Hollywood Confessional

It's Me, Fake Carol

• Ninth Way Media • Season 3 • Episode 6

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"I love writers. But if there's one thing my mom taught me, it's if you love something make it suffer."

With that tweet, the parody account that slayed with truth and laughs during the 2023 Hollywood labor strikes was born. And so was the question, "Who is Fake Carol?"

This week, the writer behind @itsmecarolamptp joins us in the booth to give us an answer. From their initial inspiration to the account going "Hollywood viral," they share how their satirical portrayal of the studios' lead negotiator caught fire, and even managed to fool a few journalists during the strike. 

Our guest also opens up about the emotional rollercoaster of being "Fake Carol" while struggling in their real life. Through their personal journey, they highlight the profound importance of community and hope in sustaining a creative career.  Join us in the booth for laughs and inspiration as we relive this cultural moment through the words of the real-life person who made it happen.

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Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth Way Media production, produced by Meagan Daine and J.R. Zamora-Thal.

Sound Effects and Music provided by Zapsplat and Pixabay.

Keywords: filmmaking podcast, film podcast, screenwriting podcast, entertainment podcast, Hollywood, filmmaking, writerslife, actorslife, setlife

Speaker 1:

In nomine Cinema e TV Espiritu Streaming. Amen. Hello, hollywood, faithful, welcome back to another episode of the Hollywood Confessional. I'm your podcast priest, jair Zamorathal.

Speaker 2:

And I'm Megan Dane and um psych. We told you guys last time that we were going to be interviewing Mo Ryan this week. We are super excited to bring that interview to you shortly. However, we have a very special surprise guest this week.

Speaker 1:

I am very excited for this guest. I'm very excited to show everybody our Mo Ryan interview, but this guest is also very exciting to me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we didn't really know what was going to happen with this story. So just a very brief intro to those who might not be familiar Back during the writer's strike of 2023, I'm going to say that like it's a historical moment or something.

Speaker 1:

Why does that feel so far in the past when you say the year?

Speaker 2:

It does. Yeah, it seems like an epic ago. So back in 2023, when we had the writer strikes, there was an individual who provided a very powerful public service by creating a parody account of Carol Lombardini, who was the lead negotiator for the AMPTP basically the studio union at that time and this parody account is called it's Me, Carol, and it kind of kept us all going in a rough time.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to be honest. When I first saw it I really thought it was Carol. Because of the articles that were coming out in Deadline, I was like, oh my god, she is that me.

Speaker 2:

This is the true Carol. And so you know, everybody was like oh, who is it, who is it, who is the real Carol. And so now we know.

Speaker 1:

Now we know. But in true Hollywood, confessional fashion, we are not unmasking fake Carol.

Speaker 2:

But will fake Carol unmask themselves? Let's step into the booth and find out.

Speaker 1:

Let's get into it.

Speaker 3:

Forgive me, Father, for I am not the real Carol Lombardini.

Speaker 1:

Good to get that cleared up. So tell us who you really are.

Speaker 2:

And maybe who Carol is and why you decided to impersonate this woman who, until about a year ago, I guess, a lot of us had probably never even heard of?

Speaker 3:

Okay, back in 2023, before the writer's strike had started and we were still in negotiations, I was on several group texts with other writers In the run-up to the strike. Everybody would be sharing links and information analysis as to what was going on, and one day I was like what is the AMPTP? And they explained to me that it's this organization that works on behalf of studios that's run by lawyers, operated by this lady out of a mall in Sherman Oaks. I just remember thinking that is the craziest fucking thing I've ever heard.

Speaker 2:

For any of our listeners who may not be familiar, the AMPTP is the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. It's an association of companies, kind of like a union is an association of individuals, and the lady in question, carol Lombardini, is the AMPTP's president.

Speaker 1:

According to their own website. Carol has worked for the AMPTP since its formation in 1982. She serves as chief negotiator for more than 80 industry-wide labor negotiations on behalf of more than 350 motion picture and television producers.

Speaker 2:

And some of those producers are pillars of the industry. We're talking Disney, nbc, netflix, amazon, apple, warner Brothers. They're all members of the AMPTP. And little trivia the offices are actually located at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where they were sublet to the AMPTP by Warner Brothers during the 2007-2008 writer's strike.

Speaker 1:

It all comes full circles.

