hollywood watch
Years ago, on a television series I was producing, we had a young male assistant. I don’t remember much about him – I can’t even remember his name – but I do remember that he was a doughy, sweaty young man.
Honestly, that was probably the only memorable thing about him. He worked on the show for about a year and distinguished himself by consistently getting lunch orders wrong and transposing numbers in phone messages. In other words, he wasn’t terribly useful as an assistant.
He was one of those young people who show up in Hollywood right out of university and get jobs working for television writers, or running around movie sets, or standing there silently in a high-rise office while an agent screams at them for some baffling set of reasons. Young people who want to break into show business have to start somewhere, of course, and the cliché is pretty deeply etched into the culture of Hollywood: you start at the bottom and you work your way to the top.
And there really are only two kinds of young people who end up here. The first kind are smoothies – polished, savvy and prepared to pretend to know what’s going on. No one knows what’s really going on, but the smoothies figure out early that the key to success is to pretend to have it all sorted out.
And then there’s the other kind: the sweaty and slightly shambling young person with a flushed and flustered look, a shirt untucked, a wedge of flesh visible in the gap between shirt and trousers, a mess of a personal appearance that betrays a mess of an interior life. That’s the kind of young person who is honestly overwhelmed and unprepared for the weird pace and totally mystifying demands of this town and this business – someone who does not know to say when fielding his boss’s phone calls, “I don’t have him” rather than: “He can’t talk right now.” Someone who knows, when placing a lunch order, to get a side order of French fries anyway, even though his boss asked for a salad, because he knows his boss will want those fries – and, probably, need them to balance out his mood swings.
Assistants move around a lot and it’s easy to lose track of them, and I had lost track of that particular production assistant. I wasn’t even sure if he was still in the entertainment business. But this week, at lunch, at a pretty fancy place, I spotted him – the same production assistant, now 20 years later – at another table.
There had been some changes in his personal appearance. In the first place, he was no longer doughy or sweaty at all, but sleek and polished and wearing one of those enormous watches men seem to be wearing these days, along with powerful looking blue jeans and important eyewear. He was talking animatedly with a couple of other people, but you could tell that it was his lunch, his moment, that he was running the conversation and at the end of it, whatever it is that he wanted those people to do for him, they were going to do.
“I get it,” a friend of mine said, when I told him the story. “He’s what I call ‘maximised’. When someone seems to have pulled himself together and reached their full potential, I say that they’ve ‘maximised’ themselves.”
Of course, it shouldn’t be shocking that 20 years later he’s no longer a confused and terrified production assistant getting salad orders wrong and inadvertently hanging up on people. In 20 years, you’re supposed to figure stuff out. That’s long enough to learn how the town works, to tuck in your shirt, to sort out which angles are worth pursuing and which are best left to others. Twenty years of trying and failing and succeeding is the equivalent, when you add it all up, of around 35,000 hours of practice, so it’s not terribly surprising that the formerly sweaty production assistant is now wearing a $90,000 watch and not recognising me when I wave at him because, well, in the ensuing years – years he’s spent maximising – I’ve become a little sweaty and doughy.
“You’re being dramatic,” my friend said, when I told him all of this. “And you’re getting my philosophy of ‘maximising’ wrong. ‘Maximising’ isn’t zero sum. You need to think in terms of ‘maximising’ abundance.”
I shrugged. “Maybe,” I said. But I didn’t really believe it. I think what’s really happening here is just the great circle of life. In 20 years, my old sweaty assistant maximises, and I minimise. We probably passed each other, somewhere halfway, about 10 years ago, both half moist, half doughy, and we never knew it.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Los Angeles
On Twitter: @rcbl