Please take a second here. This is important to digest. After all the grinding and actual work I had done for him, the reason I got promoted was not because I pulled business data, merged it with something creative, and offered him casting suggestions, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, tailor-made for his feature film. No, I got promoted because I made Captain Moneybags something shiny with his name on it that “popped.”
The promotion was essentially a vanity bump. I went from unpaid intern to unpaid junior creative executive, with the promise of a future salary; I would begin getting paid the day after I graduated. I was assigned more responsibility, like being empowered to search for new scripts on my own and hiring our new batch of interns. I realized I was in the right world because I was the first one to come in every day and the last to leave, and I was still taking a full course load at UCLA while working as a Resident Advisor in the dorms to pay for housing, making no money at the film studio, receiving no college credit, working for a wealthy narcissistic racist, and bizarrely loving that I finally had access to this incredible, creative world. The only perk that came with being an unpaid junior creative executive was a pass allowing me to park in a closer lot. (This may not sound like a big deal, but Hollywood people put the specific locations of parking spaces into their employment contracts. There’s a detailed hierarchy that takes years to work through and generally culminates when you pull into your own personal parking spot. With your name on it.)
* * *
As a young man of color who knew nobody in Hollywood and whose Indian American peers at college chastised him for pursuing a career in the arts, I viewed my situation with the internship less as someone being taken advantage of and more as someone who was gaming the system with skill and sacrifice. Of course interns in Hollywood were a relatively homogeneous group: If you were lucky enough to know the right people in the first place, you still had to be able to afford working full-time for free. Now that I was in charge of hiring CM’s interns, I could at least try to eliminate nepotism from the list of qualifications. I did an exhaustive search for the best and most diverse applicants, not just the ones who had family or school connections. My short list of candidates was an extremely talented group from around the country, including people from different demographic groups who didn’t all come from Los Angeles or attend fancy private schools.
I was proud of this.
The last time I had gone through a pile of applicants with CM was when I brought him that stack of headshots (Asians don’t watch movies!). This time, he leafed through the prospective interns, pausing at the third, fourth, and fifth résumés. I wondered what the issue was now. “Why are there chicks?” he asked. He could tell the question confused me, so he repeated it. “Kal, why are there chicks in this file?”
Was this dude kidding me with this shit?
“Every human in the pile is an exceptionally talented film student. Do you not hire women?”
“Nope. No chicks. You’ve heard me talk, right? I’m not trying to get sued for my filthy mouth. Don’t hire any chicks.” Then, with his 1930s smirk and wink, “Unless they’re hot. Bring the hot ones in for an interview.” I walked back to my desk, wanting to throw up.
The misogyny was inexcusable, and I didn’t know how to handle it—they don’t teach you that in film school, and there were no articles about it in those days. This terrible behavior also struck me as self-defeating to his company’s entire bottom line. CM’s “don’t hire women because I’m an asshole” policy eliminated half the talent pool. He was writing off insanely creative people—people who could help him move beyond “pop” and into substance. And it was all because he didn’t want to manage his own terrible sexist behavior in the workplace.
I should have fought him way harder than I did. At the time, I honestly wasn’t sure how. If I went to the head of HR to file a complaint, Captain Moneybags would find out—the guy I would have complained to was friends with his rich dad. I continued to make my point, sending him the most qualified applicants of every gender and background in the prospective intern piles. I wasn’t going to take any qualified women or people of color out of the running, even if he eventually did. What was he going to do, fire me? I was already too valuable to his empire.
* * *
I’d like to think that things have gotten better today, that people like CM are a rarer breed than they were when I was first getting into the industry. And I attribute this in large part to immense public pressure on the entertainment industry to change, and the high degree of social consciousness in the generations that followed mine. For all the crap everyone gives millennials for quitting jobs too soon and expecting sudden promotions without paying their dues, at least they and the Gen Zers don’t seem to tolerate the bullshit we had to. Racist, misogynistic behavior no longer has to be an acceptable par for the course. That gives me a lot of hope.
That said, we’re still not where we need to be. We must continue finding ways to expand the pipeline into workplaces in and out of Hollywood. When given a chance, talent and hard work will generally win out over misogyny and hackery, but only when the pool of truly qualified candidates isn’t restricted to those with contacts or money (or those of a certain gender, ethnicity, race, or identity).
Want to know the best evidence I have that money and connections aren’t enough to keep you in business? It’s Captain Moneybags himself. Within three years of opening his daddy-trust-funded production company, he had produced only one project: a straight-to-DVD movie that took a massive loss. He eventually closed up shop and left the entertainment industry forever. The last I heard he was a struggling real estate agent in Florida.
I guess nobody told him that Asians buy houses.
1?The reason I failed one of the two times.
2?Except not irritating.
3?For comparison, here’s a more recent statistic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/05/22/asian-american-consumer-market-is-now-12-trillion-and-what-that-means-for-digital-brands/.
4?This is how you word things politely in a professional environment.
5?I’m telling you, they love it when you talk like they do.
CHAPTER SEVEN AUDITIONING TO BE LATINO