Hollywood Confessional

Untouchable: When a Toxic Person Can't Be Fired

• Ninth Way Media • Season 3 • Episode 11

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Trigger Warning: Self-harm and drug use.

We all know how hard it is to land a job in this industry, but what about how hard it is to fire someone... even when they deserve it?

In this week's episode, we hear from a confessor who was an executive producer on a 20-episode order of a first-season show. The challenges they faced just to run the room and keep good scripts coming on time were compounded exponentially by a writer who disrupted the room at every turn.

September 29th, appeared visibly intoxicated while working in the room.

October 5th, he was rolling a Swiss Army knife around on his knuckles with the blade out while appearing to be under the influence.

October 25th, he left over an hour early without telling anyone.

11/11, an unidentified pill was found outside his office.

Incredibly, these and many more infractions weren't enough to convince HR to take action. It was up to our confessor to find a way to manage the problem, all while running a TV show, dealing with the writer's mental health issues, and taking care of their own.

Join us for a discussion on firing and being fired, how to cope with toxic behavior in the workplace, and why we absolutely must destigmatize mental health care to make Hollywood a happier place.

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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. Thank you guys so much for joining us again here on the podcast where people confess their deep, dark secrets, and this is a really interesting episode this week because the secret that we are here to talk about has to do with getting fired, firing and getting fired.

Speaker 1:

Have you ever gotten fired?

Speaker 2:

This is the weird thing about, like Hollywood is that it's really hard to actually get fired, like they just kind of stop talking to you, right?

Speaker 1:

I mean, and they stop paying you too, which is a pretty good indication.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, like I think it actually. I think I just went through this a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 1:

Your podcast priest is here and waiting.

Speaker 2:

I'm not entirely sure, but I was doing a sort of side project for a company, you know. Everything started out really good, but it was all fully remote and I did my first project for them. Then I didn't hear back. And then I wrote and I was like, hey, just checking in, just like, am I supposed to keep going? And I heard like a nice email like oh yeah, you did a good job on the first part. But then I never heard anything else. So I think I got fired.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that is so tough. I hate the ghosting. You know, a similar thing happened to me. I was a script reader for a management company, but the extra confusing part is that it was an unpaid internship. So there was no lack of paycheck to alert me to the fact that I had been fired.

Speaker 2:

But that's okay. I mean, come on, if they're using you for free labor, the least they could do is like, have the courtesy to let you know if they want to fire you. You know, give you some guidance, tell you like, hey, this is what wasn't working, this is what you could do better in the future.

Speaker 1:

It was an internship. I was there to learn and I was just a kid so I didn't know. Here I was emailing this guy every other day, being like waiting for the next script. Would love the next script. Read three scripts looking for the fourth.

Speaker 2:

Oh my God, ok, okay, so confess. What company was it? Oh, it was you can bleep it really yeah, those are both. That sucks man.

Speaker 1:

Those are both like legit, quote-unquote legit companies oh, and the worst part is a mentor wanted to hook me up there and I was like I don't think I should be going in there oh wow.

Speaker 2:

Oh man, what a man, what a bummer. You should have taken your mentor to task. Yeah, so we've actually got an interesting story coming up in a couple weeks from a studio reader who will talk a little bit more about what it's like behind the scenes to be a reader in like a legit paid job. I know that I didn't actually realize those existed, but they do, apparently.

Speaker 1:

And they're unionized.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. So we'll be getting into that, all that interesting, like completely revelatory information. But for this week there's the ghosting thing that happens like pretty much all the time. But then there's like legit firing situations, like what happens when someone is legally gainfully employed W-2 or whatever it is and does something that is absolutely a fireable offense or it becomes necessary to fire them. How does that work out?

Speaker 1:

I think we're going to find out if we step into the booth.

Speaker 3:

This is a story about how HR fails us, about a writer who has serious drug and mental health problems and why it was nearly impossible to get rid of him.

Speaker 2:

I have a feeling this confession is either going to piss me off or make me cry.

Speaker 1:

A lot of times it's both. Tell us how it happened.

