Give Them A Reason To Tell You

I just had a fun little mishap. I called Toby Maguire's production company and said I had heard Maguire wasn't making another Spider-Man, and asked if he was looking for any particular style of script instead. They actually sounded interested, put me on hold, and then came back to ask who I was. I faltered on that and sounded like a clueless newbie (no shock there) and they put me on hold again and then hung up.

What's funny about that is that if I'd said something else instead, something else might have happened. It's kind of entertaining that way. I've been reading up on this whole Hollywood thing and there's this fascinating contradiction going on, where film is a collaborative medium so everything's about networking, everybody wants to be the person who discovers the hot new thingamajig - the hot new actor, the hot new writer, whatever - yet at the same time, there's this constant influx of wannabes which means that anybody who ever gets anything done will be pestered incessantly by people who want an "in." so people in Hollywood, they have to cultivate this open-ness and this closed-ness at the same time.

One book I read the other day quoted somebody in Hollywood saying it drove him nuts whenever he heard people complaining that you have to know the right people to make it in Hollywood. His response, basically, was yes, you do. So go out and meet them!

And when you do, learn from my example. Toby Maguire's people were interested by my question but then decided I was a jerkoff wasting their time. They were interested because I asked a good question. But don't just ask them good questions. Asking good questions isn't enough. Give them good reasons to give you the answers.