Hollywood Failure

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PART I: SHITTY

one?

I was two hours into my dream job opportunity when I realized something was incorrect.

Can you sweep the cigarette butts off the writers’ balcony?

Hmmm. Yes. Yes, I can do that. I felt the familiar itch of annoyance behind my right eyeball, but I ignored it. It had only been two hours. I was grateful for this opportunity. I was working on "Adult Cartoon, probably the hottest show on network television, and literally, my favorite show up until two hours ago. In college I’d spend many an evening watching reruns with friends. We’d quote the good parts. I couldn’t believe I was working as a Production Assistant on Adult Cartoon." Dream job.

Now, I had no illusions about what being a Production Assistant entailed. My alma mater had done a decent enough job telling us what to expect, that we would have to eat shit for a while. Okay, I could do that. Sure. I couldn’t be happier to be eating shit at "Adult Cartoon." Because I figured, if you had to eat shit, this was the place to do it.

My first day ended with me not hating my life. I was just happy to be working. In fact, my last task for the day was to run a Mysterious Envelope to the famous creator of "Adult Cartoon, the great, great Scott MacPherson. I couldn’t believe it. I had only been employed a mere 14 hours, and I was already being bestowed the opportunity to set foot on Scott MacPherson’s property. He NEEDED THIS ENVELOPE. I was going to GIVE HIM THIS ENVELOPE. I was going to drive to his house, knock on the door, and he would say, Hi there—what’s your name? Tom Weaver? Welcome to the team, Tom Weaver, thanks for dropping off this Mysterious Envelope. I look forward to seeing you around the office and acknowledging your presence, one creative genius to another."

I couldn’t wait. I called my friend back in Small Town, New York, Jenny, who I would watch "Adult Cartoon reruns with. I’m driving to Scott MacPherson’s house! I proclaimed. Exciting!!!" she said. Yes.

I parked and got out with the Mysterious Envelope. I looked around to see if anybody was watching me—maybe they would think I was friends with Scott MacPherson. Maybe I could play it off that way. Christ, what should I say? Hi, I’m Tom, the new Production Assistant on your show, here is your Mysterious Envelope. No no, that’s no good. Definitely start out with Hi, though. All great conversations start with Hi.

But then nobody answered the goddamned door. And I had this Mysterious Envelope that I NEEDED TO HAND DELIVER TO SCOTT MACPHERSON. Maybe his life depended on this Mysterious Envelope. Maybe it was a catheter or something. Or maybe it was a check for millions of dollars. I pulled out my cell phone to call my immediate supervisor, Joe, but I had no service in the Hollywood Hills. I had no idea what to do. I was sweating. Should I take it back with me? Should I wait? Should I just leave it? It was a very nice area, no hoodlums around. Probably mostly celebrities. Shit, what if Andy Dick takes it?

I decided to just leave it at the door. But I was nervous, damp, nauseated, not sure if I was doing the right thing or not.

This is a feeling that would stay with me for the next five years.

I got the job through my alma mater’s mailing list. The mailing list was run by a fellow classmate, Gracie Barnes, whom I’ve never met, but automatically hated. Gracie was one year younger than I, blonde, and was relatively attractive in that sexy-softball-player kind of way. Built. Ready for sports at any given moment. Gracie Barnes’ older brother, Wade Barnes, was a decorated alum, and a successful writer on some humdrum sitcom called "According to Glen." Not knowing Gracie personally, I just assumed she’d ride her brother’s coattails, and would soon find herself in the position of Chancellor of Hollywood without having to work an actual day in her life.

But she did work. Gracie was a Production Assistant at "Adult Cartoon before I had even arrived in LA. I assumed the job was handed to her. Adult Cartoon" employed three Production Assistants at a time, and when there was an opening, she made the entire mailing list know, and did her best to get résumés of fellow graduates to the top of the pile. I was one of the résumés in the pile. I received an interview, and apparently had done the best job lying myself into the position.

I’ll work my butt off for you guys, I said. No job is too big or too small for me.

Terrific lies. So now, Gracie was the senior Production Assistant, and it was her job to train me on all the important job responsibilities.

This is the coffee machine. Coffee is in this cabinet, in these packets.

I took a packet. I pinched both sides at the end with my fingers and tried pulling it apart.

Yeah, ORRRR, you could open it like THIS!! and she RIPPED the packet out of my hand and tore along the perforated edge that said tear here.

I hated her.

And it was more of the same from here. Gracie Barnes, with her goddamn career path already paved in platinum, showing me exactly all the ways in which I would learn to hate my job.

