A friend of mine who works in finance was fired a few months ago. I’m not sure why, exactly. He insisted that it was totally unfair, which may be true, though I did seem to get a lot of random texts from him in the middle of the workday, and his Instagram posting was pretty prodigious for a guy who insisted that he was “crazy busy” all the time.
Barely two weeks later, though, I got one of those blast email messages telling me, and everyone else, that he had a new job at a different financial outfit and new contact information and that he was “excited to take on new challenges with a best-in-class team.”
Whatever that means.
But it was clear that whatever pain or self-doubt he felt as he was walked out of his previous job, carrying a carton of his personal effects and flanked by security guards, had evaporated. My friend had officially moved on.
That’s harder to do in close-knit businesses such as entertainment and politics, which often feel like nasty little villages and, increasingly, like the same nasty little village.
If you live and work in Hollywood long enough, two things are going to happen: Someone is going to rear-end your car, and, as you move through your career, you’re going to leave a certain amount of bad feelings and animosity in your wake. There are going to be people with whom you never want to work again.
And people, of course, who never want to work with you again, either.
There are really only two kinds of enemies a person can have. The first kind are the actual enemies, with whom you exchanged threats and bad words. In many ways, these are the best kind to have. Everyone knows where everyone stands. Everyone had their dramatic scene. Nothing was left unsaid or festering.
It’s the other kind you need to worry about. These are the secret enemies. People you just didn’t like, or who didn’t like you, but you worked together, and then, whatever project you were working on just naturally came to an end.
Secret enemies are tricky because you never really had it out. You never spoke your piece or had a piece spoken to you. You just swallowed the sourness and moved to the next gig. Maybe you were replaced on a project. Maybe you insulted a colleague.
The term I use for this is “broken glass,” as in: “I don’t think they like me at that studio. (Or bank, or office, or law firm, or Pizza Hut.) I left a lotta broken glass around when I left.”
As nice and lovely as I am to work with and to know, even I have some pieces of broken glass in my wake. There are some former colleagues — hard to believe, I know — who just don’t like me. And because show business really is a tiny toxic village, I see those people a lot. In television network lobbies. Walking along the studio soundstages. Behind me in restaurant booths.
People in show business, like people in politics, don’t move to other cities. They just move to other projects. You’re going to see them again and again. I never know what to do when that happens. Do I say hello? “Hi, don’t we hate each other?”
That seems like a lot of effort.
A friend of mine had a similar problem. An executive he worked with on a project had let it be known — never directly, of course — that they were blood enemies. He was banned from this executive’s world. His agent told him, “Hey, this relationship needs to get healed, so do whatever it takes — send a note. Send a present. Do what you can because this fatwa is going to cost you a lot of opportunity.”
But he had no idea what he did. He really didn’t know what had poisoned the relationship. This is often the case with secret enemies, which is why they’re so troublesome and dangerous.
Not many weeks later, he was walking into a restaurant, just as the Secret Enemy was walking out. Before he could pretend to be engrossed by an app on his phone, he heard his name called out.
“Hey! How are you? I miss you! Let’s get together for lunch!” And then he was swept into a hug, and that was that.
Fatwa over.
“Oh yeah,” said his agent later when my friend called him to describe the odd events, “that executive was fired this morning.”
Which is probably the most foolproof way, in Hollywood and Washington, for two enemies to bury the hatchet. One of them needs to be desperate. And luckily, in both places, this happens all the time.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
