Producers are evil. Directors are jerks. Actresses are useless. But, so you can really appreciate how sucky life can get in showbiz, this month I present to you, without comment, three stories about my friends:

CASE ONE

We’ll call him X. He has lived in Taiwan, Korea and China for the last 15 years. He’s done it alone. No supporting wife, girlfriend or (warning alarm) friends. No one to give him cogent advice or whisper loving support into his fatigued ear. So, a guy who knows how to survive. And he’s an actor, just like me.

I like him. He’s mean, funny and realistic. And he gives good, incisive advice. I also thought that even though I’ve watched him completely eviscerate other people, he wouldn’t (ha ha ha, because we were friends) do it to me.

I got this call from him one morning: “Jon, I have this super-amazing opportunity”

“Mmmmm, what is it?”

“There’s this office coming on the market. Because of my guanxi, I can get it for an awesome price.”

“So?”

“We should go in on it together!”

“Let me think about it. I’ll call you back later today.”

“No man, you have to come here right now. You have to make a decision.”

“Dude, it’s six o’clock in the morning.”

Back and forth. Finally I told him to stick it: it’s too early, it’s too much money, it’s too much of an emergency and you have lots of rich friends. And I went back to sleep.

But after I woke up, the whole thing didn’t smell right so I made a couple of phone calls. ... He owned the office.

The tenants had broken their lease and moved out and he was panicking trying to rent it. So what did he do? Call a real estate agent? Start to show the office? No, he said, I’ll call my friends and cheat them.

Now this is a guy who has been to my house, who has played with my daughter, with whom I have had long, soul-baring drunken nights. And the whole thing wasn’t even over like a million dollars or something. He tried to cheat me, a guy he’s known for 10 years, over a few thousand RMB.

What a dick. 

CASE TWO

I got hired to write a script. The person who hired me was a friend, call her Y. She hired me to write a script from an (actually cool) idea her boss had.

Because me and my writing partner hadn’t ever done anything like that before (and because she knew that) she scammed us into writing a whole treatment of this TV show for no money – telling us that we had to “prove ourselves” before they could pay us.

Which we did, slaving over it for months. Finally, when it came time to turn it in she handed us a contract. The contract was really complicated and hard to understand but there was something weird in it. I called her and she was like, “Yeah, you know this is just like a standard contract, total boilerplate, you know?”

So I asked her, “But it seems like what it says though is we give you what we write and if you like it, you buy it, but if you don’t like it, you still own it but you don’t give us any money.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good deal.”

“No, Jon, maybe you just don’t understand Hollywood you know? That’s just, like, so standard.”

And we really wanted to write the thing, so we signed the contract, wrote it, slaved over it for months and months, and then when we finally turned it in, guess what happened?

What a bitch.

CASE THREE

“Jon, your life is so awesome. We want to make a movie about it!”

So said Z, my high school buddy and now Hollywood producer. He found me on Facebook, looked through my videos, read this column and (of course) thought my life would make a killer movie. I thought he was joking but he actually sent me a ‘life rights’ contract.

“It’s all really standard Hollywood stuff, total boilerplate, dude.”

“But it looks here like you and the studio make all the money.”

“Life rights aren’t that valuable dude.”

“Then why should I sell them.”

“It’ll make you famous.”

“I’m already famous.”

So we went back and forth with this stupid negotiation – and finally, pissed off, I told him f**k it. And it wasn’t like the ‘I’m-saying-f**k-it-to-pretend-I’m-not-interested-but-really-I-am’ negotiating tactic. I really wasn’t. I was insulted that an old friend would mess me around like that – and that they thought my whole life was worth so little money.

So the next day he called me all conciliatory. “Hey man, let’s do this thing, we’re old buddies.”

And then, he made the following suggestion. He said, “Dude, maybe we should do it this way, we’re having trouble reaching a deal here so why don’t you just let me try to sell the story to a studio then you negotiate with them directly? The only caveat would be that you wouldn’t be allowed to screw up the deal; you’d have to sign a contract with me to accept anything within ‘reasonable industry expectations’.”

Which, on the face of it sounds, well, reasonable. But these Hollywood types, they come over to China thinking they are the world’s cleverest operators, that we are all morons. He forgets that I negotiate with people orders of magnitude sleazier than he could ever imagine himself to be.

What his contract means (and what he knows it means) in real terms is:

“I, Hollywood producer, sell your story to a studio. You agree to be legally bound to accept whatever the studio offers. I, your friend, will tell them this so I can get the deal signed. The deal goes through! I make money! The studio loves me because I saved them money with a clever trick! You, my high school buddy sell your life for nothing.”

What an asshole.

THE MORAL

And so finally what does this all mean? What have I, what have you, learned from this bitter little screed? Because I’ll come clean. I too am a player in this dirty playground. I stay friends with (in fact just five minutes ago got off the phone with) X because he is clever and because even though he cheats me, he cheats new people who compete with me even more. I became friends with Y because she was a producer. Because I knew that one day the relationship might be useful – so I pretended to like her more than I did, invited her to parties, and praised the depth of her insights. And I was never that tight with Z. I knew him in high school; we weren’t buddies. But I wanted to do this deal.

So, what does this tell us? Everybody is an asshole. Everybody sucks. The only difference between me and them is: They, unfortunately, are better at it.