There’s an old story about Mickey Rooney, and yes, I am aware that this sentence is a terrible way to appeal to a younger demographic. In my defense, stories about the egregious cruelty of Hollywood legends are much funnier the further away they are on the timeline.
Here’s the setup: Mickey Rooney was the star of a television sitcom, and his son, who was in his early thirties at the time, was working as his assistant. Mickey would berate and insult his son daily, usually in a mocking and mean-spirited Hey I’m just kiddin’ around! way. His son had confided to some members of the cast and crew that he wanted to quit working for his father and devote his time to music—he was, ap-
parently, a pretty good piano player—and they all encouraged him to do so.
Anyway, it is said (legal disclaimer): One day the son ginned up the courage, and during a break in rehearsal, he sat next to his father in a corner of the set and broke the news. “I want to stop working for you,” he said. “No,” his father snapped, it is said. “But Dad,” the son replied, “I want to be a full-time musician. I want to do my own thing.”
Rooney was eye-poppingly furious. He stood up and shouted to everyone on the soundstage: “Did you hear what my son just said? He said he doesn’t want to work for me anymore! He said he wants to do his own thing! His own thing!” And then, it is said, he began to prowl the set and deliver a shouty, furious rant. “Your own thing, huh? You want to do your own thing?! Hey everyone! My idiot son wants to do his own thing! Well, you know what? Go right ahead! Go do your own thing!” And here Rooney stopped and bitterly spat out, “Go ahead and do your own thing! Your own broke thing!”
See, this was the problem. Rooney’s son had been raised, almost by design, to be his father’s assistant. He grew up in a way that’s sadly typical of a lot of show business childhoods: spoiled, but not enough to be independently rich; indulged, but just enough to be helpless. Many Hollywood stars raise children the way we used to raise veal: to be tender and compact and unable to walk away.
Rooney knew that his son was essentially unemployable by anyone else; there was only one viable career option, which entailed fetching his father’s coffee and managing the Mickey Rooney International Fan Club for the rest of his son’s natural life. It is said.
Do your own broke thing may be a mean thing to say to your child, but it’s a perfect motto for show business at this moment—especially now that its corporate citizens are busy trying to buy and sell each other and there have been only a handful of bona fide culture-changing hits in years. If the Netflix bid for Warner Bro. Discovery goes through, the result will be a huge, unwieldy, sclerotic maxi-mega company that will probably squash some of its competitors without delivering any real smashes. And if David Ellison’s proposed merger between his newly purchased Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery happens instead, the result will be a slightly smaller, but no more successful, monster of a company. The winner will be beset by infighting and executive intrigues for years. Show business success is all about being nimble, and there’s nothing nimble about Paramount, or Warner Bros. Discovery, or Comcast, or any of the players in the entertainment business today. After all, if they were able to respond quickly to the changing tastes and expectations of their customers, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Now imagine two of them glued awkwardly together.
One way to think about show business in 2026 is to recall the deadly and devastating fires that tore through Malibu and the Pacific Palisades—places where a lot of the entertainment industry workforce used to live—which resulted in 12 deaths and the destruction of nearly 7,000 structures. Think of those fires as a fast-motion metaphor for what’s been happening to the media business since the advent of unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storewidth, the streaming revolution, and the near-death of the theatrical moviegoing experience. Those wildfires tore through the traditional business models of the music industry, the movie-theater business, broadcast television, and even ad-supported cable. And now show business is trying to figure out how, and where, to rebuild. Here’s where the metaphor gets darker: One year after the Palisades fires, only one house has been fully rebuilt. Home-building in the Palisades is as uncertain as the careers of the people who used to live there. Everyone is looking for a new model.
For instance: I’m working on a project right now with another writer and a producer and it’s really fun and interesting and we’re approaching the process in a very entrepreneurial way. That’s what show business is these days—it’s entrepreneurial and disrupted and exciting. And all of those words mean only one thing: The writer isn’t getting paid. At least not yet.
In the past, this was called simply “writing on spec” (short for “speculation”), and it always went the same way. The writer sat down somewhere—usually someplace distracting, like a coffee shop—and wrote the draft that was in his or her heart, without worrying about what the eventual buyer would think. The upside of this approach is that if you’re the writer, you’re working for yourself. You’re telling the story according to your own artistic intuition. The downside is, no one is paying you and no one may ever pay you.
The most realistic path to success in show business today is not the old way—write a spec, get an agent, sell the spec, make a movie or TV show, run to the mailbox to collect the checks—but a new, extremely risky series of steps that require entrepreneurial energy and an ability to wrap your head around YouTube (or Instagram Reels, or TikTok) as a reliable way to get your stuff in front of audiences.
How do I know this? Because my agent, who used to roll his eyes whenever someone mentioned YouTube as a potential outlet for high-end scripted work, called me up last week to endorse this approach as a viable strategy for my next project. And last month, another writer represented by a different agency told me the same thing. You’ve got to be entrepreneurial now, my agent said. The studios and the streamers are paralyzed.
And he explained how it works. You write and produce a small web-based series—there are a few players in this arena right now, he told me, who are good at this sort of thing and open to partnerships—and build up your audience, and then, if you’re lucky, you can sell the project to one of the streamers or networks that emerges from the wreckage.
Take advantage of this market pause, he told me. One model for the new world of entertainment is the comedian Shane Gillis—who paid out of his own pocket to write, cast, and film a six-episode first season of a sitcom called Tires. He had done the same with its pilot four years earlier, in 2019. Netflix released it. It did well. It’s now in its second season. Gillis didn’t have to pay to make that one. Netflix generously picked up the tab.
It took six years for Gillis to make any money off his highly risky gamble, but it worked, and this is the world we live in now. My agent was willing to help me walk the same path. Let me, he said, connect you with some of the players in this new space.
In other words, do your own broke thing.
Photo: Chris Saucedo/Getty Images
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