Hollywood Is Like High School with Money Read online

  "Taylor just moved here from Connecticut," Iris noted. "She was working with Eckert

  Pinckney on that film I told you about, the one about star-crossed lovers and domestic

  violence?"

  "Oh," Kylie said, playing with one of her chains. Finally she looked me in the eye. "How are

  you liking L.A. so far?"

  "Well, there's a lot of smog," I said. It was the only thing that came to mind.

  "Right," Kylie said, looking at me blankly through her long, mascaraed lashes.

  There was an awkward pause, which Iris finally broke. "Kylie's one of the best assistants I've

  ever had," she said. "If you have any questions, she's the go-to person." She turned to look at

  her e-mail. "And I guess we'll have to move my two-thirty so I'm not late from Cut."

  "No prob." Kylie nodded briskly and vanished behind the plants into the outer office.

  "Kylie'll get you situated," Iris said, dismissing me. "Good luck."

  "Thank you," I said. I thought that maybe I should shake Iris's hand again, but she was already

  scrolling through her BlackBerry screen. As I passed the jungle of plants on my way to my

  new desk, I felt a mixture of elation and mortification. I had gushed like a seventh-grader, I was

  wearing imitation designer shoes, and I'd summed up my feelings about my new home with the

  word "smog." But still, I thought, I'm here. I made it.

  I straightened my shoulders and sucked in my stomach. At twenty-four, I was ready to start

  living my life. But first, I really had to pee.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Some people say that being a second assistant is kind of demeaning," Kylie said, touching a lit

  match to one of her votive candles. "But it's not. It's incredibly important. I'm actually going to

  miss it a little." The wick sputtered, then caught the flame. Kylie looked up. "I hope you don't

  mind." She blew the match out. "It's soy-based and aromatherapeutic. It helps my

  concentration."

  "No problem," I said quickly, suppressing the urge to make a joke about fire safety. I wanted to

  ask Kylie what she was going to miss--the photocopying? the fetching of nonfat lattes? sitting

  at the smaller desk? Don't get me wrong, I was thrilled to be at Metronome, but I knew there

  were going to be parts of my job that weren't actually thrilling. That was the way things went:

  you paid your dues, and then you got to do what you came for. So far I'd been second assistant

  for half an hour, and all I'd done was log into my computer, put my notebook in my desk

  drawer, and wait for Kylie to tell me what I ought to be doing with myself.

  Kylie tossed the matchbook onto her desk. "Chateau Marmont" was written across it in loopy

  script. "So here's the deal with being Iris's assistant. We're on all her calls and we do her

  schedule. We also make sure she only speaks to the people she needs to and that she's never

  surprised by anything, " Kylie said, ticking an imaginary list off her fingers. "If she knows

  about it, we know about it. Here."

  She held out a stapled packet, which I walked over to take from her slim, manicured hand.

  "This handbook is your bible," Kylie said. "Also known as the employee manual for assisting

  the president of production. It has everything: passwords to check voice mail, the private

  numbers of all the top agents, private numbers of her favorite restaurants, and a list of callers

  you should always put through. It also has her daughter's schedule, a few lines about proper

  attire, and the recipe for her spirulina smoothie."

  "Wow," I said, flipping through the pages; there was a baffling array of lists and diagrams.

  "This is great. You know, I saw an employee manual for carnival workers once. You know,

  carnies? The rules were all like, do not sleep under cars. Do not be too drunk to respond to a

  customer's needs. Do not pee in public."

  Kylie stared at me.

  "I know this is totally different! I was just trying to be"--I paused--"funny," I said softly.

  "Right. Now, I don't know how much real assistant work you did with that professor of

  yours?" Kylie asked, peering at the screen of her Mac Pro.

  "Not much, actually," I admitted. "I was more of an assistant creatively," I added, a little

  proudly. Okay, so maybe I was more of a shadow, occasionally voicing my opinion on the

  story, the script, the way the film could be shot. And yes, there was some dirty work--scraping

  together our paltry funding, figuring out how exactly we'd be able to shoot the thing on such a

  tight budget. But I didn't think Kylie needed to know about that.

  "Right," Kylie said, dragging her eyes away from her screen and back to me. "Well, being an

  assistant at a studio is a little different. Actually, being a second assistant is a little different. It's

  a little more"--her head bobbed from side to side as she searched for the most flattering

  word--"logistical. Filing, copying, errands, making reservations. That kind of thing."

  "And reading scripts," I said. I opened the handbook. Iris's favorite herbal tea is Tazo's Wild

  Sweet Orange, someone had scrawled in the margins , and while she likes Irish breakfast tea,

  she does not like English breakfast or Earl Grey.

  "Scripts?" Kylie repeated. When I looked up, Kylie was watching me with two tiny slash lines

  of a frown between her green eyes.

  For a moment, Kylie reminded me of Melanie Pitts, who was in all my film classes at

  Wesleyan. Melanie had this annoying way of looking at you that made you feel like you were a

  tiny mouse speaking Spanish: small and unintelligible. A lot of people in my classes spoke to

  me that way, though, because nobody in film studies took me seriously. Even as all my

  classmates wore funeral-attire black, smoked cigarettes between classes, and refused to go to

  the multiplex when the latest blockbuster came out, I constantly referenced my Midwestern

  upbringing, wore Gap jeans and Nikes, and continued to see every new Ron Howard movie.

