things: create things good enough to become feature films, make records, write books. A TV show was our pie-in-the-sky goal.
To accomplish those…
