So, You Wanna Be a Mogul? : A Hollywood assistant’s job may be just the ticket. The requirements: discretion, patience, endurance, resourcefulness and a psychotherapist’s calming touch.

‘Hot, young, gifted, undiscovered writer from NYC,” read the ad in Daily Variety’s Situations Wanted classifieds. “Type 65 WPM. Organizational wizard. Never heard of ‘sexual harassment.’ If you are a successful filmmaker, I want to be your assistant.”

Pamela Francis, a 27-year-old New Yorker transplanted to L.A., placed this ad because, she says, “one of the swiftest ways to climb up (in the industry) is to be an assistant.”

As for her ad’s unguardedly frank allusion to sexual harassment, Francis figuratively shrugs.

“Because it’s such a big deal now--everybody crying at every turn--I wanted people to know I had a sense of humor.”

You need a sense of humor to be an assistant in Hollywood because much of what is asked of you--stereotypically young, ambitious and multi-degreed, with a sure-fire screenplay squirreled in your PC--is, at least in hindsight, laughably menial.

“For an assistant, the nightmare is being the guy who picks up the kids at kindergarten, buys the mother-in-law’s birthday card and does all the personal stuff,” says a Hollywood assistant who, not surprisingly, asks not to be named. “There are assistants who wear pagers, whose personal lives are on hold, because their boss is always having some panic.”

Among other not-for-attribution tales of indignity: When the Famous Screenwriter visiting the Famous Actor’s house gets tanked and takes a limo back to the hotel, you will retrieve his car the next morning. When, on a Friday night at 7, the Famous Director calls the office because he can’t fathom his fax machine, you will cancel your date and steam out to Malibu to assist. When the Famous Agent’s Mercedes is soiled, you will take it to the detailer. When the Famous Producer is upset over a broken connection, he will hurl his car phone at you.

For these tasks you will need the discretion of a madam, the patience of a saint, the resourcefulness of a street hustler and a psychotherapist’s knack for deflecting outrageous or infantile behavior from grown men and women.

“Assistants of non-civilized people just get brutalized,” says producer Doug Wick (“Wolf”), who early in his career had a good experience working as an assistant to director Alan J. Pakula. “There can be a lot of panic and bile on a set, and the less-human people choose the easiest targets.”

There is, of course, an upside. Assistantship, as Francis accurately points out, is a proven entree into a community deeply suspicious of strangers knocking timorously at its gates. If the William Morris Agency mail room was a previous generation’s version of Hollywood boot camp, securing an assistant’s position with an agent, producer or, most coveted, a director, is today’s. It also offers a bracing introduction to verities of the movie business seldom covered in film school.

“I remember once I had to spend a whole day researching a ‘start gift’ for a client,” recalls Amy Baer, 28, then an assistant to agent Jay Moloney and now senior vice president of production, with her own assistant, at TriStar Pictures. “It was a soccer ball,” she says. “I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing? This has nothing to do with making movies.’ ”

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Ah, but it does. As Baer and countless other assistants have discovered, much of what passes for business in Hollywood actually involves the relentless stroking of egos, the courting of “relationships” with ascendant stars while politely ignoring the fallen, and, at all times, making the deal happen.

Many gears are needed to keep this machinery turning; an assistant’s duty is to see that the smallest of them is freshly oiled. Which means, in between covering the phones, feeding the fax machine and securing the reservations at Le Dome, that one must grasp that the Kristall is to be delivered gift-wrapped and chilled, that the director’s on-set cappuccino is always hot and that a soccer ball may prevent your boss’s client from becoming his ex-client.

Baer, appropriately enough, characterizes the assistant’s job in Darwinian terms.

“It’s a selection process,” she says. “It’s the only real selection process this industry has . . . to see if you can hack it, if you have the endurance. Once you make it past that hurdle, it’s an even playing field.”

It is every assistant’s dream that if he or she uncomplainingly endures the drudgery and shows sufficient pluck, the boss will become a mentor (or at least get his or her own coffee). In fact, this is sometimes the case.

Wick worked for director Pakula for four years.

“He was a very lucky find,” Wick says, “because he’s an educated, decent guy, just to be around someone who had that much knowledge and insight and who was relatively patient.

“On the other hand, there were certain adjustments. If you come out of an Ivy League school, you’ve spent all this time waiting for people to cherish every pearl that drops from your mouth. Then you find out that on a set, the first thing you learn is to shut up.”

Wick got off on the wrong foot by hovering reverently “about two inches behind” the busy Pakula during the Colorado location shoot of the director’s “Comes a Horseman” (1978).

“In the back of my mind there was this fantasy about discussing shots with him--I was brimming with suggestions,” Wick says. “Finally, he turned around and in the nicest way said, ‘Please don’t stand so close to me.’ ”

Wick quickly divined that his role was “to make myself useful.” “I became very good at leveling his director’s chair on the hillside, finding the best kinds of rocks to stick underneath.”

