Chapter 8: Chapter 8 – A Typical Day in the Life of an American Digital Content Development Executive

Karen gets out of her Uber at the corner of Sunset and Western, a block away from the Upright Citizens Brigade theater. She’s meeting up with some friends to see a show tonight. Both to scout talent and to have an excuse to not spend an evening wallowing by herself at home. As she walks to the theater, a 3 story monstrosity with a massive red neon sign announcing its name, at the end of the block, she reflects on her surroundings.

 It’s a stone’s throw away from the Hollywood freeway ramp that feeds the majority of traffic into Sunset Blvd and the heart of Hollywood proper. The weird thing about Hollywood (the physical location) is that none of the movies or TV shows that made the place world famous actually got made there. Everything is shot in the Valley (Warner Brothers, Universal Studios, Disney, etc.), or Culver City (Sony Studios), or West Hollywood (Paramount). Hollywood is just a dumping ground for lost souls and dead dreams. It’s where tourists come to look at the Walk of Fame and marvel at its seedy surroundings. Here’s a star with some starlet’s name who was famous in the 1940s who you’d need to Google to remember. Here’s an anorexic homeless woman with a needle stuck in her arm sleeping on top of it. She came out here to be a star too, but she didn’t fuck the right person, or didn’t go to the right acting class, or her family didn’t have the right connections, or who knows, maybe she just didn’t have “it.”

“It” is a term used by everyone in Hollywood (the philosophical Hollywood, not just the physical location), from top level executives and decision makers, to production assistants working their first set, to acting teachers, to screenwriters, to film critics, amateur and professional. “It” is an intentionally vague, catch-all term referring to the unquantifiable star quality possessed by a person of a creative vocation or aspiration. “It” could refer to charisma or screen presence in an actor (like how you can watch all 5 feet of Al Pacino scream “say hello to my little friend” in his fake Cuban accent and be terrified and thrilled, but if you saw a real drug kingpin scream the same thing, you would cringe). “It” is the thing that makes people want to watch Kristen Stewart even though she can’t emote or cry on command. In a writer, maybe it’s the ability to arrange words in a phrase that gets repeated by the public ad nauseam, long after the movie comes out, and gets printed on t-shirts sold in Walmarts from India to Indiana. It’s the thing that makes you smile and hear Will Ferrel’s voice when you see “Did we just become best friends?” and Seth Rogen’s lack of “it” is the reason you can’t remember a single quote from any of his movies. 

“It” is purposefully undefinable and subjective because you can’t sue anyone for firing you or not hiring you over your lack of “it.” “It” can hide people from accusations of being racist, sexist, homophobic, nepotistic, etc. It’s a clean, simple way to reject someone while keeping your motives secret. “It” doesn’t mean anything, and it’s a way for people who made it big to justify their own monetary success and fame without looking too deeply at it or the world around them. It keeps them from driving off a cliff when the homeless encampments they pass by in their Bentleys and G-Wagons seem a little too close. Well, those people just didn’t have “it” and I did. That’s why I’m in a $400,000 car (the sum of which could purchase an apartment building that could house all of the people on this city block) and they’re living in tarp covered tents under a freeway underpass. “It” allows us to separate ourselves from those who are vulnerable, and justify lives of luxury and adulation which don’t make us happy, while others suffer and die in their own shit, on the streets outside of movie premieres. 

Karen reflects on the scam of the whole thing. How there might be 50 spots, max, for comedians to be in TV shows, movies, and commercials. The number 50 is generous, and includes roles with one to two lines in a 90 minute Netflix film, or side characters who just do ethnic accents, spots for people who will never really break out. Then, comedy training schools like the Upright Citizens Brigade, which offer classes in addition to their live shows, convince people that they too have a chance of breaking out, and having one of those 50 coveted spots, if they fork up $400 per unit, for 4 units to graduate, and then spend more money for advanced classes, and keep forking out money to attend shows to get better at improv, and patronize the cafe and parking lot. This could easily add up to a sum larger than a person’s monthly rent. If thousands of people are doing this every year, what are the chances of one of them actually breaking out? How many dollars of their money are actually seeing returns on their value? Karen didn’t feel like doing the math.

