The Disappearing Ladder: Gen Z Inherits the Collapse
As consolidation reshapes jobs from the top down, Hollywood’s youngest workers are rebuilding from the bottom up
Welcome to “The Disappearing Ladder,” my new series about how every generation is navigating Hollywood’s narrowing path. I host the Ankler Agenda podcast and interviewed producer Jason Beekman about his hit Netflix doc series Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. I’m elaine@theankler.com
When Heated Rivalry casting directors Sara Kay and Jenny Lewis were picking talent for a feature film last year, they encountered a peculiar problem: The 19- and 20-year-old actors filing into the audition room didn’t know where to stand. They weren’t sure whether to look at the camera or the reader. Some had never auditioned in person at all.
“They tanked. It was so uncomfortable… It was really awful to see,” says Kay, who tells me many of the actors admitted to not knowing the basics of auditioning in person. They’d only ever submitted self-tapes — filmed at home with a tripod and uploaded to a casting site — a Covid necessity that evolved into an industry norm. “There’s a whole generation of younger people who have come up never having been in a physical audition room.”
That kind of disconnect isn’t just about audition etiquette. It’s about the industry itself.
For decades, Hollywood sold a relatively stable fantasy about how a career worked. For an actor, you started in commercials. Everyone else started at the bottom — assistant, PA, junior exec — endured long hours and low pay, learned the culture and climbed. Staff writer became showrunner. Agent trainee became partner. An indie producer could actually one day become studio head. The ladder was brutal, but it was visible.
But Gen Z walked into something else: a gig economy layered on top of a troubled studio system reshaped by streaming and now squeezed further by consolidation. Entry-level jobs are scarce, promotions come without the giant pay increases of years past, and entire divisions can disappear overnight in the name of “redundancies.” The ladder broke.
The oldest members of Gen Z turn 29 this year, and have never known a stable version of this industry. The oldest graduated from college into Covid, and few have ever known five-day-a-week office life.
So how do you build a life in an industry that keeps threatening to collapse on you?
I spoke to a dozen 20-something assistants, managers, producers, writers and executives about what it feels like to come of age at this moment. Their stories reveal not a fragile cohort, but a pragmatic one: expanding definitions of success, embracing side hustles, wrestling with AI and quietly constructing new networks in the absence of old ones.
If the ladder is disappearing, they’re trying to build something else in its place.
They pour out their thoughts including:
How hard it is to move up and why promotions now mean more work, not more security
Why older generations’ Hollywood war stories feel “irrelevant”
Why AI is so divisive, even for a generation entering the workforce with the tech’s tools at their disposal
How Gen Z is “expanding the definition” of their dream jobs as Hollywood contracts and the creator economy booms
The harsh math of making it: how they pay rent, work multiple jobs and live “with human feces on the sidewalk outside” to chase their dreams
The networks they’re building to support one another and rewrite the rules
What they want most from their Gen X and boomer bosses, and the win-win if they can get it