The Year Work Stopped
Author's Note: The following piece was composed in the halcyon days between Christmas and New Year, when ever-so-cautious optimism and hope seemed to be on the horizon for Hollywood. By the time the essay reached the editor, the Palisades and Eaton fires had begun to consume our fair city. Hope for a better year was seemingly extinguished quickly, but the perseverance of the residents of the City of Angels shined through.
We’ve heard countless stories of people hosting strangers, donating money and clothing, taking in pets that had been separated from their families ... In other words, hope is being slowly restored.
As the fires begin to recede and people around Los Angeles begin to pick up the pieces, thanks to the brave firefighters and first responders, the courageous people at Pipeline Artists feel that there is still some merit to publishing the piece. Even though it will take years to rebuild our city, and many places will never be the same, I still feel mildly optimistic that 2025 will turn out to have some positive qualities. Too many good people. Too much talent and perseverance.
To embrace a cliché, which is too damn apt for my liking: Los Angeles and Hollywood will rise from the ashes.
As we begin the new year with a glimmer of hope, I thought it might be nice to reflect on the less than ideal year that was 2024.
We’ve all experienced many losses over the past few years. Despite the horrors of the pandemic; the WGA and SAG strikes, the end of relationships (lovers, as well as friends that moved away or just moved on), the existential threat of A.I. to writers and artists (as well as humanity—much gratitude to Kubrick and Cameron for laying the foundation for that), we still hold on tight to our dreams of having a career in Hollywood.
Despite all the doomsaying (as well as doomscrolling on Instagram, Threads, The App Formerly Known As Twitter, and new kid, BlueSky), we’ve all heard the rumors of things starting to pick up—with weekly articles in the trades about spec sales and the like—and we’re starting to breathe in the possibility that things might actually be getting back to normal.
As we hopefully turn the corner, it’s high time to do a postmortem on the past year, in the hopes that by merely typing the Latin words meaning “an analysis or discussion of an event held soon after it has occurred,” it will mean that things will take a turn for the better.
I write this in the sincere hope that the following serves as a time capsule for the year 2024, when we look back at the fallow time in Hollywood with a smile, a shake of the head, and a “glad we made it past that” comment.
In an effort to break down the daily life of the typical Hollywood foot soldier (not player, as most of us have had no agency—nor agent—in recent years), I’ve created composite characters of the many people in the industry who have been suffering post pandemic/post strikes/mid-industry contraction. (Feel free to damn me for being a screenwriter at all times for utilizing the term … as it’s my girlfriend’s chief complaint—or at least in her top three.)
If merely one soul had to suffer the indignity that the collection of out-of-work writers below suffered, there might be no chance of recovery. Spread out over three humans of various shapes and sizes, the pain is lessened—still difficult, but not intolerable. If the readers of Pipeline Artists demand it, there are more stories to tell, but balancing the despair and hope of Hollywood writers (WGA, Pre-WGA, and Post-WGA) forced me to limit myself.
The names have been changed to protect the guilty as well as the all too vulnerable creative and innocent souls. I have chosen the gender neutral name, Rowan, as the stand-in for all Hollywood writers in this particular piece. (The only people I spoke to were writers, but I feel confident that the stories reflect a common experience for Hollywood workers across the spectrum.)
Let us begin with Rowan #1.
Rowan #1 didn’t quite understand how he found himself in this predicament. He was a professional writer in his early 40s, married, with a young child at home. Yet, here he stood on this particularly hot and oppressive day, dressed in colorful balloon pants, red suspenders, and an old dress shirt he last wore to the Golden Globe awards a decade earlier.
As a small child hesitantly approached, sweetly asking him to make a balloon animal, he flashed back to a few years earlier, when he was sitting in the writers’ room of a prestige streaming service series. The last question he faced from a person with a face that young and eager was when the lunch menu was handed to him by a PA in that same writers’ room. (He shuddered to think what that production assistant was doing at the moment; desperately trying to pay back their student loan from the MFA program at a prestigious Ivy League school.)
Rowan was tempted to tell the child that he wanted a grilled cheese on brioche made with gruyere and white cheddar cheese, grilled onions, and thinly sliced Roma tomatoes—but instead, made a balloon animal for the child—one that resembled a flaccid penis more than anything else. To be fair, the little girl seemed quite happy and waved the balloon around as if it was a sword. Job well done.
He wasn’t so lucky with the next child; a far less sweet boy with a face covered in cotton candy and shorts that looked like they might contain last night’s dinner inside a too large diaper. The child was at least seven, but from the way he waddled, it was clear that toilet training had not successfully taken hold.
When his magician friend, the one who told him about this “easy gig” and gave him a crash course in balloon animals, approached, Rowan was relieved. He thought it was lunchtime, but the magician merely wanted to inform him that while there was no meal break, a food cart with decidedly not organic hot dogs, deep-fried Twinkies, and chips was about to roll through. As an employee, the meal was free, the magician friend offered with a smile.
At that moment, Rowan decided that he would no longer use the term “magician friend” when describing him as no friend would make him wear the balloon pants that were currently—for lack of a better word—ballooning around his waist, thanks the cotton-candy-covered child, pouring grape soda down his trousers.
