Christopher Ming's Blog

Introduction

Got slapped with a backhand of information overload the other day. Felt like a shotgun shell of wisdom blasted in my direction – that can happen when you sit down and speak with two people who genuinely care about helping others with their careers – not easy to find. The information can be spliced two ways: paradigm and conceptual.

Paradigm

There aren’t sheets on the bed – that single observation caused the paradigm shift. Changed the way you looked at these last five months in Los Angeles.

It’s a queen-sized bed, graced with a twin-long flat sheet, the type made for foam dorm beds covered in stains incoming freshman pray are remnants of beer or (if it must be a bodily fluid,) vomit. The twin-long sheets is the color of white sanitation, the color of strait-jackets and hospital corridors. Instead of a duvet or comforter or a blanket, there’s a lime green 20-degree EMS mummy-style sleeping bag. Which is great for the surprisingly cold nights in Los Angeles, but doesn’t scream, “Welcome home!”

Because – and here’s the turn – this still isn’t home.

Even after schlepping shiz from coast to coast, at the heart of it, Los Angeles still wasn’t anything of permanence. The trucker hat hasn’t been hung, the proverbial roots haven’t snaked down like octopus tentacles into fake California Astroturf grass. Living in Los Angeles was no more than a pit stop: the car still rocks New York plates, a New York driver’s license still gets flashed to bouncers, and the I-9 forms still re-direct to the 518. Up to this point, this hasn’t been life, but rather, just another grand adventure, something to  pick up and walk away from after nine months. That’s been the lifestyle for years now: never committing to call any one locale “home,” or any one gig to call a career, and living light so the departure is never much more than a middle finger while EXITING STAGE LEFT.

This realization struck like a knuckle duster to a glass chin while discussing possible career steps with a friend. We debated the merits of getting into an agency program – getting paid minimum wage for a year or more as you’re groomed to become an agent-extraordinaire – but you’d come out with an arsenal of tools, and most importantly, the contacts of the future Misters and Misses Hollywood’s.

I scoffed at the idea.

Can’t do that for a year, I told him. I can’t possibly commit 18 months learning to become something I don’t want – no matter how great the reward.

He smiled at me. He said, “Why not?”

It’s too long of a commitment.

He said, “The best writers don’t stay writers their whole careers. They move onto other things: they direct, they produce, they become creative executives. If you want to look out for your long-term career, then the agency program and establishing all those contacts is a good plan. Because at some point, you’re going to need them. The cost maybe 18 months, but over the course of your career or your life, what’s 18 months?”

This friend, who a lifetime ago, was a professional dancer, said it took him 10 years of training to get to the point where he had the physical tools to walk into an audition and know he’d get the part. Compared to 10 years of grueling, physical training, what’s 18 months?

These last five months have been cute: poking a toe in the water, testing the temperature. But at some point, the time for dicking around is over: you’re either in or you’re out. You’re either running with the bulls or you’re standing safely on the sidelines. Except this ain’t no sprint, neither – only marathon-men make it in this business, while hot commodities are just flashes in the frying pan, dying out fast as fireflies in a jar. So if you’re not willing to put in the time, don’t bother. If you can’t keep your eye on the target for three, five, ten years, then you’re just clogging up the system. You have to accept missing out on dozens of other adventures, any number of birthdays, weddings, Christmases, and decide whether those are sacrifices you’re willing to make.

The paradigm shift came down to this: continue working and living and doing the way things have been doing, then go home with some nice stories, and say, “I tried.”

Or change. Take it more seriously. Be totally and completely committed. Then visit what you used to call home, and say, “I did it.”

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Categories: hustle,turning points
by Chris
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There are bad days. Two steps forward, one step back days.

Then there are the worst days. One step for man, one mothertrucking leap to square one at escape-velocity speed, a leap straight out of the influence of All Things Good and an ejection towards Never Never land.

On the bad days, you’re in over your head.

On the worst days, you’re an imposter, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Sweat trickles into tear ducts beneath the mask, keenly aware that everyone in the elevator sees through the shined up kicks and pressed white shirt as the numbers climb tick tick tick to the beat of the Musak, towards your destiny of cracked leather chairs and arthritis inspiring keyboard, despite its ergonomic intentions.

