Launching Your Career in Hollywood

How to Break In!

By Jean A. Williams

If you have dreams of landing a good gig in Hollywood, you'd do well to learn some specific tales from the trenches, to know what you're facing as you set out on a course to become the next player in the Hollywood game. To make sure you're not chasing fool's gold out West, heed the advice of industry experts who can tell you how to negotiate your way into favor, not to mention satisfying and lucrative work, in the Hollywood system.

First, experts advise, secure the premises: know when, where and how you will land in Hollywood. Do you know anyone who can serve as support when things get hectic? Have you identified churches or other groups you can join early on for moral or spiritual support? Will you have access to transportation? What are rent rates? Safe neighborhoods? Where exactly will you live?

If you can't afford to pay rent alone, can you get a roommate, or perhaps make arrangements to live for a while with relatives or friends for free? Be certain you have explored all of your options and have a plan before you head out. "A lot of young people come to Los Angeles, and they really don't know what it means to live here," said Jaleesa Hazzard, executive director of the nonprofit placement and training organization Workplace Hollywood. "For instance, you have to have a car. You can't do production jobs without a car. You've got to have gas money. Gas is currently $3.65 a gallon in Los Angeles."

To that end, Hazzard's advice is to take care of such practical matters as knowing how to manage your resources. "You have to know how to manage money," Hazzard said. "You might get a pile of money in one job if you're working production jobs, but you might not get the next job for six or seven weeks or more. We really stress things like making a realistic budget. Know your overhead; know what else you'll have to do to make a living. It's a dual career industry anyway. Most people do more than one thing, especially if they work in something like film or TV production."

Also, early on make sure you're of the right character and disposition for the industry, experts advise. For instance, the right attitude can be as important, if not more so, than your academic credentials in this unique hiring environment.

"I look for someone who is confident without being arrogant," says Debra Martin Chase, producer of "The Princess Diaries" and "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants." "For me it's about being thorough. If I ask you to get something done, it's about the end result, doing whatever it takes to get it completed."

So check your ego at the door. Only the stars, starlets and top executives have room for hissy fits! "You have to be willing to work at whatever level," Martin Chase says. Even if you have a master's degree, you might end up having to get coffee." Chase's advice: "Do it."

"You have to understand how to get jobs and how to get jobs again," Hazzard said. "We got one candidate on Million Dollar Baby. The cool thing about [director] Clint Eastwood is he uses the same crew all the time. A lot of directors and producers tend to use the same people over again. Suit up, show up and don't be a pain. Everybody thinks this business is so big. It's actually small. Reputation is everything. It can work against you if you have a bad reputation."

Aside from a positive attitude and humility, you'll need a backbone for high-pressure, sometimes thankless tasks.

"You can't be thin-skinned," says Dionne Mahaffey Muhammad, who is founder, president and CEO of Atlantabased Celebrity Personal Assistants, a staffing agency with locations in Los Angeles and New York. "You have to be assertive because you have to get things done. There's no plan B in a lot of cases with a lot of people that are high profile. They don't take no for an answer, so when they ask you to get something, you can't come back to them with no. … You have to be resourceful to go out and get things done."

Think you've got the right stuff for working in films, TV, animation and other Hollywood niches? Then you've got to prove that you really belong. That's where networking—and lots of it—comes in. Networking in Hollywood is as unique as the industry itself. Though it pays to network in any industry, in Hollywood it could prove more critical than your degree in getting you inside the right doors. However, the education and skills that you learn in school can indeed put you above the fray.

"Hollywood is all about who you know," said Tanya Kersey, founder of the Hollywood Black Film Festival, an annual event which takes place in June 2007. "It's about people and relationships. That's the bottom line. You can go to college and learn the technical way of doing things and learn the business side of it, but to be successful in the business and to get jobs, it's all about people."

To that end, experts advise first-job seekers to build affinity in a variety of ways. Kersey, who herself is a walking resource for black Hollywood, also annually publishes the Urban Hollywood Resource Directory, which is filled with the names, addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers and websites of black ad agencies, agents, below-the-line unions, executives, talent agents, business management firms, casting directors, entertainment lawyers, film festivals, and more. Kersey offers this advice about making the right connections in Hollywood: "You really have to immerse yourself in the industry. You have to attend industry events. You have to be with industry people, join industry organizations," she says.