She’s nearing the comedy factory now. She smooths out her denim jacket and checks her phone’s selfie camera to check her nose for boogers and teeth for food scraps. She grimaces at her fat, ruddy face, and repeats to herself that the selfie angle lens is unflattering even on the most attractive people in the world. She spots her friends Morgan and Jessica in line, accompanied by a few of their own friends. She’s thrilled to see Morgan’s friend Sally, who she’d always found cute but never had an excuse to speak to. “Hey guys, how’s it going?” 

“Karen, you made it!” The friends hug her. 

“What’s up, Sally?” Sally gives her a hug, and Karen thinks she can feel Sally’s nipple rings press into her denim jacket. In the line, Karen and her friends pass around a flask, and Karen feels her face grow warm and her tongue loosen. The feeling of being ugly dissipates quickly into feeling charming and cute. 

The show isn’t a complete waste of time. Karen laughs and even sneaks a few glances at Sally’s legs, who is seated next to her. There is even a moment when their shoulders brush on the arm rest and Karen thinks it might be intentional. Afterwards, they walk to the Marshall’s parking lot across the street and go to the taco truck. Karen gets a couple of birria tacos. They eat their tacos around a plastic table. Karen attempts to breach conversation with Sally.

“What’d you think of the show?” 

“I thought it was so funny. The tall guy with glasses was pretty great.”

“Oh my God, yeah. That thing where he was like the oarsmen at the Holocaust awareness jewish summer camp.”

Sally laughs. “How do they come up with this stuff on the spot like that?”

“So insane.”

Sally takes a bite of her taco, and a line of dark red birria juice drips out of the corner of her mouth towards her well defined chin. She covers her mouth with embarrassment and tries to talk between chews. “Oh my God.”

Karen jumps into action and grabs a few napkins. “Here. This stuff is so messy.” Karen tries to force a charming laugh, but it sounds more like she’s clearing her throat. 

Sally grabs one of the napkins. “Thank you.” She wipes the sauce off her mouth and holds onto the used napkin.

“Are you pretty into comedy, then?” Karen asks after racking her brain for a better question. 

“Oh yeah, definitely. I’m not like an expert or anything, like I’m sure you’d know way more than me, but I like it.” 

“Nice. Yeah, me too. I’m actually scouting, like, talent, like to try to develop a new show around them.”

“Yeah, really? That’s so cool. What is it that you do again?”

“Well, I’m sort of like a junior, development executive.”

Karen looks down shyly, in mock humility, to try to not sound like a douche. 

“So cool. So what kind of show are you trying to develop?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. It’s kinda like, we pick the person first, then build it around whatever skills they have, or like whatever their speciality is. Usually it’s just a host talking about pop culture or something, but you never know, maybe someone is really into streetwear and you can have a show where they ask people on the street about their clothes, or they’re into politics and you can have them ask people about their political views and make them look stupid or something. Really revolutionary.” Karen forces another attempt at a charming laugh, to slightly greater success this time. She feels like she’s talking too much. 

“So, it sounds like you don’t exactly love what you do? I mean it sounds pretty cool to me.”

“Well, I don’t know. I think I used to have big dreams of making art or something, but then in practice… I don’t know if that’s possible in this industry. So I’m kinda just trying to climb the ranks and get into a position where I can make actual decisions and maybe make something good for once.”

“Uh-huh.” Sally takes a long sip of her Corona. Karen thinks she sees Sally’s eyes searching for another conversation to join around the plastic table. 

Karen takes another long sip of her own Corona. It’s empty when she puts it down. Karen admires the faint bluish veins under the skin of Sally’s neck, illuminated by the bright lights of the parking lot, and tries to guess if her tits would have the same.

“What about you, what do you do for a living?” 

“I’m a nurse practitioner.”

“Woah, I feel so pretentious now.”

“Why?”

“I’m here complaining about my job, and acting like what I do is so important, and you’re saving peoples lives.”

