Is Hollywood Assistant Life Still Insane?

The Town with Matthew Belloni

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.3 • 847 Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Matt is joined by Warner Bailey to talk about one of the most underdiscussed yet crucial pieces of the Hollywood ecosystem: the assistant. Warner surveyed tens of thousands of currently employed assistants in the entertainment business to answer questions about their current salary, how the job has changed over the years, whether they’d want to be their boss one day, if they’ve ever been asked to do something against their morals, and who the most frightening agent in Hollywood is (02:57). Matt wraps up the show with box-office predictions for the opening weekend of Wolf Man and One of Them Days (28:28). Click HERE to help those affected by the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles. For a 20 percent discount on Matt’s Hollywood insider newsletter, ‘What I’m Hearing ...,’ click here. Email us your thoughts! [email protected] Host: Matt Belloni Guest: Warner Bailey Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Jessie Lopez Theme Song: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Look, it's not that confusing.
0:02.5	I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, except we did 120 songs.
0:08.9	And now we're back with the 2000s.
0:11.2	I refuse to say aughts.
0:12.5	2000 to 2009.
0:14.2	The Strokes, Rihanna, Jalo, Kanye, sure.
0:17.8	And now the show is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s,
0:21.1	colon the 2000s. Wow. That's too long a title for me to say anything else right now.
0:26.6	Just trust me. That's 60 songs that explain the 90s, colon the 2000s,
0:31.4	preferably on Spotify.
0:37.3	It is Thursday, January 16th.
0:40.0	When I started working in Hollywood as a lawyer about 20 years ago, one of the first books I read,
0:45.2	wasn't some biography of Walt Disney or David Geffen.
0:48.8	It was a book called The Mail Room by David Renson, which is basically just stories of people
0:53.2	who worked at the lowest level of a
0:55.0	big talent agency in Hollywood. Very instructive. The cliche of the industry has always been that the
1:00.3	best way to learn the business is to start in the mailroom or as somebody's assistant, and then
1:04.7	you can slowly learn the nuances and make relationships and work your way to the top. Along the way,
1:10.3	you'll probably get overworked and humiliated and sexually harassed and have phones thrown at your way to the top. Along the way, you'll probably get
1:10.9	overworked and humiliated and sexually harassed and have phones thrown at you like Lloyd on entourage,
1:16.2	but it's ultimately worth it, the thinking goes, as a right of passage for a well-paying and
1:21.3	creatively fulfilling career in Hollywood. The reality is a little different these days.
	...

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