Doobie Doo
Veteran
Interesting read, and OF COURSE This could never happen now.What is the strangest thing to ever happen in Hollywood?
I don’t know if it was the strangest thing, but probably the funniest and ballsiest thing in Hollywood history was when a young Steve Guttenberg started his acting career by conning his way onto the Paramount Pictures lot where he proceeded to set up his own office, which he kept for a staggering 3 years.
To be clear, Guttenberg was absolutely not employed by Paramount Pictures… he was stone cold trespassing the entire time and had absolutely no business being there at all, let alone having his own office.
(As a young man, Guttenberg ran on an outrageous combination of brass balls, insane good luck, good looks, quick charm and an almost superhuman lack of fear for the consequences of his actions.)
But this feat of unmitigated chutzpa allowed him to run a successful pressure campaign to get himself a break into the film industry.
To give you an idea how the scam played out let’s just say Guttenberg was an early adopter of the concept of social engineering.
On his initial trip to Hollywood his parents had given him a whopping two weeks to make it big in Hollywood or go home and get a real job - obviously, they were just paying for a two week vacation to LA and had zero interest in him pursuing acting.
But Guttenberg was determined.
He spent his first few days hanging around the entrance to the Paramount lot, dreaming of working there someday. But while doing so, he noticed something that changed his world forever…
None of the security guards at Paramount checked the employees’ IDs.
Instead, the employees simply walked up to their entrance, punched in at the time clock and waved at the guards.
So the next day, dressed in his one blazer, he decided to see if he could pull the same trick without actually being an employee.
He got himself a note card, walked up to the time clock on the employee line, punched his blank card in, put it in the rack with the real time cards, waved at the guards and walked in.
And it worked.
Paramount had so many employees no guard could possibly know everyone. And since he acted the part of an employee, the guards bought it.
From there Guttenberg got creative.
He found a vacant office building on the lot and picked one of the empty offices, then tracked down internal Paramount requisition forms to secure himself office furniture. He then personally wired his new found office for telephone service.
Now, with an internal Paramount phone line, he could get past any gatekeeper. People actually answered his calls. He used this to get a commercial appearance in the short two weeks he had.
He also hung around the productions of several hit shows and rubbed shoulders with famous people. On top of this were his late night break-ins, and I’m not joking here, into the offices of casting directors, where he read their casting notes and read the treatments for new projects.
And he did all this because security was lax, and most employees at Paramount just took him for some very junior executive.
Crazy, but true.
This isn’t to say everyone bought his act, by the way.
He admits to getting caught several times, most humorously by Faye Dunaway who almost immediately upon meeting him realized he did not work for Paramount. But when he admitted to Dunaway he was an aspiring actor just looking for a break, she decided to keep his secret - she did not, however, agree to get him the autographed picture of John Wayne he asked her for.
Think about that… Dunaway caught him, and decided to let him off the hook and he still had the gall to ask her to get him a highly coveted autograph that, most importantly, wasn’t even her own.
What can I say, the dude had zero shame.
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