Agency Promotion Hazing represents everything wrong with this town

I saw an "EXCLUSIVE" on Deadline the other day that really turned my stomach. This is the story of how one agency told an assistant they were promoting him to full agent. They called him over to one of the partners homes on a Saturday to build a swing set. Then when he showed up, several of the partners performed a "career intervention," (where he was no doubt made to feel incompetent and unappreciated) before ushering him out into the backyard for a "surprise" celebration with his friends and family.

Bullshit like this is precisely what's wrong with this industry. I don't see what's funny about hazing a hard-working assistant like that. And I'm sure the douchebags who concocted this master scheme thought they were so clever that they'd push this guy to the limits of his temper before saying "Surprise! You're one of us now!" but honestly, it's still incredibly mean-spirited. The promoted assistant is still the butt of the joke.

But that's not what elevates the brilliant minds over at this company to the title of "Bitter Script Reader's Asshats of the Week." If you want to conduct promotion ceremonies with all the dignity of Rush Week at Beta House, be my guest. If you get your jollies by pushing someone around just to see if he'll snap, or cry, or whatever, fine... doesn't make you any different from half the assholes in this town. No, what elevates this agency to the most classless operation in town is that someone said, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we called up Nikki Finke and gave her this story exclusively?"

The Greek system at my college was loaded with assholes - it's why I pledged GDI - but there was at least one element of honor to the hazing: What happened in the house, stayed in the house. I'm sure pledges were made to endure many humiliating things, but no one called up the school newspaper and plastered it on the front page. Sad that this agency lacks the professionalism and maturity that even a 19 year-old pledge armed with ruffies can grasp.

Going public like this pretty much ensures that this whole ritual had nothing to do with the assistant at all. It was ALL about the perpetrators of this "genius" prank. Unsatisfied with merely getting their target embarrassed in front of his friends and family, they had to crow about it to the entire town!

Even so, the prank itself is still pretty tasteless. It's never funny when a boss "jokes" that one of his employees is about to be fired, or deliberately makes him feel like his job is in jeopardy just for kicks. It wasn't funny when Michael Scott did it to Pam in the first episode of The Office and it's not funny in real life.

I almost guarantee that the people at the top in that company are among the discourteous who insist "Thick Skin Required" when putting out job postings for their company. This is a sort of fine print that many in the industry use to absolve themselves of treating those in their employ like human beings. I've known plenty of CEOs and Company Presidents who've been able to get the job done and motivate their employees without resorting to dehumanizing them. What makes some Ari Gold wannabe so special that he can ignore basic human courtesy?

The worst part is that this sort of assy behavior is self-replicating. The abused become the abusers. The victims of pranks like this will turn around and do it to the next guy in five years, reasoning that it's okay because it was done to them. It's the same with salaries. "You're going to work 15 hours a day and take work home every night for the wage of a mere $9/hr. Why? 'Cause 'Fuck you,' that's why! I had to endure this years ago - what makes you so special that you're too good for this?"

Hey guys, how about you quit playing the part of "Poor Man's Ari Gold" in "The Me Story starring Me" and just focus on doing your jobs and appreciating your employees without publicly humiliating them? Maybe you're not all assholes over there, but everything in that article (including the fact it was made public) is exactly what an asshole would do.

I tell you this, though. I'm not going to be querying any of these agents. And I certainly wouldn't waste my time filling their inboxes with increasing worse pitches and made-up queries certain to annoy even the most hardened agent. Not even taking into account I know their email structure is readily available through IMDBPro.

The Thick Skin Project

There's a particular phrase in job postings that never fails to make my blood boil, "Thick skin required." I don't know if this sort of language is common in other industries, but it turns up a lot in Hollywood.

Let me translate for you, "You will be working for an asshole who is so convinced of his own self-importance that he doesn't deem those under him worthy of common courtesy. When he has a bad day, he will take it out on you. You are the flesh-and-blood stress ball. You will be yelled at, degraded, humiliated, unjustly chewed out and called names." Yet somehow all of this is okay because they specify "Thick skin required."

At what point does one's ego trump the simple human decency of treating others - even those under them - with simple respect? Most of these job postings are for assistant positions with long hours and low pay. I've gone on a few of these interviews, and you could tell just by talking to the current assistant that the boss was a real asshole. The worst is that those bosses are surrounded by people who kiss their asses so much that they've completely forgotten the manners their mother taught them.

You know what would make me happy? For all the job-seekers in Hollywood to get together and send out a standard response to any idiot in HR who thinks this kind of bullshit is acceptable. You know, come up with a standard template that reads something like this:

"You must be a total asshole to need to specify your employees should have thick skin. At what point were you elevated to being above simple manners? If you are a rude prick who can't speak to your underlings in a civil tone, that's YOUR problem, not your employees. Don't make your failings as a human into a "weakness" you blame on those who break their back for you. If you have to warn those around you to have thick-skin, that's a pretty good sign no one loves you."

If every tool who posted this got a few hundred emails, it might embarrass him into being nice for an hour.

I'm aware that most of those emails are screened by assistants, and as such, there's a good chance these hypothetical emails would never reach their target. Still, it would be great if those assistants printed those out and "accidentally" left them behind for the boss to find after said assistant has moved on to their new job. Would I feel bad about flooding the assistants' emails? No, not really. They know they work for a jerk, so they'll probably get a kick out of it.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking, you can find the UTA Joblist posted HERE and see examples of what I'm referring to. The version that's active as I write this has no fewer that three jobs specifying "thick skin required." The UTA list used to be a closely guarded list that was passed in the shadowy corners of back alleys, but it's been pretty accessible for a while now, and thus, useless as an "exclusive" job list.

Anyway, if this joblist quirk annoys you as much as it does me, feel free to send out a link to this page, Twitter about it, put it on your Facebook page, or blog about it. Other bloggers, you're welcome to repost any of this, or even come up with funnier versions of my retort. (And if anyone does have even more clever retorts, please post away in the comment section. You're all creative people - what's the most biting way you'd respond to a "thick skin only" post.)

Viva La Resistance!