One of my favorite search strings here is “Who played Amy DeZellar in The Social Network?”
I guess I seem like the kind of woman who’d have a one-night stand with Sean Parker (I’m not and didn’t). And who went to Stanford (I didn’t) a few years ago (I wish).
The gorgeous creature who played Amy in The Social Network was actually Dakota Johnson, the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, both of whom I know of since I am not a recent Stanford graduate but am in reality old enough to remember Working Girl and Miami Vice.
My first staff writing job was at a dot-com that was very reminiscent of The Social Network, though. We were in Beverly Hills, not Palo Alto, but the site was started by a few boys from their dorm room and they became instant millionaires because of financing by a Hollywood legend.
As writers for that site, we were paid a lot. We had to write approximately nine sentences a day. All of our meals were catered. We would have two-hour business-paid lunches where we could order appetizers, drinks and dessert while sitting next to Julia Roberts and Billy Zane just to have our boss tell us that, “We may be rolling out a new initiative soon.”
Out of 100 people at the company, three of us were women who were not assistants. One of them ended up doing entertainment reporting on a broadcast network, one ended up starting an extremely popular nudie site, and the other started a web site about going on 50 dates and getting a book deal from it*.
* Me
I was so behind the vision of the company at that job, I cannot tell you. More than anything. More than I was with DatingAmy.com, almost. It’s a close tie.
Were there sexual scandals? Yes.
Was there hush money about the above? Yes.
Could I have made $865,000 after one month’s work if a certain huge Hollywood player had accepted phone calls from one of the richest men in the world? Yes.
Did I make that money? No.
The truth is that the all-male editorial staff I worked with used to watch incredibly offensive homemade porn during working hours, after which my editor would try to get me demoted. It didn’t really work, since shortly thereafter we were all let go.
The Ford Modeling Agency was next door to our office. The guys I wrote with would say, “This is the best job ever. There are models and porn and we don’t have to work.”
One afternoon with tears in my eyes after an exhausting day at work I got onto the elevator with Virginia Madsen who was coming from a meeting down the hall.
“I loved you in Candyman,” I said.
She smiled and thanked me. She hadn’t done Sideways yet.
The other writers and I all got laid off after four months. As far as I know I’m the only one who’s been published. I don’t keep in touch with those people, since I’m the one who cried.
But, yeah, I’m not the Amy who was in The Social Network.
