The Greatest Depression

Falling out of my social class has been the most isolating experience of my life.

At the ripe old age of 44, I recently moved back home after a 22-year bout in Hollywood, in which I attempted the wildest maneuver of my family’s entire existence (at least to my knowledge)—to break into writing for TV and movies in Hollywood. The sheer audacity of believing that I could level jump in such an extreme way came mostly from a place of lifelong confidence in my academics. Prior to moving to Los Angeles sight unseen, the furthest west I had been was in Alabama.

When my mother tried to tell someone at my preschool—I believe it was—because I was four-years-old, that I was reading signs on the road, they dismissed her by saying, “Well, a lot of children her age recognize brands like McDonald’s or Burger King.” It was at that point that she revealed that I was rattling off billboards that read, “Luxurious Condominiums,” and quite probably following that with whatever the price of luxurious condominiums happened to be in Central Florida in the early eighties.

I was subsequently tested thoroughly in kindergarten, after which time it was suggested that I skip grades every other year, Doogie Howser-style, until I swiftly completed high school. My parents agreed that I should skip a total of one grade. My strongest skills included decoding and mastering standardized tests, which, in the U.S. school system, is considered the height of academic ability. From there, school was pretty much smooth sailing for me.

While I didn’t aspire to or achieve all A’s, my grades were solid, and I could always deflect any deficiencies by pointing out that I was already one year ahead of my peers. I even attended a German Gymnasium (university-bound high school) for four years when we lived there as a U.S. army family, which is where I became fluent in German and proficient in French.

My parents met in high school. My father was raised in a trailer park by a single mother with two younger brothers. He had a deadbeat dad—an engineer of some sort—who was rarely in the picture, and famously did not pay child support. From a very young age, my dad mowed lawns in the trailer park in exchange for a reduction in rent. He was a source of income for his family for probably most of the entirety of his life. As big as he was, he was never as invisible as he would have liked to be.

My mother is the oldest of six, a family of immigrants from Colombia. She excelled in school, was a Girl Scout, and boasted a flawless native accent in both English (American) and Spanish (Colombian). Gregarious and energetic, she was a familiar sight on the football field, running around and encouraging the crowd during games as the school mascot, Little Willie, complete with a coonskin cap for hootin’ and hollerin’ placed atop her long, dark hair. Never shy about raising her hand in class, she was confident and loved sharing the answer, if she knew it.

The two families knew each other, and when my parents (both the eldest of their broods) came together, they managed to harness the building momentum of the Boomer Generation to achieve a level of financial security that I’m pretty confident was beyond anything anyone before them had achieved, on both sides.

They both attended and finished college, earning themselves the coveted degree that back then, practically came with a guarantee of success. My mother, I believe, was the first in her family to do so. My father, a gentle, but physically intimidating 6’5” blonde, blue-eyed dreamer, struggled to find his focus. He attended several educational institutions before managing to finish at the small, but prestigious private school in central Florida, where my mother had achieved her degree years prior.

I represent such a combination of the two. However, my mother’s ability to excel in the structured environment of academics instilled in her the confidence to take on capitalism and thrive in a way that I simply have never been able to do myself. Instead, I struggled with the same challenges that had plagued my father until he finally landed on a career that seemed completely out of the realm of what was possible: airplane pilot. It was, sadly, the job that ultimately took his life a few short years beyond my current age, but the prescient planning that he did just before his untimely passing provided my mother with the windfall to propel her to use her mastery of process to maintain her financial independence and freedom ever since.

Losing my father the spring break before my college graduation in a plane crash changed the entire trajectory of my life. Prior to that, I was uncertain what my next move was after graduation. The degree I received that year was in journalism, from a public university, with a minor in film studies and French. I had a notion that I wanted to be a writer, but as anyone who has pursued a career in writing knows, there is no clear or direct path to financial security and success.

I remember talking to my guidance counselor in college, who told me, quite frankly, that writers were required to become experts in two arenas in order to have a viable career: writing, and some other topic in which you had to become professionally knowledgeable, so that you could get paid to write about it.

I asked what the most lucrative writing career was, to which she replied casually, “Oh, writing for film and television.” What a delightful surprise it was to hear that the funnest-sounding writing job also paid the best. I literally never even considered becoming a journalist, as it seemed that it was an occupation on the verge of disappearing altogether. If becoming an expert in all things film and television were the assignment, I was more than up to the task.

I feel like my story resembles that of many former long-time “aspiring” something-or-others consumed, processed and rejected by the City of Angels. After toiling for years, I finally called it quits. Truth is, though, in October 2023, I started posting pro-Palestine satirical comedic reels on my Instagram, which is when I truly burned any and all bridges I could possibly have had left in Hollywood.

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Subconsciously, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had been in the process of deciding whether or not to go all in on trying to sell the half hour comedy series I had been developing called Neighborhood Council, but my heart wasn’t in it. Selling any part of myself has always felt so cheap to me. If you like what I have to say, then speak up and buy it. That’s the energy I’ve always had about my work, much to my own financial detriment. I’m not saying it’s the best perspective to have, but it’s the truth about how I’ve always operated.

When last October hit, I felt obligated to speak up about Palestine, as soon as I felt I had educated myself sufficiently on the subject, which, as it turns out, doesn’t require that much additional historical context to be crystal clear how one should feel about the subject, ethically. I was more shocked at my long-time glaring ignorance on the matter, as the situation seemed quite obvious once I had engaged in a single day of thorough research.

My Instagram account had amassed a following between thirty and fifty thousand (I forgot the actual number at the time) by taking on anti-celebrity worship and pointing out instances of hypocritical injustice, all with fart jokes peppered throughout. Additionally, I had a few blue check industry faces that I knew would see my posts, and whom I was hopeful would take the time to absorb the information I was cheekily and sometimes sneakily sharing in my posts.

