This is A Genuine Rare Bird Book
Copyright © 2013 by Carol Wolper
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: Rare Bird Books | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 531, Los Angeles, CA 90013
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
Set in Goudy Old Style
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Wolper, Carol.
Adapt or wait tables : a freelancer’s guide / Carol Wolper.
p. cm.
ISBN 9781940207216
1. Self-employed. 2. Motion picture authorship. 3. Screenwriters. 4. Creative ability in business. 5. Success in business. 6. Social change—Economic aspects. I. Title.
HD8036 .W65 2013
658/.041—dc23
Inability to adapt is the new illiteracy
Also by Carol Wolper
Anne of Hollywood
The Cigarette Girl
Secret Celebrity
Mr. Famous
Contents
You know that safety net you think you want...
A good idea doesn’t matter...as much as you’d like it to.
The Daddy Factor
Knowing No One
Carrying the burden of an ox while walking on eggshells.
Reset
WHY Bother?
Silver Lining Axe
On the morning after the Oscars of 1993, I showed up at my E! Entertainment Television job and found a note on my desk saying my department head wanted to see me. It was unusually quiet at the office because so many of the staff had worked late covering the Oscar event and after-parties and weren’t due in until noon. That made it the perfect time to fire me without causing fear and drama among those who would see their own destiny in my dismissal.
The department head was my polar opposite. She was a paint-by-numbers, upbeat team-player corporate type while I was known for appreciating free thinking, cynicism, and wit. Some might call me a rabble-rouser. Hardly. I didn’t have the energy for it. I could barely rouse myself out of bed to get in my cubicle on time. Anyway, my boss calmly told me my job had been discontinued and they were offering me a very nice exit package. Nice by their standards, maybe, but that wasn’t my concern at the moment. I was fascinated by the excuse that they were “discontinuing” my job. I worked as a writer. Were they planning on having all their on-air talent ad-lib? If so, they needed to take a closer look at some of that talent. One girl, in particular, who famously (around the office) thought Al Pacino’s name was pronounced “Al Pakino.” When pressed on my issue, the department head muttered something about how all writers would now have to edit video that accompanied their pieces. But it was clearly a manufactured technicality.
A little backstory here might be helpful. I was part of the original small group that launched the network in 1987. Back when it was called Movietime. I wrote the very first hour of programming, which was veejayed by Greg Kinnear. A few years after the launch, the Movietime founders sold out to a group of cable companies with HBO taking the lead position in calling the shots. In the early Movietime days the pay and surroundings weren’t great, but there was some fun in building a new network—even one started simply as a place to run movie trailers. In those early days, we worked out of a small brick building on the seedy side of Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. The rumor was that it once served as production offices for a company that made pornos, which would explain why porn actor wannabes would occasionally show up at the front door in search of some quick work and fast cash.
Once the big cable companies bought in, they moved us to fancy offices on Wilshire Boulevard. They pumped a lot more money into the operation and then re-branded it as E! It then became a full service source for all entertainment news and was run like a real corporation. Gone was the madcap Movietime atmosphere, replaced with too many meetings and the word “mandatory” popping up far more often than I would have preferred.
My personality and E! were never really a good fit, so I had mixed feelings about being forced out. I was leaving a situation that I should have left years before but stuck with it because I had no faith that I could make a living as a freelancer. I feared that it was stick with this or wait tables. Now, I was liberated from those mandatory meetings and had a severance that bought me three months to figure out how I was going to pay my rent. “It was time,” one of my freelancer pals said, “to jump out of the airplane and trust the parachute would open.” Hmm, heights and trust—neither one could be called my strong suit.
Two decades later, I can now look back on getting fired as an important turning point. I never necessarily had any deep negative feelings about E!, or for the department head who got rid of me and who would soon be axed as well. Being told my job was discontinued was essentially a lie, and yet it touched on a much bigger truth. Jobs are being changed, re-defined everyday—and so, in effect, discontinued all the time. Corporations have to do what’s in their best interest. It’s called survival and success. I don’t blame them for slicing and dicing. Likewise, employees have to do what’s in their best interest, and that means learning how to adapt—adapt fast and always be developing new skills and a Plan B. Everyone has to think like an entrepreneur these days. Getting kicked out of E! was a gift because it forced me to come up with other ways to make money and further my career.
Within three months of being fired I wrote a spec screenplay that caught the eye of producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. They immediately hired me to write a script for them based on an Esquire article they’d optioned. A few months later, I signed a deal to do a second script, quickly followed by the assignment to do the production re-write on the hit movie Bad Boys, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. And so it began. Those experiences led to more opportunities, which led to writing novels and television pilots. Then in a moment of full circle synchronicity, in 2012, my latest novel, Anne of Hollywood, was optioned by producer John Wells and Warner Brothers—and set up to be developed at E! Entertainment as a one-hour scripted drama series.
Twenty years earlier, I was shown the door. Now I was being invited back in to create a show for them. Had I managed to hold onto my low-level writer’s job at E! do you think they’d be offering me a shot to create my own one-hour show for them? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
You know that safety net you think you want...
Freelance careers are a feast/famine ride. At a low point in my ride, I went to see a shrink even though I couldn’t afford it. And not just any shrink. I went to see Robert Lorenz, which, at the time, was like being admitted to the coolest VIP club in town. Picture someone who had the gravitas of a president on Mount Rushmore and the street cred of a Hollywood secret celebrity. The word around town was that a number of A-list Hollywood people saw Robert. In fact, it was rumored that a key player in the movie Fight Club was a Robert devotee—a claim supported by the fact that a number of Robert’s best known phrases ended up in the movie, including his description of a certain type of woman as “a predator posing as a house-pet.”
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