Tis the season! We're in the middle of a month long period where not much show business business gets done as everyone concentrates on the holidays. This follows hard on the heels of the two weeks nobody did much because of American Thanksgiving and the American Film Market which preceeded it.
They came a short time after little was accomplished because everybody was at Mipcom in October and the Toronto Film Festival in September. Luckily, the Festival falls after Labor Day when people are just getting back from summer vacations which arrived around the time they returned from Banff or the Upfronts.
And before that was Cannes, NATPE and Sundance as we work in reverse order back to last New Year and Christmas.
An outsider looking at our industry might wonder just when anything actually gets done. We tell them it's a "relationship" business. You have to "network", "do face time" or "schmooze" and we get a lot of that done during our almost continuous party season!
I love parties! I love hangin' with people in the biz, the more often than not free booze, the mystery finger foods and even the almost never cutting edge mix disks.
I'm a fabulous guest too!
For starters, I'm a cheap date having inherited enough of my mom's DNA to know I can't handle more than a couple of drinks -- or in her words "Two and I'm anybody's, three and I'm everybody's."
Secondly, because good old mom also taught me to be courteous to the host and deferential to their guests, I've ended up with the understated sophistication and charm that has become my trademark.
Finally, I have absolutely no problem talking to anybody about anything and also, for the most part, sounding like I actually know what I'm talking about -- and give a handsome shit about what they think as well!
Being such fun on dates means I'm one of the miniature mirror balls at any soiree and as such -- given the prevailing wisdom of our industry, have wonderful things said about me by virtually everyone and thus get hired for all kinds of jobs...
Unfortunately, I can't recall one single, solitary work situation that came my way through schmoozing, networking or getting somebody completely hammered and taking pictures of them nobody else should ever see.
Likewise, I've only hired one person who was a hoot to party with. This was an accountant who used to tabulate showbiz award ballots. He was a laugh a minute and made accounting actual fun! A year after I hired him, he was in rehab for his Coke habit and I was explaining a lot of things that didn't make much sense to me either to a Tax Auditor.
I've worked with a few people who were hired because they were stars on the social circuit. There was the director who wanted to film a police gunbattle in the style of Andrzej Wajda making a Spaghetti Western. His first dailies were so indecipherable, we rushed him off to do all important establishing shots while a 2nd Unit director, who couldn't party worth a damn and would go on to direct the pilots of three of the seminal series of the 90's, grabbed enough "inserts" to allow an audience to follow the bullets.
I run into the art meets spaghetti director all the time at parties. He always has a new image, a new martini recipe and a new film. The last one I saw didn't have an ending. Honest, it didn't. It stopped just before the big climactic scene the last 20 minutes had built toward. I remember thinking, "Wow, what a dumb place to put a commercial break!" and then instead of a few words from our sponsor the final credits started to roll.
I was also once instructed to assign a script to a writer who's a fixture at parties. I've never been a fan of his work, but he's a wine encyclopedia and one of my execs aspired to own vineyards, so he got a script.
To nobody's surprise, there were a lot of notes on his first draft, and when I called to warn him of that and set a time for the ordeal, he had no problem taking care of the matter right away. About an hour into the notes marathon, I heard a toilet flush on the other end of the line. I was a little flumoxed, asked if he needed a minute. He said, "No" and asked me to repeat the last dialogue note because he'd been...
That's a level of professionalism you just can't discern on the dance floor.
And I probably can't count the number of charming actors, gorgeous actresses and canape servers somebody's hired to play a role. My favorite was a pilot I wrote where the director managed to have his three most favorite Maitre D's burst into a restaurant and dispatch a mob boss. This casting coup almost turned tragic when one of them hit another in the ass with the wad from a blank and the third almost took off his own foot with the blast from a sawed off shotgun.
Still, the director assured me over dailies, this creative choice would guarantee him good tables for years to come once the trio saw themselves onscreen. That was when I pointed out something he didn't appear to have noticed on set -- the three mob hitmen were all wearing balaclavas.
Come to think of it, this guy was pretty good at the schmooze himself.
What I'm getting at here is this. A lot of people get jobs because of who they know and where they show. Many of those people keep getting jobs despite any visible talent or system of logic anyone can explain. But only a few of these party animals do work that's either interesting or lasting.
I realize that paying the rent is important, but if money's what matters to you, please go and sell crack. You'll pocket way more than you will ever earn in this business, meet far more interesting associates and your chances of ending up in jail will be far smaller than your odds of winning any industry statues or plaques.
If I'm looking for a Brain surgeon, I don't call a guy I met over bean dip. And if I'm in trouble, I'm not calling that lawyer who was at that thing at my agent's beach house and knew a lot of cute blondes.
Sorry to be the party pooper here, but most good people hire other good people because they're actually good at what they do.
It seems I'm forever shaking hands over the shrimp trolley with some guy who tells me he's heard a lot about me. My response is usually, "I hope it's as juicy as some of the stuff I've heard." The other line they use is how nice it is to put a face to the name. And inside I'm always thinking, "What's any of this got to do with what I do?" and it reminds me of when I was starting out in the business 30 years ago and women writers used initials instead of their given names so the guys reading their script wouldn't know it was written by a "girl".
We've almost killed that old boy network and it's time we stopped degrading our business by making its face that of some idiot's personal trainer or mistress and the talent behind them not the best we can find but the funny guys we hung out with at some overhyped BBQ...
That's why nobody's watching our shows, folks. Any girl from a trailer park knows the flashy guy at the party is not the one who will come through when it counts.
I didn't go to any parties this holiday season. A few years ago, I was quoted as saying I wasn't attending some award ceremony "Because they don't let you bring your shotgun." I was kidding then, but those words have a different resonance for me now.
The recent CRTC hearings have revealed, among those who broadcast our work, a level of dismissal of what we all do that is beyond my comprehension -- and a lack of outrage from our guilds, agents and fellow artists that is soul crushing.
You can't help but meet network execs at industry fetes and I can't comprehend a conversation I'd want to have with any of them that didn't involve a ball gag, metal clamps and a car battery. And I'm done watching actors down to their last tank of gas put on a brave face and I'm through listening to writers with beautiful scripts aging past their relevance spout gallows humor. So I decided to stay away from all of them until I make some sense of this.
What I did instead was gather up my invitations, cable my regrets (okay e-mailed but I was going for that understated sophistication thing) and calculated how much time I'd probably spend at each and what I'd shell out for parking, hostess gifts, cash bars and the like. The money went into a Salvation Army bucket and bought coffee for several surprised cops. The time was spent taking a disabled neighbor shopping, delivering the books I've realized I'll never read to the old folks home I'll probably end up in, (Hey, I can read 'em then!) an afternoon serving in a Church soup kitchen and a night working for a local program that drives home drunks.
To be honest, I think I had more fun than I would have had at those parties. I gathered a ton of great ideas -- and I talked to a lot of people nobody ever talks to about Canadian television and why none of them bother to watch it.
If you went out to the parties, I hope you had a good time. I truly do. (Confidentially, I don't even own a shotgun) But I also hope that if a call hasn't come from that special someone you schmoozed, you've vowed not to party a little harder next time, but decided to work on your craft instead.
It's all about the work, people. It really is. And very soon the ones who do it well are going to be invaluable.
