ASSISTANT TO PRESIDENT IN ONE DAY

There is a truism in the entertainment industry that states “an assistant one day, a president the next.”

I just heard a great story that emphasizes this point: John Palermo was Bryan Singer’s assistant on the first X-Men film. John made such a good impression that Hugh Jackman hired him as Hugh’s assistant.

From there John was promoted on each subsequent film of Hugh’s: John became the executive producer on X-Men the Last Stand and full producer on X-Men: Origins. John is now running Hugh Jackman’s production company — Seed Productions.

This just goes to show you that you always have to be nice to everyone — from the assistant all the way up to the president. (In fact, when I launched Tom Sawyer Entertainment I promoted myself from assistant to CEO.)

And in the last six months alone, one of my friends went from assistant to director of development at a studio (skipping several steps along the way) and another friend went from the right-hand person of the head of a studio to becoming the president of Sony Pictures Animation.

On the same principle as meeting ANYONE – you should meet EVERYONE in the business, regardless of what company these people are at.

Because everyone switches jobs all the time, someone can be at a company one day (a company with which you might not have the same sensibilities) but could move to a different company the next day (a company for which you are perfect).

And again, if those executives/producers/agents like you, they will remember you and will reach back out to you and try to find a project to work with you on at their new company.

True story: An agent told me about how her client refused to meet with an executive at Lifetime. Now that same executive is running drama at NBC, and her client doesn’t have a relationship with that executive because the client wouldn’t take the meeting at Lifetime and start building a foundation for a successful future relationship.

Another true story: My client took a general meeting at Hugh Jackman’s company Seed Productions. The client is a young comedy writer/actor and, while he was never going to write something for Hugh, our friend who is the executive over there wanted to meet him.

We set up the meeting and told our client that nothing would probably happen but the exec is a good person to know.

It turns out that the company was looking for a writer for the Oscars and the executive fell in love with him.  Three days later he was on a plane to New York to write Hugh’s opening number for the Oscars.

In short, meet with anyone and everyone because you never know who or where these people will end up.