Speaker 3:

So, leading up to the 2023 strikes, we were facing a lot of fear and anxiety and when I found out it all ran through this one lady. I immediately looked her up on Google and she's in this sort of business casual pantsuit or something and it was like, oh, this is so funny. That would be a funny Twitter account. I refuse to call it X. So, anyway, I registered the name it's me, carol A-M-P-T-P, and I just kind of sat on it for a while.

Speaker 3:

Then the writer's strike began and I had to work a day job, so I would go out and pick it when I could like I could sneak out on a Friday or do an early morning shift. But by the first or second week I was starting to feel like, oh, we're going to be doing this for a while, and I started to feel an intense sort of FOMO, not being able to be out there with the other writers and my friends. I wanted to be helpful and to be a part of this, this bigger labor action that I believed in so deeply. I wanted to feel connected. One day I took a walk and on the walk I decided, okay, I'm going to make this account. I got the picture, wrote her bio. I wrote several initial tweets like what might this lady be thinking about? And one of them I'm going to paraphrase my own joke and ruin it it was something about her mother I can't remember. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Oh, I got it. I got it.

Speaker 1:

It was like I actually love writers, and if there's one thing I learned from my mother, it's if you love something, make it suffer.

Speaker 3:

And that was the genesis of the fake Carol account. That joke started getting passed around and retweeted. Several people started following and sharing the account and some of those early supporters were key people with big followings. So it started slowly at first and then it started to snowball. Early on I was just trying to figure out how much of this do I want to seem real? You know like you create an account and you're trying to trick people into thinking it's legitimately that person so you can say crazy shit and it's funny. Multiple journalists, some of them pretty respected I think, would DM me asking me for comments on things, thinking it was Carol One of them. I sort of did feel bad about this one. She DM'd me and I kept going with her. I made up an assistant named Kayla, who I put in touch with her to coordinate my schedule. I had this whole crazy thing where I was like Carol is too busy for a phone interview but, she's given a few things you can quote her on.

Speaker 3:

I was like really trying to calibrate it to be just crazy enough, where it was obviously a joke, but like can I trick this person into posting it? I think she figured out somewhere along the way that she was not talking to the actual Carol Lombardini. But there were multiple people who used something crazy. I had tweeted as if it were true. One was like a big journalist with 300,000 followers or something and I immediately tweeted back at them. You are using me as a source. I am making a parody Twitter account.

Speaker 2:

Which, to be fair, it does say in your bio Cat Mom recovering Buffy addict. Lead negotiator for the AMPTP. Parody of a person.

Speaker 1:

Hey, but who reads?

Speaker 2:

anymore, Exactly.

Speaker 3:

Little by little, the account took on its own life. Some of the jokes started getting more and more people sharing them and I was like, oh, it seems like people are starting to pay attention. Then somebody I respect, who was involved in negotiations, reached out to me and was like what you're doing is meaningful, it's getting to them. That was the first time I was like, oh wow, maybe there's something else going on beyond me just poking fun at this sad small lady. Because of the anonymity thing.

Speaker 1:

This account can speak truth to power and, speaking as one of the workers who was on strike, we needed something to rally around. In that moment, fake Carol created a face that we could all get behind. You would tweet something and it was like, yeah, this is what we're doing.

Speaker 2:

Fake Carol humanized the conflict in the most perfect way. Otherwise it was just like we were fighting the studios and they feel like this omnipotent monolith. But the fact that it's all run by this one woman who works out of the Galleria, it's absurd. I mean, when you boil it down to that and all of a sudden it's like, oh, we could actually win this.

Speaker 3:

And it's also the banality of that. I do think it's kind of evil. With your legal education, you devote your one life to depressing workers' wages across an entire industry on behalf of a handful of multinational conglomerates. That's kind of an evil choice. In my book there were times when I was like should I feel bad that I'm making fun of this woman?

Speaker 2:

Nah.

Speaker 3:

Anytime I would get near a sense of feeling sorry for her. I constantly come back to no, what she's doing is wrong. I guess somebody has to negotiate on behalf of the billionaires. But in the context of where this business has gone in, seeing the human result in real life, I've been in the situation of I've got to think of something else to do. I can't stay in LA. It's fucking heartbreaking.

Speaker 3:

And to look at the system that was created and this person makes 3 million a year or whatever to contribute to that. And then you look at the banality of it a lady in a mall who's grinding down an entire industry of people. I wanted to counter that to be a force for good. As the strike went on, I started to see the influence growing. Even now, the account only has about 6,000 followers. It's not, objectively, a massive social media following. It's just that among those followers were an unbelievable amount of writers and journalists, people in the Hollywood community. I would say it went Hollywood viral. After several months there was a situation where we'd been on strike for a while and then the studios invited the negotiating committee to a meeting. It was basically the first time it sounded like there might be some progress.