  But then when it came time for all the seniors to show our short films, and I screened my

  Fellini-meets-Judd Apatow piece, my classmates suddenly took notice. Melanie, whom I'd

  spent the last four years praising but who never deigned to say more than, "Um, thanks," even

  asked me out to coffee to "discuss my work."

  "Yeah, reading scripts for Iris," I prodded, shaking off the memory. "She was just telling me

  that it's part of the job."

  "That's sort of more of the first assistant's job," Kylie corrected. "She probably meant in the

  future you would be doing that."

  Before I could ask her to clarify, her computer made a bell-like sound.

  "Sorry, it's just an IM from my boyfriend"--Kylie turned to type a reply--"hang on."

  I leaned back in my new chair. It made a squishy, new-car noise. I turned the knob to adjust the

  lumbar support. "Is he at a studio too?"

  Kylie seemed to hesitate. "Actually, no. He's not in the industry."

  I imagined a banker, a real estate mogul, an ad man--someone who could keep Kylie well

  stocked in Louboutins. He probably wore shiny shirts and a Princeton ring on his finger and

  picked Kylie up after work in a yellow Porsche Boxter. "What does he do?"

  "He teaches tennis in Beverly Hills." Kylie gave her hair a small, almost defiant toss. "He could

  totally act if he wanted to, though," she added, and I wondered if she was slightly embarrassed

  by her boyfriend's job. "Everyone always says how charismatic he is."


  I would have offered up something about my boyfriend in return, just to be friendly, but I

  didn't have one. I wondered if I should make one up--some dashing, dark-haired fellow pining

  for me back in Middletown. Instead there was only Brandon, who certainly wasn't missing me.

  Unless you counted the fact that he couldn't wait to see me crawl back there with my tail

  between my legs. Brandon Rogers was another person who'd suddenly joined the Taylor

  Henning bandwagon during senior year. He went from the cute, unattainable guy whose neck

  I'd always liked to stare at in Advanced French Film Theory to my number-one fan. We dated

  for the two years after graduation, while I was working with Professor Pinckney and he was a

  production assistant at a small New York company that made edgy documentaries. We broke

  up when I took the job at Metronome. On the flight to L.A., I kept replaying our good-bye in

  my head: the lingering kiss on the cheek, and then, "Call me in a few years, when you're

  making Superman 7."

  Suddenly our phones rang simultaneously. I looked in confusion at all the NASA-like buttons

  on mine.

  Kylie slid a little headset over her blond waves. "Iris Whitaker's office," she purred. "Oh yes,

  of course she'll be attending. Yes, with a plus one. No, thank you." She took the headset off

  again and smiled at me. "See? Nothing to it."

  "An RSVP," I offered brightly, trying to seem like I knew what was going on.

  "Mmm. A Women in Film fund-raiser. Drew Barrymore is co-chairing, and Iris has known her

  practically since Poltergeist. She used to babysit Iris's daughter. But anyway, let's take a quick

  tour, and then we'll get you acquainted with the Xerox machine." Kylie slid out from behind

  her desk and motioned me to follow. "This floor is all the CEs, plus all their assistants," she

  said, leading me down the hall past framed posters of all of Metronome's hits.

  Creative executives ranged in importance from freshly promoted junior execs to executive vice

  presidents, and even I could tell which was which by the size of their offices and the costliness

  of the furniture in them. But whether they were lowly or powerful, they all had one singular

  and crucial mission: to find the raw material to make movies. Once they did and a script was

  bought, they shepherded that script through the obstacle course of preproduction: they found

  directors, attached actors, hired new writers to punch up the script, and picked locations.

  Development people were like fortune-tellers. They were the ones who could see--in the spare

  white pages of a screenplay, a few thousand words of a magazine article, or the unpublished

  galleys of a novel--an audience sitting in front of a thirty-foot screen, in rapt attention. They

  were the kind of people who helped Michael Deming make his masterpiece.

  As Kylie walked me around, I eagerly took everything in. The Metronome offices were

  arranged like a bull's-eye, with the outer ring of big, windowed offices belonging to the bosses,

  to people like Iris. In the next ring sat their assistants, ready to answer to their bosses' every

  whim. The junior CEs had a cluster of offices on the north side of the building. And in the

  light-deprived inner sections of the office were the kitchen, the copy room, and the cubicles for

  various lower-level assistants.

  "There's the VP of marketing's office," Kylie said, "and that's his assistant, Margie; over there

  is Peter--he's a scout."

  I was trying to take in all the names, but I could feel them fading from my mind seconds after

  Kylie pronounced them, like hastily memorized equations after a math final.

  A guy our age in a silky shirt and a retro skinny tie came jogging down the hall past us. "Hey,

  Kylie," he called in passing. "IM me--I've got gossip."

  Kylie let out a little squeal. "In a sec!" she cried. Then her voice flattened again. "That's

  Wyman. He's another assistant. Here's the kitchen, the bathrooms, the nap room--"

  "Nap room?"