Speaker 3:

Well, I start by saying that, as someone who struggles with mental health problems myself, I have enormous sympathy for people dealing with these issues. None of that stuff is easy, and also as someone who has fired multiple people over my career, that is not something I think is fun and it's not something I ever want to do. It's just that sometimes, for the good of other people in the workplace, it has to be done. This story started back in May of I got a job on a new show. Generally, the way a writer's room works is you've got a group of writers who are on staff. You work on one episode at a time, trying to figure out what we call the story break, which is the order of things that are going to happen in an episode. You come up with an idea for an episode. You pitch that to the showrunner. The showrunner says yes or no, and then you take that idea and expand it, get enough to write like one pager for it and then enough to write an outline. So the writer's room is sort of like a little factory that's churning out story break over the course of a season. And in a well-functioning room you've generally got a co-executive producer or a higher level writer who's there all the time running the room and making sure the discussion stays focused. And then you have somebody at the showrunner level who's there as much as they can be to sort of help guide the discussion. I call it having the green light in the room. You have someone there who can say yes or no.

Speaker 3:

In the case of this show, we had an overarching showrunner who was focusing on multiple shows and then we had two executive producer level writers who were running the show day to day. I was one of those people. When you're running a television show, your job is to be the person who stays calm. You're running a small business with 200 to 250 employees and all their jobs depend on you making smart decisions about a lot of different things.

Speaker 3:

This show started with a pretty typical writer's room, but it was a weird situation. One of the writers this guy named was an old friend of the showrunner and you immediately got the sense that one of these things is not like the other had problems from the get-go. He was kind of combative, like if somebody pointed out a problem with one of his pitches he'd say see how it goes next time you're pitching. He was more concerned with his personal status in the room than with the success of our team, and he wasn't that great at the job. There was this one pitch he got stuck on.

Speaker 3:

I don't remember if it was for one episode or if he kept pitching it, but I feel like it was in many episodes I'd seen it before. The idea kind of fell flat, but he just kept pitching the same thing, so it wasn't going great. Really early on this is like late May. Then at some point in June I got a report from one of the writers that there had been a bag of white powder found on the floor. Oh shit, when somebody pointed it out, he grabbed it and threw it out, you know, giving the impression that it might have belonged to him and he didn't want it to be seen. That was the first idea I got that maybe there's something else going on, maybe this guy's got a drug problem.

Speaker 3:

You know people have problems and it was a first season show. There was a lot of pressure, we were racing the clock and it wasn't a great environment to begin with, but you could sort of feel the pressure mounting for this guy as he continued to not fit in. Then it had to have been like September, a big turning point. One of our writers comes to me and she's very worried. I'm like what's going on and she's like I don't know if this is okay for me to tell you about, but I don't know what to do. I was contacted by a friend last night who was also friends with.

Speaker 3:

They were talking and he said he's thinking about killing himself oh, oh, my god and I tell the other ep on the show, we talk about it with this writer, and then we pretty fucking quickly go to our boss and say, hey, this is the information we have. I don't know what to do with this, but I don't want anything bad to happen. Our boss called hr and we're like okay, maybe they're going to do something, maybe he's going to get some help. The next day we found out that the studio's response was to 5150. This poor guy.

Speaker 1:

That's literally the worst response.

Speaker 3:

Oh my God. So the cops showed up at his place to take him in. He starts talking lawyer talk to the cops and scares them away so they don't take him in. And this whole thing infuriates me, because how does that make anything better? In no way does having the police grab this guy and take him to some sort of psychiatric facility like I have fucking depression and I've been suicidal. It's not a thing you want to fuck around with. And sending the cops to someone's door, let me tell you that wouldn't help, but that's what the studio did.

Speaker 3:

So when got in the next day or the day after, it was obvious we'd been told the other EP said you know, we talked to him at length about what he was going through and what he needed, and I feel for the guy Like it sounded like he was going through a tough go.

Speaker 3:

So I'm doing my best, but I'm a producer on a TV show, not a trained mental health professional. So from there things get worse. Back in June there had been a mass shooting in the news and there was a conversation in the room that I wasn't there for in which said he had guns and no one was going to take them away. It was. It was no big deal at the time, it was just, you know, a conversation. But as things progressed and we're also in a very busy season trying to make a show that's very hard to make several writers asked not to be left alone in the room with him. B***h was becoming more argumentative and when the other EP and I are in the room, the other writers have to be the ones to tell him no. And you don't want to say no to the guy who takes it personally when you kill his pitch.

Speaker 3:

And who's already said that he has guns it personally when you kill his pitch. And who's already said that he has guns. And the other EP brought a baseball bat to keep by his desk. But he didn't listen to the writer's requests that they not be left alone with. So by late Septemberth appeared visibly intoxicated while working in the room, kept interrupting and could not seem to follow the thread of conversation.

