The Button

How to get canceled as a comedy writer (and as a human) by an Icon 😂

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Live from our last meeting.

Hello, Lovelies, how the hell are you?

I am still digesting Kimberly Warner’s stunning post this morning, In Defense of Disappointment. It is spot on in its truth and its wisdom. And being the inveterate oversharer that I am, it’s making it wicked hard not bust out with all the good news from our heretofore slightly scary adventures in the publishing world, but we have to wait… so in the meantime, here’s another tale of disappointment… with a twist.

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I am sitting in a punishingly bright conference room across from three bleary-eyed TV writers and The Icon, who is responsible for some of the most legendary television and film in America.

Everything about him radiates impossible Hollywood authority.

The silver hair. The beam of the glasses. The tan, which is expensive but restrained, the way rich people tan. The checked blazer, perfectly tailored. The ivory cashmere turtleneck so thin and exquisite it appears to have been knitted by spiders with MFAs. The loafers. The watch. The ankles.

My God, the ankles.

Perfect, elegant, suspiciously moisturized ankles, as though Cary Grant has briefly returned from the dead to sell luxury skincare products in Malibu. No actual man I know has ankles like these. It’s like they’ve had facials.

And there I am, with a pencil in my hair, discussing a comedic adaptation of one of my books with a major television network.

The book is about a woman whose life has gone spectacularly off the rails. Picture perfect marriage implodes. Health implodes. Career implodes. Identity hanging by a thread. There are medieval treatments and psychedelic side effects and doctors ranging from devastatingly handsome to jowly, yet comforting Walter Matthau types. There are brightly colored emotional support carbohydrates straight from a Vitamix.

The executives on the call are all white male, chronically overbooked rutabaga types phoning in from various locations, all of them sounding faintly inconvenienced, as though they’ve briefly stepped away from a steak lunch to humor this conversation about a woman having feelings in public.

We’ve met before.

They’re gracious, actually. The whole thing is mostly a professional courtesy to The Icon, who at this point in Hollywood occupies the kind of mythic status generally reserved for studio founders, difficult Roman emperors, and men who have screamed at assistants through multiple Oscar campaigns.

They are perfectly pleasant. Warm, even. For root vegetables.

And I understand the arrangement immediately. They are not here because they are especially interested in my strange little comedy about a woman whose body and life have detonated publicly. They are here because The Icon asked them to be.

These are men who speak reverently about “quadrants” and “market positioning” and whether audiences in Omaha will “connect,” which is Hollywood code for: can a frightened executive explain this project to another frightened executive while trapped inside a black SUV on the 405.

They like stories about men who unravel because male collapse is considered prestige. Men can destroy their marriages, their careers, entire hedge funds, and still be viewed as layered and fascinating so long as they stare moodily through enough rain-streaked windows.

Women, meanwhile, are expected to unravel attractively. Preferably while remaining likable in under two hours.

And my book, unfortunately, is not especially interested in behaving itself that way.

The call ends. Everyone exhales.

The Icon leans toward the triangle speakerphone in the middle of the table and presses a button. He wears a beneficent smile as if, this is just one set of rutabagas. Plenty more root vegetables in the sea.

I take the pencil out of my hair, where I have apparently been storing pencils since the Clinton administration, and start chewing on it while swiveling in my chair.

Then I say, “Well, obviously they were never going to buy it. Everyone knows they only make shows about themselves… miserable, self-loathing white guys having existential crises in architecturally significant kitchens while their emotionally volatile porn sidepieces threaten to burn it all to the ground. This was never never going to be that.”

I sigh and start winding my hair back into a bun, using the pencil to pin it up again because, as far as I know, the meeting is over.

Silence. Not normal silence. The kind of silence where suddenly the molecules in the room rearrange themselves into the shape of a gargantuan black hole. A void so black, so yawning, it sucks every micron of oxygen from every pore across the surface of your being. Even the pores inside your ears. And yes, even the pores inside your asshole, they are not safe.

And then, through the speakerphone, a voice says, “Excuse me?”

At which point every person in the room freezes. The writers freeze. The Icon freezes. I morph into a human Ice Pop. Somewhere down in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, Virgil asks for a puffer.

