When I worked on staff on TV shows, I worked in an environment where some people were getting rich and/or famous and some people were about as far down on the food chain as one could possibly imagine. The latter included unpaid interns and folks who were paid but not that much more than the unpaid interns. These were folks who could not have survived forever on those wages (or lack thereof) and were gambling that being in the office and proving themselves hard-working, smart and useful would lead to much better positions.
And sometimes, it did. Some of those folks went on to the more prestigious, better paying jobs…and some did not. One I know finally gave up all dreams of a lucrative position in Show Biz. Let’s call him Paul. He was a “runner,” someone to send on errors to get lunch or deliver scripts of pick people up at the airport…stuff like that. It rarely pays well and those who do it are often treated like dogs being told to run out, catch the frisbee and bring it back.
One day, Paul had enough of the disrespect and he quit and went to work for a company that does “board-up” services. If a window in your house suddenly shatters, you call them and they send someone over to clean up the broken glass and nail plywood over the opening.
Glamorous? Exciting? Probably not. But he was glad to be freed from worrying about the rent and the grocery bills. And he’s probably happiest to be out of that “rock bottom” staff job where he endured a fair amount of emotional abuse. Just as there always seemed to be people around on those shows to do menial tasks, there always seemed to be at least one well-paid, secure-in-his-or-her-position person who enjoyed treating the underlings like shit.
A lot of people seem very interested in finding out if celebrities — or really, anyone who’s successful that they know of –are nice. I’m asked about some of the famous people I’ve met: “Is he nice?” And sometimes, they don’t ask. They just form their own opinions based on unsourced rumors or brief encounters. Here’s an exchange I’ve had a few times. Let’s say it’s about a prominent person named Harry in a creative field.
SOMEONE: I just heard someone who works with him say that Harry isn’t very nice. I don’t understand this. When I met him, he was perfectly nice to me. He seemed like a great guy.
ME: Uh-uh. Under what circumstances did you meet him?
SOMEONE: At an autograph show. I waited in line fifteen minutes to meet him and when I got to the head of the line, I told him how much I always enjoyed his work and he couldn’t have been nicer.
Well, of course. In public…being treated like a god…perhaps earning money from his fans…even Attila the Hun could have been a helluva nice guy for five minutes. Work with Harry every day in stressful situations with a lot of money and/or power on the line…then lets see how “nice” he is.
I don’t like being judgmental about people but it’s sometimes unavoidable. You have to have a good sense of who to watch out for in this world, who to avoid, who to treat with the proverbial kid gloves. And if you’re going to make those judgments, you need to consider how the individual conducts him or herself in two situations…
- How do they treat people who perhaps pose some threat to them? Someone who could conceivably cost them some of their success?
- And how do they treat people who can’t fight back?
When you’re telling them you love their work and asking or paying for an autograph, you are in neither position. Of course, most of them will be nice. (The ones who aren’t really have problems.)
And if you’re only in their presence for five or ten minutes…well, the worst human being on the planet can go five or ten minutes without showing it. Someone who works with them every day in conditions where everyone really has to deliver might be in a better position to know who and what they are. But even that might not tell you everything.
Because at one time or another, everyone is at their worst and if that’s all you see of them, you might get a false or incomplete impression. There might be a good explanation for why they were rude or seemed to be rude at a given moment. Misunderstandings do happen and people do have bad days. I’ve seen some of the people I’ve admired most in this world not be at their best.
What I guess I’m getting at is: If you must judge people, don’t judge them by brief, casual encounters. Or rumors. On someone else’s description of their experiences with them.
Which brings us back to Paul. You remember Paul from a number of paragraphs above. Here is what caused Paul to flee the tinsel ‘n’ glamour of a network television series and go off to a life of boarding up broken windows…
The boss on that series — I think his title was Supervising Producer — decided one day to buy beer for the entire staff one Friday afternoon. He summoned Paul and told him how much beer would be needed and then handed Paul an amount of cash with which to buy the beer. It was about half of what even the cheapest beer would cost in the required volume.
Paul said something like “I can’t get that much beer for that little money” and the boss began screaming at him. Full-out. Hysterically. I even heard it in my office down the hall. Paul had forgotten a couple of very crucial rules for working with this particular boss: You never tell him no. You never tell him something he wants can’t be done. And you never, ever tell him he’s wrong.
No, it was not rational. Paul was right. The boss was wrong. But the boss had something in him that hated — hated! — being told he was wrong and he couldn’t take that hate out on most of the people who worked on our show. But he could take it out on Paul because Paul couldn’t fight back. All Paul could do was get the hell out there and he was glad he did.
But if you’d asked the stars of our show what they thought of our Supervising Producer, you know what they would have said? They would have told you he was nice. Very nice. He didn’t treat them the way he treated Paul.
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