Let's talk about transactional relationships.
As a literary manager, I made a career out of building a Hollywood network. While networking isn't *exactly* the same as making friends, the foundations are the same.
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Everyone knows that if you want to succeed in Hollywood, it’s all about who you know.
No matter how good of a screenwriter you are, you will not get your career off the ground if you can’t network.
Most writers complain about this. I’m sure that you wish you could cut out all the bullshit and just spend your day focused on what really matters: the work.
I agree.
The work should be your #1 priority.
But the requirement that you network will not go away. Humans are social creatures. Whether you think it’s fair or not, people will always hire, sign, buy from, and invest in their friends before think about helping out a stranger.
No matter how talented, promising, or deserving that stranger is.
Instead of complaining, the solution to this is to make more influential friends.
But this endeavor can feel cringe-inducing. Many screenwriters feel awkward networking. It feels sleazy. You don’t want to feel like you’re using people. The whole endeavor can feel like all the bad parts of Hollywood rolled up into one.
But it doesn’t have to be.
That networking is “fake” is a misconception.
The way to avoid being fake is to only network with people you genuinely like, enjoy talking to, and have fun working with. The entertainment industry contains literally millions of people. Therefore, odds are, you can find at least a few that you click with. You don’t have to change your personality or even lie to anyone.
But many of these relationships will still be “transactional.”
And that’s okay.
The purpose of today’s deep dive is to call these relationships what they really are. Once you understand the purpose that each type of relationship serves in your life, you can show up to it with the right energy and the right expectations.
If you fail to calibrate either of these things properly, you will either push the other person away, or you will experience disappointment.
So, let’s avoid this by defining the different types of relationships you have and articulating how you should show up for each of them.
There are two types of relationships.
The two different types of relationships I’ll be talking about today are “transactional” and “emotional.”
For the purpose of this discussion, here’s how I define each:
A transactional relationship is a friendship that is mutually beneficial to each party. Meaning, each friend gets something tangible (monetary or career-related) out of the relationship.
Examples include:
Your boss (You get a paycheck and you give them your labor).
Your agent (They help you find work and you give them 10% of your paycheck).
Your sugar daddy (He gives you money and you give him your time and attention).
Your hairdresser (You give them money and they give you a haircut).
An industry colleague (You give them your connections and intel, and they give you their connections and intel).
An emotional relationship is a friendship that is primarily characterized by mutual entertainment, love, and support. Meaning that each friend is only here because of how hanging out with the other person makes them feel or because they don’t want to spend time alone.
Examples include:
Your college roommate that you still go out with on the weekends.
The neighbor that you meet up with for Happy Hour every Friday.
Your boyfriend.
Your best friend, who works outside of the industry.
There is also a third type that overlaps with both of these.
I’ll call it an obligatory relationship: A relationship that comes from proximity, birth, or mutual need. You don’t have to like this person. But because of your situation, you can’t avoid them, so you might as well make the most of it.
Examples include:
Your parents.
The parents at your kids’ school.
Any members of your extended family who you see at least occasionally.
The co-worker who sits next to you.
These relationships aren’t something you get to (by definition) proactively seek out and nurture on your own. And there are entire books and industries devoted to navigating them, so I won’t be focusing on obligatory relationships in this deep dive.
Every type of relationship in your life has value and serves a purpose.
None are better or worse than the others.
For your career and your emotional well-being, it’s important to have both transactional and emotional relationships. Where people start to get into trouble is when they don’t know the difference between the two or when they have misidentified what type of relationship one is. Because no matter who your friends are, there are emotional and transactional aspects to every relationship.
And that’s not a bad thing.
Transactional relationships aren’t bad.
They don’t mean that you are “using” someone else or that someone is “using” you. Either of these things can certainly happen (especially in Hollywood!) but they are the sign of an unhealthy transactional relationship.
And it’s possible to have a whole network of healthy ones.
A transactional relationship can and should be characterized by genuine care. The relationship you have with your literary manager is transactional. But they can still be a real friend, and you both can legitimately care about one another.
That’s how it should be.
We are humans living in a society, which means that we engage in transactional relationships every single day.
It will make all of us feel better if we show up for these relationships with just as much love, politeness, and genuine curiosity as we would give to an old friend. In a transactional way, this will make that person want to do better work for you. And in an emotional way, it’ll make the whole interaction a positive experience for you.
And when something is a positive experience, you’ll keep being motivated to continue showing up for and nurturing that friendship.
Hollywood runs on transactional relationships.
Notice that I am not calling a non-transactional relationship a “real” friendship.
Screenwriters, agents, managers, and executives have tons of friends.
This is because, as I mentioned earlier, people are more likely to hire, buy from, and work with their friends. So, in the interest of increasing the likelihood that someone will buy from us, hire us (or our clients), or work with us, we spend years trying to make as many friends in the industry as possible.
These friendships can range in emotional intensity.
For many, they consist of getting lunch exactly once a year.
During this time, we catch up on everything that’s been going on, we share information, and we’ll follow it up by making submissions to one another afterward. For others, it might look like a weekly tennis match, running in the same social circles, or even going to that person’s wedding.