Speaker 2:

Right, I remember that there were all these rumors floating around like this is it we're going to get a deal and it has to be now or else?

Speaker 3:

Then they got the negotiating committee in there and basically just lectured them and it ended up in another impasse. At that point I wrote a fake letter from Carol and that was when I felt like, okay, I know this voice. Now you know, I know what I'm doing here. And it kind of locked in for me how to write as this funny character but also use it to shine a light on what they were doing to try to counter their misinformation.

Speaker 1:

And now a reading from Fate Carol's letter to the AMPTP. Dear AMPTP members, after 102 days of doing jack shit outside of cutting down some trees and idly hoping writers lose their homes, we sat down with the WGA last night and, in bad faith, grabbed them by the metaphorical ear and gave them a very stern talking to about how they're lucky. We even offered what we did and were the smart geniuses with all the power around here, and it's time to end the strike and for them to get their little asses back to work making big fat hit shows and movies for daddy to monetize Yours in mutual greed. Carol Lombardini.

Speaker 2:

Speaking of countering information, didn't a profile on Carol come out in the New York Times around the same time?

Speaker 3:

Yes, and it was clearly written to launder her reputation. Like we have a grown-up, competent negotiator and she's doing a great job. There was one line in it, a reading from the New York Times profile on Carol Lombardini and she's doing a great job.

Speaker 1:

There was one line in it, a reading from the New York.

Speaker 2:

Times profile on Carol.

Speaker 1:

Lombardini, a parody account just popped up on Twitter. Yes, carol is aware of it. No, she is not amused.

Speaker 3:

I remember reading that article in bed, putting my phone down and just laughing so hard. That kept me going for months Like, whatever else happens, that was enough. No, she is not amused. So towards the end, when everything was coming down to the wire, it got insane. It was this fever pitch of every day. Everything I was posting, I was getting such insane feedback. Everyone was sharing. Every post was getting like a thousand likes. David Simon, the creator of the Wire, tweeted some really nice thing. It felt like being blasted by our fire hose of compliments and goodwill, like being cheered on from people I really respected. Then we got to the last day of the strike. I was chaperoning a kid's birthday party. We had like 30 third graders in a big party with a bouncy house and stuff. It quickly devolves into like child Thunderdome. I'm getting this barrage of texts. I knew the strike was ending. They kept doing the last best and final offer dance. I was at this party. That in and of itself felt like the Normandy beach scenes from.

Speaker 2:

Saving Private.

Speaker 3:

Ryan, everywhere I look, some kid is crying or hurt or needs something and I'm not totally glued to my phone but because it was the last hours of the strike, everyone was like you have to have the perfect final tweet. And I was like, yeah, what do I say? And I tweeted a bunch of stuff and it kind of went viral.

Speaker 1:

Well, we left, we cried, we fucked around, we found out, we murdered some trees and we wished a little light homelessness on certain people. But overall, I think we can agree. I personally did a great job. Now, if you'll excuse us, we need to go at tone.

Speaker 3:

And I basically wake up in the morning and my DMs are the New Yorker Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Reporter. Every publication was like if you want to reveal yourself, can we please have the exclusive?

Speaker 2:

For the record, you also had a DM from the Hollywood Confessional, but we were cool with you staying anonymous.

Speaker 3:

Oh my God, did you DM me? I'm so sorry. I was so overwhelmed. I remember having a breakdown as to what any of this means. What am I supposed to do, like? How am I supposed to feel? How am I supposed to navigate what felt like a very intense pressure to reveal myself? The strike was ending. I was feeling so much love and support for the fake Carol thing. All this press was wanting to interview me.

Speaker 3:

But the real me I'm like at the lowest point in my career. I have not worked in four years. I just got kicked off the guild insurance. For the first time in 10 years I've been, really since the pandemic, in an incredibly dark place, not seeing any hope or reasons for optimism. I had been somewhat established.

Speaker 3:

I worked steadily for an extended period of time. I've had some success and it just felt like the rug had gotten pulled out from under me. I'm looking at other career paths like what am I going to do? Instead? It feels like I can't keep doing this and providing for my family or have a stable life. I never started the Carol thing to get anything out of it. It was never like I'm going to do this funny thing and make it go viral and everyone's going to want to hire me. People kind of put that on Carol. There was this constant refrain of oh, when the strike's over, you guys need to hire this person or like, give Carol an overall deal. I know it's just social media people saying nice things to show that they liked what you're doing, but I don't know it also affected me.