Sally tucks her platinum blonde hair behind her ear and gives a smile that Karen wants badly to read as sexually inviting. “I’m hardly saving lives. It’s mostly giving sponge baths and writing things in Excel charts… but yeah, I do feel like it’s meaningful. But hey… what you do is meaningful too.”

“Oh really, how?” 

“My patients watch a lot of T.V. It’s more comforting than staring at a blank wall, or having a doctor try to give you some vague encouragement. More often than not, people who are dying don’t even have family visit them. Or if they do, they don’t want to perform for them or have the energy to engage. A lot of time, the last thing people will see before they die, or the last happy experience they have is watching something on TV, or their laptop or whatever. It’s a great comfort, and it requires people like you to make it.”

“I really appreciate you saying that. Maybe I’m not such a piece of shit after all.”

The rest of the group seems ready to go home. The mutual friends that Karen knows Sally through are gathering their stuff and giving out their goodbye hugs. “It’s a school night, guys. I gotta get to bed.” Karen’s friend says. 

Karen turns to Sally, “Hey, would you want to get another drink? There’s this place Birds really close to us that’s pretty chill. All the comedians go there after their shows. 

Sally forces a tight lipped smile. She pulls her denim jacket closed, across her chest. “Ah, that sounds like so much fun, but I have an early shift tomorrow. Next time for sure.” 

Karen smiles back warmly, attempting to alleviate the awkwardness. “Yeah, of course! Hey, I’ll follow you on instagram or something.”

“Yeah, definitely!”

Karen watches Sally’s ass as she and the others walk to their cars. 

#

Karen gets home. She enters her hip, mid century modern Silver Lake bungalow and puts on some music. She cracks open a La Fin Du Monde and snuggles into her desk chair.

She’s horny. With the hours she’d been putting in at her job, she had very little time for dating. The paradox was the more she worked, the less time she had to cultivate her personal life. But the bleaker her personal life became, the more she needed to work to avoid thinking about it. Thus, her career has been going well and she spends most of her waking hours thinking about work. From the time she wakes up, during her morning routine and her 20 minute drive, she will parse through the various problems of the week. What shows on their development slate will succeed. What’s the dark horse, what can be put on the back burner. How this sizzle reel could be spiced up, how this project could have a stronger entry point for a brand integration.

At work she keeps her nose to the grindstone and makes sure to get in plenty of networking. You can be the hardest worker in the world but stay in the same position forever if you never meet the right connection. She stays late almost every day, polishing the development packages, tweaking, searching for the new projects, and she always gets drinks or dinner with a group of colleagues, or a mentor, or a friend in an adjacent industry or a rival company. That’s the only way to get the best blackmail. And always, she thinks of how to get ahead. She was promoted three times in her first year at the corporation, which has to be a record. 

One cannot be constantly working though, which is why she allows herself creative ways of blowing off steam. Such as tonight, it’s watching people die. Just videos. There are a multitude of them. Industrial accidents in factories in China with bad safety regulations. Teens playing with guns. Traffic cameras capturing multi-vehicle pile ups. Cartels sawing peoples limbs off, ISIS torture and beheading videos. Always a multitude.

This is a special night, because on the 4chan thread she sees a mysterious link to a recently ended live stream on some bootleg version of Twitch. She clicks it. It takes her to the carnage displayed in the shooter’s movie theater stream. She’s hooked. The drama. The off-handed film critique. The bodycount. Has to be above 50. Even better, there is another link in the thread to another live stream of a separate shooting. It has to be the same person. This time in a school. She has to know more.

Karen gets an adrenaline rush as the thought crashes into her brain like a bolt of lighting: This could be The Next Big Hit. She calls Peter. 

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“You’re joking. Who wants to watch some kind of school shooter killing people?” 

“According to the numbers on the link, a lot.” 

“How many?” 

“A few hundred thousand.”

“That’s nothing. I could get more engagement uploading myself jacking off.”

“It’s an unlisted link, posted totally anonymously. And that many people are interested. And forgive me for saying this, but the guy has charisma.” 

“He’s a murderer.” 

“I know this is very edgy but I think we could be onto something. If we just monetize his stream, we could make a ton of money for our brands. Way more than fucking Netflix. There’s nothing else like it.”