Rowan #2 had booked her first babysitting gig.
She hadn’t watched a child since she was forced to take care of her little brother in middle school, but it didn’t seem too demeaning and actually paid pretty well. Thirty dollars an hour with a minimum of four hours. Not WGA minimum, but it would help with the ever-increasing cost of groceries.
When told last minute that the child of record was not fully toilet trained, Rowan felt tempted to cancel. But as her first TV writing job had ended after a mere four weeks in a Zoom mini room, she was eager to not have to call her parents to bail her out. Again.
When she arrived at the house in Santa Monica, Rowan was surprised to discover that her ward was walking and talking, so the potential diaper issue seemed a bit odd. Well, not talking, but babbling incoherently in a way that only the child’s mother could understand.
After the child’s parents departed—leaving a list of food restrictions that would give a dietician a headache, Rowan sat down on the couch to read a book to the adorable, albeit very spoiled, little girl. Almost immediately, a certain smell wafted through the air. She leaned down to smell the little girl’s bottom to confirm the awful truth. Not that she was savvy enough to able to reference the classic Irene Dunne/Cary Grant film, but there was nastiness below. A level five, Titanic (apologies for the movie references, but you are reading a site for writers and filmmakers) mess.
Rowan couldn’t have scripted the moment better—cleaning up a fecal-stuffed diaper as symbolism for the shitty direction her career was headed. A small smile crossed her face as she thought this would make a good scene in a not-terrible romcom. The smile faded as she carried the child to her room (and the diaper changing station, which was a bit too short for the three year-old).
She reflected back on her MFA program and William Goldman’s Adventures in The Screen Trade and couldn’t come up with an analogy for what she was about to do. Well, actually she did come up with something, but it’s too obvious to state in (digital) print.
Then there was Rowan #3.
As Rowan #3 listened to a Sabrina Carpenter song (it didn’t matter which one, he thought they all vaguely sounded like droning Muzak with a pleasing hypnotic vocal), he placed the name tag on his store branded polo, he was having difficulty processing how a particular course of actions led him here.
He didn’t come from money, nor privilege, and was certainly not a “nepo baby," so was used to hard and sometimes unpleasant work. But a feature script sale five years earlier had put him on the map. Notices in the trades, lavish meals covered by the expense accounts of agents and executives, etc. Then, the film wasn’t made, which is par for the course, but still profoundly disappointing. Followed by the pandemic, the strike, and now the economic downturn/contraction of the industry.
As he was raised by a single mother, who was still working as a schoolteacher and had difficulty paying her own bills, Rowan had no place to turn for financial assistance.
So, here he was—standing as a greeter at a well-known chain store whose nickname rhymed with Faberge—in a shopping mall with a smile plastered on his face, listening to the thin, tinny sound of modern Top 40 on a sound system that was likely installed before Ms. Carpenter was conceived. As a screenwriter, he would have chosen the Talking Heads “Once in A Lifetime” on the soundtrack with the “you may ask yourself how did I get here” lyric, but this was unfortunately not a scripted moment.
Rowan prayed that no one he knew would come into the store, and he chose an inconvenient location to work in for that very reason, but we know how things happen. At least he was able to script the location into the real world. Everything else that happened was as the TV industry has labeled reality television—unscripted.
As a greeter, he didn’t have to suffer the indignity of the other Rowans—cleaning up fecal matter from young children—but he did face the wrath of several “Karens,” one less than genius shoplifter, and having his foot run over by a wheelchair. Twice. All on his first day.
All the Rowans told me that they gathered plenty of material for future scripts, working in their non-chosen field, but all were eager—even desperate—to get back in the Hollywood trenches.
Each of them were exhausted by their new roles and often too tired to write at the end of the day. To be fair, they started to adjust to their new worlds over time—and plenty of writers throughout history have suffered far greater indignities than a soiled nappy or a broken big toe. But having worked in Hollywood, and many of them having seen the fruits of their labor on screen, made this detour all the more painful.
The industry is highly unlikely to return to the halcyon days of 600+ TV shows with the streamers realizing they can import cheaper programing from other countries as well as milk the comfort food aspect of old television shows for seemingly decades, but things are looking up. (To be fair, the fact that audiences are now willing to watch foreign language programs is a good thing overall, in terms of cultural awareness, even if not necessarily for Hollywood writers.)
The hope is that the Rowans will find a way back. At least one of them made a no-budget short film that is currently doing the festival rounds and the others have acclimated to their new work lives to allow time to be creative (when not covered in the aforementioned fecal matter or being assaulted by a Karen). All are passionate about the written word and have never viewed Hollywood success as winning the lottery.
In fact, at least one Rowan was (somewhat) appreciative of the detour. The balloon-making circus barker inspired his next script.
In terms of “write what you know,” it’s new material for Rowan—which is good thing for him, as well as the audience, since the last thing anyone wants is another film or TV series about a struggling novelist/playwright/screenwriter.
*Feature image by Jorm Sangsorn (Adobe)
