Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek by Olivia Munn

Right?

    Not so fast.
    “Don’t you know who I am?” was exactly what I heard uttered by a slobby, fat, smug and ridiculously rich and famous blockbuster film director at the very first movie premiere I attended. Was he for real with this? Apparently so.
    Sure, I had been warned about Hollywood, with its egos and excesses and…egos. But still, that hadn’t prepared me for the sheer, openly assholic behavior of many of its less classy denizens. How does one even answer a question like that? And is it meant to be rhetorical? A linguistic lasso deployed to rope you into their sadly screwed-up existence? Who knows? All I know is this is what popped out of my mouth upon hearing the question: “No, I’m sorry.”
    Okay, yes, I lied. And you know what? It felt great. Of course I knew who the son of a bitch in front of me was—anyone who has sat through a billion-dollar popcorn movie in the past ten years would—but I sure as hell was not about to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I knew, much less fawning over his tubby little self. So I lied. If it hurt anyone it was this guy—and he clearly deserved it. Sure, he’d earned a bit of fuck-you money over the years—but did that give him a license to douchify? I think not.
    “No, I’m sorry.” Ha! That flicker of panic in his squinty eyes made it all so worth it.

    Cut to a few months later. By then I had settled into life in L.A.—and by settled I mean I was still renting a couch for $400 a month from a pair of selfish and fabulously gay cousins who hearted wearing my new, expensive heels until the seams burst. Luckily, I was busy with my career and going on regular auditions, which got me out of the house a lot. And that’s also where I met most of my new Hollywood friends. One such friend was this nice, blond, Midwestern guy named Jim. One night Jim invited me and a bunch of other actors out to a movie premiere. I jumped at the chance.
    If you’ve ever watched a Discovery Channel documentary on cheetahs, say, or animals living wild in the jungle, you basically have seen what a Hollywood premiere is like. It’s a mad scrum where the Hollywood correspondents wield microphones like sharp claws and attempt to corner and then feast on the flesh of the more powerful lions and tigers and bears—oh, hells yeah! It’s actually pretty exciting, what with all the glamorous people craning toward the frenzied paparazzi, who flash away, the camera bulbs popping until it looks like a scene out of Raging Bull.
    It was while elbowing my way into the crowd that I saw Jim and flagged him down. He told me he was working on a new movie and invited me down to the set the next day. Perfect! Well, almost—Jim worked as an assistant to Mr. “Do You Know Who I Am?” himself! Nooooooooooooooo!
    I had thought a movie premiere was exciting but it’s got nothing on a movie set. Like, really amazing. I pulled up to the set the following day and took stock of the scene: we were inside an airplane hangar meant to look like a gorgeous beach house. Movie magic, yo! The lead actress—small, busty A-list walking paparazzi bait—hid behind enormous shades. So did the male lead, a guy who had parlayed an incredibly successful TV career as a bumbling charmer into a film career playing bumbling charmers. I made a mental note to call my mom as soon as possible, as she absolutely adored his work.
    And holy crap—here he was totally talking to me. Or at least he said, “Hello,” and flashed a blindingly white smile. That was a hell of a lot more than the lead actress had done to acknowledge me—well, in fairness, she had sent a flurry of mental daggers my way when I’d overheard her asking an assistant if any of the pretty girls on set were prettier than her.
    Actor dude, by comparison, seemed so human, so normal. He even wanted to speak with me more—how sweet! “Can you get me a water? It’s Fiji, room temperature. But you should know that by now.”
    Ugh. He thought I was his