“What brand in their right mind is going to sell an ad on a stream that shows innocent people being killed?”

“Every major news station shows videos of war, death, car wrecks, all that bullshit. No one is up in arms about the commercials playing on those channels. I guarantee you, we sell one episode to a brand, any brand, and the other ones will see how it performs, they'll be on us like flies on shit. It’s going to be the next gold rush. I’m telling you.” 

“You are truly fucked in the head. I love it.You realize you’re going to hell, too, if you make a dime on this.”

“Hell is just Earth with no money in your pocket.” 

“You know what, fuck it. I’m shitcanned anyway if we don’t sell something, and I can’t have another fucking meeting with another pretentious dickwad kid. I just can’t. We pitch it for the digital wing. We’ll find some way to hide our tracks so the inevitable bad PR doesn’t touch the rest of our company. If they kick us out of the building, sobeit.”

#

The next day, back at the office, Karen and Peter huddle in a “think room” on the 28th floor. It’s got some couches and chairs and is supposed to make people think they’re not working when they actually are. Artificial intelligence has not yet been developed that can create profitable ideas for entertainment. Until then, for a piece of entertainment to come together, a few creative types are required to spitball with one another. Either that or some poor schlub has to type it all out by himself. You get the idea. Anyway, smart people get stuffed into these rooms and drained of their imagination juices, life experiences, and insights, until they can cobble something together that can be marketed for mass consumption and sold for advertising space. In the death of art is found the life of commerce. Karen and Peter talk about their secret pitch, the possibilities surrounding it, and even their ethical qualms. 

“Okay, let’s say we do sell this thing… isn’t that blood money?

Well… technically just by living out an upper middle class lifestyle in the United States, we’re profiting off the deaths of a lot of people. Think of all the soldiers who died … all the civilians, to allow us this. You think those janitors and waiters and shit that make your life easier exist because everything is equal?”

“You’re high again.” 

“Just a little bit.”

“I’m gonna go grab a snack, I need some carbs to get this ol’ brain working. You better have something convincing when I come back.”

“As long as I get some credit.”

“You know damn well it doesn’t work that way.”

Peter walks out of the think room and into the open concept office. Creative types work at “half-cube”’s, typing, listening to music, chit chatting about the latest TV show, movie, or underground comedy show they watched. Peter walks past. In his caramel suede chelsea boots, white jeans, blue denim shirt, gelled back hair, with perfect 5 o'clock shadow, he’s the man here. A secret nerd, he empathizes with the outward nerds who work around him, but he knows they look up to him as a leader, and probably think he was some type of jock back in high school. Couldn’t be farther from the truth, but they can’t know that. 

Peter enters the kitchen, and walks to the rows of free snacks. Bug protein bars, chips, some type of vegan jerky, everything. Janey, one of the assistants, enters the kitchen. Peter is happy he timed his trip well. She’s sexy in her cling wrap hippie meditation pants. White and black. Or black and white. They’re loose at the bottom like something a yogi would wear while he drank his coffee, but they cling to her ass like a second skin. She smiles at him as she walks in. Peter gestures to the bug protein bars. “Don’t they have any real snacks here? Do they want me to starve to death?” 

Janey approaches the kitchen island opposite Peter, she leans on it with her elbows, bending forward to grimace at the bar. “Eww.” Peter, delightedly, can see her cleavage, and her beautiful ass in those pants, sticking up just behind her. She looks at him with steady eyes. He pictures her sucking his cock. “Here, I know.”

She unlocks a cupboard under the island and comes back up with a row of Doritos. “Fuck. Thank you. You’re saving my life.” She hands him a bag of chips. Their fingers touch for a moment and he feels electricity shoot through his half-erection. Just then, a crotchety old office bitch walks in. Anorexic, her hair falling out. She smells strongly of wet dog. 

She glares at them and stares at their touching fingers. “Why don’t you two fuck already?” Peter tries to laugh it off but the moment is over. Janey tries to laugh it off too, but is turned off. She looks at him now like he’s old. They both exit the kitchen. Peter heads back to the think room. 

