The 3 "Laws of Hollywood" Every Filmmaker Should Know

People are always trying to crack the code of how to make it in the entertainment industry. And it's true, it's a world that does seem to operate under an invisible framework you only come to understand when you're in it, and you learn the hierarchies of managers and executives and assistants and mailrooms.

Every once in a while, someone tries to parse the industry's intricate ceremonies. Enter Peter M. Hoffman, a unique voice in indie film who recently spoke to Film Courage about his career and viewpoint.

Hoffman became President and CEO of Carolco Pictures (the independent studio founded by Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna that produced Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and Rambo III) during its late-'80s and early-'90s peak.

He founded Seven Arts Entertainment in 1992 and produced The Believer, Johnny Mnemonic, Stander, Asylum, and Rules of Engagement.

In 2015, Hoffman was convicted on federal wire fraud charges in a Louisiana film-tax-credit case, a conviction he continues to dispute. He wrote his memoir Karmic Winds during his prison sentence.

In this video, he names his three laws of Hollywood and how to work under them. Let's learn more together.

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The Three Laws of Hollywood

"The first law in Hollywood is that no good deed goes unpunished."

He doesn't elaborate. But does he need to? There are too many finicky personalities on a set for you to perform perfectly every single time. He's joking here, but there's a bittersweet truth to it too.

"And the second law in Hollywood that I like to say is that it's not enough that I succeed. My friends have to fail. There's a certain sanguine quality to the competitiveness in our business. Sometimes we don't give the recognition to our colleagues' success that perhaps we should, and therefore some of the cattiness that you see comes out of that."

You might feel like a bad person for thinking this. But it's natural to be jealous. It's cutthroat out there. If you've ever caught yourself feeling a small, ugly thing about a peer's Sundance premiere, you're not alone.

"I have a third law, which is that anything that isn't done when it should will get screwed up. You have a certain inertia with a film. Barb Schroeder used to say, you have the centrifugal forces, and then you have the inertia, and you want to keep the things that keep it together as opposed to all the things that can make it fly apart, and so dragging things out and not getting things done, to me, is one of the ways you get into trouble on films."

Barbet Schroeder is the director of Reversal of Fortune, Barfly, and Single White Female.

This one is the biggest thing to remember in your own work. Don't push a decision to next week, because then it'll probably get pushed again, the department that needed it will have moved on to something else, and the whole thing will start unraveling.

Hoffman's language for it (centrifugal forces versus inertia) is a good visual. There is stuff pulling your film apart at all times. Your job is to keep it together, and you do that by making small decisions on the day they're due.

What do you think about these laws? They're obviously not hard and fast, but it is true that Hollywood is tough, some people are in it for reasons other than art, and it can be demoralizing at times. Hoffman says the bigger goal is not to take these laws personally.

"I think you do have to accept them, but it doesn't mean that you don't try to manage them and keep them from happening. It's as much for your own ironic self-distance so that you don't get too engaged in some of the stuff that happens and you just deal with it as a problem."

If someone gets upset with you on a set, it usually has nothing to do with you personally. So at the very least, remember that. And learn how to communicate directly.

Know That Self-Confidence Isn't Ego

Film Courage asks how much ego you need to work in the industry. Hoffman says he doesn't like the word.

"I think you have to have a tremendous amount of self-confidence. You have to really believe in yourself because you have some very strong-willed people."

The people, he says, who get pushed around and become sycophants are "part of the problem" of Hollywood. Hoffman argues that agreeable but passive collaborators actively harm projects. He wants strong-willed people, even when they disagree.

You'll likely meet many of those strong-willed people, including in writer/producer/director relationships.

"My wife likes to say, you can never tell a good director, writer, actor what to do. If they are, then they're a hack. All you can do is worry them. All you can do is get them to think maybe it's not as good as it should be yet. And in order to do that, you have to have a certain confidence. You have to have the ability to express yourself. You have to believe in what you're doing. And you have the ability to step back and recognize somebody else's point of view."

What's he saying here? Essentially, producers who tell directors what to do produce hacks. Producers who worry their directors produce better films.

If you're a producer, executive, or department head giving notes, you're not there to hand a good director a solution. You're there to make them wonder whether their current version is really the best possible version, then let them go find the better one.

If you're a director, writer, or actor receiving notes, the same thought process helps. The best notes you get won't tell you what to do. They're going to worry you. If a note lands and you can't stop turning it over in your head three days later, that's usually the one that mattered.

And on the ego-versus-self-confidence point Hoffman keeps making, Scorsese recently made a similar point about how believing your own hype is the fastest way to kill your own work.