For a brief time in the 1990’s, I lived and worked in Los Angeles in film & television production. How I ended up there was a textbook example of someone running toward a new adventure after a bad breakup. At the time, I was 28 years old which is practically ancient in the minds of whoever I was going to try to convince to hire me. I spent many hours on the phone from Boston, cold calling anyone I’d ever met who might know anyone in the entertainment industry who could help me land an interview for some kind of job. It was the only way I could think of to prepare since my love of movies wasn’t going to be much of a help. By the time I finally headed west in my Honda Accord packed with only the bare essentials, I wasn’t yet focusing on how I’d survive when I got to Los Angeles. I was more excited about my pit stops at Graceland, the Grand Canyon and Vegas.

Nine days later, I arrived at a dear college friend’s house in the San Fernando Valley where I set up camp in her toddler’s room for 2 weeks. Luckily, the cold calling & networking paid off and within a week I had talked my way into a job with a successful writing/directing/producing duo who had a deal with Touchstone Pictures on the Walt Disney Studio lot in Burbank. Our offices overlooked the Team Disney building which was home to the top studio executives. Carved into the facade are giant figures of the Seven Dwarfs positioned like columns along the top of the building. No recognition of Snow White anywhere, but that was par for the course. Do a little digging into the man himself, Walt Disney, and you’ll find some not-so-flattering words about his thoughts on women and other groups.

After promising my new bosses that I’d be a quick study to learn the “Who’s Who” in the industry, I spent the next week memorizing a list of agents & their clients, studio heads, producers and the names of all of the gatekeeper assistants through whom one has to go in order to get their bosses on the phone line. I was now one of those gatekeepers. Fortunately, I worked for people who were in demand, so I could usually get the other bigwig on the phone. However, I was quickly initiated into this weird dynamic where no assistant wanted to get his boss on the phone first and make him wait for the other person’s boss to pick up. Forcing someone else to “Hold” was a total power play. It was both entertaining and completely ridiculous.

Luckily, and for whatever reason, I’ve never been starstruck by working with “movie stars”. That turned out to be a good thing because the bulk of my time that first year was working with Julia Roberts & Nick Nolte. Only one famous person ever made me nervous – Steve Martin. I wasn’t starstruck, but I did have an enormous crush on him. He was and still is a genius and a true Renaissance Man. We met when when I was working on location in Chicago, based out of a large suite at the Ritz Carlton. While Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte were there meeting with us one day, Steve Martin stopped by to visit my bosses with whom he was friends and had previously worked on a film. He was in town staging “Picasso at the Lapin Agile”, a play he had written. I was sitting in a chair on which his coat was draped and he’d left his glasses in the pocket of the coat. As he excused himself to reach around me for the glasses, we ended up in one of those cute dances where he goes left when I go left, and he goes right when I go right. That was the extent of our interaction until I was shown a note sent a day later from Steve to my bosses thanking them for the afternoon visit. In the note, he wrote, “P.S., who’s the girl?”. If this were a real Hollywood story, someone would have introduced us properly, we would have dated, and I would have become Mrs. Steve Martin. That did not happen. One of my bosses decided she had to put me in my “assistant” place and announced that “the note must have been him just making a joke about meeting Julia Roberts, a.k.a “the girl”. It was a rather unkind, power-play thing to do, but it’s a fine example of the necessity of having a thick skin in that business. Aside from that, and so many other comical examples of the nonsense that assistants had to put up with, I have so many other memories that are wonderful. Including memories of a little something called the Craft Service table. When I was working 18 hour days, being lauded for doing such a great job but still getting screamed at when someone else is having a bad day, the Craft Service table was my happy oasis. It’s really just a table, off in some dark corner adjacent to wherever the filming is taking place, and it’s stocked with every kind of delicious junk food and carbohydrate. On a rough day, nothing takes the edge off like a huge canister of really fresh Twizzlers.

More than anything else though, it was the great friends and co-workers I met during this time that made the whole experience unforgettable. One might think that it would be hard to make true, lifelong friends in such a cut-throat business where everyone is trying to “make it”, but that was not my experience. Nearly 30 years have passed since my short stint in film production (and television production, but that’s a whole other story) but I can still count at least a handful of meaningful friendships that have endured. Even though one of those friendships still isn’t Steve Martin.