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What It’s REALLY Like to be a Hollywood Assistant
by Erin La Rosa
I asked assistants currently working in the entertainment industry to share their stories. Here’s what they had to say about working in the Hollywood trenches.
1. The agency assistant who’s been working through seven years of “pain and suffering”:
Speaking of questions and answers, one of TVWriter™’s writing heroes, J. Michael Straczynski (BABYLON 5, JEREMIAH, SENSE8, etc.), recently answered a few questions over at Slashdot.Org.
by samzenpus
Last week you had the chance to ask J. Michael Straczynski (jms) about Babylon 5, his new original series, Sense8 , and all things sci-fi. Below you’ll find his answers to your questions.
Team #RCWD has been working hard, brainstorming concepts to pitch to NBCUniversal. In the past 8 months, instead of just talking about pitching, we’ve pitched in-person to executives at NBC Drama, NBC Comedy, USA, Bravo, and E!. We have two more pitch meetings coming up, one at Style and we’re going back to USA.
I continue reiterating this because pitching is partly a numbers game. Out of fifteen written proposals we managed to get two requestes for MOW treatments from Syfy. From 35 or so concepts we’ve leveraged eight pitch meetings. From the outside looking in it might be easy to assume that “nothing’s going to happen.” But when you fully comprehend the dynamics and that mathematics of what we’ve done, and are doing, you’d probably deduce correctly that, it’s just a matter of time.
With one idea you’ve got one shot. With twenty ideas you’ve got twenty chances to hit the “big idea” or form a relationship with people who can do something for your writing career either now or in the future.
You’re a writer, you write, but you have another life as well, family, work, whatever takes you away from writing yet you DO want to write.
So how do you sort out the time? How do you keep the juices flowing, how do you keep that brain alert and cooperating? Avoid those stones in the road?
There’s a lot more to writing than writing so I decided today I’d list a few tips I’ve used in my writing routine. There’s more, of course, but ten seemed like a good place to start. Developing great writing habits will take that writing a long way. Pick and choose which ones here and elsewhere work for you, then use them!
Yes, you’ve seen the Steve Ditko pic below on TVWriter™ before. Last week, as a matter of fact.
But no, this post isn’t just a repackaged version of the same profoundly helpful verbiage as last time. I’ve decided to make the pic my “Glad You Asked” logo pic.