Going Broke in Hollywood: TV Assistants Reel From Pandemic Pay Cuts

Vanity Fair: “Isobbed on the phone with my showrunner—our pay was already too low.”

That’s a Hollywood assistant describing her reaction when her boss let her know that the studio was jeopardizing her income in ways she found “cruel.” This assistant, one of more than 20 sources that Vanity Fair interviewed for this story, is an LGBTQ woman of color who works in TV. She doesn’t blame the showrunner for the kind of reductions that assistants all over the industry have been forced to accept in the wake of the pandemic. But she and many of her peers are furious at the studios that employ them.