Have you ever wondered how celebrities used to write their resumes? How did Brad Pitt or Matt Damon apply for a job back in the day, before their fame? Well generally they probably went through pretty much the same process as any other aspiring candidate; they’d sit at home, stressing over their financial situation, realizing that they could no longer live off just their dreams, and jot down whatever experience they had on a document and send it off hoping for the best.
I guess the main question that’s really occupying your mind is, what did they put on their resumes?
Now I can’t really answer that questions specifically as I sadly don’t know any celebrities well enough to ask them what their job application process was like. But let’s take a fictional stab at it shall we? Let’s ask ourselves that question, pretending to be struggling actors with grand dreams of making it in the competitive world that has become known as Tinseltown.
So we have grand dreams of one day becoming movie stars or musicians, but we come from normal or humble beginnings, meaning we have to operate normal day jobs while we work away at our true passion.
So let’s pretend that our genre of preferred fame would be acting.
That means we would want to apply for jobs that could perhaps put us in the path of a famous script writer, director or producer. Bearing that in mind, we would shape our resumes to fit those kind of jobs. We would probably start out similar to a certain Mr. Quentin Tarantino, working in a video rental, or maybe a movie theater. From there we would apply for roles as extras, or we’d do our outmost to lock down a job at one of the big studios where we could get, at least somewhat, closer to the action we one-day wish to partake in.
When we have successfully managed to lock down the studio position, that’s when the real opportunities start coming our way.
We start hearing about interesting opportunities, we start see things the way they are, and we are amassing knowledge that can one day help us reach that extra inch. We now start believing that our dreams can actually become reality. As young aspiring actors we have now accumulated enough industry experience, as well as maybe completed acting school, that we can start attending auditions and castings for more than just roles as extras. This is when we land our first, decent part in a feature film; and from there on out we are in a good position to continue. Perhaps we have now managed to get ourselves a decent agent, thus making normal resume writing a distant memory from a past life.
I do not claim that this is an accurate tale of how celebrities would write their resumes before their fame. Perhaps it was nothing like this for most; I mean you do hear stories of people just being discovered on the street, and if that was the case then my fictional little scenario does not apply. However, it is an imaginative way of re-creating what it may have looked like for somebody who eventually went on to become famous.
Steve Kinsly likes to read Top Travel Games before writing the articles.