A Sitcom Writer-Turned-Psychologist Counsels Hollywood Workers on the ‘Industry Apocalypse’
Holding on in Hollywood: Phil Stark, a writer on “That '70s Show” tpivoted to counseling industry brethren
The post A Sitcom Writer-Turned-Psychologist Counsels Hollywood Workers on the ‘Industry Apocalypse’ appeared first on TheWrap.
Phil Stark understands better than most how the struggling workers of Hollywood are feeling these days.
The 51-year-old former comedy writer, who authored the movie script “Dude, Where’s My Car” and worked in the writer’s room of “That ’70s Show,” is seeing the pain and confusion gripping entertainment professionals from another angle: through his tele-health practice as a licensed psychologist.
His patients, who are mostly screenwriters and comedians, are living through the Hollywood tumult. The WGA strike stopped production in its tracks. Screenwriters are struggling to pay their bills, even as they walk the picket lines to fight for their futures. Production is fleeing California.
And as Stark described it, there is a general sense of pessimism in the air, the feeling that the present was difficult, but the future could be bleaker.
“People are coming to me with the bigger questions about whether this career is sustainable or whether they can afford to do it at all,” Stark told TheWrap. “A lot of people are looking for help and support dealing with the aftershocks of these big changes in entertainment.”
As TheWrap has reported in its Holding on in Hollywood series, a growing pool of Hollywood workers — both above and below the line — are fighting to stay in the industry to which they dedicated their careers. With jobs drying up and the uncertainties around artificial intelligence, the competition for gigs has become fierce, with hundreds of people applying for the same positions.
Stark can certainly relate, in more ways than one. For him, the 2008 recession was a turning point in his own career, when the writing opportunities started to dry up and he steadily lost his mojo — before he decided to pivot to an entirely new career in his 40s.
He has a message for Hollywood workers battling their own anxieties dealing with the “entertainment industry apocalypse.” First, there’s no going back. “Time is just a conveyor belt that constantly moves into the future,” he said. And second, Hollywood workers today need to be prepared to leave.
“You can’t just get the same jobs in L.A. anymore,” Stark said. “Production is fleeing the state and the country. Now you have to assess: Do I want to move to Vancouver for three months, or can I get this same job that somebody in Alabama is going to be doing instead of me? You might be thinking it’ll go back to normal. But the truth is, you should be trying to figure out can I live like this in the future? Is this how I want it to be?”
From “South Park” to “Dude, Where’s My Car?”
Stark drove out to Los Angeles from his native Houston, Texas, with the goal of becoming a screenwriter. The year was 1995 and he got a job in a coffee shop so he could focus on his scripts. He read all the classic screenwriting tomes, including Syd Field’s “Screenplay.”
Then a friend suggested he was funny and should take a stab at comedy writing. So he wrote a “Simpsons” spec script, and a “Seinfield.” Then another friend from college got him a job as a PA on a new animated show for Comedy Central in development. It was six weeks work. That show ended up being “South Park.”
“It was a rocket ship to hang onto,” Stark recalled.
He only worked on the show for a year, as a writer’s assistant, but it set up his career. His agents soon lined up producers wanting to meet anybody who had a “South Park” credit. His first meeting ended up being for “That ’70s Show.” Suddenly, he had an office and was being paid a WGA minimum for scripts.
He ended up working on the sitcom for all eight seasons, forging friendships with cast members like Ashton Kutcher, who was later cast as the lead in Stark’s movie, “Dude, Where’s My Car?”
Stark saved well, bought a house and started a family with two children.
Then Hollywood began to change. Reality TV took off. The recession hit. “And there were less and less overall deals,” he said. “People were making fewer pilots. I felt like a coal miner in an industry where everybody was going solar.”
Stark said he had “made a lot of money” in the first decade of his career but slowly he drew down his savings. His agents stopped returning his calls, and the frustration and unhappiness mounted. “Eventually I started feeling like I had to break in all over again,” he said. “And it is hard enough to break in one time.”
He recalled a turning point of sorts, when in 2018 his agent at the time dusted off an old spec script of his for a multi-camera sitcom and lined up financing. The agent wanted Stark to make a formal pitch deck for him to be named showrunner. “So, I made this deck, and it was pretty shitty,” he recalled. “I half-assed it.”
In that moment he realized he didn’t want to be a showrunner, after all. He wanted a different life, one with less of the same struggles. “That was when I realized that I made a real choice,” he said. “By the end of my career, I was just writing stuff that I hoped somebody would buy. And I didn’t care if it was my story, or I was passionate about it.”
A new beginning
In 2019, Stark enrolled in graduate school at Antioch College in Culver City to be a psychologist. At Antioch, he was surrounded by other writer friends who also later became therapists. “We could have put on a production, because we had a director, a producer, a writer and actor,” he said. ‘We had everybody.”
Only months into his training, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down his opportunity at practical training. He started out administering counseling via zoom calls and has never known otherwise.
“I work 100% via tele-health,” he said. “This is how all my clients experience the work.”
Today, he is happily acting as his own agent to find clients. He works with writers, directors, producers, comedians, comedy troupes. Oftentimes they are dealing with a midlife crisis. And more recently they have specific concerns, like how will artificial intelligence affect their entertainment careers. Will the studio just have a computer write feature scripts? Will human writers even be needed?
The pivot hasn’t been easy, Stark admitted. “It’s not as stable or not nearly as lucrative” as his early entertainment career was. He has a lot of work to do still to establish his practice. He joked that he wishes there were “residuals” in therapy. “If a client like had a breakthrough and felt great that I would get a percentage of their earnings, it’d be great,” he said. “Makes me feel how lucky I was to be a member of the guild back in the day. But I’m loving what I’m doing now, and I’m happy doing it. I’m building it as a career, just as I did my writing career.”
He counseled that it’s okay for those holding on in Hollywood to admit they don’t have all the answers right now, that their anxiety and paralysis are not misplaced or wrong to feel.
Today the industry “is fragmented, and people are realizing now that they’re not going to do for the whole lives what they started out doing” Stark said, “and that period where you’re trying to figure out the differences is hard.”
In late 2021, Stark self-published a self-help book, “Dude, Where’s My Car-tharsis?”
In the book, there’s a chapter about change that uses the metaphor of standing on top of a dam, watching the water rise below. “We know it’s coming. We know we’re going to get wet. We know we need to move, but for some reason we can’t act yet,” Stark described. “We’re just not ready. Sometimes it’s only when our feet get wet that we become ready to act.”
Next week: The series continues.
Catch up on Holding on in Hollywood:
Part 1: Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads (Erin Browne)
Part 2: A Development Executive Wrestles With How TV’s New Normal Is Crushing the Job Market (Erin Copen Howard)
Part 3: An Assistant Director Says: ‘There Are 100s of Us Sitting at Home’ as Production Shrinks
The post A Sitcom Writer-Turned-Psychologist Counsels Hollywood Workers on the ‘Industry Apocalypse’ appeared first on TheWrap.