“Listen, I think we just need to find a way to get in contact with this guy. We’ll work on the pitch, but if we can’t get a deal with the guy on the ground, we don’t have shit. Call up one of those Indian dudes. Get ‘em on it. Okay?”

Pete’s laptop pings. He looks at the notification. It’s for an informational meeting with Daisy the intern. He sighs theatrically. “God dammit, another informational?” 

Karen looks up from her laptop. “You’ve had a lot of those lately?” 

“Yep, perks of being a senior VP, my sweet princess. Once you get to my level, everyone wants something from you. Interns look up to you and just want to hear your voice. Anyway, I better get going. Keep me posted with whatever the Indians say. And obviously, everything should comply with company privacy standards, et cetera.” 

He walks down to where the food trucks congregate outside of the corporate cafeteria. She stands still among the milling, nervous business drones. Her hair is down and frames her face as she looks out toward the oncoming foot traffic. Peter makes eye contact with her a hundred feet away, and they hold it as he continues to walk toward her. Like a secret. A fat white guy in a vintage leather jacket and a neck beard, seemingly in an attempt to open a flirtatious conversation, asks her if she’s in line, and she shakes her head. She returns to looking back at Peter and grins. Their little secret. Get your fat paws off of her you fat fuck, before I cave in your head. She’s mine, and I’m hers, Peter thinks to himself. 

Peter reaches her in the congregation of food trucks. “Hey, how’s it going?” 

“Good. Thank you for meeting with me again.” 

“No problem at all. It’s good to get out of the damn building. Do you need a coffee or anything? I’m starting to hit that mid-afternoon slump.” 

The intern purses her lips in concentration and looks around at the food trucks. “I think I’m good on coffee, but I’m weirdly craving ice cream. Do you want any?” Peter looks at the ice cream truck. It’s some hipster establishment called Milk-Ice with pink cherry blossoms painted all over the truck. 

“Yeah, ice cream sounds good.” 

She orders a scoop of rose lavender in a cup, and he gets buttercream crunch, also in a cup. She zips open her leather bag to try to pay, but Peter puts his hand up. He accidentally brushes her hand and his cock gets hard. “No, it’s okay. Corporate card, remember? These informational meetings are supposed to be for your benefit.” The intern gives him a mock frown. Dopamine pours into his brain. He feels like he’s falling in love if he hasn’t already. 

They take a seat on a metal bench, set back in a courtyard walkway between some production offices. Trees provide shade and there are enough people sitting around on laptops, or chatting through late lunches that their presence on the bench doesn’t look secretive, and there are few enough people walking by to make it unlikely for anyone who knows Peter to be there and inquire to his reasoning for sitting on a bench next to an intern more than ten years his junior. 

They eat their respective ice creams with small, pastel colored plastic spoons. “So how’s your screenplay going?” 

“Not great. I think I hate writing. And then we have to share our pages with the class every week, and theirs are even worse, and we have to give notes on them. It’s all bullshit because no one wants to upset anyone about something they wrote, so everyone just ends up giving compliments.” 

“I’m sure yours is better than you’re giving yourself credit for. What’s it about?” 

“It’s a horror movie about a family with a mentally ill child. But it’s ambiguous whether or not he’s possessed by a demon, or has a legitimate mental illness.” 

“Sounds pretty good.” 

“Can I try a bite of yours? I think I got the wrong one.” 

The intern dolefully looks at Peter’s cup of ice cream. Her tongue and lips are purple from the one she’d been eating. “Oh yeah, sure. Let me get you another--” The intern grabs the spoon from Peter’s cup, takes a small scoop of his buttercream ice cream, and takes a bite of it. She licks the spoon clean, then puts it back in his cup. 

“Ooh, so much better.” Peter feels shaky. He then takes a scoop of his ice cream. He savors the taste of the saliva Daisy left on the spoon. 

“How’d you like to grab a drink some time? We could go over your screenplay.” The intern smiles. 

“Are you asking me out?” 

Peter takes a moment. “My response to that is whatever will be considered less like sexual harassment.” 

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