Welcome back to How-To H’wood week, where I solve the great issues surrounding the most labyrinthine and treacherous of industries, and reveal how to rise, stay sane and grease the wheels of basic survival. Yesterday, I explained how to ask a favor. For my earlier guides, click here.
In today’s edition, we turn to that grayest of Hollywood areas: friendship.
In Hollywood, a city fueled by refined passive-aggressive energy, we are all “friends.” Everyone you had a meeting with and had a great talk with about your respective vacation plans is instantly a friend. Every actor who remembers your name is certainly your friend — your very good friend, most likely. Everyone you met somewhere before, and now you’re seeing them here, is an old, old friend. Even your enemies are your friends, or your frenemies.
The business of Hollywood is so dependent on relationships that no one can afford not to be friends with someone. No one can afford not to be friends with everyone. As seen in yesterday’s How-To, at the very least, having decent relationships with a lot of people is the key to survival in this whole business.
All this is why — if maintaining your sanity is of importance to you — having friends and relationships from outside the industry, where relative status, pecking orders and a general sense of “What can this person do for me?” aren’t being constantly assessed and reassessed at every turn. Having those touchstones to remind you that human contact isn’t all Hunger Games from start to finish is critical — not just for keeping your head, but for then allowing you to dive back into the Thunderdome, without a sense of desperation.
But there are friends and then there are friends. And the latter are a rare breed in this town. In the nation’s capital, the old quote from Harry Truman is the guide to relationships there: “You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.”
But in Hollywood, your dog has already taken a meeting with your agent and made plans to cut you out of his three-picture deal and give the vet’s assistant a producer credit instead.
Note the example used below in Merriam-Webster in its lowest definition of “friend”: Showbiz friends.
So howdoyou make real friends in this town, and keep them? Or can you even? Below, I break it all down — including why old friends are key, business partnerships are vital (but with a dangerous downside), how to recognize if you are loyal or just a scheming climber, making the first steps in approaching a possible friendship, the upside and downside of trauma bonding, and how sometimes a bank robber’s mentality wins the day…
MEAN STREAK From left: Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese and Lindsay Lohan in 2004’s Mean Girls, about a young woman who betrays her friends to advance on the social ladder. (Paramount/Everett Collection)
When Hollywood friendships go wrong among showbiz friends, as they so often do, the trouble more often than not can be traced to one of the pair losing their head — letting their ego inflate to the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving parade balloon.
Or, more prosaically, when the choice comes between a friendship and a career advantage, someone picks Door #2… ...
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