I have a friend who is having financial trouble – nothing too dire, just the usual temporary bind that afflicts everyone in the entertainment business at one time or another – and when he asked me to lunch a few weeks ago, I have to admit that I hesitated.
Friends with cash troubles who ask you to lunch are mostly, in my experience, about to ask you for money. Somewhere between the last plate being cleared and the coffee served, there will be a pause in the chit chat, an awkward throat clearing, and then: “So, anyway, you know I haven’t worked in a while, right?”
But I went anyway, and decided in advance that no matter what happened, I’d pick up the bill. Because I also knew that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to lend him any money. About 10 years and several thousand dollars ago, I realised that lending money to friends was never a good idea.
I shouldn’t have worried. My friend is too much of a gentleman to have put the touch on me. What he wanted was for me to make a call to another colleague and recommend him for a job opening. To which I gladly agreed.
Over lunch, he told me that one of the things he’s noticed about himself – and he’s a fairly practical, no-nonsense person – is that since hitting the financial rough patch, he spends lot of time daydreaming about money. Whole hours can go by as he zones out, spinning detailed fantasies about winning the multi-state lottery or finding a lot of cash somewhere or having some rich foreigner hit him with a car and ending up with a huge court-ordered settlement.
“I don’t think it’s entirely normal,” he told me as he waited for me to pick up the tab. (I ungenerously assumed that since I had agreed to call my colleague, lunch was on him.)
I tried to reassure him. “Everyone daydreams about winning the lottery,” I said. He wasn’t totally convinced. The really strange thing, he told me, was that he always daydreams about huge windfalls. His current financial straits aren’t all that catastrophic – he’s not going to lose his house or anything – but he’s unable to fantasise, as he put it, “realistically”.
Which makes him fit right into the entertainment industry’s feast-or-famine attitude. Around here, you’ll overhear people who work in coffee shops talk about how this movie bombed or that TV show is a ratings disaster – even though one made millions of dollars and the other garnered millions of eyeballs and neither was made by people who work in coffee shops.
But “a little” is never enough around here. In fact, enough isn’t even enough. An actor I know had a movie come out in November, and it was sheer bad luck that the studio elected to release the picture on the same weekend as the next instalment of The Hunger Games.
That picture swamped all of its competition, and my actor friend’s movie sputtered along for several lacklustre weeks. You’d imagine, based on the way it was reported in the trade publications and box-office news websites, that his movie was an unmitigated disaster. In fact, it will probably garner about US$100 million between its theatrical run, the DVD release, and its appearance on cable television. But $100 million isn’t enough for the jaded appetites of Hollywood. Around here, the only kind of profits that matter are the obscene ones. Tidy profits don’t count.
Outsize expectations, in Hollywood, are now an epidemic. My friend – the one who needed a job – called me a day ago to thank me for recommending him for the job and to tell me that, after thinking about it, he decided to turn it down. “I wasn’t thrilled with the salary,” he told me, “or the job title.”
Despite his real-world money worries, he preferred to hold out for a fantasy daydream of a job. That’s his right, of course. You can’t force someone to face reality. But next time, he’s buying lunch.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