The question, “What made you think you were special?” Sonic Booms! in ear drums on the worst days. Thousands flock to Los Angeles, the Hajj of the entertainment industry, and they’ll devote years of their lives to the crusade, giving up friends and family and dates and poker nights and beaches and sunsets to make it. You think you’ll climb even a mole hill while you’re here? Yes, talent rises, but if you don’t realize there are at least hundreds of people more talented than you, if you think you gots the biggest talent in all the land, then you’re spending time with the wrong people. Even artists with talent oozing from their pores may never make it to the top, as there’s only so much square footage to go around. You want your piece, you have to take it: throwing bows and Tony Jaa knees strikes in every direction. Forget claws; get an Adamantine skeletal frame and hide so tough, it’ll make Captain America’s, federally endorsed, Nazi-crushing shield look like a single-ply toilet paper. And if you hear “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” one more time, you might donkey punch that person right in their sardonic mug.

Trying to make it Los Angeles changes how you view the world. You see it through a rotating kaleidoscope, where values and morals and truth and lies shift with the slightest breeze. It changes you; changes you precisely in the manner you scoffed at before, back when you thought nothing would change you, that you’d stay true no matter what.  The worst days whittle down that resolve like a sharp knife and rough hands groping a block of putty. Straight-shooters might make it in this business, but they certainly don’t make it easy on themselves, and who’d notice if you cheated an inch here, took an iota advantage there?

The loneliness aches like a dull pang on the worst days. Countless meals-for-one while you create your own hustle 3,000 miles away from anyone familiar, the people you want in your life as they love and cry and marry and hold concerts and make art and make mistakes and do what made you love them to begin with. Meanwhile, you try forging new relationships in a climate where throwaway friends are as common as Astroturf roll-out lawns, and just as fake. Everyone’s playing the game, and at some point you realize there’s no way to turn it off, no reset button to push.

But even if the day stretches itself out like Gumby downing muscle relaxers on a hot day, the day ends; even the worst days end. And when it does, you’re still living in Los Angeles, driving down Sunset Blvd to go home or go drink or go commiserate, and this is something no one can take away. No matter the abuse or the belittlement or the loneliness, you’ll have this: you could be anywhere in the world, and here you are, making it on your own initiative and own hustle, getting paid to work your own hours, to create something unique for the world. You’re getting exactly what you signed up for; no more no less. All it took was the willingness to risk everything, which for the great majority of people, amounts to nothing at all.

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Categories: hustle,lonliness
by Chris
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What do great assistants do?

At 24, my father owned his first restaurant. The first Chinese delivery spot in downtown Albany, with stats like quote you’d get off the phone with Lee Fong and the delivery boy was ringing your doorbell unquote. When five p.m. came ‘round, it was sweet ‘n sour and Moo Shu out the wazoo. And my father, he’d storm the kitchen, up to his nostrils in hand-scribbled orders, and 1X1 he’d Gatling gun it to his partner and chef, Sam.

As quick as he shouted orders, Sam prepped the ingredients into wire handled white boxes. His hands dove in and out of his prep fridge like a conductor’s stroking his orchestra into the climax.  No premeasured portions, this wasn’t no Subway operation run by teeny boppers paid minimum wage to pretend to be sandwich artists. Fresh broccoli crowns and snappy peapods and crisp baby corn was weighed by their texture against your palm, by their feel, not by numbers on a scale. Sauces didn’t come in La Choy glass bottles, they were recreated from pinches and dashes of soy, sesame oil, ketchup, salt, sugar, mirin. Nothing written down, nothing completely standardized. Every improvised off the top.

Ticket minders lined every wall, and by five thirteen, white tickets with mental math computed totals surrounded my father. He and Sam were very fast, very smart. Both retained information like a sponge retains E. coli. But those qualities alone didn’t make them a good team. That wasn’t what made them a success.

Anticipation made them a success. My father didn’t just read the orders; he watched Sam, constantly aware of how fast he was packing, that if he was packing Orange Chicken, he only memorized the next seven dishes and he forgot there were two Kung Pao dishes, not one. It was a jazz duo between the two, never missing a beat even as they trampled notes and forgot orders, because at the end of a string of tickets, Sam would ask, “What did I forget?”

And my father knew. No hesitation, straight off the top.

