Hollywood: Is it Worth It?

What do you think, Howard?

A few years back — well, more than “a few,” actually — a thoughtful young reader named Emilio responded to an entry called The Post-Shoot Blues.

“I'm just finishing up school and plan on moving to L.A. to start a career in the industry, and blogs like this one really keep me going. Where others might see negativity in a post like this, I am very much looking forward to it. Working on student films the last couple of years, I have felt these post-wrap blues myself plenty of times. It's definitely bitter-sweet to get that rest but have the realization that you're not going back to that same environment. The question I would ask of a professional such as yourself: is it worth it? Would you rather be doing something else?”

Emilio doesn't fuck around: he asks the Big Questions.

Every life is a long and winding road of decisions, compromises, victories, and defeats — sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Work is just another zero-sum thread in that unfolding tapestry, where we occasionally have to make quick decisions that are later seen as turning points in a career. Life is too short to do it all, so we pick and choose as best we can along the way, then hope it all works out.

It's human nature for a young people to dream about their potential future, but the course of a life often pivots on happenstance. Fate might kick you in the teeth one day, leaving you bleeding and miserable, then a week later knock on the door with an unexpected opportunity … and voila: everything changes for the better. No matter how much you plan and maneuver, success is often a matter of being at the right place at the right time — and being prepared to carpe the diem.

Before all you Latin scholars shake your heads, wag your fingers, and cluck your tongues, yes, the correct phrase is “carpe diem” — but I prefer the mangled version used in Steven Martin’s movie Roxanne. Hey, if you know, you know … and if you don’t, then watch the movie with somebody you like. It’s a good one.

I didn't head for Hollywood chasing dreams of becoming a juicer. I didn’t even know what a “juicer” was — or a grip, or a set-dresser, or anything else about the reality of working in the biz — but with a zeal born of desperation, I was determined to break into the business. If things didn’t work out, I’d have to go with Plan B ... except there was no Plan B: my journey was Hollywood or bust. After several months during which my savings dwindled — just before the tide turned, I had all of eight dollars left in my wallet — I got my first job as a production assistant working for free (ahem: “exposure”) on an extemely low-budget feature. After calling home to borrow a couple of hundred bucks, I put my head down and got to it. That job introduced me to several people who would, each in a different way, open the door to more film work down the road — including the production secretary, who got me my second PA job a few months later on a show with a budget fat enough to pay a PA $25/day. When the grips and juicers noticed my willingness to pitch in and hustle, they took me under their wing for three straight weeks of filming all-nighters — movies ‘til dawn — after which the gaffer and key grip hired me on occasional low-pay jobs until I’d learned enough to earn a spot on their regular crew as juicer. It took three lean and hungry years of working hard and jumping at every opportunity, but by then I was on my way.

It's tougher for newbies to break in these days. The last five years have been bad, first with the Covid shutdown, then the writers and actors strikes, a subsequent contraction among the streaming networks, and the stampede of productions to other states and offshore. With the high cost of living in California and increased migration of skilled below-the-line workers to other states or industries, Hollywood may be on the road to becoming the new Detroit, a hollow shell of its former bustling, prosperous self. Some jobs will come back if California boosts the film industry subsidy program, but the fate of that legislation is still up in the air — and no matter what happens, a return to the good old days of balls-to-the-wall production seems unlikely. With sound stages empty all over town and so many industry veterans looking for work, a newbie with no professional experience faces a steep climb to get started nowadays — and that’s just the first step on a long, hard road. The real work of building a career comes later.

But … getting back to Emilio's question: has working in the belly of the Hollywood beast — riding the roller-coaster of highs and lows over the years, and enduring the insecurity and uncertainty endemic to the film industry — been worth it? Is there anything else I’d rather have done?

There’s no simple answer. If helping hands hadn’t reached out to give me a boost at crucial stages along the way, I might have been forced to find another path in life. Maybe that would have worked out fine, leaving me fat, prosperous, and happy at the far end of some very different rainbow, but it seems more likely I’d have landed in some dead-end job living a life of quiet desperation while wondering what might have been. It could be a lot worse, too: more than a few who were drawn to Hollywood spun off the film industry merry-go-round and fell through the cracks to a miserable existence huddled under freeway overpasses and in cardboard condos beneath the Sixth Street bridge. I got lucky and was given the chance to climb from griptrician to juicer to best boy to gaffer, then — after flying a little too close to the sun — I slipped back down that slippery ladder of success to play out the string of my career as a juicer.

I'll never know what might have been — all I know is what happened — and for me, things worked out pretty well.*

All I can say with reasonable certainty is that I wouldn’t have lasted long slaving under the fluorescent glow of a cube farm — strapping on a suit and tie to run the corporate rat-race was not for me — so I ended up where I belonged. But leaving aside all the “what if” speculation … yeah, it was worth it. This business flew me all over the country to work on features, commercials, music videos, and industrial films back in the pre-terrorist, pre-Covid era when air travel was easy, relaxing, and fun. I watched a sunrise bathe the snow-capped Grand Teton Mountains in a gorgeous pink glow, saw another stunning dawn emerge from the blackest of nights over the Pyramid of the Sun outside Mexico City — where Aztec priests once ripped out the hearts of sacrificial victims — and got to sit in Howard Hugh’s pilot seat aboard the Spruce Goose.** I was able to see and do a lot of interesting things while meeting so many truly amazing people over the years — behind and in front of the cameras — all while being paid for the experience. If some of those checks were blood money, that doesn't matter anymore: the pain (and the money) are long gone, but the memories remain.

Would I rather have done something different? It would have been fun to play lead guitar for the Rolling Stones or patrol center field and bat cleanup for the San Francisco Giants, but those cards were never in my deck. All in all, I'm fine with how my years in Hollywood unfolded.

The business is changing fast, the old ways crumbling under the sledgehammer of the digital revolution. If the domestic film industry makes a comeback and you decide to answer the siren call of Hollywood, be prepared to work very hard — and make sure you’re ready to grasp opportunity with both hands when it appears. Some of your dreams will probably come true; maybe not all of them, but enough so that when you get to where I am now, you can look back and feel good about it. As that famous rock and roll band from my era sang: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might get what you need.”

Amen to that. I can't promise that a Hollywood adventure will be worth it to Emilio or anybody else — that’s for them to discover — but it was worth it for me.

* More or less. It’s not as if I came, saw, and conquered, but I made a decent living and had some fun in the process. What more can you ask out of life?

* Yep, the very same pilot seat in the photo above. Having grown up crazy about airplanes as a kid, that was a big deal to me at the time.