How-To H’wood: Business Lunch Kabuki
Location, when to end chit-chat, and how to gain the upper hand. The art of the ‘friendly’ nosh — with an agenda
Welcome back to How-To H’wood week, where I solve the great issues surrounding the most labyrinthine and treacherous of industries. This week, I’ve explained how to ask a favor and make a friend. If you want more advice like this, apply to The Ladder. Details here.
Working in entertainment, one will be faced with tough decisions — choices on which lives and careers hang in the balance, to be won or lost with a single misstep. Which projects do you commit hundreds of millions of dollars to? What unmade concepts do you pin your entire reputation on? Which stars do you trust will have chemistry with each other, not blow up in scandal or lose cultural currency in the five years it will take for a project to make its way through the system?
Problems that could test the forbearance of Job! Decisions that would test the wisdom of Solomon!
But none of this compares to the most fearsome problem of all — a problem so beset with logistical, strategic and cultural difficulties (a labyrinth of tripwires) that one wonders whether the whole practice and tradition should just be banned.
I refer to the problem of where to have lunch.
Hollywood, of course, is a lunch-based civilization. Other nations, tribes and cultures have used military power, wealth or religious identity as ways to order their societies and sort out hierarchies within. In our world, lunch signifies status, order and a veneer of camaraderie and friendliness which disguises the true aggression that plays out under the surface whenever two industry professionals meet.
“Hollywood” is the umbrella term for an ever-changing constellation of deals that shape the making of entertainment and the places of everyone involved in it. Lots and lots of deals. On every single show and film, every single project that might become a show or film, there are lots of deals within each of them.
And people make each of those deals, often a bunch of people, who have to hammer out money, status, credit, time, etc., and do it all constantly, clawing their way to the highest possible point.
But acknowledging, even to ourselves, the constant churning machinery of naked aggression would lead to madness. One thinks of soldiers in the Great War who, it was felt, could survive somewhere between one and two weeks at the front before succumbing to insanity.
So to keep such a relentless deal-making apparatus afloat, we need artifice and pretense. Thus — lunch! It’s all just friends getting together for a meal.
Inside, on some level, we always know the truth. That is why, before the deal is done — before the kabuki of ordering and putting aside friendly chit-chat occurs — the details of the lunch meeting must be exquisitely calibrated to a level that would make a Japanese tea master blush.
How to do it? How to survive it? Here are a few tips to guide you — including what lunch even really means, how to pick a location that doesn’t feel like you caved, over what course to end small talk and bring up the real topic at hand, and the Sun Tzu-style power moves you may not even know are being played against you at the valet line…
The Grand Strategy of Lunching
The first thing to remember is that winning the lunch is not the goal. The lunch is the context for the deal, or the deals, that flow from the meal.
The second thing to remember is that winning is a matter of perception. And rarely what it seems.
And if you think you have won, it might be worth asking — what put that idea in your head?