The Art of the Meet and Greet

When you reach the lofty heights of sporadic employment in show business that I have people make several assumptions about you. You must have cracked a code, learned the secret handshake or sold your soul to the devil to have achieved even your level of modest success.

(For the record, Satan and I have not done business together, although we have been trading calls.)

For those of you imagining the wild Malibu parties and drug fueled orgies we of working Hollywood are constantly enjoying, I won’t discourage that impression. Just give my regards to President Carter and the rest of the 1970’s. The truth is that day-to-day life of working Hollywood is much more mundane. Most of it pivots around an odd, deceptively simple sounding ritual, The Meeting.

The Meeting can take on several forms, the most common of which is the “Meet and Greet”. Think of the Meet and Greet as a job interview where there’s no specific job involved and the person you’re meeting has no power to hire you. You are there, whether as a writer, actor or director, to meet an executive at a network or studio so when their superiors are discussing prospective writers, directors or actors, the executive can say,

“Yeah, I met him.” And so the wheel turns.

“Meet and Greets” are all pretty much the same. Let’s say you are a new writer that CBS has requested to meet in preparation for staffing season, when new shows are hiring their writers.

The phone call comes from your agent. (How to get one is a tale for another day) You have a “Meet and Greet” with a VP of Comedy at the network, who loved your “Two and A Half Men” writing sample. You hang up the phone, convinced that your rocket to the top has begun. You tell your manager at work that Starbucks can find another barista; you have a “Meet and Greet”!

Your manager smiles enigmatically, wishes you good luck and turns back to typing on his laptop. While leaving, you glance over his shoulder and manage to catch a quick glimpse at his “Desperate Housewives” spec script.

The day of your meeting, you drive to the gate and give the guard your name. He pulls your pass up from the computer and directs you to a parking space, usually nowhere near where you’ll ultimately be going. You park the car and get out. As you walk across the lot to your meeting, you silently take it all in. “Wow, there’s Bob Barker’s parking spot”. “Is that Ted Danson?” “Maybe I’ll run into Leeza Gibbons! That’d be sweet.”

You’ll get to the office of the VP of Comedy. Understand that titles in Hollywood are nothing to be intimidated by. Think of them as ambassadorships. It’s a much easier meeting to take if you think you’re sitting across from the Ambassador to Luxembourg.

You walk into the reception area and give your name. The comely young receptionist gives you a dazzling smile that makes you melt and believe that you are destined to be together forever. That, in all likelihood, will not happen.

You, hopefully, will have arrived promptly. Always a good strategy if tempered with the knowledge that your Meet and Greet will never begin on time. The executive will have calls to juggle, other Meet and Greets that day and more. Like a doctor, their schedule can be thrown off by a single late call or unexpected event. (And like a doctor, the executive will also be suffering from an unwarranted “god complex”)

You will be offered coffee, soda of some kind, or water. Always take the beverage. If possible, have a subsequent request, just nothing exotic or obnoxious. A pedicure, for example, would be going too far. Simply request enough to make them remember you. If you ask for coffee, ask for creamer, but if all they have is the powdered stuff, change to a Coke instead. Show them that their job is to take care of you, even now. But, be charming, always.

Eventually, you will be ushered into the executive’s office. The first question you will be asked is if you need anything to drink, even if you’re carrying your beverage in from the reception area. Leave your first drink in the reception area and ask for another one. Allow the executive to make this gesture for you. Let them enjoy their power. They may not have it next week.

You will enter the office and be faced with what seat to take. Take the couch. Quickly note the personal items in the executive’s office, whether it’s movie memorabilia, sports stuff or pictures of their children and come up with one thing to say about them. “Hey, how about those Red Sox?” “Boy, I really loved Caddyshack 2” “Your daughter’s goiter is almost unnoticeable.”

This is the small talk portion of the Meet and Greet. The executive will ask you about your background, mostly because they like being reminded that people come from somewhere else and don’t pop out of a pod somewhere in the basement of the Writer’s Guild Building. Have a story about the time your crazy Uncle Ernie dressed up in your mom’s prom dress and held up a gas station. Just make it the funny version.

The conversation will inevitably turn to your career, or your aspirations if your career hasn’t begun. Two tips here: 1) Your career goal is to direct/write/act in something exactly like that executive’s most recent success. 2) Resist the temptation to break into sobs and say something like,

“I just want to work. I have no money. I have no other skills. My family thinks I’m crazy.”

(Unfortunately, I learned Tip #2 the hard way.)

The conversation will continue through vague banter about current movies or TV, to more specific discussion of the executive’s current projects. Your passion and desire to be involved in them cannot be oversold. Again, though, any weeping should be confined to tears of rapture that such a comic gem as “My Stepson is a Gay Alien” with Jim Belushi could find it’s way on to their fall schedule and how it would be the creative pinnacle of your career to be hired on that show.

Eventually, the conversation will start to double back on itself. Your first clue will be the awkward silences and the clumsy segues back to topics already covered. “So, from Boston, huh?”

In the real world, when called into an interview, at some point, the interviewer will have gotten all of the information they need and will close the meeting. “Well, thanks for coming in. We have a lot of people to talk to. We’ll let you know.”

That will not happen in Hollywood. Think of the Hall of Presidents in Disneyland. Like the automatons of past Chief Executives (or the denizens of Country Bear Jamboree, for that matter), the executives are on an internal meeting loop that will repeat until you close the meeting yourself, thanking them for their time and getting out of there.

If you don’t, you run a serious risk of an executive malfunction. While there is no actual record of what happens when one occurs, there is a rumor that a small fire at Universal Studios in 1996 resulted when a writer on a Meet and Greet with an executive kept waiting for the exec to close the meeting. The resulting short circuit and fire caused extensive damage throughout the Black Tower.

You will leave the office and drive off the lot. You will call your agent and tell them that the meeting went great. They will promise to check in with the network and get back to you. A couple of hours later, you learn that the executive thought you were “ A really nice guy.” You never hear from CBS again.

You are depressed. You go to your favorite bar. The bartender asks you what is wrong. You reply that you just had your first “Meet and Greet”. The bartender groans sympathetically and pours you a draft, even though you didn’t ask for one.

Always take the beverage. But just the one. You have two more “Meet and Greets” tomorrow.