How-To H’wood: The Blood Sport of Asking for a Favor
In the marketplace of asks lurks danger and payback. Part 1 of my four-day series with top names on outsmarting Hollywood’s dysfunction
Welcome back to another How-To H’wood week, where I solve the great issues surrounding the most labyrinthine and treacherous of industries, and reveal how to rise, stay sane and grease the wheels of basic survival. For my earlier guides, click here.
Hollywood is a place where the simplest of tasks can become fraught with unseen consequences and trapdoors down every dark alley.
And in the constellation of treacherous tasks one must undertake, perhaps nothing is so fearsome as that most dreaded of Hollywood duties — asking a favor.
We work in a business of people. There is no surviving in Hollywood without some reservoir of goodwill to call on — even if it’s goodwill that has been bought and paid for, or kept alive by fear. To get by in Hollywood — or indeed to rise — you will need, more often than we’d like to think, to elicit the help of others.
Blanche DuBois may depend on the kindness of strangers, but I don’t think she spent much time in the 310 or 323. Strangers will give you nothing in Hollywood. No favor is handed out without a price, immediate or promised. Which is what makes the task of asking for them so terrible, made all the worse with the knowledge that the favor granter will have something to hold over you. “Someday, and that day may never come,” said Don Corleone, “I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”
But like everything else, there are easy ways and harder ways to navigate the rough favor-granting seas. And today, I offer a little guidance, a few tips for how to do that worst, most humbling thing you can do in Hollywood: ask for a favor.
Below, I break it down into a few rules, including when and how to use an assistant, the art of the text ask, how to play the long game to get what you want, and, most important of all, how to save face when your request is rejected…
