I recently tried to count all the times I’ve been scammed.
In my ten years in the film industry, I’ve experienced everything from predatory accountants, stolen money, stolen scripts and stalled productions.
Now, I’m analytical by nature and as a documentarian - I love my structure.
I came up with too many scams to count. My pride feels a little bruised. So I worked out 5 reasons why.
Naivety
I’m a village girl. My parents were kind, small-town teachers in a town of 2000 people in rural Norway.
I spent my childhood walking home alone in the dark and cycling to school without a care in the world, none of which worked out so well when I moved to London aged 18.
It didn’t help that I started as a model. Not the cat-walking, well paid kind, mind you - the kind that gets told ‘well, you’re not tall enough for runway, but you have a great figure. Would you consider nude?’
What do you mean, ‘Craigslist is a bad place to look for gigs?’
If you want to really feel the sharp end of the eat-young-women-alive stick, that’s certainly where to start. It’s not that I’m against celebrating the freedom and fun of being comfortable in your body in front of a camera, but Village Girl here had zero idea how to navigate it.
Memorably, a ‘modelling agent’ demanded to call me at all hours of the day, to get me to tell him my favourite sexual positions - y’know, in order to become a confident model.
And let’s not forget the guy who wanted to do a test shoot, but when I turned up slid a laptop across the table with foot fetish images.
‘That’s my penis. We could try it if you want, my studio is down the road?’
Nobody had told me that I could pick up a camera myself, or write my own script. It took me two more years to figure it out.
Find a mentor. If you, like me, come from a small backwater where no one had ever picked up a camera, find the nearest creative person and don’t let them go. Go to a bigger place. Make something. I’m of the last generation who got to age ten largely without internet in the house. Pretending to be 16 on mIRC wasn’t conducive to filmmaking. (For Gen Z readers: imagine snapchat without emojis, but definitely with pedos.)
2: I grew up middle class in a safe country, so I assumed the world was on my side.
Lotta dangers lurking in rural Norway.
In Shonda Rhimes’s ‘Inventing Anna’, the character Neff says ‘I always figure there’s a bill due’. She’s talking of white privilege; and her limited sympathy with the poor white girl who’s been scammed out of 62.000 dollars. This wouldn’t happen to Neff, because Neff knows not to give her damn credit card to a hustler if she didn’t want to end up in trouble. I felt the pain of this in my soul. I was that naive white girl.
Not that I didn’t know adversity - I’m an orphan. My father died when I was 9, my mother when I was 24. I figured my bill was already paid. What more could life throw at me?
Fancy that.
I had experienced grief, yes. Shockingly, that didn’t exempt me from other pain or adversity. I’d grown up safe, sheltered, well fed.
Checking your privilege is a great place to start if you don’t want to get scammed.
Being a people-pleaser
I was raised in the nineties and naughties. I was told, by parents, and pretty much all media I consumed, that I was to be obliging, pretty, thin, and don’t make a fuss or raise hell. If a man cat-calls you? Gropes you? Laugh it off. If you’re uncomfortable? Grit your teeth.
Oh hi, it’s all my healthy role models
The problem is that this bleeds over into work.
When my first TV show was commissioned, and I was the sole director and producer - I rapidly found myself with everyone asking me for everything, all the time. Commissioners, editors, accountants, talent. They all wanted something, and they wanted it immediately. I was staying with my grandmother who had dementia, and soon found myself in tears at 2 a.m. trying to deliver to everyone, pleasing absolutely nobody, and more importantly, missing that grandma had tried to cook a broom in the oven.
I asked a friend (and very excellent director of Good Omens), Douglas MacKinnon, for advice. And he reminded me of what I should have remembered all along.
You run the show. It’s your show. They can fucking wait.
4. I assume people do their job.
You would think that someone with any measure of success in the film industry would be good at their job - otherwise, how did they get there?
So trustworthy.
Some people are clever, wily or good at exploiting others, but they have zero interest in actually doing the work. Thus you get charismatic, great-seeming people at all levels of production, and we’re left baffled when they overpromise - or leave you with your pants down on delivery day. You’d better learn to recognise them, or you are simply an inconvenience or stepping ladder on their way.
My shock, when a a small production company I’d taken a script to, turned around after three months of collaboration and said there was ‘no place for me’ in ‘their’ production.
My shock, when I’d worked with a documentary subject and close friend for two years, and his team turned around ten days before broadcast and decided to blow up the production in nationwide media because it didn’t suit their agenda.
My shock, when the editor I had used for a project I’d put my heart and soul into had absolutely no idea how to technically deliver a project and handed in a god-awful mess to the post house that took two weeks, and an additional 25.000 dollars, to fix.
Meet the person you’re going to work with. Read your contracts. In fact, always have a contract. Question everything. Do the ‘crazy check’ - Melissa McCarthy is an advocate, and I need no better recommendation.
When all else fails, trust your gut and fire their ass.
I didn’t learn to spot those who smell easy prey.
All of this is really to tell you one thing, and I’ll use the words of prison psychiatrist Randi Rosenqvist, a woman who literally spends her time convincing psycopaths they should stay behind bars. I recently interviewed her for our new documentary:
In these exchanges, we make the assumption that if I am nice to you, you will be nice to me. If you’re a psychopath, that’s not how it works. Other people are simply ways of getting what you want.
But mom, she had such a nice smile and she said she’d read my script.
The lesson being, there are predators out there and particularly in media, law, politics and professions that promise fame and/or money. They’re not going to go away, so hone your skills. Maybe we should dial down our addiction to revering nasty, grifting, charming characters in all our media consumption. Maybe we should stop denying our gut feeling and our naivety.
— Kat
Images: Michael Keaton as Ray Croc in ‘The Founder’. Britney Spears/The Mickey Mouse Club. Lena Heady as Cersei in ‘Game of Thrones’.