I once got an offer to come up with an entire season’s worth of ideas and jokes for a TV show on a well-known basic cable network over the course of a long weekend for exactly zero dollars and zero cents. But they did offer me nearly twenty dollars a day in non-refundable meal vouchers! I didn’t take that job, by the way. Well, I guess “job” is being generous, since traditionally jobs give you some form of compensation. Oh boy, I love working in an industry with roughly the same labor practices as a Reconstruction-era uranium taste-testing factory! To further illustrate my point: I was a professional editor for years, so when I first moved to LA I looked for editing jobs to keep the lights on. Here’s a real-ass ad I saw on Craigslist:
Craigslist
The flipside of this crappy, crappy coin is this: Having so many young and hungry writers has fostered a culture wherein some on the trying-to-break-in side of the equation will do unscrupulous things to get a leg up. It’s rare, but I’d be lying if I said it was completely unheard of for wannabes to step on each other’s necks if it means they can get even the slightest advantage. Work in Hollywood long enough and you will eventually see someone who wronged you personally be richly rewarded for it. It’s like if the Olympics had an event called Toddler Kicking with a hefty cash prize.
Here’s a personal example. I really struggled with whether or not to include this for reasons I’ll get to later, but someone I believed was one of my closest friends got their big break and asked for my help coming up with ideas for the movie they were going to be in. Which I did, with the agreement being they’d help me out when the movie dropped and they had some cultural cachet. I should probably mention this person was my roommate and we’d been friends since fifth grade.