I previously wrote about Spencer Pratt’s Hollywood backers, the AI wars at top film schools and how Hollywood studios are scrambling to build IRL experiences. Email me at matthew@theankler.com
In flusher times, one veteran director recalls, a TV show might keep three production assistants in the office. Today it’s usually one — and increasingly, that one is somebody’s kid.
“There aren’t necessarily more nepo must-hires,” the director says. “There are fewer jobs, so the percentage is getting worse.” Back when a show kept three PAs, one must-hire was a third of the roster. Now, he says, “it’s the whole thing.”
Hollywood has always been a family business. The four Warner brothers divvied up executive roles among themselves when they founded their studio in 1923. The Redstones and Murdochs turned succession into blood sport. But the nepotism that’s biting hardest right now is happening far from the C-suite. At the struggling bottom rungs of the employment ladder, a contracting industry has turned every entry-level opening into a referendum on who you know.
This dynamic plays out across the industry. Coveted internships at studios go to the sons of billionaires, while smaller production companies frequently award competitive slots to unqualified high schoolers with ties to senior executives.
I spoke with over a dozen industry figures to understand the dynamics at play: a shrinking industry, a still-eager workforce — and who gets the internship or entry-level gig when push comes to shove. What emerges is a hiring machine that increasingly rewards proximity over talent — and a worry, voiced again and again, that an industry filtering its next generation through family connections is quietly engineering its own creative decline.
“For those people that don’t have the connection, they’re not even getting interviews,” one network employee involved in hiring decisions says. “But for these nepo hires, they have no credits. It’s almost like two different standards for the very entry-level roles.… It’s just different rules depending on who you know.”
A Foot in the Door
Hollywood nepotism is most visible in talent: the Maya Hawkes, and Patrick Schwarzeneggers, their parents’ legacy emblazoned in their names and, often enough, on their faces. Children of renowned directors get opportunities early, like Destry Allyn Spielberg and Ishana Night Shyamalan, who released their debut films in 2024 at ages 28 and 24, respectively, largely to critical derision. Denzel Washington’s four children — Malcolm, Olivia, John David and Katia — are all involved in Hollywood, either as actors, directors or producers.
A quick tour of current TV gives you Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder (daughter of Laraine Newman); Love Story’s Grace Gummer (Meryl Streep); The Pitt’s Taylor Dearden (Bryan Cranston); and The Boys’ Jack Quaid (Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid) — but the more revealing nepo pipeline is the one audiences never see.
The same family logic that puts a Schwarzenegger in front of the camera often plays a part in who gets hired far from it — in the writers room, on the production floor and up through the executive ranks.
To be clear, the point isn’t that the spawn of bold-faced names do not have talent. It’s that the path to success often appears to come without the same friction.
Bob Chapek’s son Brian Chapek is in production and development at Marvel, where he executive produced last year’s Thunderbolts — greenlit and announced in 2022, when the elder Chapek was Disney’s CEO. Ted Sarandos’ daughter, Sarah Sarandos, is a film producer with eight credits, seven of which were either Netflix originals or can be found on the platform. His son, Tony, co-hosts a podcast that was featured at Netflix Is a Joke Fest last month.
Development is an obvious first destination for the well-connected. There are no inherent qualifications for the role — the jobs are about instinct — and it’s a fun job.
“Everyone wants to do it, and it’s really cushy,” one longtime development assistant says. “It’s a job that everyone aspires to.”
“It’s not sweating and toiling away on set,” adds a creative exec. “It’s an office job, and I get to read scripts, and that sounds like a pretty neat deal.”
These roles are frequently handed out without ever being open for a genuinely competitive application process. One creative executive says “old-money vibes” — generational connections and the sense of entitlement that comes with them — drive many entry-level hiring decisions, especially at larger or midsize studios. Malia Obama interned on Girls and at The Weinstein Company, and had a short film in competition at Sundance in 2024, tellingly, under the name “Malia Ann.”
Getting in the door at one of the Big Three agency mailrooms can make or break a young entertainment player’s career — a decades-old Hollywood tradition (UTA has said it receives 4,000 trainee applicants a month — and accepts 200 a year). At WME, a niece of former executive chairman Patrick Whitesell quickly worked her way up from assistant to talent agent, a role she’s held for over five years now. Another Whitesell relative began her career as a WME intern before joining full-time as a brand partnerships assistant; she has since moved on to a talent-management company.
The nepotism can be especially brazen at small production companies, which typically lack corporate HR oversight and often feature relatives of the honchos all over the org chart. One assistant at a family-run production company was the only person on staff who wasn’t related to the company president. At another, a partner’s son was handed a coordinator role but had ambitions to be a writer and did very little of the day job.
One production manager estimates that over 50 percent of his PA roster are referrals — pushed by senior executives — whom the manager never meets prior to shooting. At a prestigious production company, an internship class was filled entirely with Ivy Leaguers as favors the president granted to friends.
