Life After Hollywood: A Writer’s New Life as a Construction Worker

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.) 

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 memoire, 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, painting and electric. They can hurl 90-pound bags of concrete into a truck bed with the same ease I employ to sip a latte.  They speak a language of Romex wire and five-and-a-half-inch double-gang plates. I can’t tell the difference between a jackhammer and a skill saw. I stumble around the job site — a minefield of half-built concrete footings and sewer trenches — in my khakis and Gazelles like a burlesque dancer navigating the ruins of the London Blitz. 

From the start, a big part of my job was being sent to Home Depot. People of color won’t go there these days because ICE has effectively suspended habeas corpus for anyone who even looks like they may be undocumented. But someone on every construction crew must endlessly ferry supplies from the lumber yard to the site. That job fell to me, and I sucked at it. After every run, Ramon — my construction foreman — would ream me out in broken English for buying the wrong shit.  Even when he sent me pictures of exactly what he wanted, I somehow always still got it wrong.  

“You need to double check,” Ramon implores. “You need to ask for help!” I try to swallow his criticism gracefully, but it’s not easy. “My show was nominated for an Emmy!!!” I want to scream. But when I do voice my frustration, I have to then listen to the whole crew mock me in the Spanish language they know I can’t understand. I suppose if I had been hoping to feel less worthless, taking an entry-level position in a blue-collar industry where the language of choice is not my native tongue was probably the wrong move.

Still, I clearly wasn’t doing everything wrong, because three months into the job, my brother-in-law called me to the job site one morning and offered me a promotion, tasking me with taking a crew up to an iconic music venue in Hollywood to scrape and repaint the hulking landmark in anticipation of a grand unveiling to celebrate its fortieth year. He also asked me if I was down to help him oversee the rehabilitation of a Neutra jewel box in Bel Air, a Spanish two-bedroom in West Hollywood and the gut renovation of an Eichler split level in Thousand Oaks. I wasn’t in a place to turn the opportunity down. My wife — the Emmy-winning costume designer Marie Schley — shattered her spine in a ski accident in December, so no one in this household has been earning any income for quite some time. Naturally, I said yes.

Painting the music venue goes bad right out the gate. I don’t know what I am doing, and I don’t even know what to look for. It reminds me of my earliest visits to film sets when I’d linger around video village praying no one asked me to do anything. Even the language barrier in construction reminds me how it felt to wander too close to the camera truck and overhear the grips chattering in exotic terms about c-stands and stingers, quarter-apples and Duvetyne. I try to employ the same strategies I used back then: look attentive, stay positive and be patient knowing it will all eventually start to make sense. Still, I somehow miss the fact that our stucco team — as they scrape and patch the venue’s walls — leave drippings under every surface they touch. 

One afternoon — after my team has left the site — the guy who runs the club’s VIP room tells me there’s stucco on his staircase. “Get a mop and clean it up.” He tells me. “Now! Tobey and Leo are coming.” I don’t have a mop, so I find myself at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday on my hands and knees in the blistering L.A. sun using my own T-shirt to scrape stucco from the club’s decrepit steps. “I met Leo, once,” I think to myself, “at Edward Norton’s birthday party at the Wattles Mansion. Courtney Love invited me. And look at me, now!”  

I want to scream out in frustration. I want to cry. I am so angry that Hollywood has reduced me to this level of desperation. All the favors I doled out when I was in a position to do so have gone unreciprocated in my darkest hour — my direct pleas for help treated as the humorous pangs of a spoiled child. Why is nobody returning my calls!? How could the end of my 30-year career find me scrubbing floors? Why wasn’t I taken more seriously by my peers? Was I too haughty? Did I not sleep around enough?  

I feel like a fool for ever believing in myself, and I want to take my stupid bucket and knock the Hailey Bieber smoothie right out of the hands of every smug development exec in town. But on some level, I also feel this is exactly what I deserve. It’s the penance I’ve wrought for my incompetence, my indifference and my failure to attack the biz with requisite psychosis assuming my privilege would somehow see me through.  Hollywood is telling me where I belong. 

And where I belong, it turns out, is where I began this story — in Aisle 18 at Home Depot on Sunset at 5:45 in the morning.

After I finish shopping, I’m loading my supplies into my trunk when I hear a plaintive voice offering help. I assume it’s one of the many day laborers looking for work, and I say, “No, thanks,” without looking up. But then I feel a hand smack my back and when I turn around I’m greeted not a laborer but the toothy grin of an old TV writer friend. 

“What are you doing?” he asks incredulously. 

I’m caught off guard. Stammering, I answer, “This is what I do, now — for a living.”  It’s the first time I’ve revealed to anyone in the industry what’s become of my life. I’m embarrassed, and I feel my bottom lip quiver like I might burst into tears. But when I look up to meet his gaze, I see something there I’ve never seen before when talking about my projects or my pitches or my career. I’m not even sure what it is.  

“Good for you,” he says, sizing me up as if seeing me for the very first time. “That’s what my dad did growing up!” And I realize the look on his face is one I’ve rarely seen from Hollywood. It’s respect. 

As I pull out of the Home Depot, I experience a kind of spiritual reconstitution as I feel the many parts that make up my psyche — father, comic, husband, Deadhead, tennis maniac and now “construction worker” — flow back into the strange amalgam that is Nick Morton. Perhaps I am not something less for this unlikely turn my life has taken — for my determination to not go broke waiting for a call that may never come. Perhaps, even in the act of running around this wild city, working on a team of guys from all walks of life and meeting the kinds of people you tend to ignore when ensconced in your Hollywood bubble, I am becoming something more. 

When I arrive at the job site, my crew is oblivious to the beatific transformation I’ve just undergone. The plaster compound’s not right, and I didn’t get the correct tape. I thought “frog” tape was just a cute idiom for green drywall tape. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever master my new construction gig. I’m pretty sure I will never understand what I did so wrong to make me fail at my earlier job, writing for Hollywood. All I do know is that after six months of construction, my skin has cleared up, I’ve lost 12 pounds, and I sleep like an adolescent boy. I’ve learned a crazy fuck-ton about re-bar and sewer lines and Simpson ties and mortar. I can strap a thousand pounds of cut lumber to the roof of my truck with barely a second thought. I’ve grown one serious set of man balls, and I take shit from no one.  

While there’s no glory in this work — no red-carpet ceremony awaiting us at the end of the year — there’s no bowing and scraping, either. I’m not begging for an opportunity to prove my worth. On some days, when I’m bombing up to Bel Air in my beat-up old truck,  mariachi music blaring from the radio, the grate of the old F-150 scraping the street shrubs and sending gusts of sweet lavender billowing into my cab, I wonder why I would ever ask for more. 

Sure, I make an hourly wage, but I’m wanted, here. I’m valued. It’s a feeling I rarely experienced in Hollywood, and sometimes it’s enough to make me believe I will never go back.