The story sticks, on this slow descent towards Santa Monica Blvd, after day one on a manager’s desk, my introduction on How to be an Assistant. It sticks because amidst the coagulated information on the brain stem, the major takeaway, the 90 to the 90/10 is: great people anticipate. Don’t matter the industry, of food or film, the most important skill is the ability to anticipate the needs of the people around you. That’s what makes someone an asset to cause and company. Anticipation.

It’s not some voodoo extra sensory perception, neither – no ting-tangling spidey-sense alerting you of lasers or sentient metal claws in the immediate vicinity. Good anticipation is measurable. Actionable.  It’s work and research and focus on the details that directly affect you. The other components of a good assistant: phones mechanics, conferences and schedules and messengering, how fast you read and write; all trimmings. Anticipation, attention to detail, that’s the turkey. Not just saying it, not just putting on the resume because it sounds good. Living it, breathing it, delivering on it:

What’s on next week’s schedule? Next month’s? What meetings must The Big Cheese take? With whom, pertaining to what deals? Where and at what time is each of these meeting? How many glances and double-checks till you’re positive? Are you confident enough to schedule appointments on the fly, Blackberry unattached to fist, and without a peek at Outlook?

How far back have you read their e-mail? What projects are in the works?  Are you researching everyone in the phone log: who they are, who they work for, what’s their relationship to your employer? Are you building your own mental dossier of the people in the business? Why not?

Who are the clients? Who are the important clients? How does he speak to them when he’s got them on the phone?

Do you know when to interrupt? Which calls to give him when says, “no calls?” After your third reminder of who he owes, do you know who he’ll actually return to and who he won’t?

Who is the competition? What is their relationship to these people?

The assistant position isn’t a fair one. It’s not fair to get dumped on with miscellaneous chore, to take on work outside of the job description, or to get screamed at for failure to communicate, especially when the failure happened on someone else’s end. It isn’t fair that mind reading is required to succeed as an assistant. But since when was any aspect of this industry fair? Agents and managers get paid to make deals, not have myelin coated communication channels. That’s what the assistant is for.

It can be frustrating, thankless work, executing the duties of an assistant at this standard. It’s easy to ask, “Is it worth it?” especially if joining the ranks of the Masters of the Universe isn’t the end goal.  Why kill yourself in this role if it’s not the angle you want to break into the industry?

Because people don’t align themselves with you because you’re acute or obtuse. They get on your side because they see you’re smart, that you’re going to be a success. And an IVY league diploma is hardly a guarantee of that. Getting the small details correct, following up on the miniscule, is.

Nailing the small details is the only way to prove you can handle the big ones.

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Categories: anticipation,assistants,restaurants
by Chris
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What’s the play?

There be two.

Numero uno – wait. Wait till you’ve put the finishing touches on your portfolio, spit-polished pitches to crossfire, getting caught up in the BING BANG BOOM, trying to send tingles a-shuddering down spines. Wait till you can show the Masters of the Universe you’re serious about the craft, not no East Coast blow-in blow hard moonlighting through the Denny’s managerial fast track as of two weeks ago, before scribbling THE END on a senior year creative writing thesis, convinced you’re holding Wonka’s Golden Ticket.

If you’re no blow-in, if you made the move to stand toe-to-toe with everyone else in this endeavor, you’re treated with an iota more seriousness. Except seven minutes into the hustle, and the temptation to wait will strike you harder than a Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! punch-out. You got the first person POV of the cliché: who you know matters more than how good you are.

Because everyone’s saying – no one’s buying.

Because everyone’s saying – there are no jobs.

Because – no baby writer can get a meeting or make a wave – not without the gravitational pull of a star from afar: the phone call from an uncle or cousin, the referral of a family friend.

That first person POV is filled with slush, garbage and shod from coast to coast, peripheral to peripheral.  Without the referral, don’t matter how brilliant the concept or how wonderfully tight the story, it’s just more sludge clogging up the system. So you wait. Till you’ve built your own following, till your reputation precedes yourself, till you’ve paid your dues and the people who matter know you’re the Real Deal.

Plenty of reasons to wait. All of them good.

Opportunity costs are expensive. Every tick tock wasted on writing queries that won’t get read, or setting up meetings that get pushed, is time spent not making cash monies or time not spent working on the next script. It’s not enough to be a worker – everyone’s a worker, and everyone’s got access to the same 24 hours you do. But who’s working smarter? Who’s investing their 19-hour day in the right basket? Without the referral, is it a waste of time trying to get past the gatekeepers?

