Why Nobody in Hollywood Has Any Friends

The Hollywood Reporter ^ | 8/30/2019 | Stephen Galloway

[Beave Meister]

Transience is the very essence of the entertainment business, unpredictability its warp and weft.

Early this month, the market research and data analytics firm YouGov published the results of a startling poll.

According to interviews with 1,254 adult Americans, 30 percent of millennials have no best friends, 27 percent have no close friends and 22 percent have no friends at all. Not surprisingly, the report named them “the loneliest generation.” But loneliness is all around and perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in Hollywood.

Here’s what surprised me: that the statistics weren’t worse, for older people as well as millennials.

Look around and you’ll see whole armies of workers engulfed in their professional concerns, scurrying in and out of buildings, manning computers and phones, earbuds jammed in their lobes, too busy and overwhelmed by the pressures of their lives to have time to reach out, let alone form deep and lasting bonds.

Social media, as we know, has made this worse. A University of Pennsylvania study published in December in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that symptoms of loneliness and depression went down when social media was used less. And no group is more attuned to social media than those in the entertainment industry. But that’s just one of multiple factors altering our relationships with others. Stress, uncertainty, overwork, the volatility of the workplace, narcissism, competition — all these things play a part, honed to a fine art in the film and TV world.

In other industries, the workplace is often a communal hub. In Hollywood, it’s too frequently the core of a maelstrom that pits one individual against another. In other industries, relationships build over time as men and women come to know each other better, aware they’ll likely be working on the same team for years;

[Beave Meister]

I had met this woman in Chicago thru a theatre company I was in. She was from Florida. We remained friends for years while I was in Chicago. After I moved to Los Angeles she moved there a few years later. We would run into each other from time to time out in LA. Years later we went out to dinner with a group of friends from Chicago. So this female friend of mine and I were talking about the differences between people in Chicago and people in LA, and she said it was much easier for her to have close friends in LA than in Chicago. I asked why is that? She said because you guys from Chicago still have all your friends from grade school and high school and I could never ever be in that group. I thought that was interesting, because I’m still very close with several friends I grew up with from grade school as well as high school. We still get together on a regular basis.