Transcript: My 20 Years in Hollywood
What to do when you were born just a half-decade too late in this industry
This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.
The bad news, I told a young person last week who wanted to know how to break into show business, is that there really isn’t a show business to break into. It’s all a fantastically chaotic muddle, and the rules and patterns are being constructed right now.
That’s also the good news, if you’re in your 20’s like he is. Chaos and disruption are good things. And when you hear people talk about legacy and tradition and history, remember that that’s how people talk when they’re broke or about to be. What every young person needs to know is that all they really need to do is to take the car keys away from grandpa. I mean, metaphorically, right? But that would be my advice, which I give, but it never seems to really land. People don’t like to be told that the key to success in show business is to try stuff out and risk and desecrate the old temples, whether they’re Ivy League college kids who dream of getting an eight-episode order from Hulu or billionaires who just bought a studio and now want to buy another one.
Nobody likes to hear that it’s a splendid and ungovernable muddle.
But people still ask me this question — How did you break in? What was your career path? — and even though I say over and over again that none of that is relevant to someone trying to do the same thing today — I mean, in the first place, I wanted to be a comedy writer at a time when there were lots of comedies on the air, and the only thing that you really needed to decide was, are you a nine o’clock writer or an eight o’clock writer, and even saying those words now gives you an idea of just how much has changed and how absolutely certain we can be that it’s never going to change back — but, still, people want to know how you did it and so I tell them, mostly, that what they need to do is buy my book. Either one, they’re both kind of the same, and it’s all in there written in the show business equivalent of cuneiform — mutterings and curses and memories from a long time ago.
What happens mostly, though, is that the young questioner discovers that they got here too late, born too late to take advantage of the golden years, which always seem to have happened before you got here and to have ended just as you were arriving, probably in your first car, after driving across the country to, you know, break in. Every Golden Age of show business ends just as you’re heading west, somewhere in the desert, on the 10.
It’s always been this way.