Field Guide #9: Assistants
Field Guide #9: Assistants
First-hand accounts of the new reality for life at the bottom
Welcome to the final (for now) of my Field Guides to Modern Hollywood, covering the handling and care of the different personalities and professions who populate your neighborhood. Earlier I wrote about Actors, Writers, Agents, Executives, Reporters, Directors, Producers and Publicists. Today we hear from the future of the business, Assistants, and it’s not pretty.
To close this batch of field guides, we come to the quintessential Hollywood profession: assistants.
Without their work, the business would literally grind to a halt, yet their position is increasingly fraught by the realities of the business today. Essential though they may be, they remain invisible to the larger industry. No one goes on strike for assistants; no one threatens to shut down Hollywood on their behalf.
Doing time as an assistant has long been the apprenticeship required of those who wish to rise in the industry. Tomorrow’s studio chief may be bringing you coffee today. Today’s studio chiefs were once rolling calls for yesterday’s titans.
So who are these long-suffering wretches? Well, they are everyone. They are the future of this industry, if we’ve got one. In this installment, I wanted to do things a little differently. After soliciting the thoughts of a score of assistants in different roles, I found they explained things so much better than I ever could. I also found it truly alarming to hear how tough things have gotten for a variety of reasons.
To put on my middle-aged man’s hat on here, as one who knocked around Young Hollywood long ago — being an assistant was always hard, even brutal. But it wasn’t impossible. No one got rich living on an assistant’s salary in Los Angeles, but neither did they fear that one just couldn’t do it, that there was no way to keep their head above water, even as a fully-employed young single person. That’s a big problem!
When the only people who can now make that journey come from privileged backgrounds, restocking the Hollywood pond with people from a very narrow slice of the populace — that’s a time bomb we’re setting under ourselves.
Further, as challenging as entry-level Hollywood may have been, people never questioned that it was for something, that there was a pathway to climb with hard work and just a tiny bit of luck. Too many of the assistants I spoke with see the prospect of getting ahead as a hopeless battle. I don’t think that’s just from the streaming pullback; that feeling has been present at the lower rungs for awhile now.
So for this installment, I’m giving them the floor to lay out where things stand. Our world depends so much on them, so let us take a look at the state of assistantdom, circa 2024, in the words of those who are getting through it.
I. How’s it Going? Keeping the Ship Afloat through Stormy Seas
Things are just as bad for assistants, if not worse, as they are for everyone else right now. The difference is things have already been bad for assistants for several years now. Fewer jobs and less advancement means that you’re often submitting your resume into a void with literally hundreds of others, all for a single position.