Maybe.

But isn’t that their job? That’s why these assistants get paid their $10 per hour plus daily bonuses or ridicule and abuse, yes? And why the interns eek out a living on just the latter? They call ‘em gatekeepers, so give them something to keep. Like Elizabeth Gilbert said:

“I often hear people say, ‘I’m not good enough yet to be published.’ That’s quite possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that. Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT.”

Shell out on the opportunity cost to chase the lucky break. Sinking 20 hours into queries that produce squat, yes, that’s 20 hours you’ll never get back. But it’s not like you’re thumb twirling between those 20 hours, staking out the USPS for the rejection letter. You’re still working, still creating, still hustling – point being: go after the big score, but keep notching the small victories.

So GO. Don’t wait. Hustle. Make your own luck and create your own contacts. This means taking some long shots, doing things people say don’t produce results. Remember, they don’t know; nobody knows what works. No one can predict the next hit. The only way you can guarantee it’s not you is by never getting in the mix.

Have a methodology to GO. Target, individualize, meet people in person if you can; doesn’t matter how good a writer you are, it’s difficult for personality to shine through an e-mail. Do not prematurely burn a contact by asking for a favor – not until you’ve earned the right to do so. Target, target, target; don’t waste anyone’s time by sending over something that’s out in left field for them, or less than your best. Do your homework – which is more than a good log-line and a Google search of whom you’re meeting. As a manager said, “it’s not just knowing the pitches. It’s knowing the stories backwards and forwards, never missing a beat. It’s knowing the subtext beneath the stories, the motives behind the characters. It’s knowing everything and having the polish to communicate it in the simplest, clearest way possible.”

That’s the play after finishing the script.

Go. Do your homework. Take the long shot – and keep hustling amidst it all.

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Categories: hustle,scripts
by Chris
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There’s this scene in the flick, Social Network. Two score, seven more bodies circled ‘round five computers and a bottle of whiskey. The dry erase board squishes uncomfortably against the wall. Music blares. Students cheer. In the epicenter, five students write code to break into a security system. That’s fifty fingers — count ‘em! — flying through keyboard strokes; ten individual eyeballs absorbing data at a pace that makes Hoffman’s Rainman look like Special Ed; five shots of amber elixir slammed down throats every seven seconds the bell goes BRING BRING BRINGING. These mad geniuses pound away, hacking to see who hacks it amongst Mark Zuckerberg’s band of merry.

At a distance, Zuckerberg and business partner, Eduardo Salverin, observe the spectacle. Neither knows it, but it’s the beginning of the end. Zuckerberg’s assembling the West Coast Crew, his A-Team; he’s surrounding himself with very own Justice League or Teen Titans or Planeteers and he’s not even trying to save the world or take pollution down to zero. He just wants to be your Friend.

So he gathers his squad of geeks and programmers, all who’ll pursue this passion with what some might call fervor, others call obsession. And Salverin, he’s already opted out of this leg of the gravy train. He believes in the product as much as anyone else, but his dedication is back at stage 1-02 while the Z-Boys polish their plungers and comb their mustaches, readying to storm King Koopa’s castle

Zuckerberg knew it. That Salverin didn’t have the “stand-to-lose-everything, win-at-all-costs” drive. The only thing Salverin offered the partnership was “balance” – sound advice, hedged bets and proportionate responses – everything Zuckerberg didn’t want or need. Zuckerberg wanted focus. He wanted to surround himself with like-minded individuals, all with sights on the same goal, all sharing the attitude to get it done.

Not easy. Not easy to have this foresight. Not with the rhetoric of balance bouncing around like a Plinko chip, preached by everyone and their baby’s momma. Balanced diet, balanced portfolio, work-life balance… advice that probably works for 98 percent of the population. But for the two percent who want to change an established order, determined to win against the house when the deck is stacked clear to the cumulus nimbus, dividing eggs is a waste of protein.

Benjamin Graham said it best: “Don’t diversify. Don’t put your eggs in different baskets. Put all your eggs in one basket.

Then watch that basket like a hawk.”

When odds be long and time short, balance beams and juggling acts don’t impress no one. Balance leads to great stories of how someone once took their shot and missed. Focus, immersing yourself in passion and passionate people, leads to others telling your story for you.

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Categories: focus,friends
by Chris
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