I felt it would make zero sense for me to blatantly choose to ignore the issue of genocide in Palestine—not to me, and certainly not to my followers, who were following me in the first place because of my willingness to be bold.

Shortly after I had folded in Palestine into the issues I tackled in my daily Instagram reels, I started getting accused of being antisemitic, racist, and a host of other things I can’t remember right now. However, with a long-time career of working in social media and web writing in general, my Internet skin is thick and pretty impervious to insults and jabs made by randos online. If they ain’t payin’ yo bills, don’t pay them no mind—or so I’ve heard.

But it wasn’t the comments and direct messages insulting and/or condescending to me that were the real problem. It was the deafening silence from my industry peers and friend groups. To be clear, there are more than several individuals in my circle whom I witnessed take a similar path to mine, choosing to be vocal, rather than to sit quietly and pray that nobody look to them to see what their opinion was of the situation in Palestine. They inspired me to keep going—to go even harder, because they proved they were willing to come along for the ride.

I understood that what I was doing was ensuring that I “wouldn’t ever work in this town again.” And I was fine with that. I found myself becoming increasingly more disgusted with the (at least to me) obvious singular objective of Hollywood to support Zionism by upholding the perceived victimhood of all Jewish people through film and television in order to maintain the justification of the existence of the settler state of Israel through widespread, systematic blackmail and intimidation.

Unlike many writers in the industry I seemed to meet—aspiring and otherwise—I had actually taken many film classes in college, as well as throughout the course of my career. As a result, I started putting pieces together by looking back in history at how it was Jewish gangsters who originally founded what we refer to with nostalgia as Tinsel Town. If my perspective on how the movie business started is considered antisemitic, then it’s literally only because I have the audacity to point out facts and patterns about the industry that they themselves have proudly admitted time and again.

I have since gone down so many rabbit holes (which I plan to explore here on the Lisa Farts You Substack in many subsequent articles, I’m sure) that have led me to the general conclusion that Hollywood preys on children. Not only does it prey on children, it is not some sort of accidental collateral damage considered part of the price of making movies. It’s the whole literal point.

For as long as Hollywood has existed, there have been child movie stars. Shirley Temple and The Little Rascals represent some of the earliest faces anyone ever saw in early films. In fact, one rabbit hole that sucked me in pretty quickly was about The Little Rascals cast and their storylines. The cryptic secret society symbolism and episodes involving the young orphans and elderly rich couples are just a few aspects of the deep dives that I’m planning to cover.

I’ve personally never been comfortable with the fact that just because Hollywood is perceived by the mainstream public as “glamorous,” somehow employing child labor on a regular basis is socially acceptable and legal. Every time I’ve seen an actual newborn on screen, I have cringed at the thought that this innocent creature is experiencing some of its first hours on the planet on a cold film set surrounded by strangers and bright, glaring lights, all while having a small piece of its soul stolen by a camera recording. If parents were willing to inflict this, what else were they willing to agree to allow to be done to their as-of-yet still innocent children?

When I was able to fully accept the dark truth that all Hollywood money is, in fact, blood money, I could no longer attempt to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. Thankfully, I was in a position to simply walk away, hoping to lick my wounds from the financial beating I had taken over the past couple of years.

Once I had made that decision, I became completely unemployable in entertainment. To be fair, over the past five years, I chose to isolate myself, first because of the COVID lockdown. Later, I realized that my disengagement from the system at large had given me an opportunity do what I had always desperately wanted to figure out how to do, which was to get off the hamster wheel and really think about what it was I was pursuing without any outside influence. All illusions that I could “craft a cozy little career of my own” eventually faded away into the background as I found myself drifting into a more bleak but realistic reality that actually, finally made sense to me.

But what of my Instagram account? Earlier this year, I boasted 100k followers, but I am now currently holding strong at 94.2k as of the writing of this article as a result of regular shadowbanning and other social media tactics of suppression. As a result, I haven’t been able to make a living through monetization, but it has kept my message crystal clear.

My anti-overconsumption stance has made it all but impossible for me to sell anything either. However, I am currently working on a signature, small batch “Lisa Farts You” t-shirt featuring an original design of mine as a limited edition wearable art piece. It’s taken me years to craft an idea for something to sell that I can morally get behind. More on that in a later post. Stay tuned!

All this to say, I don’t think my situation is all that unique at the moment. So many other aspiring writers, directors, actors, producers, and [insert Hollywood dream job here], have gone into significant debt simply trying to survive these past several years in an industry that already requires you to pretend to be better off than you actually are. Fake it till you make it, baby.

Those of us Hollywood hopefuls have all been hedging our bets that the years and dollars invested into our ability to be readily available when our life-changing opportunity would finally present itself, only to find that the career dreams we all had were actually walking night terrors.

With less multi-cam sitcoms on the air, and above-the-line strikes routinely pushing out those at the bottom of their organizations every couple of years, increasingly fewer coveted writer spots have existed year after year. Fewer opportunities, consolidation of merged corporations, competition with digital media for eyeballs, and the ever-looming threat that A.I. could take your assembly line, robotic, “creative” job away from you, has all but made survival utterly hopeless in Hollywood for most except a select few.

As more and more names are being named in connection to the Diddy human trafficking case, entire careers are being firebombed in the process. As the Hollywood empire continues imploding to quietly die a messy, terrible death in front of our eyes, I hope that perhaps my story will inspire those still unwilling to walk away to ask themselves if all of this is still what they want. What could a dream possibly cost these days, given the state of inflation? Whatever it is. It ain’t worth it.