There’s a pervasive, unspoken belief in Hollywood that if your experience wasn’t in L.A., New York, or maybe Atlanta, it doesn’t actually count. Oh, you made local human interest documentaries for PBS in Indiana? Which one did you put forward for Emmy consideration, Incest: Not as Harmless as You Think! or Don’t Shoot at the Postman? I took a job walking dogs, so my first job in LA, with a college degree and an overinflated sense of self-importance, was literally picking up turds. Which at the time I found kind of humiliating, but also, I got to pet a lot of dogs, so it’s kind of a wash.
Not even the local PBS affiliates would hire me. In my first year in L.A., counting both traditional resume-and-cover-letter applications and websites that let you apply for jobs and gigs with a pre-saved resume, I stopped counting after my 3,000th application. That’s not a Comedy Number. Of those three thousand, I got three interviews — a 1:1000 hit rate. I would have been better off betting on Competitive Getting Struck By Lightning or possibly roulette.
One of those interviews was for a company that edits movie trailers. The first question the interviewer asked me was “What is your dream in life?” I very maturely resisted the urge to say “To crush my enemies, to see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their women” and instead said “Someday, I want to write and direct.” She said “This isn’t going to work. We’re only looking for people whose goal in life is to do stringouts for upcoming film trailers,” and that was that. Interview over.
Is that anyone‘s dream? In the playground, while everyone else was pretending to be an astronaut or a Lego Cowboy or a racecar, was one kid sitting in the sandbox in total silence for hours at a stretch, trying to find a cover of “When the Levee Breaks” that’s just right for the gritty, sexy, Riverdale-esque live-action reboot of Scooby-Doo called The Scooby Files? If so, how did they survive the nonstop butthole trauma from decades of wedgies?
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