Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,9

agent, his mentor, talking in his office.

“Gloria-in-human-resources wants an answer by tonight,” I heard Brad say. “Should I pick the smart one or the hot one?”

I froze, appalled.

“Always pick the smart one,” the other agent replied, and I wondered which one Brad considered me to be.

An hour later, I got the job. And despite finding the question outrageously inappropriate, I felt perversely hurt.

Still, I wasn’t sure why Brad had pegged me as smart. All I’d done that day was dial a string of phone numbers (repeatedly disconnecting calls by pressing the wrong buttons on the confusing phone system), make coffee (which was sent back twice), Xerox a script (I pushed 10 instead of 1 for number of copies, then hid the nine extra screenplays under a couch in the break room), and trip over a lamp cord in Brad’s office and fall on my ass.

The hot one, I concluded, must have been particularly stupid.

Technically, my position was “motion-picture literary assistant,” but really I was a secretary who rolled the call list all day, dialing the numbers of studio executives and filmmakers, telling each person’s assistant that my boss was on the line, then patching my boss through. It was widely known in the industry that assistants were expected to listen in silently on these calls so that we’d know what scripts had to be sent where without the need for instructions later. Sometimes, though, the parties on the calls would forget about us, and we’d hear all kinds of juicy gossip about our bosses’ famous friends—who’d had an argument with a spouse or which studio executive was “very confidentially” about to be sent to “producers pasture,” shorthand for being given a vanity production deal on the studio lot. If the person my boss was trying to reach wasn’t available, I’d “leave word” and move on to the next name on the hundred-person call sheet, sometimes being instructed to strategically return calls at inopportune times (before nine thirty a.m., because nobody in Hollywood arrived at work before ten, or, less subtly, during lunch) in order to miss the person on purpose.

Although the movie world was glamorous—Brad’s Rolodex was filled with the home numbers and addresses of people I’d admired for years—the job of an assistant was its opposite. As an assistant, you fetched coffee, made haircut and pedicure appointments, picked up dry cleaning, screened calls from parents or exes, Xeroxed and messengered documents, took cars to the mechanic, ran personal errands, and always, without fail, brought chilled bottled water into every meeting (never saying a word to the writers or directors present, whom you were dying to meet).

Finally, late at night, you’d type up ten pages of single-spaced notes on scripts that came in from the agency’s clients so that your boss could make insightful comments in meetings the next day without having to read anything. We assistants put a lot of effort into those script notes in order to demonstrate that we were bright and capable and could one day (please, God!) stop doing assistant work, with its mind-numbing duties, long hours, minimal pay, and no overtime compensation.

A few months into the job, it became apparent that while the hot ones at my agency got all the attention—and there were many hot ones in the assistant pool—the smart ones got assigned all the extra work. In my first year there, I slept very little because I was reading and writing comments on a dozen scripts a week—all after hours and on weekends. But I didn’t mind. In fact, that was my favorite part of the job. I learned how to craft stories and fell in love with fascinating characters with complicated inner lives. As the months went by, I got slightly more confident in my instincts, less worried about sharing a silly story idea.

Soon I was hired as an entry-level film executive at a production company, with the title story editor; here I got to participate in meetings while another assistant brought in the bottled water. I worked closely with writers and directors, hunkering down in a room and going over material scene by scene, helping to make changes the studio wanted without having the writers, who often felt protective of their material, fly into a rage or threaten to quit the project. (These negotiations would turn out to be great practice for couples therapy.)

Sometimes, to avoid distractions at the office, I’d work with filmmakers early in the morning in my tiny starter apartment, picking up breakfast snacks the night