The payoff for all that chair-leveling came during the movie’s post-production, when Wick found himself alone with Pakula for long stretches in the editing room.

“It was just Alan and me and a pad, taking his notes on shots,” Wick recalls. “That’s when you’re incredibly lucky. He would say, ‘What do you think of that take?’ and suddenly, by default, you’ve got his ear.”

Such experience is nigh impossible to achieve without an assistant’s access to the inner sanctum.

“One of the nice things about working for (Moloney) was that he was young and on the rise,” says Baer, “and as he rose I got more access to the information he was generating.”

Says Wick: “What’s valuable about the assistant’s position is that the craft of making movies is so intangible there’s really no great school for it--there’s no good way to learn about making a film.”

Or, for that matter, to learn who the real players are. During her first days as assistant to writer-director Cameron Crowe (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Say Anything . . . “) a few years back, Lisa Stewart, 30, realized that while she “could give the filmographies of directors and name 10 Scorsese pictures, I didn’t know who Mike Ovitz and Bob Bookman were. I didn’t know the business. It took me several weeks to figure who was important.”

Soon thereafter, Stewart was plunged into the pre-production of Crowe’s “Singles.” The director, she says, “included me in almost everything.”

“A lot of times we sat in his office and he pitched ideas to me,” she says. “One of the great things is that he’s always been very solicitous of my opinions.”

On location in Seattle with “Singles,” Stewart metamorphosed into “a little junior producer with a cellular phone--I was sort of a liaison between the production office and the set and the studio.”

Crowe also placed her in charge of “making sure the cast was always happy.” Stewart was thus privy to the small-town intrigues that infest every movie set. “We’d sit down to dinner, and (Crowe) would ask me who was sleeping with whom, what the gossip was,” she says, thus forging a closer relationship with the director.

After the shoot, Stewart was actively involved in the film’s post-production and the recording of its platinum-selling soundtrack album.

“The making of ‘Singles’ was a tremendous learning experience,” she says. “I absolutely loved it. I thought: ‘This is why I came to Los Angeles.’ Now, I want some credit for this responsibility. I feel like I did the job of an associate producer. It’s such an industry thing to want the credit, but I do want the credit--and I want the paycheck next time.”

In fact, she will get both. Stewart will serve as assistant producer of Crowe’s next, still untitled film, which begins shooting late this year.

Nevertheless, some assistants, blissfully young and caught up, however briefly, in the glamour of filmmaking, are slow to realize that gilt by association and a tiny acknowledgment near the end of the credits do not make a career. This sort of thing is fine at 22 but a bit sobering when, a few years down the line, your ridiculous pre-law roommate is driving a Lexus and living in Brentwood while you spend your days mewling “Mr. Silver is in a meeting” every time the phone rings.

“How long should you stay?” Wick says. “At what point do you stop pouring drinks and get some responsibility? In (Pakula’s) case, he’s a good guy and would delegate. The other version is where, four years later, you’re still leveling the director’s chair.”

Which is to say many assistants become exquisitely aware of the glass ceiling lurking overhead.

“If you’re ambitious, it’s hard to sit there and be an assistant,” Baer says. “That’s the inherent frustration to the job.”

In retrospect, she adds, “I wouldn’t have taken it so seriously and toiled over every little thing if I’d realized it was a means to an end. No one had explained that to me, and I took things way too much to heart.”

Although Baer liked working for Moloney, she says, “I was able to figure out very quickly I didn’t want to be an agent. Some people are still assistants because they haven’t figured out what part of the business to be in.”

More typically, industry hopefuls become mired in assistant positions because, as one of their number points out, “you can become too good an assistant.”

Vicarious filmmaking experience and first-name familiarity with, say, Liam Neeson are substantial perks, but an assistant’s ultimate responsibility is the care and feeding of the boss. Assistants who uncomplainingly anticipate their employers’ every need, from fetching the latte to finessing exasperating but profitable clients, can find themselves becalmed in a professional backwater. Few Hollywood moguls will willingly promote the sort of assistant who instinctively books them on the port flank of the first-class cabin to New York so the sun won’t glint annoyingly off the screens of their Power Books.

It’s a trap that seems to befall female assistants more than men, for the usual sexual-stereotype cliches.

“As dependent as executives may become on a male assistant, the assumption is that he will get promoted; he will never become a professional secretary,” says a former assistant. “But women, if they make themselves indispensable, tend to get stuck.”

Such a fate probably will not befall Pamela Francis, whose “I want to be your assistant” classified netted her inquiries from a major production house and an independent producer looking to fill an administrative position.

“It doesn’t worry me,” Francis says. “I’m the kind of person who, if I don’t see things happening, I pursue other avenues.”

And really, what Francis wants out of Hollywood is what every downtrodden, underappreciated, overworked assistant, one way or another, wants and probably deserves: a job, a little respect and “somebody who’s in a position to green-light a film to read me and forward it.”

Francis, as it turns out, is halfway there. One of her five screenplays has been optioned.

“Actually,” she says, “I think I’m doing great.”*