Transcript: How the Sweaty Guy Wins

Rob Long on the art of becoming 'maximized'

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Years ago, we had a production assistant working on a show we were doing who was sort of a sweaty, doughy character—one of those young people who show up in Hollywood right out of college and get jobs working on shows or running around sets or standing there silently while an agent screams at them for some baffling set of reasons.

And there really are only two kinds of young people who end up here. The first kind are smoothies — polished and savvy and prepared to pretend to know what's going on — because of course, no one knows what's really going on, but some young people figure out really early that the key is to pretend to have it all together.  

And then there's the other kind: the sweaty and slightly shambling young person with a flushed and flustered look. A shirt untucked. A wedge of flesh visible in the gap between shirt and pants. Someone honestly overwhelmed by the weird pace and totally mystifying demands of this town and this business — someone who did not know, intuitively, to say "I don't have him" rather than "He can't talk right now." Someone who knows to order a side of fries and wait for you to ask for them even though you asked for a salad on the side instead.  

Assistants move around a lot, and it's easy to lose track of them, and I had lost track of this particular production assistant — some start in television and move into something else, some realize that this isn't the place for them at all, some just wanted to earn a little money to fund their indie movie, it's not exactly a direct career path — until this week, at lunch, at a pretty fancy place, I spotted the doughy, sweaty production assistant, 20 years later, at another table.

No longer doughy or sweaty at all, but sleek and polished and wearing one of those enormous watches men seem to be wearing these days, along with powerful looking jeans and important eyewear. Talking animatedly with a couple of other people, but you could tell — you know how that is — that it was his lunch, his moment, that he was running the conversation and at the end of it, whatever it is that he wanted those people to do for him, they were going to do.

He looked . . .