How to get fired in Hollywood

AXE MAN Getting fired by Woody Allen is no Hollywood Ending

Laid off, downsized, let go, escorted out by security—however it happens, being fired sucks. When actress Annabelle Gurwitch was fired from a play by Woody Allen, who told her that she "looked retarded," she went through the requisite torrent of tears before realizing that as firing stories go, she had a pretty good one. And, it turned out, so did many of her show biz friends. So Gurwitch took the topic and ran with it, creating a stage show, a book, and now a film, Fired! (in theaters now), with tales of torturous job losses by the likes of Tim Allen, Anne Meara, Judy Gold, Sarah Silverman, Fred Willard, and many more, plus a look at some non-show biz folks whose stories are a bit more dire.

As a longtime veteran of surgical job removal, I felt well-qualified to talk about the experience with Gurwitch and two of the film's contributors: comedian/writer Paul F. Tompkins (Mr. Show, Best Week Ever), who was fired from two video stores, one of which let him go for purloining mass quantities of videotapes over an extended period of time; and humorist Andy Borowitz (CNN, NPR, borowitzreport.com), who, several years before cocreating The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, was fired as a writer for The Facts of Life because he didn't "get" Tootie.

Lesson No. 1: "If you feel you're about to get fired, take other people down with you. It's so much better to get fired en masse. It really mitigates the pain"RADAR: So how'd the idea for the film come about?
ANNABELLE GURWITCH: The whole reason I have Fired! is that I went to interview a friend of mine, Richard Foos, who founded Rhino Records. In his first and only job working for someone else, he was a delivery boy for a pharmacy. Let's just say his firing had something to do with delivering the wrong drugs to the wrong people. He couldn't keep the orders straight. Not only was he fired, but the next week they asked for the money back that they'd paid him. He said, "Fuck you. I'm never working for anyone ever again." And he hasn't. I love that story so much, that's where the movie came from.

The three of you each have stories as well. Annabelle, when you were fired by Woody Allen, did you see it coming?
GURWITCH: Oh, I saw it coming. Many times, when you're going to be fired, there's writing on the wall. Or, in my case, being told I "look retarded."

The firing for theft from the video store seemed well deserved, Paul.
Paul F. Tompkins: Absolutely. One hundred percent. I stole everything from Hollywood classics to current releases. The Third Man came from that haul. There was a movie called The Incident, an obscure Martin Sheen movie from the late '60s or early '70s—a hard-to-find release, and I still have a copy of it. The Star Wars trilogy ... I took a lot of stuff.

Andy, how long were you at The Facts of Life?
Andy Borowitz: One season. I wrote five episodes. For a guy who was reviled, I was pretty productive.

CHARACTER FLAW Tootie

Did you see it coming?
Borowitz:I was warned by friends that there was a writer the season before who had done terribly and was not renewed. That guy turned out to be Paul Haggis, who wound up writing and directing Crash and winning Best Picture. I didn't know him. I just thought, Paul Haggis, what a loser. Even I can write Tootie better than Paul Haggis. Another guy who was not well thought of on the show was George Clooney. He joined a year after I left, and he was playing the goofy handyman.

When they told you that you just didn't "get" Tootie, what went through your mind?
Borowitz: I thought the show was terrible, very hacky, but there's this moment where you realize, I'm writing this really hacky show, but I'm failing at it. So how bad does that make me? I must be the worst writer in history. So when I really started to fail, I got Stockholm Syndrome. I wanted to please my captors. I wanted to really prove that I "got" Tootie. But it was to no avail. My work deteriorated from there.

If being fired is so universal, why do you think it still has such a stigma?
GURWITCH: It's one of the last bastions of shame.
Tompkins: The way it happens is very shameful, and you're made to be ashamed while it's happening, in a lot of cases. They're saying, "We're letting you go." It's not always, "Hey, we're downsizing, we have no choice." A lot of times it's, "We are unhappy with you as a person. You have to get out of here."

FIRING SQUAD Notorious pink-slippers Trump and Helmsley

The firing experience is such a weird power dynamic, because it's the ultimate show of control from someone who already has complete power over you.
GURWITCH: Absolutely, and yet, at that moment they fire you, you have been set free from their circle of power. Once when Harry Shearer was fired, the person firing him said, "I envy you your freedom." That's not what Harry was thinking, but what he later thought was, Yes. Freedom from your tyranny.
Tompkins: The big issue, though, is the shame. When you get fired, you're hesitant to talk about it. You don't wanna get that look from someone, that brief flicker of disgust: "Oh, you were fired from a job."
"After I was fired by Woody, I thought about waiting on a street corner and accosting him"Borowitz:In Hollywood, being fired as an actor or writer may have a stigma, but being fired as a studio executive does not. There seems to be a feeling that if you're a studio executive and you lost $200 million or a half-billion dollars for a studio, at least you had the experience of losing that amount of money, so you're qualified to do it for another studio. I think it's also true in government, where these political hacks just go into a think tank in Washington for a couple of years, then bounce right back. It's really not stigmatized at the upper echelon. The head of Home Depot was recently fired, and he got something over $200 million. I would love to be in a job and do such a shitty job that they're willing to pay me that amount of money to go away. You gotta really fuck up big time for them to say, "How much money could we put in your pockets to please make you never show up to work again?"

Have you ever gotten revenge on an ex-boss? I was a little alarmed by the woman in the film who said she contemplated taking out a hit on the people who fired her.
GURWITCH: Who hasn't? After I was fired by Woody, I thought about waiting on a street corner and accosting him, like, "Hey man, how come you didn't call me yourself!" I didn't price out a hit, but think of Woody himself in Bullets over Broadway. Jennifer Tilly was so bad in the playwright's play, he had to kill her. It did occur to me after I was fired that I was lucky he didn't kill me!

It really adds insult to injury when the person in charge doesn't even do the firing themselves.
GURWITCH: In my book, I have a story by Joyce Beber, who founded Beber Silverstein. She was fired three times by Leona Helmsley and once by Donald Trump. When she was fired by Donald, he had an underling do it. She said to the underling, "Tell Donald he should take a lesson from his friend Leona. At least Leona fired me herself." Cut to years later, and there's Donald Trump doing all the firing on his show! She said, "It was prophetic. I told him he should do his own firing, and look what happens—he went into the firing business."

BURN VICTIMS Radar's roundtable: Gurwitch, Tompkins, and Borowitz

Have you ever fired someone?
GURWITCH: Yes, and it's horrible. I hate firing people—I'll do anything to not fire someone. Dana Gould, one of my favorite comedians, describes in my book how terrible he is at firing someone. Talking about how he fired an agent, he said, "I fired him like a man—over an 18-month period of squirming and indecision." That's me.
Borowitz:I was a producer for many years in Hollywood, and I hated firing people. I would suffer gross and prolonged incompetence before I would actually give somebody the ax. Then when I did, it was like a break-up. I had to fire an assistant, and I talked a lot about our chemistry. It was like saying, "It's not you, it's me. I wanna start seeing other people typing my letters."

What advice would you give to people about the best way to recover from being fired?
GURWITCH: If you feel you're about to get fired, take other people down with you. It's so much better to get fired en masse. It really mitigates the pain.
Borowitz:When you're fired from Kinko's, you go out with your friends and drink and get depressed. We should imitate what happens to our superiors in society when they get fired. Put out a press release and say, "We're leaving Kinko's to explore new opportunities, and to spend more time with our family." Then people will think it's a move upward. "We feel like we've accomplished all we can at Kinko's, and now it's time to explore new opportunities—possibly at Wal-Mart." The more Rumsfeldian it sounds, the better off you're going to be.