No One Ever Really Makes it in Hollywood
By Natalie McCarty
In Los Angeles, nothing is happening, but everything is about to. Everyone is a prelude. It’s somehow a networking win if you manage to befriend the busboy who happens to be the brother-in-law of the former dog sitter for Al Pacino. The influencer “fame” is laughably fraudulent. You have twelve people with massive influence lurking in your followers, yet none of them are actually doing anything except reselling the same tired products and maybe assembling an interesting outfit or two all but once a year. People are just marketing tactics in human form, stacked with catchy taglines and overly-edited images. Meetings begin and end with no discernible markers of time, populated by people whose titles morph based on whether or not the table next to them is eavesdropping.
Everyone’s selling something, but no one’s really selling anything at all.
“Walk of Fame,” by Ethan Thomas Barrett
I grew up in this city, but I went to college in New York, where people are debatably more interesting—and also better at pretending not to care who you think they are.
The funny thing is, everyone in LA wants to take some time to figure themselves out in New York. And everyone in New York wants their shot at making it in LA.
I’ve been back in LA and working in this industry for the last few years, and eventually, you realize everyone’s orbiting the same soft center: attention, love, or funding. It’s a circus of empty promises. A facade built on networked smiles, a “PR voice,” and an Instagram story that might get you noticed. No one’s ever really hiring. Promotions feel more like MLB trade-offs between companies. And if you’re a woman, you can bet your unpaid internship that the “love” your boss has for you is on a timeline—as long as you stay hot enough. Grit gets you nowhere in this city if you don’t have “the look” or you don’t have the “IT factor.” And it’s infuriating.
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Here’s the thing: no one ever really makes it in Hollywood. Not in the way people mean. You just get better at approximating the illusion. You get better at adopting the posture of success and mimicking the tone of arrival. Your name gets said in rooms you’re not in, usually with a question mark, and a “maybe next time” that never comes.
You RSVP “yes” to things you don’t understand because someone told you it’s good to be seen. You develop a kind of psychic limp from constantly performing certainty about a future that doesn’t yet exist. It’s exhausting. You start to miss the days when you were just pretending to be an adult. Now, you’re Googling “how to file taxes as a freelancer.”
It’s not even about ambition. It’s about architecture, about learning how to build a self that other people can invest in. You are your own product. Your own PR firm (literally in my case). Your own crisis management team. You adjust your bio compulsively. A little change here, a new title there. It’s all to shift the perception.
It is a chess game, and, if you don’t know how to play it, you will never win.
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Eventually, you start to realize Hollywood is filled with people clutching onto their “almosts,” dragging themselves toward the next “well, maybe this one.” They hover at the edges of parties, pretending not to check their phones for emails they’re expecting. They sit in corner offices of major studios, panicked they’ll lose their job before the day ends.
Without blinking, they’ve mastered the fine art of saying “currently in development”—even when it’s absolutely not the case. They’re not jaded, just worn down in a way that’s hard to explain. The exhaustion that comes from hearing you’re almost there, year after year. Or maybe it’s just the toll this industry takes on you. For coming so close, they’ve started to confuse being near something with actually having it.
They’ve waited on validation for so long, they’ve forgotten how to work without it. Success starts to look like the ability to send a dozen unanswered emails without spiraling over why the people who used to grab drinks with them now leave them on read. Connections are fickle, alliances shift without warning. Hollywood never sleeps; it just reshuffles.
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Your contacts list becomes a taxonomy of ambiguity: “Ava – maybe stylist?” “Daniel – brunch Netflix?” “Sam (??? possibly director???)” You have at least sixty unsaved numbers that text like they know you intimately, but refer to your latest project as “that cool thing.” You reply with caution. Every conversation is a potential opportunity, a trapdoor, or a date that ends in someone asking if you’re open to co-writing something “super grounded but funny.” You’re never really sure if they’re interested in you, or just the narrative of you.
You live in a purgatory of conditional tense. Was about to sign. Could be greenlit. Might have a distributor. You begin to speak in future-perfect: “By next year, I’ll have directed something.” “Once I get representation, I’ll be able to…” You write your résumé like it’s a will, just in case you don’t get that “yes” you’ve been banking on.
This is the emotional architecture of Hollywood: a bureaucratic ghosthood. You may occupy rooms, but you're nowhere to be found on paper. Yet, you're still tethered to the fantasy of it and the reality you could very well create for yourself.
The thing is, I actually am one of the lucky ones. Not to toot my own horn, but there are multitudes of people who’d argue I’ve “made it.” I mean, I have, in the way that I’m legitimately doing the job I set out to do. The things I was “manifesting” four years ago are my reality now. I’m getting the calls, booking the clients, building the companies, and the work is rolling in.
But this industry is just so... this industry. I work every single moment of the day. I’m obsessed! And you have to be. Or you have no shot.
Even actors at the top of their game have to WORK to stay there. Take a year off, and they’ll forget you ever even won the Oscar.
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It’s like high school when you miss just one day of school, and you come back the next day only to find the entire social ladder has shifted. The difference here is that business alliances and deals are far more consequential, and missing even an hour of being in the room where it happens could cost you everything.
And yet. Right before the spiral caves in — someone reminds you why you’re here.
It’s never who you expect. Not the executive. Not the friend-of-a-friend producer who “loved your piece” but can’t remember the title. It’s the waiter who asks if you’re a writer because he saw you scribbling on a napkin, the boss who actually mentors you, or the stranger at an afterparty who says, “Your piece made me feel less insane.” You won’t meet them in meetings. You’ll meet them at bus stops, in text threads with no punctuation but a lot of love, or, in my case, at Van Leeuwen.
These moments don’t scale. They don’t land you meetings or get you repped. But they anchor you to the version of yourself who created for the sake of creating before there was anyone to impress.
Behind the envy of optioned films, the press-cycle fatigue, and the overuse of words like excited and aligned, you’ll find people still trying to protect their creative integrity. People who quietly and stubbornly believe in the possibility of something real, even in a city engineered to manufacture the opposite.
In a city where so many ghost their dreams and their favorite collaborators, there’s something tragic and beautiful about the ones who don’t let go. The ones who understand there is no finish line: just persistence, and the creation of something new.
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