• Qaleb Pillai was an assistant to top Hollywood agents for nearly a year.
  • He said the culture was hard on his mental health and the pay at the time was only $15 an hour.
  • Pillai ultimately left the agency and LA altogether to chart a new path for himself.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Qaleb Pillai. It has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2019, I was an assistant at a major Hollywood talent agency, ICM, for eight months.

I started as a floater. Floaters are at the bottom of the agency totem pole — basically you work as a temporary assistant for different agents whenever a permanent assistant is out. You spend the rest of your time working in the mailroom, running errands, and sorting mail. 

You do it all in the hopes that you'll eventually be hired by an agent as their permanent assistant, which we call "getting a desk." 

I'd pretty much always wanted to work in the entertainment industry as a screenwriter — I wanted to tell diverse stories. I went to USC for business and screenwriting, and in my four years there, everyone told me the same thing: The best way to learn the industry is to work at an agency. It became my goal. 

A good amount of people I knew who studied screenwriting at my school ended up going to an agency of some sort, whether it was one of the big four (at the time) Hollywood agencies — CAA, ICM Partners, UTA, or WME — or a smaller literary agency, like Verve. 

We all had the same plan: Do a year or two, make some connections, and then leave to one of the coveted creative jobs that only former Hollywood agent assistants have access to.

Little did I know, a year would ultimately be too long for me.

Being a Hollywood assistant meant being a target for some pretty terrible behavior

Both my mailroom class (the people I joined the floater pool with) and the assistants who sat near me once I got on a desk were great and supportive. You're kind of just suffering together and that really does create a bond. 

Qaleb Pillai pictured standing under a waterfall
After awhile, the culture took a toll on Pillai's mental health.
Courtesy of Qaleb Pillai

During lunches and after-work drinks, we'd vent and be one another's support system. One person would say they'd cried in the bathroom; another would describe being humiliated by their agent in front of a bunch of people. We'd laugh it off together, and it created a sense of camaraderie.

Most agents in Hollywood are known for being cutthroat, mean, and even ruthless. One agent said they're tough on their assistants to prepare them for life as an agent — because clients treat you poorly and you have to be strong in negotiation. That explanation never sat right with me and still doesn't.

I broke my collarbone outside of work a week after getting hired at the agency. I was assigned my second-ever float a couple weeks later after that — and I was yelled at by the agent for being too slow and not knowing the answers all the time. The agent also talked about what a bad assistant I was on a call with someone (assistants listen in on all the agent's calls). 

I was doing the whole job with one arm, and in pain, but the agent didn't care.

When I finally got hired to a desk permanently, I felt like the outlier among most assistants because I got a nice agent. To this day I only have good things to say about him — he was a great guy. But two weeks after hiring me out of the floater pool, he left the company. 

That's when my experience changed pretty drastically. It ended up being the beginning of the end for me.

I found myself back in the mailroom. My initial mailroom class was gone, all hired to desks already. And since an experienced mailroom floater (one who's already had a desk) can be a rare commodity, that meant I got the hardest floats. I would get the partners and the department heads. And those people are usually … not that nice.

The culture wasn't right for me — so I decided it was time to leave

At this point, the positives that had kept me going gave way, and the bubbling frustrations really set in — one of which is that it's a predominantly white industry. The people in power are white, and they hire people that remind them of themselves — usually other white people. 

I knew this going in, of course, but experiencing it up close really took a toll on my mental health. 

On top of that, in a Hollywood assistant Facebook group I was in I'd see people in their 30s and 40s talking about trying to get married or start a family, and how they couldn't. This Hollywood assistant lifestyle just isn't conducive to any of that. Assistant wages for me were only $15 an hour (the legal minimum wage in California at the time) — and in Los Angeles, an incredibly expensive city, it was really hard to live on.

I also heard a story about an assistant who took PTO for his wedding. A mixup in the mailroom meant no one was there to cover the desk, and someone actually tried calling him while he was getting married. 

That was another experience that made me think, "I don't want to be at my wedding getting a call from HR or my boss. I want autonomy." I needed to figure out a different way. 

I went to HR and put in my notice. The next week, I left the agency — and Los Angeles altogether.

I found a different path toward making an impact in Hollywood

I moved back home to Texas and took a job at the front desk of a local gym. It was a low point in my life, because I had no idea what I wanted to do next and I felt like I'd failed. I decided to take some money I'd managed to save up and travel for a few months on my own.

I realized that I still wanted to make a change in the industry and to see stories get made about people that look like me. Ultimately, I decided to make a career switch to finance so I could fund the projects that I wanted to see. I graduated with a master's in finance, and moved to New York City to take a job as a financial analyst. 

My goal is the same as it was before I joined an agency, but it's a different way of getting there. 

Editor's note: The events described took place prior to ICM's merger with CAA in 2022. CAA declined to comment for this story.

Disclosure: The reporter of this story is a former ICM Partners assistant.

If you work in Hollywood and would like to share your story, email Eboni Boykin-Patterson at eboykinpatterson@insider.com.