Hollywood or bust!

"Strip away the phony tinsel of hollywood," Oscar Levant once observed, "and you'll find the real tinsel underneath."

Everett Weinberger, MBA '90, diarist and would-be producer, now realizes the truth in these words, but he wouldn't have paid any attention to them five years ago, when he abandoned a budding career as a Wall Street investment banker and headed to Hollywood. The movies didn't work out, but you can still read the book.

For over a year, Weinberger networked furiously to find a position as a junior creative executive. He called people he met as a summer intern in finance at Paramount Studios and talked with Stanford alumni who have careers or connections in Hollywood.

In all, Weinberger estimates he landed about 100 meetings and interviews. "I wanted to hook up with a smart guy going places who could bring me up with him," he says. "I thought: I have an encyclopedic knowledge about movies, I've networked my butt off to know everyone on the creative side and, hopefully, I've demonstrated intelligence."

But Hollywood wasn't impressed. Weinberger's efforts netted him temp jobs as assistant to assistants to senior executives. Along the way, he had encounters of the strange kind with movie moguls, top box office actors, and actor has-beens. Then, like a scene from a Hollywood movie, Weinberger had an epiphany: "I realized I really didn't want to become like the people who were doing the job I thought I wanted to do." So he packed his bags and returned to Wall Street, where he now works as an international banker with Dillon, Read & Co.

"I tried it and got it out of my system," he says.

Well, maybe not. Weinberger recorded his experiences in a diary, which he turned into a book, Wannabe: A Would-Be Player's Misadventures in Hollywood (Birch Lane Press). In a twist of poetic justice, a big-name producer recently purchased movie rights to the book.

-- Heidi Garfield

Stanford Business School Magazine
(ISSN 0883-265X)
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