Uh, other management office stories:

We had a former child star who once I knew him I noticed had bit parts in everything, and voices in half the kids’ cartoons in production. He actually took the biggest chunk of our time, mostly mediating between his (stage) mom and (former child star) girlfriend as they tried to outmaneuver each other for control of him. He booked hella jobs tho, so worth it.

Anyway when he was coming in we had to lock the door to the waiting room because otherwise he would burst in and monopolize our time because he’d just never learned how not to be the center of attention at all times. Like once when the managers were taking a call while they waited on a contract to print he used the time to come out to the assistants’ room, pull out a deck of cards, and do fucking magic tricks for us.

And the weirdest thing about it, it wasn’t actually grating. They were good magic tricks! And he was very charming and charismatic! Dude just didn’t have an off switch.

What else… oh, there was a guy who had been a soap actor but hadn’t worked in a while and the calls I overheard pushing him were these ridiculous dances of talking around things, like “Oh yeah, he’s GREAT, and everyone loves him, ALWAYS HAS, and aah, you know, that’s just catty rumors, really he’s never even been ACCUSED of ANYTHING, certainly not raping his costar in her trailer, anyway WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE, he’s a WHOLE NEW MAN now, have you heard about his newfound passion for animal rights activism?”

Oh also we had Aaron Carter for a while, which among other things means I’ve actually seen his shitty motocross movie. Dude would never ever return calls, if we actually needed to talk to him we had to contact him through Lou Pearlman’s office. Now this is an industry of assholes and these managers held their own, but that’s the only guy I ever saw them tangibly afraid of.