Speaker 3:

I was like yeah, that would be my dream that this would end in Somebody would give me a job to go back to. So when the press stuff started happening, I also felt this pressure.

Speaker 3:

A couple of people in my orbit were like you need to take as much advantage of this as you can. You've got a limited window where you've got the attention of Hollywood and that's a really hard thing to get. You need to do whatever you can to capitalize on this and just, I don't know something felt wrong about that. Do whatever you can to capitalize on this and just, I don't know something felt wrong about that. I talked to some people I knew who were high level in the guild, trying to get as much advice as I could from enough different people to get a handle on. What does this whole thing mean Beyond the distortion field of social media? How significant even you know, was it? One of the points that was made to me was listen, this is a weapon. You reduce this scary organization and entity down to a much more understandable human thing. So, going forward, it's something that might be, you know, helpful. Again, this person was encouraging me. Like, look, if you come out and it's just you, the thing loses all its power, and I agreed with that. But I had to figure it out for myself.

Speaker 3:

Going back to how the whole fake Carol thing started being surrounded by other really engaged, inspiring writers and labor organizers. That was the secret sauce. It's very easy for me to make a joke about the Cheesecake Factory and the Galleria and make up some stupid cocktail that Carol would like to drink that's, you know, very low-hanging fruit and stuff. But I think what resonated with people were those moments when we didn't know what was going on but the studios were putting out this constant drumbeat of misinformation meant to prey upon all our fears and anxieties and get us to take a bad deal, because that's how you break labor and to have that group of people from whom I was learning what was going on while it was going on. I think that's what gave the Carol account a certain amount of credibility. Whatever authenticity it had, it was because there was a community of people I was interacting with that were heavily influencing it. Carol was all of us, Not just that group text, but everybody I talked to on the lines, people I would see on Twitter that did inspiring things to lift everybody else up. To me, that was the stakes of what this was about.

Speaker 3:

Where I netted out was I gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter. They were one of the only people who offered to preserve my anonymity. Also, the reporter I had interacted with on a picket line. I felt like I could trust her. She doesn't know that, she knows me, but she knows me. And there were things I wanted to say, things I wanted people to know about me and what I was trying to do. So I did that and that came out on Tuesday or Wednesday. And then we had the end of Strike Writers Meeting at the Hollywood Palladium. The last time I was there, I think I was seeing LCD Sound System or something A huge music venue packed with writers, the whole stage, Ellen Stutzman, the whole guild's up there, and I'm in the far back balcony with some of my friends waiting to hear from leadership how it went and what they thought.

Speaker 3:

And as they're getting into it, Chris Kaiser is doing this thing where he gives a super inspiring speech and everybody's applauding and standing ovating and he does a thing like drew carey standing ovation, green envelope, joelle garfinkel standing ovation, and then he says fake carol. And I just intimidated to see the whole fucking place a standing ovation. I'm so glad that I was anonymous because I could enjoy that moment free of being self-conscious. I could just sit there, invisible and feel it. I had been wrestling with. What is this thing? What does it mean to me now that the strike is over, and what that did for me was it released me to feel like, okay, this was impactful If it's being mentioned in the same breath as people who had done way bigger things than I had. It helped me accept that, yeah, you're not crazy. There was something kind of meaningful about that, but at the same time, it felt very emotional because my confidence as a creative person was at an all-time low.

Speaker 3:

Sitting down in the morning and working on projects, I felt this constant, overwhelming sense of you know, why are you even trying? It's like imposter syndrome. If you were really talented, you would still be working Successful. I'm sure every writer can relate to that voice in your head You're a fucking crazy person. Why are you doing this? And that voice for me in the last few years had gotten really loud, but that night at the Palladium I realized I didn't want to reveal myself.

Speaker 3:

What I finally accepted was that, even if nothing comes out of it, if there's no cash and prizes associated with this parody Twitter account, it restored my confidence. I felt like you got the attention. All these people that you look at and objectively believe are better, more successful, operating at a higher level than you. Those people all stopped and noticed and I think I don't know. I think I needed that. I feel like writers. We use hope and optimism as fuel. Why would you sit alone in a room doing homework for your whole life if you didn't have this naive, deluded belief that the words that are falling out of your head and onto the screen are going to have value? Everyone who works in this business knows that. You're constantly comparing yourself to everybody else and you're constantly fighting this battle to prove that you deserve to be here, and I feel like with Fake Carol, I got that back.

