Hollywood's Employed Unemployeds

Showbiz runs on the belief that something great is about to happen — true or not

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

A friend of mine has been having a hard time in the entertainment business lately. I know, I know — this isn’t really news in the traditional sense. Or unique. It’s been that way for a lot of our friends. And he’s a writer — a good one — but he hasn’t worked in a while, and recently he asked me for advice. We were at Zankou Chicken. Just to set the scene.

I hate giving advice. I especially hate giving career advice, because career advice is almost always just autobiography — you tell people what worked for you, which may have absolutely nothing to do with what will work for them, and you send them off to do something that made sense in a completely different era, in a completely different business climate, for a completely different person. Career advice, in other words, is mostly just telling stories about yourself and hoping they mean something useful to other people. Which, I guess, is sort of what I do here. That’s an awkward thought.

Anyway, back to Zankou Chicken. My friend wanted to know what I thought: Should he keep pushing, knocking on doors, trying to break into an industry in serious turbulence? Or should he pack it in right now, fold his tents and do something else for the rest of his life. “What do you think I should do?” he wanted to know.

And I paused. And in that pause, I started thinking. And what I thought about was a leather jacket.