Students looking to be the next Hank Azaria or Peter Gallagher gathered in Eaton Hall Monday to get tips on how to make it in Hollywood.
Andrea Gall Schmitt (J '90), the director of the alumni network in Los Angeles, spoke at the event, which was hosted by the Communications and Media Studies program.
She told the audience of about 30 students it is difficult to succeed in Hollywood. "I want to begin by saying that I currently am not working," she said. "So you will have to take the things I am saying with a grain of salt."
Gall Schmitt has spent many years acting in Los Angeles. At Tufts, she majored in English and drama.
"There is a lot of pain and suffering trying to get work out there, so if you have a head start it can only help you," she said. "For every job out there, there are about 5,000 qualified people to take it."
Students who want to write movie scripts need to know that it takes years for works to be read, revised and rewritten, Gall Schmitt said, so people entering the industry should have a long-term plan.
"You could look now and see that 'The Forty-Year-Old Virgin' was very popular, and you see that the trend is toward R-rated comedies, so you go and work on an R-rated comedy," she said. "But by the time the script is ready to be made into a movie, these types of movies may no longer be popular."
She said students need a "5-3-1 formula" - a long-term plan with interim steps. "If your goal in five years is to write up a script for a movie, what do you need to have done to make that happen?" she asked.
The best way to get a job from industry executives, Gall Schmitt said, is to have a specific goal. "These people are very busy, so if you call and say, 'I am interested in working in television,' they won't have the time to help you," she said.
Another strategy is using alumni contacts in the industry as leverage. "It is a bit discouraging that a Harvard student got the job before it was even posted because he had a connection," she said.
"Tufts alums really like to help out Tufts alums," the director of the Communications and Media Studies program, Julie Dobrow, said.
Gall Schmitt said jobs are available to recent graduates, but usually as personal assistants. "There definitely is a hazing mentality for the assistants," she said. She recounted a story of an assistant who put the wrong type of sweetener in her boss' coffee and had the cup hurled at her head.
"Ask yourself, 'do I want to spend the next five years of my life getting coffee for these people?'" she said. "You are going to have to choose a path, and it may not be the original path you intended to take, but you have to make a choice."
Gall Schmitt was also in town for Saturday night's Cheap Sox 25th reunion show in Goddard Chapel.
Her speech ended with a final piece of advice. "The most important skills you can develop are to be observant and to be able to think on your feet," she said.