Speaker 2:

That's beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing both of these stories with us the story of fake carol and the story of real you. It's kind of both a personal story and a story about all of us, and so I'm wondering if you could write them both an ending, what? What do you hope would happen for you and for the industry as a whole?

Speaker 3:

Hmm, I hope for me what I hope for everybody that we all can continue to pursue and achieve and live out our creative dreams, whatever they may be. I hope we can do that in an industry and a landscape that is still hospitable to human life. From the pandemic into the Netflix stock correction, into the strike, into the post-strike God, the past few years have been an endless litany of horrors for this industry and it's really been impossible to navigate. Having gone through this long period of time where work slowed down like way down, I feel like I've gone through the whole cycle of grief about my career and in some ways, it's been helpful to have that ego death. I don't know what will happen. I've had some opportunities that have come my way. I don't know if there'll be anything concrete, but it's opened some doors and, more than anything, it's been clarifying for me just in terms of my own relationship to my own writing.

Speaker 3:

Fake Carol reminded me of the joy of just writing something for fun, to entertain myself and my friends and to make other writers laugh, and how much I love I just love writers. It helped me get back to the simple, pure reason we all start to do this thing. I hope for myself what I hope for everybody that we can, one way or another, as soon as possible, find our way back into doing the thing that we love.

Speaker 1:

Amen to that. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Go create in peace wow, that quickly became one of my favorite stories oh, I know, me too.

Speaker 2:

I did not expect. I didn't really know what to expect, I guess yeah when we first found out that we were going to um be hearing from this person.

Speaker 2:

It's like you have an image of who it might be right right and like I guess I don't know, maybe I'm guilty of, of doing some of the things that they mentioned in this confession, of like sort of putting things on fake Carol, like, oh, fake Carol, like somebody would give this person a job and somebody, oh, like this, they must be like this. And I sort of imagined that this is probably, you know, somebody who's just like rolling.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and what I really loved about it is what a hopeful tone it ended on. I thought that was beautiful and it like really reminded me sort of why we all write. It's not just to put things out into the void, it's to say something and it gives us purpose. And the way Fate Carol found their purpose through the account and found their love for writing again, that was just so beautiful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it was like the ultimate act of rebellion. Yeah, I mean, you know, as part of this industry is like the pressure to sell yourself right, and the opportunity was there for this person. They created this thing not really expecting anything from it, and then it kind of blew up and then it was like they were faced with this choice of whether or not to try to capitalize on that, and I love that they chose not to do so and then that that brought them back to, like you say, that sort of sense of why they do this and why we all do this.

Speaker 1:

I mean, that's a perfect third act, if I've ever heard one.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, agreed, and also, not to be underestimated, the power of leaving the account anonymous. I mean, we have IATSE negotiations going on right now. There should be JR and I are both members of Local 871. And there is supposed to be, hopefully, some kind of announcement, I think on Wednesday, which will have actually already transpired by the time you guys are listening to this, so you may know more about it than we do right now.

Speaker 1:

I hope we don't go back to strike talk.

Speaker 2:

Oh God, yeah, I know, and I could go on.

Speaker 1:

I know everything about organized labor now, just from you, Megan.

Speaker 2:

You're welcome, but you know, hopefully, like fake Carol, is a weapon that will not be needed, but in the event that it becomes necessary, you can follow fake carol at. It's me, carol, am ptp on twitter and, hey, you can follow us while you're at it at fess up hollywood twitter or, uh, instagram, or that's pretty much the only two that we even try to keep up with, so I guess that's about it. And coming up only two that we even try to keep up with, so I guess that's about it.

Speaker 1:

And coming up in two weeks, we finally have our interview with Mo Ryan.

Speaker 2:

For reals this time. For real this time.

Speaker 1:

It's an incredible interview. I think you all are going to love it, so tune in then.

Speaker 2:

Thank you guys so much for joining us. We will talk to you next time here on the Hollywood Confessional.

Speaker 1:

And until then, go create in peace. The Hollywood Confessional is produced by Megan Dane and Jair Zamora-Thal. Joelle Garfinkel is our co-producer and AJ Thal is our post-production coordinator and editor. Our cast today Timothy Wardell, anna Rapallo. Special effects provided by ZapSplat and Pixabay. Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth Way Media production. Follow us on socials at FessUpHollywood.