Life After Hollywood: A Writer's New Life as a Construction Worker
Nick Morton
Courtesy of Subject
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It’s 5:45 a.m. on a Tuesday, and the Home Depot on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood is already bustling. I am standing in Aisle 18 — deep in the lumber section of the cavernous space — evaluating formulations of plaster compound. I’ve been sent here to get a 50-pound bag of “40 minute,” a box of “red dot,” a box of “green dot,” a roll of drywall tape and a roll of “frog” tape. To be clear, I don’t know what any of these things are.
The last time I was up this early for work, I was on the set of Cooper’s Bar (the Emmy-nominated sitcom I co-created for AMC), trying to convince our star, Rhea Seehorn, that one of the jokes I had written for her character would be funnier if she said the words “face anus” instead of her preferred choice, “face hole.” (Rhea, to her endless credit, ultimately agreed.)
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In the intervening months, Hollywood had suffered an actors’ strike, a writers’ strike, a spiraling production exodus and a content contraction precipitated by the economics of streaming and the rise of creators on media platforms like YouTube and TikTok. I lost my job working at a production company, and my show got cancelled. After a 30-year career in Hollywood where I held executive positions at companies like Anschutz Entertainment Group and Phoenix Pictures ­— where I wrote, produced and directed award-winning movies and TV like Ray and Afternoon Delight — I am now a construction worker.
Like going broke — as Hemingway famously quipped — my construction career happened gradually and then all at once. I spent the first year after getting laid off holding on to the Hollywood dream. My old company, Whitewater Films, hired me to write a sports comedy — Puckheads — about an aging minor league hockey enforcer who gets coerced into playing for a cartel in Mexico City. Everyone loved the script. Ian Jeffers (The Grey) and I wrote a supernatural pilot about special ops forces in post-WW2 Germany tracking Hitler’s nukes. Everyone loved the script!! I wrote a contained horror film, The Vegetable, I planned to direct. OMFG. Everyone loved the script!!!
I collected unemployment. I started a YouTube channel (The Cross-Eyed Chef), and I wrote a memoir, Supah Ritz. But more and more, my calls to Hollywood went unreturned, and it became clear that despite all the kind words about my work, I could not pay the rent (and college tuition for my 18-year-old) on praise alone.
It was a fast and demoralizing descent, but one I suppose I had always seen coming. Over the years, the Grim Reaper of Hollywood had already come for so many of my colleagues — forcing them to pull their kids from private school and move home. There was no way my number wouldn’t one day come up. Besides, Hollywood had always made me feel like I had no real value. As an exec, you sit in your office trying to catch falling knives, wondering which one will deliver the fatal blow. You have almost no control over it. Being a writer is even worse. What’s more, the town had made it clear to me that I didn’t have the right stuff. As a studio chief once told me in a job interview, “Affability counts for nothing in this town, Nick.” What was I if not affable? When I lost my job and show, it just confirmed the way Hollywood had always made me feel. Worthless.
Thankfully, during that first year my brother-in-law — a master cabinetmaker and general contractor in Los Angeles (and one of the all-time great dudes in the pantheon of Dudedom) — approached me about overseeing the renovation of a house in Los Feliz that he had purchased as an investment. He was planning a gut renovation, and he wanted me to keep an eye on it, handle some of the administrative work around city permitting and make sure the crew had whatever supplies they might need for the day’s planned work. Knowing nothing about construction, save the few projects I’d done at my own house, I said yes.
Every day after writing for a couple hours, I stepped out of my effete world of character arcs and inciting incidents — coffee meetings and tracking boards — and into the manly world of construction. I won’t kid you. It was intimidating. My brother-in-law’s team is made up of guys from all over the globe with expertise in carpentry, masonry, paintin