Hollywood

I might lose my job. As a weenie Hollywood “development executive.” Which, fine, I fucking hate my job. Work work work all goddamn day and then come home and read scripts, garbage scripts that will never amount to anything, but I need to read them to preserve relationships. Relationships that will never amount to anything. My job completely eats my life, leaves me a wrecked, miserable shell of a man each day, destroys any chance of my spending time with women and friends, and it doesn’t even fucking pay anything, so fuck my job.

The problem is, after 7 years of doing this– answering phones, learning names, mastering the bizarre mandarin etiquette and arcane structure of Hollywood– I am now only equipped to do this one thing that I hate. I have no choice but to pursue another, similar job. Which, there are two reasons you would want this: to make movies, and to impress girls. Making movies is impossible, and if you have one of these gigs you’re not even around girls enough to impress them. That’s why guys like (REDACTED) have to stock their reception pool with hot young USC pieces of ass– it’s the only exposure they will have to a woman. Most of their life is spent hobnobbing in rooms full of jowelly old William Morris agents.

You are working nineteen hours a day, because everybody wants to get into the movies. Everybody wants to get into the movies and has to outcompete each other by hustling more, working more, we gotta do more with less, and people are willing to get out there and wade through the mountains and mountains of shit that other people who want to get into the movies on the acting, writing, management and agency sides are putting out there, out hustling over piles of shit because there is nothing good left– everything good was snapped up by some jowelly old dude, or some famous person’s son.

Anyway. I am not equipped, now, to do anything but this. My skills and knowledge are so specialized that I’m the weird bird of paradise who can only subsist off a particular nut that grows on a particular tree in New Guinea which is nurtured by soil enriched by the chemical signature of a particular volcano. And I can only build my nest out of a particular anteater’s solidified dung, which dung is digested from a particular berry, and etc. etc. And now global warming is happening and this berry got a fungus and the whole fucking jenga system is falling apart. So unless there is a glut of low-level Hollywood development jobs at the exact kind of place I have already worked for the past several years, which there will never be, I am fucked and unemployable.

Better to be the pigeon, than the bird of paradise. Better to be able to live off discarded french fries or chewing gum or old ladies’ bird feeders or whateverthefuck, and build your nest in a stop light.  Learn how to weld, or wire houses, or some other skill that people will always need. Learn how to turn hand made wooden furniture on a lathe.  Although my shirt collar would just get caught in the thing and it would rip my fucking face off.

Tags: birds, hollywood, my job, rutherford b. hayes