  "Yeah, some consultant came in and told us that naps improve productivity, so Metronome

  made a nap room in what used to be a janitor's closet, but no one's ever actually gone to sleep in

  it. It just doesn't look professional, you know?"

  When we returned to our desks, Kylie held out a script. "Three copies, please. Third door on

  your left, as I'm sure you remember."

  I took the pages and started down the hall, past the desks of other assistants busily answering

  phones for their own bosses. One girl with short black hair looked up at me as I passed, and

  when I smiled, she flashed her teeth in return, but it was more a grimace than a smile. I tried to

  smile back--isn't that what karma's all about?--but faltered. People here weren't going to go out

  of their way to welcome me, that was for sure. But, I reminded myself, that was okay. I'd spent

  four years feeling like the underdog in college, and look how that had turned out. L.A. was

  different, certainly, but winning these people over couldn't be any harder.

  The copy room was lit with a cold fluorescent light, and inside were two Xerox machines, two

  fax machines, and a giant color printer. I put the pages into the feeder, realizing as I did so that

  it was Paul Haggis's new script. I felt a little thrill of excitement. Take that, Brandon, I thought.

  For all his talk about how American cinema was dead, I knew he'd secretly kill to get his hands

  on a Haggis screenplay.

  As the machine spit out its pages, I picked them up and began to read, scanning through

  paragraphs of stage directions describing long tracking shots. It was a slow start, but by page

  twenty-five, I was fully absorbed in the story of Jack Tharp, a small-town lawyer who slowly

  comes to realize that the life he's living is an utter sham, and I didn't realize for another ten

  pages that the machine had jammed.

  "Shit," I said. I tossed the script on the counter and began opening various drawers and hatches

  in the copier and slamming them closed again in a rising panic.

  "Um, are you trying to kill the copier?" said a voice.

  It belonged to the girl who'd grimaced at me earlier. Her black hair was cut in a sleek bob--very

  Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago--and she was leaning in the doorway, looking vaguely

  amused. Very vaguely.

  "It jammed," I said desperately.

  "I can see that. Here." The girl took the remainder of the Haggis script and fed it into the other

  copier. "This one still works. When you get back to your desk, you can call the copy guy."

  "Thank you so much," I said.

  "Whatever," the girl said mildly. "It's your first day."

  "Is it that obvious?"

  "Pretty much." Then she turned on her heel and walked away, which I tried not to take

  personally.

  I stood with my hands on my hips, watching the rest of the script print out. For a moment, the

  copier seemed to pause, and I held my breath in consternation. But then it kicked into gear

  again, and I sighed with relief.

  "So it's Ken from CAA?" I asked. It was only the sixth phone call I'd dared to answer, and I

  could feel Kylie watching me. I liked the headset--it made me feel like a travel agent or an

  infomercial hostess--but the connection wasn't very good, and I strained to hear.

  "No, Kent from UTA," said the assistant on the other line, his voice rising. "How many more

  times do I have to say it? UTA, not CAA. Jesus!"
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  I typed Kent/UTA as quickly as I could on Iris's call sheet on her computer, then slugged down

  the rest of my Diet Coke.

  "Right, of course," I said. "I'll let her know you called. Would you like to leave a number?"

  Kent's assistant made a sound of disgust and hung up the phone.

  "We have his number," Kylie told me when I took off my headset. "We have everybody's

  number."

  I looked up at her guiltily. "Was that the wrong thing to ask?"

  Kylie didn't even bother to respond, but by the afternoon, I felt like things were beginning to

  look up a little. I hadn't broken any machines for a couple of hours, I'd only hung up on one

  person, and Kylie had assured me that he was only a screenwriter, and not a very famous one

  at that. (" Never piss off an actor or a director," Kylie counseled, looking down her ski-jump

  nose, "but don't worry so much about writers. They're used to being snubbed.") Sometimes I

  thought I felt Iris's eyes on me, checking up on my progress, but it was impossible to tell

  through all the greenery.

  The only problem was that no one had said anything about lunch. Kylie had vanished for a little

  while, but whether she'd eaten or not, I didn't know--she looked like the kind of girl who lived

  on Diet Cokes and celery with low-fat peanut butter. I'd already devoured the stale granola bar

  in my purse and was now relying solely on caffeine to keep me functioning. But my teeth hurt,

  and my leg was jittering more than a spastic Rockette's.

  I was also hoping Kylie would talk to me more about what it was like to be at Metronome.

  What movies were they making now? Had she ever come across a really great script in the

  slush pile? Which famous people were nice, and which ones were ass-holes? Did Jack

  Nicholson really shower only once a week? Was it true that Vince Vaughn had a weird foot

  fetish? But Kylie generally ignored me and kept her nose buried in screenplays. Every once in a

  while her computer pinged, though, which meant she was IMing her tennis player or gossiping

  with the other assistants. Over the course of the last hour, shiny-shirt guy had passed by,

  offering her a knowing wink, and a tall, impeccably dressed brunette with Pantene Pro-V

  commercial hair had whispered something in Kylie's ear and then stalked off, seemingly