These Cardboard Boxes Smell Like Failure

I’m stacking furniture and re-arranging boxes of old scripts and movie posters in a place so depressing I want to forget that I’m nearly 30 and, at one time, had a promising career and a sense of dignity.

Not only am I in the fucking basement of a development company doing manual labor for free, I’m in a mouse-infested storage area literally called, “The Cage,” where the Important Producer keeps his broken Bowflex and old promotional material featuring Tom Cruise with hair extensions.

It’s a fitting example of the profound indignity of trying to weasel your way into a Hollywood career from the bottom, a degrading process that encourages you to wallow in the sleaze under the idiotic hope that somehow, one day, an Important Producer will see your work and say something like, “Man that guy can re-arrange moldy boxes of outdated crew lists, I should hire him to write a major summer blockbuster.”

The retarded logic only becomes more stark when you are in a fetid basement enclosure surrounded by chain-link fence, re-piling crates of someone’s long-lost copies of “Once and Again” scripts and inhaling mouse feces. With every box I stack I get more and more fucking furious at Hollywood in general, and the assholes who told me to do this job specifically. Internships, we have been told, are one way to get a hand into the Teflon vault of Big Entertainment, but what they don’t say is that there’s no way that’s going to happen by doing chores you wouldn’t perform as a favor to your paralytic father.

On top of all that, there’s a distinct, rancid odor coming from all these boxes, and it smells like one specific thing: Failure.