Staffing Season

It’s hard to explain staffing season, but I will give it an all-American effort. A long time ago I was hired by a ‘major’ producer to write a movie based on a true story. It was one of my most notable accomplishments as a young writer back in the day. I was really in the big time. It was big time money with a big time producer.

I was flown first class to a small town in Maine. I was to follow around this person I was to ink a movie about and soak up as much from him as I could. The story was about his unique experience in the military. He had been on national television, ‘Sixty Minutes’ and even ‘Oprah.’ After several weeks of research, I commenced to writing this famous person’s story and finally produced a first draft. The big time producer and his cronies read my first draft. A story notes meeting was called. I was excited. I knew it was going to be a tedious, page by page notes session, but I was so excited because I believed I had crafted a masterpiece.

I waited in the conference room and the big time producer and his cronies arrived. The big time producer got his assistant on the intercom and told her to hold all his calls for the next few hours. I got out my script, note pad, pen, and braced myself.

For the next 4 hours I was berated and just put through the wood shredder. This big time producer raked me over the hot coals. He told me the script was a piece of crap and he said I was the worst writer he’d ever experienced at my level. He said I should give all the money I made back.

I sat there and the misery and pain was unbearable. I could not wait to get out of there, get home and throw the noose over the rafters. It was by far the worst experience for me as a young writer, early in my career. My reputation took a tremendous hit. When a noted producer starts telling other noted producers, agents, directors, school teachers, and taxi drivers, how bad this writer he hired was, the town caves in on you.

This experience was not nearly a fraction as painful as waiting through staffing season and not getting pick up for a show.

I loathe staffing season with every molecule of my body. You have to sit for 3 months and hear every day, that a new show is up and running and two of your friends are on it. And when the entire season goes by and no one wanted you and you receive not one offer, you feel a thousand times worse than getting cut from a ball team, or not getting a date for the prom, or not asked to the big party that everyone was invited to but you.

Not getting a show during staffing season cuts through a writer’s self-esteem like a hot knife through butter. Even when you are writing a movie and you are getting checks in the mail, the buzz around town about who got picked up and what shows are being slotted in for May pickups, wears you down to a stub.

I really believe, truly, that if you asked one hundred writers, which was more painful, your mother’s unexpected death or not getting a staff position for a show during staffing season? I promise you, any writer who has been on a television show would say, ‘not getting staffed.’

My mother died unexpectedly and I’m still not completely healed. May my mother rest in piece. I loved her more than life, however, I’m closer to being healed from the loss of my mother, than the year I didn’t get a staff position as a writer after three straight seasons of being on a show. Staffing season is a bitch.

And if you are lucky enough to get hired on a new or existing show, there is no higher high than the first day you set foot in the writer’s room. You take your seat, you look out the window, and you feel so sorry for those poor, miserable, bastards that are out in the bitter cold of not being on a show.