The dog days of summer are upon us: temperatures climb, the losses from tentpole-sized flops rival the budgets of mid-sized countries and airport lines resemble AI-generated visions of the apocalypse.
Then what better way to lift our spirits than by contemplating the Hollywood professionals whose lives are even worse than ours?
Today, I bring you my ranking of the 10 worst jobs in Hollywood, informed by 30-plus years wandering this business, conversations with some wise friends, many in those jobs, and a recent day on set spent considering the eternal question:
Who has it worse?
A few parameters: This isn’t a ranking of Hollywood’s worst-paid jobs or the careers facing extinction. Nor is it about the ordinary misery of starting at the bottom. These are jobs with structural forms of awfulness that persist no matter how successful you become — the jobs that would kill most of us, starting with me, regardless of the paycheck.
Every position on this list has its pleasures, and many are filled by people I admire enormously. In fact, surviving these jobs while remaining good at them only makes those people more impressive.
With that, here are the 10 worst jobs in Hollywood — reflecting assorted parts of the industry from the agencies (hey guys, two slots!) to a certain kind of comms person to those involved with production who get the least respect.
I’ll count down to No. 1. Time to guess the winner before I get there!
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