I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

Since we have all but settled on our Tucker, we had to tell the other guys who had done chemistry reads and callbacks for Tucker that they weren’t getting it. Generally, this is done by the casting agent. Joseph will call the actor’s agent, tell them the news, and that’s basically that.
But in this case we’d had drinks and hung out with both of the guys who had done chemistry reads, and Nils and I really got along with and respected both of them. I didn’t want to spend all that time with them, bond with them–even on a small level–and then have them find out through their agent that they weren’t going to get the part. That just feels cheap to me. Either you like someone as a person or you don’t, and if you do, then you like them all the time, regardless of the immediate economic benefit. Maybe I’m wrong, but it just seemed like they’d want to hear the news from me. At least, if I was in their position, that’s what I would want.
So I told them personally. I sent an email to one of them (I didn’t have his phone number) and called the other one. Real basic conversation, I told them that another guy had come in and just blown us away, that I was impressed with them as actors and that I would have loved to work with them, and sincerely thanked them for coming in. Really, nothing special at all, what any other decent person would do and say in my shoes. It didn’t even occur to me that I was doing anything unusual.
From the reaction I got, you’d think I had given a kidney to a dying child. Joseph called me and was gushing for five minutes about how nice and awesome I was to do that, and the other actor sent this email:
“Hey man,
Thanks for being so up front about all this. I really appreciate hearing about this from you. Obviously, I wanted to play you, but I know how it is and if someone came in and blew the doors off it, I can live with that. If you guys are happy and think you found your guy, I’m happy for you and I’m sure the movie will be better for it. Normally I’d be like, “Fuck that, I hope the movie bombs,” but I really hope for your sake (and Nils) that it blows up. You guys have worked really hard and you deserve it…[irrelevant part excerpted]…Again, thanks a lot for treating me like a person instead of a commodity. I appreciate it more than you can understand.”
My response to both of them was awkward and stammering. I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never seen anyone so grateful for basic human decency. It’s not like I liberated prisoners of war from a concentration camp–I just treated people the way I would want to be treated. Isn’t this the Golden Rule? Doesn’t everyone do this?
The sad thing is, once I stopped and thought about it, I realized I should have expected this. Everyone in Hollywood is so used to getting treated like shit that when someone comes along and is nice in a situation where they don’t need to be or don’t want something from the other person, they are so grateful.
One of the first things you notice when you come to work in Hollywood from the outside business world, is the lack of respect with which the system treats people. It’s shocking really, when you realize that the standard behavior model is to treat people like complete shit.
You can read a ton of books about this (Why Does Sammy Run?, Adventures In The Screen Trade), or see all the movies about it (Swimming With Sharks, The Player), but I have seen it first-hand a ton of times already–we’ve been in pre-production for only three months, and I already have all kinds of examples. The agent for the casting director cursed at and then hung up on the production lawyer when they were discussing the deal. The production lawyer is about the nicest, sweetest woman you could ever imagine. Before she started working in Hollywood, she was a public defender in the juvenile crimes division for Baltimore. She said she gets treated worse in Hollywood. The first line producer we thought about attaching had a lawyer that refused to give us her precedent for a deal, asked us to come back with an offer, and then once we did, cursed at and insulted my lawyer about the offer we gave them. I told him to fuck off, and we attached a different line producer.
I could go on and on with examples like this, but the people who have worked here for years have much better ones, especially the actors and the below-the-line people. One actor told us a story about how on a movie, the director walked around with a bullhorn screaming in the faces of everyone on set. He was directing a COMEDY! When we asked one actor what he thought of the character’s motivation in a specific scene, he kinda paused and said, “I don’t think a director has ever asked me what I thought about anything before.” Every below-the-line person has dozens of stories about how producers have thrown phones at them, berated them to the point of tears, fired them for no reason, etc, etc. When they talk about it, it’s like you can see their crushed souls, you can see how the system’s corrupt DNA has its boot on their neck. They all just resign themselves to this treatment as a part of being in the system.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Jesus Christ–I AM FAMOUS FOR BEING AN ASSHOLE–and even I treat the people I work with well, if for no other reason than because it makes good business sense. Why do so many of the successful people in Hollywood not understand this? Why does no one get that if you treat people well, they will work twice as hard, be twice as productive (and probably work for less money). Everyone is better off if you are just nice to the people you work with.
In what world is Tucker Max giving someone a lecture about decency and respect?
Only in Hollywood.
Comment and discuss.