The Summer I Worked for the. Most Powerful. Studio n Hollywood. By Cecy Correra

Transcription

1 The Summer I Worked for the Most Powerful Studio n Hollywood By Cecy Correra

2 I hung up on him. I hung up on the head of the studio my first week there. No one trained me on how to use the phones and I m just a lowly intern. It s their fault, really......but let me backtrack. It was 2008 and I was about to graduate from film school. I thought I had it all figured out: I would leverage my school s Semester in L.A. offering, but save it for my last semester. That way I d graduate, find a job, and stay in L.A. This was also the year of the famed Writers Strike, when all union writers working in Hollywood shut down production on every major TV show in the hopes of negotiating a better deal. While I fully supported the writers plight, it wasn t a great year to graduate from film school. My stint as an intern in L.A. began shortly after the strike was over, but the effects were still palpable. Millions of dollars were lost as a result of halted productions, and some shows never even made it back after the strike had ended. The industry was still recovering and jobs were harder to find. MEet the AUthOr Cecy Correa Cecy is a Web Chef for Four Kitchens, a one-stop web consulting firm. In her spare time, Cecy continues to connect the dots for the local tech community by co-organizing Refresh Austin and our local Girl Develop It chapter. JOP TITLE: Web Chef COMPANY: Four Kitchens cecycorrea.com

3 The Bad Living in L.A. sounds like paradise, and sure I got to drive by the Hollywood Bowl and Hollywood Boulevard every day on my way to work. But therein lies the caveat of living in L.A. if there s a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, your commute back home is two hours. If there s a film opening at the Chinese, your commute back home is two hours. I cursed the names of Coldplay and the new X-Files movie many times. Still, those are nuisances you can deal with; what I couldn t deal with were the hours and the pay. As a lowly intern, I worked about eleven to twelve hours a day, not including the time I spent reading scripts after I finally went home. They offered me $10 per day for my work, but capped the intern salary at $300. So for four months of twelve-hour days, I was paid a grand total of $300. My rent alone, for a tiny studio apartment, was $1,300 a month, which was paid for by student loans. I had two years of experience working for film festivals and independent films, but that didn t matter in L.A. because I amassed that experience outside of L.A. With that experience, I couldn t even get a job making $9 an hour as a production assistant. The Ugly If you re not an executive by the time you re 30, you re never going to be an exec. The executive I worked for had no love for film anymore. It was clear to me that she had lost the spark somewhere along the way. She got to attend festivals I ve only ever dreamed of attending Cannes, Berlinale, Sundance. She was hardly in the office, and when she was, she was miserable, exhausted even. The best way I can explain it is that she looked hung over all the time hung over on film. It was too much. There s a lot of ageism in the film industry, too. It s not just the actresses who have to be young; executives are held to the same standard. If you re not an executive by the time you re thirty, you re never going to be an executive. They ll think you re not hip anymore, an older assistant once said to me. He was well into his thirties and knew his only way out of assistantship was to sell a script. Worst of all, people working around me didn t want to be writers or actors because they loved film; they wanted to be writers or actors because they wanted to be famous. Ultimately, that s the reason people like me didn t fit in. I was there for my love of film, not out of a desire for fame.

4 The Decision These things I knew: I loved film, but I also wanted a good life. My definition of a good life was to have a steady job and get paid my worth in order to have the freedom of the life I wanted. I knew then that I didn t want to take a gamble and work my ass off in the hopes that someone would notice me before I was thirty. A gamble like that meant I wouldn t be the master of my own fate. Finally, I knew I never wanted to lose my love of film like the executive I worked for. I couldn t imagine a life so burnt out on film that I couldn t love it anymore. The adage goes, Find something you love and do it every day, but there are a lot of different types of love. You have to find the right love for your career, and film wasn t the right love for me. For me, a career in film was almost like an abusive relationship I did all the work for very little in return. So, film and I dated. It didn t work out, but we re still friends. I found another thing to love, a healthier love that allows me to have a healthy life. I m now the Director of Business Development at a web design agency in Austin a job that pays me what I am worth, allows me to be creative, and live in a town that lets me have the life I want. I still love film, but from a healthy distance, and I now control the relationship with my remote.* Given the long-standing gender bias of Hollywood, it s noteworthy that Cecy was working for a female executive six years ago. However, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women are making strides to level the playing field as producers (25% women), production designers (23% women), and editors (17% women). We still have a long way to go to really see gender equity in the film industry, especially in areas like cinematography (3% women) and direction (only 6% of films in 2013 were directed by women), but it s encouraging to see that talented women in film are finding an increasing number of career opportunities serving the silver screen. REALITY CHECK Source: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film

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