Speaker 3:

October 3rd fell asleep while reading lunch menu. October 4th worked with shirt half unbuttoned and belly button showing. October 5th he was rolling a Swiss army knife around on his knuckles with the blade out, while appearing to be under the influence. October 25th he left over an hour early without telling anyone. November 4th he arrived 30 minutes late and then he had to leave midday, to quote, meet a friend in the parking lot. November 11th an unidentified pill was found outside his office. November 15th he laid down for hours, came out of his office reeking of alcohol at 5.30, ruined the productivity of the room. Why we were still in the room at 530 and working for hours beyond is another story. November 21st fell asleep in the room again Asked questions. That evidence he hasn't been reading the script. He would sleep at the script coordinator's desk Like he could have gone in his office and slept all day long and everybody would have been fine with that, but for some reason he was falling asleep in the writer's room and covering himself with the blinds. How did he even?

Speaker 1:

do that.

Speaker 3:

He's like leaning on the window with his head out and they're like what are you doing? And he's like, no, no, no, I'm listening, I just need some sun.

Speaker 1:

That's incredible.

Speaker 3:

So it was all the chaos of living with someone with an active drug and alcohol problem, but he's not our relative, this is our workplace. It added enormously to the stress that everybody was going through. By November the other EP and I were talking we need to be able to fire this guy, but because the studio's first move was to 5150 the dude, the dude was now trying to sue them. So, no matter what, the studio would not let us fire him. We just went on and on in this really awkward situation. In like February we were starting to come out the other side of our 20 episode order. We were like, okay, fine, we can make it through this season. We were like, okay, fine, we can make it through this season, we don't have to fire him. Then we started seeing hints that, despite all these issues, he's going to be brought back for a second season.

Speaker 1:

God, this is like the end of a zombie movie, where they got him buried and the hand just jumps up out of the grave.

Speaker 3:

And I spent hours on the phone with HR documenting his behavior. I read them, all the things I just read you, and talked about a lot of shit that I've probably blissfully forgotten. It was not a great time. None of this was fun. I hope it's funny from a distance, in the abstract, but living through it it was just gut wrenching. So I'm going through the contemporaneous notes and then we move offices and we're thinking, oh, he just won't move with us. But he moved with us and we're like, oh God, they're giving him an office for next year. And that's when there was a second drop pill found on the floor. This is just insane.

Speaker 3:

I've heard stories about some of the big hit shows in the 80s and 90s and you know the amount of drugs that were being done, but I've never seen anything like that. Most writers rooms that I've worked in are you know the amount of drugs that were being done, but I've never seen anything like that. Most writers' rooms that I've worked in are, you know, creative but very conventional workplaces. This was anomalous for me in my career. Now, for all I know, this thing was a vitamin, but it was found on the floor outside his office. I'd held on to the first one that I had like picked up and bagged like I know what I was doing. So I bagged this one up, you know, and dated them and, per instructions from HR, I mailed them to the HR office for them to I don't know test. I had a hunch, they went straight into the fucking garbage, but I did that.

Speaker 1:

I think HR was watching too many cop shows.

Speaker 3:

But we're finding actual drugs. There are drug dealers being let onto the lot as near as we can tell Would call in a drive-on for a buddy and then go meet him in the parking lot and we'd never see him again. So all this is going on and, by the way, this is an office where we also have rats.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely not. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3:

Rats in the break room, bugs that live in the standing water below the building. So I'm like calling facilities, telling the assistant to call facilities. It's like a drug addict and rats, and nothing we can do will get rid of them. Until finally, one day, we stopped talking about unsafe, unprofessional and unacceptable behavior and start making the only argument that worked he couldn't write. Huh, I mean, I remember saying look, I am not an expert on mental health or drug addiction or any of this other stuff, but I am an expert on how to write this show and I am telling you, in my expert opinion, this guy can't do it. And that's how we were finally able to fire him. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:

I did not see that coming.

Speaker 3:

If there's a moral to this story, or an amoral, it is that the HR departments in Hollywood don't work at all Full stop. They exist to protect the company from lawsuits. Theyweighs their responsibility to create a safe and professional workspace for their employees. So that was a nightmare everybody on that staff had to live through.

Speaker 2:

Having gone through this nightmare, what would you say to other people who might be experiencing something similar?

