Luck and timing aside, the former would be nowhere without the latter.
Such a man was Bernie Brillstein, who died last week at the age of 77.
Much has been made of the comedy revolution of the mid-1970s, spearheaded by the breakout cast of Saturday Night Live.
But as much as the likes of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and later Bill Murray, Marty Short and Adam Sandler, would change the face of television and movies, it was Brillstein who discovered them (sharing no small credit with producer Lorne Michaels, whom he also managed), then guided and helped to shape their success.
And then, as his influence grew along with theirs, he expanded to include A-listers like Brad Pitt and Nicolas Cage, and eventually such prestigious and revolutionary TV hits as Larry Sanders and The Sopranos.
Less a manager than a sort of avuncular uncle, Brillstein's beginnings are the stuff of classic Hollywood legend.
He grew up sharing the Manhattan home of his uncle, vaudeville and radio dialect comic Jack Pearl.
After graduating from New York University and a stint in the army, he made the most traditional and time-honoured entrance into the business: the mailroom of the William Morris Agency.
It did not take him long to work his way up to agent, striking out on his own with the Brillstein Company in 1969.
One of the first to see and reap the benefits of producing his own clients' projects, he enjoyed his earliest TV success with the Muppets, which brought him to Saturday Night Live in 1975.
From that point on, he piloted the rocket that propelled the SNL stable to movie stardom, executive-producing (among others) The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, Dragnet, Summer Rental, The Cable Guy and Happy Gilmore.
In the 1980s, Brillstein partnered up with an up-and-coming young hotshot named Brad Grey, whom he had met at a San Francisco television convention.
Grey had a similarly classic Hollywood backstory, having started out as a gofer for Harvey Weinstein before hitching his wagon to rising star Bob Saget.
Grey is now the head of Paramount Pictures.
The partnership's Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, established in 1991, was also responsible for such precedent-setting television as It's Garry Shandling's Show, Mr. Show, Politically Incorrect, Just Shoot Me, NewsRadio and Primetime Glick.
I had the privilege of being seated next to the effusively charming Brillstein at an SCTV tribute dinner in Aspen in 1999.
To suggest that he had stories would be the understatement of the decade (now almost three).
By that point, he was pretty much working from a script, having quite eloquently chronicled his own life and times one year earlier in his memoir, Where Did I Go Right? You're No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead.
And now he is. And no one wanted it.
