Revenge of the desk slaves
FOR FOUR weeks in April of 2006, I was an Internet celebrity. In one industry, in one city, I was a star. The blogs went crazy. Defamer was all over me. National Public Radio wanted an interview -- but I turned them down. My site got more than a million hits in 24 hours.
It all started one morning the previous December, the same week the Hollywood Reporter listed the 100 most powerful women in Hollywood -- the trade's equivalent of a swimsuit issue.
The first thing I did that morning was run to Starbucks and get my boss' drink of choice, a double tall latte with caramel sauce, not caramel syrup because "it tastes like trans fats." I was a Hollywood assistant, one of hundreds of young, ambitious college graduates in L.A. getting coffee that morning. It was always better to get the coffee before we got busy rolling calls. (Rolling calls, for the uninitiated, is when an assistant acts as a telephone operator. The boss calls from out of the office. Then, with the boss still on the line, the assistant calls someone else and links them together.)
That morning, my boss told me to work on urgent tasks, so I skimmed the 100 Most Powerful Women list for hotties or notties. Successfully finding both, I considered my first urgent task a success.
I read the Hollywood Reporter not because I loved it, particularly, but because it was part of my job as an assistant to a successful movie producer. I was the eyes and ears of my boss. I answered phones all day, rolled calls to him when he was out and only saw celebrities as they walked past my cubicle.
Hollywood assistants spend every minute of every hour of every day at a computer, the Internet at our fingertips, a telephone headset connecting us to the outside world. On a daily basis, I might've rolled 500 calls -- and it was always another assistant who answered the phone. We did each other favors and kept scores and made enemies and backstabbed, and most of the time we'd never even met. The assistant subculture is a Zen koan: Everyone knows everyone; no one knows anyone. And if assistants do happen to meet in person, their names really don't even matter. "I'm Alex McArdle." Pause. "From Tom Hanks' office."
Taken as one entity, assistants form the biggest brain in Hollywood, a living network where information spreads via e-mail at 120 words per minute. As individuals, they operate alone in a vacuum, vaguely aware they're part of a community that doesn't really exist.