Speaker 3:

If I knew somebody in the same situation, the big thing I would tell them is the studio HR department is never going to care about their person's behavior, they're going to care about the quality of their work. I really do hope that post Me Too, all this stuff has gotten at least a little better, but it was really shocking to me that evidence of drugs being brought into the workplace, sleeping on the job, not keeping up with the basics of the job, like reading other scripts None of that was disqualifying. The thing that they believe they could legally defend, I guess, was me and my fellow EP saying he can't write the show, they don't care about SAFE, they just care about not getting the company sued. So they should probably call that department something else.

Speaker 1:

You've talked a lot today about trying to mitigate the stress other writers were feeling in this situation. What about the stress you were dealing with? As a person whose job it is to stay calm, how do you make sure you're available to manage everything?

Speaker 3:

For me, as someone who has depression, medication was pretty life-changing. I went to it reluctantly You're talking about changing your brain, and my brain is how I make my living. I was really worried that it would affect my ability to write, but if anything, it's been the opposite. My 20s were basically spent white-knuckling it through some pretty serious depression symptoms, and it wasn't until I got onto antidepressants in my mid-30s that I was able to look past the symptoms and start getting at the underlying causes.

Speaker 1:

That's a fantastic answer and so candid talking about the way that antidepressants help people. I mean we've definitely done a lot of work in the last five, ten years to destigmatize mental health, but not enough has been done to destigmatize what helps mental health get better, and in some cases it is medication.

Speaker 3:

You know if you told the people you had cancer you'd have an outpouring of sympathy. And if you tell people that you know you have depression or an eating disorder, you know you're thinking about killing yourself. You are frequently treated like you're the problem and it is every bit as much a disease as cancer. I have survived with depression for I'm not going to say how many years, but quite a few. I live with this disease and it fucking sucks. And one of the things that makes it suck is that you're kind of expected to hide it. Since crawling out of that hole for the first time I've tried not to hide it, but you know it's not fun.

Speaker 1:

It's incredibly tough, but we really appreciate your openness about it and we hope the subject of your story was also able to get the help he needs.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing this story with us and for all you do to help people create.

Speaker 1:

In peace God. That's so frustrating.

Speaker 2:

Oh, my God.

Speaker 1:

And I just I feel bad for everybody else in the room that had to endure that. I mean, you work so hard to get into a room and then for it to be a negative experience and to have someone like kind of actively destroying the work that you guys are doing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's. I mean it's a complicated situation and I love the fact that the confessor was so compassionate. I mean, at the same time as they had all this responsibility and we're trying to take the best possible care of everybody in the room, that included this person who was acting in this horrible way and like concern for their mental health, which I thought was incredibly just, selfless. I really appreciate that, but at the same time, it puts the confessor in this impossible situation, because they do care. They care about all the people in the room, and then you've got this one person who, like you say, is just destroying the dynamic and you can't do anything about it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's horrible, and I think just to talk about the Confessor again for a moment it's such an underrated and underdeveloped skill, I feel, in Hollywood to be a good manager. I mean, you work so hard on your writing skills, on your storytelling skills, even like the skills that it takes to produce but once you get to a certain level, you have to be a good manager in order for the show to go right. And they showed what a brilliant manager they are in taking care of both the person who was the problem and everybody else in the room. It's really inspiring to hear a story like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a great point, and I think I mean, I think it's important to say that this carries across all departments. Like whenever you become a department head, you're, the nature of your work changes and you're absolutely right. For the most part there's no training for that. It's like you're a camera operator and then all of a sudden you're the head of the camera department, and that is a very different skill set. And I think when we talk about how work environments become toxic in Hollywood, it's very often because people don't have this kind of training or they don't have these kinds of skills, and so they don't know how to address problems like this when they arise. And then you've got the whole systemic issue where, even when they want to fix these problems, people in managerial positions are just sort of like hamstrung. They can't do anything about it, because apparently saying that someone was using drugs and falling asleep at the table isn't enough.

Speaker 1:

Oh, my God, I'm just thankful that I'm still at the level where I only have to focus on my writing. I know right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there are definitely some benefits to not being the boss sometimes. Well, that's all we've got for you guys this week. Thank you again so much for joining us, and we'll be back in a couple of weeks with a story, like I said, about a studio reader and what it's like to be a Hollywood gatekeeper.

Speaker 1:

Join us in two weeks, but until then, you can hit us up at Fess Up Hollywood on Instagram and X. And if you've got a confession you know, reach out, let us know. Until then, go create in peace this episode, vicky george. Special effects provided by zap splat and pixabay. Hollywood confessional is a ninth way media production. Follow us on socials at fess up hollywood.