Branding Yourself Without Breaking Yourself

Because every blog is someone’s first blog, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Tennyson E. Stead. I’m a screenwriter with more than 50 screenplays under my belt, I’m a director, I’m a producer, I’m an old-school theater guy, and I’m a cutting-edge transmedia creator. My biggest credit to date is for writing a dark future gladiator tentpole called Atlas: Uprising for Emagine Content, and I’ve got a sci-fi heist movie in development called Quantum Theory.

I’ve been given a lot of unsolicited advice about my brand, over the course of the last few weeks, by people who make less money than me. If there is just one measure of a brand’s value, it’s probably tied to the brand’s income or net worth… so what this steady stream of free advice tells me is that there are a lot of desperate people out there. Folks are looking to establish their authority, whether or not they’ve earned it, and this is nothing new. Professional branding has always been a hot topic of conversation and a profound source of stress in New Hollywood.

With all this in mind, I thought it might be a good time to talk about where my public image comes from. Most of the people on this website know me to be a pretty relentless asshole, as a survivor of cataclysms, and as a very devoted showperson. My brand is pretty well-established, and at the same time it’s not something I put a…