She showed me the 20th Century Faux studio lot, which was a daily stop for Production Assistants. "Adult Cartoon" was a Faux program, but it was produced off-lot in some office building in Miracle Mile with too many windows. How many goddamned windows could one building possibly have? This building was obnoxious-looking. From the outside the entire thing looked like a giant fly eyeball—a flyball, if you will. Every day you had to drive from this building to the studio lot, sometimes multiple times, to deliver things that ranged from the final cut of that week’s episode, to stupid gifts, to a single piece of paper reflecting a slight punctuation change on page 24, etc.

God. Those pages. "Adult Cartoon" had a tremendously efficient system wherein any minor change to the script had to be delivered IN PERSON to faceless studio executives, most of whom didn’t give a shit. On these occasions, the advent of the FAX machine was promptly ignored, and it was the responsibility of the PA to spend time and gas and effort to hand deliver 1-2 sheets of paper to these trolls.

At the start, the PAs were Gracie Barnes, me, and this guy Arnie. Arnie was a good guy. He seemed to get along with everybody. Nothing seemed to bother him. He had a way of letting things roll off him that I just could not understand. He was never on edge. I was kind of in awe of it. That’s the way you’re supposed to act in these types of situations, I thought. I just couldn’t do it. I was too high strung, too full of resentment. I hated being talked down to. I hated being made to feel less-than. I couldn’t tolerate it. I was insecure enough on my own without somebody telling me the exact same things I’ve been saying to myself for years.

"Adult Cartoon was set up a bit differently than how I understood most TV shows to operate. In most circumstances, PAs were relegated to different departments. The writers department had their bitch, production had their bitch, and post-production had their bitch; each bitch doing their own department’s specific bitch work. Adult Cartoon didn’t operate that way. As one of three bitches, you were just expected to cater to anyone who wanted something at the time. This included not only writers, but animators as well. Once people realized there were three people available at their beck and call, any degree of self-sufficiency disappeared. There was so much trivial nonsense to do and we were spread so thin, that when something asinine like OH GOD, NO COLD SPRITES IN THE FRIDGE" came up, people automatically assumed the PA was incompetent. They confused the pettiness of our tasks with the volume of these tasks. They assumed we had so FEW responsibilities that the fridge should ALWAYS be stocked 24/7.

I always had plenty of time to stew over things during my exceptionally shitty commute. I lived in a less-than-ideal area of the San Fernando Valley called Reseda. Reseda is probably best known for causing Elizabeth Shue’s parents to recoil in disgust when the Karate Kid tells them he’s from there. That, or from Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’, where he proclaims It’s a long day / Livin’ in Reseda / Because it’s too goddamn hot and littered with uninsured Mexican motorists. / Ventura Boulevard. So I lived there, and as I’ve said, "Adult Cartoon was based in the Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles, which was approximately 19 miles, equating to about 90 minutes in LA time. Miracle Mile. I never did find out what was so miraculous" about it, exactly. It’s a miracle I didn’t blow my brains out driving there everyday.

They made you get there super early. I am not a morning person. I’m not even a first-half-of-the-day person. I don’t even truly start to feel awake until 1 or 2 hours before I’m supposed to go to sleep. To manage this, I developed a system for pouring my carcass off the mattress every morning. It’s not a healthy system, and it’s probably eaten a golf-ball sized crater through my stomach lining, but it works. Here’s what you do: Let’s say you have to wake up at 6 a.m. You set your alarm for 5 a.m. You have—preset on your bedside table—a glass of water and a handful of caffeine pills. When the 5 a.m. alarm goes off, roll over, eat the pills, and go back to sleep. At around 5:30, 5:45, your body will start to wake you up in this jittery, nauseated mess. Now you physically CANNOT go back to sleep. You have NO CHOICE but to get up, dry heave, hate yourself, and get ready for the daily grind.

On more than one occasion I would vomit. Which would pretty much set the stage for the next 12 hours.

two?

Weeks passed. The disenchantment continued. Joe would find me.

We need to have these phone lists distributed.

The phone lists. Sheer insanity. Between writers, production staff and animators, there were approximately 150 people working at "Adult Cartoon." 150 phones. 150 lists. Sometimes people quit, got hired, fired, promoted, demoted, died, whatever, and all of these events would constitute the need for a new phone list. This happened about 3 times per week. 150 phone lists had to be copied on paper of different colors to denote there was a change—Mr. Chow moved over three cubicles and the ENTIRE goddamned office needed to be made aware of his new phone extension. But nobody was calling Mr. Chow. Mr. Chow was a storyboard revisionist from Korea. Nobody can communicate with Mr. Chow. But there I was, dropping pink papers into 150 inboxes, most of which still contained yesterday’s blue phone list, and the day before that’s yellow phone list from when Brenda Whatsherface quit, and on and on and on and on. An exorbitant waste of paper. Utter fucking buffoonery. Somewhere out there, a maple tree was crying. Entire forests were being demolished for Mr. Chow. Nobody was calling Mr. Chow.