All of us staring at the triangle conference phone the way people in horror movies stare at the basement door they absolutely should not open.

And then everyone starts yelling.

The network executives are yelling. “You are nothing. A nobody. How dare you presume to know anything about what we buy or who we are…” Blah, blah, blah.

The writers are yelling. “What were you thinking? You can’t expect him to know about buttons. He’s an icon. He’s a legend.”

The Icon is yelling. “That’s right. I am an icon and a legend. You’re just the author. YOU DON’T TALK.”

And then I am yelling because, “WHY DOES HE NOT KNOW HOW TO HANG UP A PHONE?”

And because my brain now does everything in soundtracks, suddenly all I can hear over the sea of shouting is:

I walk home.

What nobody in that room understands is that, for me, this is never just a television deal.

I do not even want to be here, not really. I only say yes because they offer, because somewhere deep down I still believe this might be a way of showing my daughters:

See? Your mother is not completely unemployable after all. Or at the very least, moderately employable with supervision. So when the room explodes, the stakes feel catastrophically high. I am devastated. Not dramatically devastated. Not movie devastated, but quiet grief devastated.

The kind where your whole nervous system suddenly goes cold and thin and silent, and all you can hear is the running internal monologue of your own humiliation, which goes like this:

“You absolute idiot. You ridiculously overeducated, emotionally overcaffeinated cliché of a woman. Who did you think you were in there? Honestly. You walk into one television meeting and suddenly you think you’re Joan Didion with a development deal? You think because you once worked in Hollywood and survived neurologically microdosing the universe and published a moderately compelling book about it that you now possess wisdom? Insight? Authority? Please. You’re a woman with a pencil in her hair and an eyepatch-induced Messiah complex who just insulted an entire network because you momentarily confused ‘having observations’ with ‘having impulse control.’”

But one of the great under-appreciated truths about the brain is that walking helps.

It helps when your heart is broken. It helps when you are panicking. It helps when you have accidentally vaporized your own television career before lunch and your amygdala is behaving like a raccoon trapped inside a burning Panera Bread.

Movement shifts the story your brain is telling itself.

And somewhere between one block and the next, while replaying the sound of powerful men yelling “YOU ARE NOTHING” through a conference speakerphone, I suddenly realize… Oh my God. This is a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Not metaphorically, but literally.

This is exactly the sort of thing that happens to Larry David every fifteen minutes. A moderate social misunderstanding escalates into total professional or social annihilation because nobody involved possesses either the emotional maturity or the technical competence to stop it.

I can suddenly SEE the scene… The Icon fat fingering the speakerphone like an aging Roman emperor trying to launch a fax machine into orbit. The horrified writers. The executives bellowing through static from Beverly Hills steak houses (Hi Dan Tana’s). Me, absentmindedly pinning my hair into a bun while inadvertently tanking my future.

And once I see it that way, something shifts. Because the second catastrophe becomes story, the panic loosens its grip. The nervous system stops screaming: WE ARE DYING. And starts whispering: Wait, this is material.

By the time I get home, I am no longer rehearsing my professional funeral. I am mentally casting the episode, writing the chapter.

The next morning, my agent calls. I am sitting in the bathtub because this is Los Angeles and humiliation is always followed by a bath. I recount the tale of the meeting, The Icon, and the button.

Then she says, “Oh God, you got the button?”

And I gasp. Because until this exact moment, I still believe The Icon simply does not understand technology. That this is all just some crazy Boomer accident involving cashmere and speakerphones.

Then she says, “Oh honey. He’s done this to other authors.”

And suddenly everything rearranges itself. The performance of it all. This man knows exactly how to hang up a phone. It is not an accident.

It is a hazing ritual.

A completely psychotic, old-school Hollywood initiation ceremony apparently designed to test whether writers can survive public humiliation without dissolving into powder. And honestly?

Now it’s even funnier. Dark funny, let’s be clear. Because the whole thing is no longer merely a disaster. It is a deeply elaborate character study about power, ego, terror, performance, and one legendary Hollywood Icon psychologically waterboarding authors for sport through a conference speakerphone. Which, I have to admit, is still incredible material.

Hoo boy.

Ok, that’s what I got. Hope you’re having a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.

xoxo - Gotham Girl 🖤

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PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.