I was a prosecutor in Brooklyn in the homicide division and then as a senior assistant district attorney.
The importance of the assistant director cannot be overemphasized.
I was on a couple of scholarships. I had a job in the school administrative office. I had a job as a hat-check boy in a restaurant. I had another job as an assistant to a casting director. It took a lot to get myself enough money to put myself through Juilliard.
You have a very poor neighborhood. You have students that are required to go to school. They have no money, no habit of work. What if you paid them in the afternoon to work in the clerical office or as the assistant librarian?
My father was a psychiatrist, the medical director of a mental hospital in Scotland, and when I was a student, I took vacation jobs there as a nursing assistant. So I did get to see mental illness, but I don't remember conversations about mental conditions. My father was a cheerful man with a robust attitude to such things.
Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon intimidated us all because she walked in and was going to be the dance captain. She was a great star, but she loved that kind of work as his assistant.
Both parents were teachers. My father became an assistant principal, and he was responsible for discipline at the school. So I didn't get away with much at home.
The first job I was offered was as an editorial assistant. I think it was the best thing for me, in terms of being a storyteller by nature, to have spent years being an editor because I learned so much from it.
I'll even cut things. Or, I'll guesstimate it, and I'll have my assistant get it hemmed for me because I don't have time.
I don't go for holidays or celebrate my success because I know nothing is permanent. I don't let it get to me - like I am India's top director with too many hits. If that happens, I might lose the connect with my audience. The day I go wrong, they will run away from me. I want to be like an assistant director all my life.
My career got off to a very shaky start when I dropped out of school at the age of 18. Despite my lack of academic credentials, I got a job as a fashion assistant at 'Harper's & Queen.'
At one point, I had over 800 employees, and I always paid all health care for my people - including a man who was my assistant who got HIV. I wound up paying his medical bills, which went into the hundreds of thousands. I'm not making myself out to be a saint. I did the right thing.
Frank Capra's grandson was a second Assistant Director on 'Christmas Vacation.'
My interactions with Sorkin were agonisingly weird. He is by far the weirdest person I have ever met. I had dinner with him and a few hours before I got an e-mail from his assistant saying, 'Sean, this does not need to be a long conversation. Aaron is only going to use it to win your trust.'
I love coaching my grandkids, but I love working with my two sons. J.D. is the head coach, and I'm the assistant - you believe that? I missed so much of them growing up. I really messed up there. So I like working with J.D. and Coy. I'm trying not to do the same thing again. With J.D. and Coy, I missed so much.
I was studying to be a dental hygienist and working as a dental assistant. I met a photographer and decided to put my job on hold for just a summer to begin modeling.
My son works as a production assistant in television.
I was a hairdresser's assistant. I used to get 20p tips for washing an old woman's hair. I used to get there at 8 A.M., leave at 6 P.M. and get £10.
My dad was a golden gloves boxer in the Marine Corps, then a deputy sheriff. My mom worked as an office assistant.
As an assistant operations officer for a helicopter task force in Iraq, I saw my fellow Guardsmen and soldiers risk life and limb to maintain diesel fuel supply lines.
The least-crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person. Email is the most difficult, the most crowded... I'm a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don't even see because my assistant declines them.
The life of an actor is not filled with limousines and talk-show interviews. I've moved crates of beer; I've been a bartender, personal assistant, butler. But all those skills have helped me in the business aspect of what I do.
I was Paul Schrader's assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he's very much about knowing what's going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue - the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out.
I had a job lined up as an assistant brand manager at Playtex, at age 23, all lined up. But my father had an offer to be acquired by DDB in 1978. He said, 'I'd really like you to come into the business for a year.'
I know when I was an assistant coach and I started interviewing for head coaching jobs, I actually lost out on many jobs, several jobs, and the complaint that I got was, 'Well, he doesn't fit the mold of a head coach. He doesn't look the part. He's not gonna jump up and down. He's not going to scream.'
I kind of romanticized what it was like to be a writer and director when I was in my early twenties. Working as a production assistant knocked that right out of me.
I'm a good assistant. That's why I don't have an assistant, because I'm so on it that no one can be as on it as me. I know that.
For a long time, I was an assistant in the NFL to George Allen, and George was paranoid that other teams were cheating on him... that they were offering bounties, that they were wiring our locker room, that they were putting food poisoning into the pregame meal of the other team's stars, stuff like that.
I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly.
I wouldn't go down the route of having an assistant. I don't want to be like that. I want to be normal.
Passion and hunger are the two ingredients that I look for in first making the judgment on - whether an athlete, an assistant coach, or a horse trainer or anybody I do business with.
I like to disappear in my roles because I don't have an assistant.
In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency.
I surrender to my directors. I do that because I respect them immensely. In fact, a director's talent scares me. I admit that they're more intelligent than me, and I submit to that, as an assistant director does. Even when I have suggestions to make, I don't state them strongly.
I had the pleasure of working for Hart Hanson as the writers' assistant on the Fox show 'Bones.' He was always willing to take five minutes in the kitchen and answer questions I had about writing and the business. Looking back now, I realize he might have just been politely waiting for the coffee to brew.
I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