Lunch was another burden, perhaps the burdenest of burdens. Now, this one I knew was coming. If you were a PA, you more than likely had to get lunch for people. I thought I had mentally prepared myself for this endeavor. But at "Adult Cartoon," they wanted the impossible. Every day you were expected to get 30-40 people their own individual lunch. There was a standard list of people who were supposed to get it, but then each day you had to find the Production Supervisor who would then tack on an additional 5-10 people, usually a group of character designers or storyboard revisionists who were under deadline and had to work through their lunch break.

Any lunch additions today? I’d have to ask the Production Supervisor, inevitably interrupting something important. At "Adult Cartoon," you always felt like a nagging child coming to interrupt Mommy and Daddy from Important Business Time. It felt like everyone in the office was doing something more important than you were. And they were. But nevertheless, you had a JOB to do.

No additional lunches today, Tom.

I’d let out a mental sigh of relief and turn to leave.

Wait! Tom! The entire Animatics Department, actually. And Mr. Chow.

So then you had to go on this goddamned quest around the office in the hopes you could find all these people, and force them to give you their lunch order in a timely manner. The sheer number of lunches everyday meant that only a handful of restaurants were capable of handling the volume, so ultimately somebody was sick of something and HATED where you were going. So every day you’d just be bombarded with snarky comments, as if you purposefully chose their Least Favorite Restaurant because it amused you.

Ugh, ‘Dana’s Deli.’ Everything here sits like a lump of shit in my stomach.

Ugh, ‘Caribbean Cantina.’ Last time I ate here I got worms.

Ugh, ‘Thirty Dollar Sandwich Hut.’ They give you pink napkins.

Who gives a shit? It’s FREE. They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, this WAS a free lunch. The company paid for EVERYTHING. I mean who scoffs at a free meal?! I’m excited when places let you take as many ketchup packets as you want.

There was this one writer, Ryan Avery. He looked like a lacrosse player. I mean that in the worst sense of the word. Didn’t have it in him to walk, he had to strut—always strutting, from point A to point B. And the whistling—always whistling, with his chest puffed out, like a hen.

BAD. BAD Tom. Chinese food for lunch? BAD Tom.

Like a dog. Like a goddamn dog. And here I thought I’d please the masses by trying somewhere new, an area restaurant that claimed they could manage the workload. But there was simply no pleasing these yo-yos. Ever. You can please some of the people none of the time, and you can please none of the people all of the time. That became my motto.

Well, so far no one else has complained... I’d chirp.

Well, I’M complaining! And I don’t care how you run it up the flagpole, no more Gook food for lunch! He’d strut away.

Once you faxed the order in, you had to jump in your piece of shit car and haul ass to whatever restaurant held the fate of your young career in its hands. Most of the time the restaurants were in ritzy parts of town with terrible parking situations. Occasionally the valet guy would let you park at the curb, but not always. Then it became a battle to find street parking that wasn’t light years away.

Once in the restaurant, you’d use an Excel document that had everybody on the staff’s name on it. You’d have to un-bag all the orders (even though you repeated on the phone several times not to bag it) and hope to GOD the restaurant labeled each order by name. If the container had Vinnie written on it in magic marker, you’d cross the name Vinnie off your Excel document. Until you had all 40-something orders crossed off.

I used to care about every single order, but that took up way too much mental energy. Soon I learned to pay attention only to the writers’ meals. They would be the ones at your throat if something was wrong. Plus, your nonexistent career depended on them. Nevermind that you had any actual talent, the only way you could make it in this industry was if they allowed it. So sometimes, if a mistake happened – such as you stopping very slowly at a red light, thus propelling all the food orders from your back seat to the floor of the car – you had to improvise. If Executive Producer Sol Bergstein ordered the same thing as Mr. Chow, you’d swap Sol Bergstein’s squashed chicken salad wrap with Mr. Chow’s mint condition chicken salad wrap. That way you’d keep things in the status quo by having Sol Bergstein continue to ignore your existence instead of dropping the guillotine.

If you had managed to get back to the office without any casualties, you had to brace yourself for the razor-sharp wit of Random Elevator Rider, who would see you with all these lunches and assault you with lines like Oh, is THAT for ME? You SHOULDN’T have! or, WOW, I guess SOMEBODY must be hungry! Then you walked to the doorway of the writers’ room. You were not allowed to go inside the writers’ room uninvited. Did you hear me? I said you were NOT ALLOWED TO GO INSIDE THE WRITERS’ ROOM UNINVITED, even to announce lunch was there. Instead, you had to stand there and wait for Executive Producer Sol Bergstein to catch your eye. If it was okay to proceed, he would give you a throwaway nod. That was your cue to place all the writers’ individual lunches in front of them to a completely silent room.

