Transcript: The Leakiest Business

Silicon Valley's hard lessons about how Hollywood operates

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I drove into Los Angeles for the first time in a 10 year-old Subaru Outback with a rusted undercarriage and a permanently shut rear passenger side door. It burned a quart of oil a month and needed new radiator fluid about that often and when you lifted the hood what you saw was a block of iron covered in sticky oil grime. When I made a little bit of money I took it to the garage and asked them to fix the oil leak and look at the radiator and the guy stopped me mid-sentence and said, “To fix the oil leak we need to steam clean that engine to find the leak, which is going to end up making a lot more trouble because who knows what all of that sticky oil is holding together?”

So I didn’t fix the car. I let it leak. And it ran for another two years. It burned a lot of oil, and smelled weird, and occasionally gave off a toxic blue cloud, but, you know, it ran.

Which brings us to the entertainment industry.

Immediately after the director yells "Cut!" on a film set, someone else yells, "Check the gates!"

Or used to.