How to Stay in the Game When the Axe Swings

A survival guide for the newly ankled 'independent producers'

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Years ago I had lunch with a studio executive who had left his job — that’s what the story was, anyway, though it was less about leaving and more about being asked to leave, less ankle more axe, to put it in terms that fans of The Ankler will understand.

The good news for most of these executives is — well, was — they still paid you. You shifted effortlessly into a production deal and life went on — if not as usual than at least as well as can be expected.

You would have meetings and drive around and eat lunch and try to get a project going and, probably, spend a little too much time wondering if this or that executive at this or that studio or network is going to last, and if maybe they’ll call you back into the executive ranks, where the studio gates all rise as you approach and you can always get a good table at lunch.

But for the time being, then and now, you’re sort of in the wilderness. You’re just a person driving around town showing your ID to the guard.

I start a lot of these Martini Shots with what we call a “handle” — I’ll say something like, I had lunch with a friend a few weeks ago, or, Once, not long ago… and then I’ll launch into a story that occurred either a week ago or 20 years ago, sometimes I can’t remember myself.

But this one happened a long time ago. And here’s how you know:

“Thank God,” the executive told me over lunch, “I had my assistant print out all of my contacts and update them.”

Because when you’re fired, or axed, or even if you ankle unexpectedly, you lose access to the trappings you need to stay in the game.

He added, and this is how you know my story is an old one: “I wish we still had a Rolodex. Because it’s hard,” he said, “to contact people.”

I am aware that there are some young people listening to this right now, for whom the word Rolodex is a baffling mystery. A Rolodex, young friends, was a physical thing, a card file on a metal ring, on which your assistant kept every important someone’s name and address up to date somehow. When agents would sneak out of their old agencies to start working at a new place, they first had to figure out how to steal the Rolodex. You can’t poach clients if you don’t know where to call them. You needed paper. Because once you leave the office for the last time, they shut off your Outlook.

I thought of this recently when I got an email from a newly independent producer, which is a euphemism as I know you’ll understand from the layoff news coming out of every studio and network these days, who was an executive I have worked with before and who I like a lot, and of course would love to work with again and who is now, well, producing instead of executive-ing, and who now wants everyone to know how to connect at the new email and new office.