Three Kinds of Nepo Hire
People involved in nepo hiring defend the practice, pointing out that many candidates rely on connections of one kind or another to land a job. Someone who built connections through excessive networking has simply earned it more than someone who relied on a parent, these people argue, saying that it’s a meaningless distinction. On top of that, connections can help you get your first gig — but eventually, if you’re not capable, you won’t hack it in the upper ranks.
Of course, some nepo hires arrive with real qualifications on top of their connections, and do the work well.
The trouble is the two other kinds: the ones who can’t do the job, and the ones who don’t think they have to. And because the connections that got them in the door tend to keep them rising too, these aren’t just bad assistants to be endured — they’re the people who may one day decide what gets made.
First, the ones thrust into jobs they can’t do — to their own detriment and everyone else’s.
A well-connected high-schooler can sometimes nab an internship that hundreds of college students are chasing. And too often the person who lands one can’t do the work. On one show, a writers room production assistant with no film background couldn’t even file an expense report, leaving a mess for the finance department.
One connected production assistant got hired for an on-set gig despite lacking a driver’s license, forcing already-stretched crews to cover their tasks. On a cable show with a young, unqualified nepo-assistant, the other PA had to work twice as hard, says the production coordinator on the shoot, and crew had to poach a PA from an entirely different department to help with basic errands.
“Most people view PAs as you’re just there to make everyone’s job a little easier,” the coordinator says. “When you put people in there that don’t know anything and there’s no one to train them, it just becomes another body in the room.”
The damage isn’t only to the production; it’s to the hire, who gets pushed up a ladder he has never learned to climb.
“I’ve seen that where people get promoted too fast and then they get to a point where you can see they don’t know what they’re doing,” a veteran production manager says. “Because they don’t have the experience that somebody that’s been there double their time has.”
Then there are ones who simply don’t care — turning up at the office occasionally, getting stoned in the writers room. Everyone in the business has a horror story.
“They usually come from privilege and they just don’t take the job seriously,” a second creative executive says. “They have things to fall back on. They’re not dying for it.” Another longtime assistant recalled working alongside a coordinator who secured his job simply because his father was the company’s co-partner: “They weren’t really doing anything.”
Bad for the Business?
The clearest sign of the problem is on screen. “It feels like there’s a disconnect between the types of movies being made and what audiences want,” one studio exec says. “Hollywood feels a little out of touch.”
That disconnect, this executive argues, traces back to who’s making the decisions. A C-suite that has aged in place over 30 years tends to hire in its own image, and the filter compounds at every level below, until the rooms where movies get greenlit are full of people who grew up around the same dinner tables. Regional, racial and economic diversity is part of what makes a project resonate with a broad audience. When the exec ranks reflect a single view of the world — largely white, upper-class insiders raised in the business — the result is film and television that feels beamed in from somewhere else. Bad for art, worse for business.
And the financial structure of entry-level Hollywood helps enforce the same filter. Assistants without connections are pushed to cheaper neighborhoods far from the studios just to survive on entry-level pay, while hires with family money build social capital over drinks and lunches in WeHo. The people best positioned to climb are the ones who needed the job the least.
Breaking in Anyway
Those involved in hiring stress that, as ever, it’s tough to get a foot in the door in Hollywood.
“Your résumé is just in a big pile,” one production company assistant says. “The only thing that’s going to get your résumé read is if someone flags your application. That is kind of a standard for the industry.”
And there are only so many assistant-type gigs out there, especially as AI threatens to cull the ranks even further.
There are ways to stand out, though — even without strong connections. Applicants will often reach out over LinkedIn to people at the companies they’re applying to or others in the orbit who can put in a word, with varying degrees of success. Regardless of company ties, within the first five minutes of an interview, the studio HR pro says he and his colleagues can usually tell whether a candidate will move forward.
“Right now the industry is chaotic. Everyone’s going through change,” he says. “It’s very noticeable on candidates which one is allowing the chaos to get to them and which one is thriving in it.”
To stand out in that crucial window, he advises bringing proactive energy to interviews, such as pitching specific marketing campaigns or potential brand partners. If you lack experience, don’t hold out for a massive studio; take an internship at a small production company or even a business outside Hollywood to build your résumé. And remember you’re interviewing for the company, not just the specific role. If you bring a positive attitude and make an excellent impression, recruiters will actively try to match you with other internal positions.
Cindy Kaplan and Angela Silak Vargas of Hollywood Résumés believe that while entry-level competition is fierce — especially against local graduates with multiple prestigious internships — candidates can still break in. They advise looking for PA jobs in cheaper secondary markets, taking remote script coverage opportunities and being hyper-specific about your long-term career goals when networking.
Kaplan says: “If you come from outside, you do have a different perspective, and we say that’s a value add.”
The problem is that Hollywood keeps treating that value add as a long shot — and treating proximity as proof.
