Transcript: Sharing Our Showbiz Luck

Rob Long on the good fortune to complain — and give to others

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

A young person in the early part of his career in show business sent me an email the other day. He said some nice things about this podcast — if you're listening, thank you by the way — but he wrapped it all up by saying that he couldn’t shake the feeling that the TL;DR of every Martini Shot is that everything in show business was better before and everything is terrible now, and that if you’re just joining it, you missed all the good years.

Which is sort of true. But then, I think people were saying that to me when I got to Hollywood. And the thing that those people had in common with, well, not me but with people like me is that they were tired or burnt out or running low on the gas that runs show business: heedless enthusiasm, reckless optimism, and maybe even a certain kind of willful stupidity — I mean, if you’re smart you’ll put your money and your talents into some other more rational business — and they projected it all on the business itself. I mean, if you’re over, fine, but that doesn’t mean the business is over.

Once, when I was an aspiring screenwriter living in Los Angeles, I went to see a movie.

I got there early, bought a ticket, and wandered around the mall looking into stores to kill time. I was a film student back then and this was in the middle of the workday for people with jobs. I didn’t have one at the time, or the faintest prospect of one. Milling around the shopping mall were people like me — indigents, layabouts — and infants and geriatrics and the people who were being paid to take care of them.

It may seem like having a lot of free time with nothing to do should be, at the very least, an inexpensive lifestyle. I have found the opposite to be true. For instance, in the mall that day I saw this really cool leather jacket in a store. It was four hundred dollars — a lot of money now, but an insane amount back then — and roughly about 400 dollars more than I had.

Of course I bought it.