Let's face it: tons of people want to see their names up in lights in Hollywood, even if it's during the end credits. On your way to fame, however, may be a bit of famine. That's only partially a joke. Unlike most other industries, Hollywood can be a place where you must earn some stripes before you earn a dime. Many people get their start in the industry by doing internships, sometimes for school credit only. Even after you've already graduated from college, you may find that certain internships require free labor.

"People come out of college with BAs. They don't get a paid job. They go in as an intern because you want to get in the door," says Kersey, who says she uses interns every year to assist in putting on the Hollywood Black Film Festival. "Getting in the door is hard to do in Hollywood. Just offering your services for free is competitive. There may be 20 people trying to get an intern's job. So you've got to really map out what you want to do, what you're willing to pay in terms of lack of salary and all those things to get your feet in the door and to get in a position where you can move up."

Not being paid right away is the norm, but the right intern positions can help put your career in the right trajectory. "We use interns all the time, though they are not paid," says Martin Chase. Yet, Martin Chase in recent years has witnessed one of her former interns evolve from sidekick to award-winning TV producer. "I gave Shonda Rimes [creator and executive producer of the hit ABC drama "Grey's Anatomy"] her first internship when she was at USC," Martin Chase says. "It wasn't paid, but she came in and worked for me. I was getting these [weak] interns and so I asked them to send me their very best African-American student and they gave me Shonda."

"It usually takes 3 to 5 years for people to go through the entry-level phase and everybody has to go through the entry-level phase — the groveling, the no pay, the long hours," said Don Smith, who is one of the founders of Columbia College's LA Semester, an offshoot of the film and video program at the Chicagobased media and arts college and the only program housed on a major studio lot. "The long hours kind of solve a little bit of the problem with the no-pay because you're working all the time."

Though a lucky few get compensation right off, chances are that they did some preliminary hard work to land such plum spots, perhaps fattening their resumes with internships and skills BEFORE finishing college and heading to Hollywood to make a go of it. "I would suggest that individuals who are interested in working in Hollywood spend their summers there, get to know the city, volunteer there maybe in the summertime," Muhammad says. "Find a summer internship, and that way when you finish school you will have some work experience … as well as you will know the terrain because it's very crucial to being a personal assistant to know that terrain."

Build up your Hollywood specific skills as early as possible, advises Jon Katzman, director of Columbia College's LA Semester. Katzman is a Hollywood veteran who has worked in various capacities on television shows such as "Full House" and "Saved By The Bell" and on made-for-cable films such as "Redemption" starring Jamie Foxx. These skills can be practical across specific sub-interests. "We encourage survival skills such as learning how to give coverage and doing film and TV research," he said. Coverage is a typical chore for interns and entry-level workers with production companies whereby an assistant reads through scripts and presents a synopsis addressing key areas of interest to the producer for consideration, preventing the producer from having to read through loads of material, some of which would be a waste of the producers time and energy.

After building such skills and gaining some experience and exposure through industry internships, attending industry trade shows and events and joining industry associations, you're in a better position to land a paid position. Typically, the paid jobs are at the assistant level, Kersey says. "That's the job when you're starting out. A lot of assistants have become producers, have become writers, have moved up. But that's the entry-level job, whether you're in an agency, whether you're in a studio, whether you're at a network."

Even Martin Chase started as an executive assistant. After a previous career in law, she took a few steps back for a shot at making one giant leap forward. "I was
working as a corporate attorney, and I took a huge pay cut to come into the executive training program at Columbia Pictures," she says.

She was an executive assistant to former studio boss Frank Price. "I went with him to every meeting," Martin Chase says. "I gave him all his reading at the end of the day for the night, including scripts and books that I thought he needed to see."

If you can land a plum assistant's position, be ready to begin your move up the ranks. But also be ready for a long haul, experts warn, not to mention crowded rungs above you. "You have people that have been around for much longer, that have been around for 10 years, that are still trying to move up to those [top] positions," Kersey says. "Then there are some people that come out and get lucky right away. Obviously, there are people who don't go by this normal route."

Jean A. Williams is an author and freelance writer based in Chicago.