These are real friendships.
This pace of networking wouldn’t be sustainable if they weren’t.
Even if I only see someone once a year, they’re someone I genuinely like. Otherwise, I would spend that time getting lunch with someone else. Or I’d find a different person at that company to talk to.
Once you start showing up as a “real” friend in your transactional relationships, they start to become more fun and more fulfilling.
Emotional relationships are essential to maintain.
Because so much of your day-to-day can be focused on networking, it’s especially important for screenwriters to maintain relationships outside of this industry.
If you’re currently outside of Entertainment working to break in, this probably isn’t an issue for you. Keep nurturing the friends that you have, and focus on making more friends who work in film and TV.
But writers who already have that foot in the door might be working as a screenwriter, an assistant, or someone who has built a successful career in some other aspect of Entertainment (like production). For these people, it’s easy to get sucked into having a 100% Film/TV industry social sphere. Suddenly, one day you look up and realize that all your friends are in Hollywood.
This can be great.
It means that all your friends “get” you.
Every hangout is the opportunity to get ahead, expand your network, and potentially end up in a delightfully fortuitous situation. And who knows what will happen as a result of these? But this is also an emotionally exhausting way to live.
Humans are social creatures.
We want to be understood and loved for who we are, not just what we have to offer.
For this reason, I cannot stress enough how important it is that you have at least 2-3 friends who cannot do anything to help you and don’t want to be in this industry at all. These people can offer you perspective when you need someone to tell you how unreasonable the demands of your office environment are.
They are the people you can talk to about things besides work.
And most importantly, they’re the people you can let your guard down with.
You don’t have to be “on.” You don’t have to worry about how you can help them, and you don’t have to worry about annoying them. You know that they love you (whether romantically or platonically), and this feeling of support is crucial to building the resilience you need to succeed in this brutal environment.
It will get you through the hardest days of your career.
Not everyone in this industry is good at networking.
Many will attempt it with you, they will do it poorly, and they will make you feel used. When you experience a networking fail that makes you feel dehumanized, your emotional relationships are the antidote for this.
They will pick you up and remind you that there are other things to care about.
Every relationship is a blend of both.
A transactional relationship can be emotionally supportive.
And an emotional relationship can include transactions.
For example, as a manager, I had some clients that I loved to talk to. We could shoot the shit on the phone for 1-2 hours or more before we started talking about the business issue at hand. I considered them real friends. But what made this a transactional relationship and not an emotional one was that the transaction was the most important part of the friendship.
I wouldn’t have done or said anything to jeopardize it.
Because I actually liked and cared about them, this wasn’t hard to do.
I didn’t have to bite my tongue to avoid saying something that would hurt them because I genuinely wasn’t thinking any hurtful things. But there was always a line in our conversations. There were things that I wouldn’t talk about that I can talk about with my girlfriends.
Or times of day that I wouldn’t call them during.
Subject matters I wouldn’t bring up.
On the other hand, you might have an emotional relationship with someone who trades pet sitting with you. Or who offers to buy you dinner as a thank you for giving an informational interview to their son. That doesn’t make these relationships transactional if the #1 reason you hang out is because you want to be in each other’s company and nothing else.
The way to tell if something is an emotional relationship is to ask yourself this:
If I turned down the transaction, would the relationship end?
For example, when my hairdresser moved to Palm Springs, he stopped doing my hair. Once that transaction ended, there was no reason to continue communicating. Even though we had had hours and hours of enjoyable chatting while I was in the chair, I don’t talk to him anymore.
That was a transactional relationship.
On the other hand, I have a friend who I have talked to about potentially hiring him to re-vamp my website. If, for any reason, he tells me that he doesn’t want to do it or is too busy, we’ll still keep hanging out. One failed transaction isn’t going to ruin the decade-long relationship that we have with one another.
These distinctions bring up a tricky question:
How should we show up in transactional relationships vs. emotional ones?
Hollywood is tricky because people want to make transactional relationships as emotional as possible.
Some people do this consciously, and others do it unconsciously.
The result is sometimes totally harmless, like if you become best friends with a fellow assistant. But it can be problematic, like if you become your boss’s mistress. No matter how messy the people around you are being, I recommend drawing healthy boundaries in your transactional relationships.
Here are some rules to guide you.
I learned many of them the hard way, so please let me help you avoid the same pitfalls I faced on my journey.
Rules for Transactional Relationships
Rule #1: Keep conversations to appropriate topics.
Maybe it is part of your comedic voice to overshare about your sex life.
If so, try to keep these shocking reveals contained within your pitches or the pages of your script. When talking to industry friends, it can be tempting to treat them like your college friends, bonding through telling personal stories. But if you make them too personal, it can blur the lines about the role that they play in your life.
In general, stories about dating are okay and stories about graphic sex are off-putting.
Rule #2: Be clear what kind of friendship this is (but don’t make it weird).
Please, whatever you do, do not ever tell anyone that what you have with them is a “transactional relationship.”
