Ada Tseng says she partially wrote the book, Breaking Into New Hollywood: A Career Guide to a Changing Industry (Simon and Schuster), for Asian American children and their immigrant parents. As an entertainment reporter, Tseng spent years covering elusive career pathways and connecting with Asian Americans in Hollywood. Eventually, she landed as an editor focused on articles that help readers navigate common questions at the LA Times, where she wanted to help people trying to break into the industry.
That curiosity about who makes movie magic happen led her to co-author Breaking Into New Hollywood with former LA Times editor Jon Healey. I sat down with Tseng to ask her about what she learned as she got behind-the-scenes access into the entertainment industry.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Iris Kim: You feature a lot of anecdotes about Asian Americans in Hollywood and how their careers took so many turns and pivots. It seems like many of them had to be scrappy and work with what they had. What sets their stories apart?
Ada Tseng: Many Asian Americans come into the industry without connections, because historically, our parents are not a part of this industry. Their parents might want to help them, or maybe they disapprove of this career choice, but ultimately they’re on their own. So that’s where you see a lot of the drive and the entrepreneurship and having to take things into their own hands. I remember when I started covering Asian American films, there was so little. In the last 20 years, we’ve gone from seeing almost nothing to my daughter’s generation seeing Asian Americans winning Oscars and Emmys. Looking at the Asian American community, you see a lot of lessons. How did that community build their own networks?
Iris Kim: It’s clear that you and your co-author are rooting for the underdogs. You’re addressing the people who don’t have the money to go to a fancy film school or are starting in a smaller city. It felt like you were really just trying to democratize information so anyone can pursue their dreams.
Ada Tseng: That really is the mission of the book. We were thinking, how can we make this a little bit easier for the people who don’t have connections? The book covers a lot of different types of jobs, because we wanted people to know—there’s a lot of different things you could do in the industry. People tend to only think of actors, writers, and directors, which are probably the most competitive jobs.
Every time we wrote about a new career path, like costume designer or stunt performer, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to pretend that I want to be that.” I put myself in that position, or imagined my daughter, or my younger sister wanted to do that career.
As a journalist, I didn’t really have to impress the Hollywood workers I was interviewing. I could just ask all the stupid questions. I would say, “I’m sorry. I’m not an expert on location managers, or professional hairstylists. Can you walk me through this? How often do actors actually wear wigs? Can you explain it to me like I’m a five year old?”
Iris Kim: You address concerns like AI, and how it might reduce jobs or create new opportunities. What did insiders say about how the industry is changing?
Ada Tseng: Most of the book is organized into chapters about specific jobs. But there are two chapters that go outside of the format. One is on AI, and the other is on crowdfunding your own project. Those, to me, are the main ways that the industry is changing.
First, you have to look at how AI is changing your particular field. To be honest, it’s all happening so fast, and it’s hard to keep up. So what we did was give historical context into AI, explaining how it fits into one of many technological disruptions that Hollywood has gone through. We framed it as: this is what you need to be aware of.
Second, on crowdfunding: Hollywood used to be very small with very strict gatekeepers, and now you can embark on projects of your own. It’s still hard. Nothing is easy, but you can find your own audience and make your own film in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before.
Iris Kim: You mention the whisper network, and how jobs are rarely posted publicly. What did you uncover as you were reporting on that?
Ada Tseng: When they say getting hired is all about who you know—in Hollywood, it’s literal. Most of the time, you know somebody who knows somebody. It’s because once a shoot gets going, it’s so fast, there’s so much money at stake, and everything needs to be done correctly. They need somebody that they can trust. Do they have enough credits that the team knows they can execute? So that’s why it’s hard for somebody who doesn’t have any credits, experience or direct connections to land a job. There’s just so much pre-work that goes into making yourself a candidate that’s competitive.
I think that’s one of the things we wanted to demystify about the industry. We wanted to say it flat out: when you start in the industry, most of the time you’re not making a living wage. There’s a time period where people are juggling other jobs while building their credits. People don’t like to talk about it, because there’s a glamor of Hollywood where you want to pretend like you’re only doing cool stuff. But a lot of people said they worked in service jobs or were dog walkers.
Iris Kim: Was there anything that you didn’t know that really excited you, or something new that you learned during the writing process?
Ada Tseng: Everything excited me! I feel like a lot of the work of Hollywood is invisible. You don’t see all the work it takes in order for everything onscreen to seem very natural. We don’t know, for example, what it takes to secure a location and get that shot of the freeway.
My favorite thing I learned was about costume design. I learned that there are agers and dyers. If you buy a new shirt for costuming, it looks entirely new. We will notice that as the audience. So there’s people who actually age and dye the clothing so it looks just like a worn shirt. Especially in an action film, imagine somebody gets shot, and falls on a dirt ground, then they charge through the desert. There’s somebody who prepares the clothes for each step of that story. What does the blood look like when he first gets shot? And then, how does the blood stain devolve over time? In Hollywood, you’re creating a completely unnatural world, but it has to seem natural. There’s all these steps just for the viewer to not notice what they’re not supposed to notice.
Breaking Into New Hollywood is available on August 12.
