I had lunch a few months ago with a friend of mine who is a major executive recruiter. When people are looking for a job or, better, when people are looking to hire a high-level executive, he’s the first guy they call.
It wasn’t that kind of lunch, of course. We were just shooting the breeze about politics and Elon Musk and things in general. But later that day, I told another friend of mine, an executive at a big media company, about my lunch with the executive recruiter, and she instantly jumped on it.
“Great! Great!” she shouted. “I am so happy that you’re doing that. You really need to branch out. You really need to start exploring other options besides, you know, the writing thing. Which is, what, stalled? Can we agree that your career is slowing down? So I’m thrilled to hear that you’re being proactive about your dwindling options. Bravo. Seriously.”
“Um, dwindling options?” I said. “It was just a friendly lunch. I’m not, you know, I’m not, I mean, my career is fine.”
She looked at me for a long moment. And then she said: “Yeah. Oh, sure. I know that.”
The background is that something strange is happening in Hollywood. People are getting fired. Well, let me clarify: People get axed all the time around here. (That’s what we call it: “getting the ax.”) Executives are tossed out with such routine indifference that any studio boss who hasn’t been fired at least three times in his career is probably not very good at his job. A couple of bad television seasons, an outright flop at the box office, or maybe just a long-simmering blood feud with a new boss — all of these are respectable reasons to get thrown out on your ear.
In fact, there’s sort of a cushy career carousel operating in Hollywood: studio executive gets fired, gets a nice severance package that includes a production deal, produces a few movies, gets rehired as an executive at another studio, gets fired from that studio, gets a nice severance package that includes a production deal, produces a few movies… You see where I’m going with this.
The trick is to hang on. (That’s the trick with most things.) It’s all about staying on the carousel with the painted ponies and the pretty music and the atmosphere of fantasy and fable that’s so festive and childlike and circular.
But for the past few years, the entire entertainment industry has been trapped in a tight margin squeeze. And that always means one thing, no matter whether your business is movies or burritos or scented candles: You’ve got to cut overhead.
The Hollywood carousel, right now, is broken: The ponies aren’t going up and down as profitably as before, which means the paint is peeling and the music is distinctly off-tune. The whole thing is starting to look a little sad and shabby. That means a lot of people in Hollywood are getting fired without getting plush packages and production deals. A lot of people are getting tossed off the carousel entirely. Children are crying on the sidelines.
That’s executives, though. If you’re a writer in Hollywood, like me, you never really were on the carousel. There were no severance packages or golden parachutes for us. We were always scrambling around the carousel, trying to hop on, getting tossed in the gravel, trying again.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