I am trying to de-stigmatize this word in the context of today’s deep dive, but the icky connotation is still very much attached to it. What you can do is clarify the context within which you’re having this conversation.
If you want someone to be your manager, ask them if they would like to rep you.
If you want to meet up with an executive friend, suggest getting lunch and specifically say, “So we can find a way to work together.” (That is one of Hollywood’s favorite noncommittal phrases).
It’s okay to say, “my writer friend,” “my producer friend,” or my “Showrunner friend.”
Putting someone’s job before the word “friend” is a clear indicator to you, them, and anyone that you’re talking to, that this is a transactional relationship. They came into your life because of the occupation that they have.
This means that occupation is where they provide the most value to you.
And that’s okay. Just call it what it is.
Rule #3: Don’t ask for non-industry favors.
A transactional friend is someone you provide value to and who provides value to you.
But this exchange is in a specific industry (and subset of the industry).
If you primarily know someone in a work context, they are not the person to ask to pick you up from LAX. Or to dog sit for them. Or to source drugs from. (I am not saying that I personally have ever done any of these. 😇)
But trust me, these are the things you want to ask your emotional relationships for.
Rule #4: Limit the time of day and week that you reach out to them.
When a relationship is transactional, keep your communication to business hours.
This means 10am-6pm, Monday-Friday (their time zone).
Even if you get along really well, your manager doesn’t want to receive memes from you at 10pm. And your co-worker doesn’t need you to text them a response at 5am. You might have a specific excuse for talking to a transactional relationship on the weekend (like if you’re going to their birthday party).
But in general, they don’t need to hear from you on a Saturday night when they’re with their friends or family.
Pushing these boundaries could blur the lines of your relationship or annoy them.
Rule #5: Don’t measure the transactions.
As if all this wasn’t complicated enough, let’s bring in an additional variable:
Explicitly vs. Implicitly transactional relationships.
Explicitly transactional relationships are easy: A boss needs to follow labor laws. An agent or manager has company policy. The producer you’re working with will have you sign a contract. A consultant has a booking link on her website. In these situations, you can and should be upfront about what you are receiving and what you are giving.
These relationships are healthiest when everyone communicates.
Implicitly transactional relationships, on the other hand, are a little trickier.
These are the relationships that are not overtly articulated as being “give and take.” You don’t say, “I’ll come to your stand-up comedy show, but after I do this 10 times, you must read my screenplay,” and then the writer agrees and you shake hands.
That would be nice and above board. But that’s not how people work.
With implicitly transactional relationships, the transaction is implied.
No one in Hollywood likes to make promises (unless they are getting paid money in that immediate moment). So implied transactions are a lot squishier. You might get lunch or drinks with a producer friend for years before they bring you an IP that they want you to adapt. You might interact with a Showrunner for months before they ask what your goals are. You might have assistant friends that you give contact information and scripts to multiple times before they ever offer anything to you in return.
And that’s okay.
The whole point is that you don’t know how a relationship will help you until it pays off years down the line when a connection leads to another connection leads to an opportunity.
And you will build goodwill along the way the more you show up for other people and provide value for them.
Whether that is explicit value in the form of favors and information or implicit value in just being a good hang.
Rule #6: The more the better.
A big mistake screenwriters make when they first show up in this industry is they find one influential person willing to spend time with them, and they cling to that person for dear life.
You might pin all your hopes on your A-List boss, spend all your free time trying to please a mentor who believes in you, or find one single friend-of-friend who could make all your dreams come true, if only you can just time the ask perfectly.
There are a few reasons that this will never work:
You’re going to show up in these interactions looking and feeling desperate. This will either put the person off you (no one in this town likes desperate energy), or it will indicate that you are an easy mark for a predator trying to take advantage of you in whatever way that they do.
These things always take way longer to pan out than writers want. Instead of putting all your eggs in one single basket and then getting discouraged when things don’t pan out immediately, create multiple relationships with different people across the industry. Your big break is actually more likely to come from somewhere unexpected.
You provide more value to others when you have a broader, stronger network. If you know one single person who can help you, you’re not very valuable to that person. Even if they like you, they’re only going to go so far out on a limb for you. They’re only going to invest so much time and effort into their relationship with you. It’s not because they’re petty or selfish or rude. It’s because we humans only have so much time in a day. We need to spend that time doing activities that are most likely to pay off in a big way. This goes for your mentors too.
It might sound counterintuitive, but you still want to show up as a real friend in transactional relationships.
Infusing this investment with genuine care is what keeps it rewarding even if that payoff never actually happens.
Worst case scenario, you have a friend.
A transactional, industry friendship should still be considered a “real friendship.”
Such great advice for any industry. Brilliant article 🌟
I love everything about this. Cultivating community and authentic relationships, both within and beyond the industry, is what makes the journey meaningful. I'm less focused on the endgame and more on all the moments along the way. Writing is the vehicle that allows my path to intersect with others. My life is enriched by the people my creative journey has drawn in. AND those connections that manifested organically have been the ones that have also been the most valuable professionally. Thank you for sharing your wisdom on this subject!