Yeah, that was another thing. I don’t know if they did it on purpose or what, but when you walked in there, they would all stop pitching jokes and just sit there in silence as you dispatched these lunches with a trembling hand. They would just stare at you, I guess in order to make things as uncomfortable as humanly possible. I never got used to this. Each time I just built up more and more anxiety. It was like walking the world’s longest plank each and every work day.

One time was the worst. The writers wanted to go to Hee-Haw Barbecue for lunch. Everyone was real excited for Hee-Haw Barbecue. I hated Hee-Haw Barbecue. I can’t speak for the food, because if you were a PA, nourishing yourself wasn’t allowed, but an office lunch run to Hee-Haw Barbecue was always impossible. It was located at the Grove, which was a nice place to visit if you had a life, but that meant you had to park in their stupid parking garage and walk. They packed their meals in what had to be the World’s Largest Containers, such that you could only carry four meals at a time back to your car. At some point I learned to bring my own boxes to Hee-Haw Barbecue so I could carry more. That meant every person enjoying their dining experience could watch this nervous idiot march in with his boxes and proceed with his dopey check-off list.

On this particular occasion, I happened to catch that Hee-Haw Barbecue had prepared the wrong meal for Inconsequential Staff Writer Ryan Avery. They had prepared the steak SANDWICH instead of the steak ENTREE. I thought about saying screw it, but I didn’t know what kind of bodily harm might come to me. So I had to wait there while they took a billion minutes preparing a new steak entree for Ryan Avery.

Then Joe called. He would always call.

The writers are wondering where lunch is.

Lunch is on its way.

Okay, thanks.

Useless call. What was the purpose of these calls? It’s not like it expedited the process. I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve been dealt. It’s not like I went out joyriding with $520 worth of lunches because I forgot I had them. Nobody had any idea what an undertaking this was for a man. They must have thought you prepared the meals yourself. Because the blame would always fall on you if things were late. It’s not my fault that I couldn’t fax the order until 11:30 because Co-Consulting Supervising Producer Ira Hasnowitz was too busy yapping on the phone with his agent or mistress or tailor or whatever to give me an order. Everything was MY fault. My head was never NOT on the chopping block.

Then everything was shifted and destroyed in the back seat of my car when I stopped at aforementioned Stop Light of Death. Ryan Avery’s beautiful expensive steak slid all over my car’s mud mat, which was fresh with liquid from my leaky air conditioner. I had no time to panic. I picked off the gravel, kissed the steak for good luck, and placed it back in its container. I never heard about it.

After everything was distributed, one of Scott MacPherson’s three assistants came up to me. Scott MacPherson had three assistants of his own. Three.

Scott’s pulled pork sandwich is piled too high with pork.

This fucking guy. His sandwiches were always piled too high. He didn’t like his sandwiches overstuffed with content. What a reasonable person might find to be a generous portion, Scott MacPherson found to be an irritant of epic proportions.

But let’s pretend for a moment that you, too, are an irrational human being, and you, too, do not like your sandwich to have sandwich things in it. What you would do, I would hope, is remove the things you did not like from the sandwich by your own hand. But this is an insurmountable obstacle when you are a Soft Hollywood Asshole. You require a BRAND NEW meal. This meant time, and gas, and money, and gas—that none of Scott’s actual three assistants seemed to have, mind you—to go and retrieve said additional sandwich.

Sometimes busy busy Scott MacPherson wasn’t ready to eat his lunch, and his lunch would sit. He didn’t like his lunch to have sat, or be put in the refrigerator, or to continue to age with seconds at ALL. When he was READY to eat, one of his three assistants would inform you, so you could rush back to the restaurant and get the exact same sandwich AGAIN. They loved to perform this task, because this meant one of them could eat the Poisonous Old Sandwich, which had been decaying for an entire twenty minutes.

I had just returned to the office from buying the third copy of Scott’s impossible sandwich when I was called into the office of Suzanne, the crotchety hobbling production controller.

When you are documenting your mileage for reimbursement, please be accurate with your figures. Last week you went to Thirty Dollar Sandwich Hut and marked it as an 8 mile round trip. MapQuest says it’s a 6.2 mile round trip.

So from then on, I had to be more accurate with my mileage sheets, so I wouldn’t receive too many pennies back. To keep production costs low, after all. Stay within budget. She spoke nothing of Scott’s neverending sandwiches.

Another demented concept designed to break the will of the PA was this keys procedure. "Adult Cartoon" occupied the third floor of an office building. The underground parking garage of our building had tandem parking, so everyone relinquished their keys to the parking attendant. Then they gave you a ticket. You would then trade this ticket for your keys when you were ready to go home.

After 8 p.m., they would transfer all the keys still in their possession to the parking office, located next door in the sister building.

Well, as a convenience for those employees staying past 8 p.m., the PA would have to go around to everybody’s office or cubicle and say, Keys? The person would hand you their ticket. By the time you made a full round, you had a handful of stupid tickets that you had to take to the