AN INTERN AT a Hollywood production company was vying for an assistant job when he found out his boss was dead. “I got a call telling me not to come in, and I wondered if I was fired,” he says. He’d spent the weekend deep cleaning the office. Did he break something? Maybe he was in trouble for taking a photograph of a prop from one of the company’s hit movies? “It wound up being way more of a serious issue, however.” His boss had died by suicide.
When he was called back to work, one of the company’s producers gave him a promotion of sorts. He was no longer an intern, he was a runner, which meant he’d get a small hourly wage for doing anything he could to help a company in crisis. “No matter what they asked, I just said, ‘No problem,’ ” he says. Organize funeral flowers? No problem. Run errands for grieving loved ones? No problem.
Then he was asked to help deal with his late boss’s office. “I found a lot of drugs in there,” he says. It was the first time he had seen anything like it. “I was like, This is Hollywood. This is drugs.” Higher-ups debated what to do with the controlled substance in question. “I just was like, ‘You guys, if you want to take this giant bag of drugs into another room, I’m never going to ask you what happened to it."" He was subsequently offered the assistant job.
"To this day," he says, "I think that's why I got it."
When the news broke that Matthew Perry’s personal assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, would face up to 15 years in prison for illegally procuring the ketamine that led to the actor’s death, a shudder went through assistants all over the entertainment industry. It was a serious there-but-for-the-grace-of-God moment. After all, the assistant community knows how hard it is to say no to a Hollywood boss.
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