If anyone wants to get some idea of the abuse that actors and, yes, writers endure as 'normal' when in the entertainment industry, Jerry Stahl gives some vivid examples
in his brilliant and hellish drugs-in-TV-writing-in-Hollywood memoir, Permanent Midnight.

Vile sarcasm and screaming abuse are all too common amongst tycoons and they feel free to dump their verbal vomitus using underlings (writers and new actors) as barf basins.

Stahl tells what happened to him when he was sent by Playboy to interview a big name actor. This actor enjoyed degrading an underling whom he kept in his entourage for that purpose--to absorb verbal abuse from the Big Guy. Stahl was assigned to interview this luminary and spent hours witnessing how Big Guy made his pet human squirm. If the victim ventured a mild rebuke, the Big Guy would scream at Stahl what a pathetic (expletive deleted) this guy was.

Hours spent watching Big Guy emotionally torturing this underling left Stahl feeling dirty and diminished. He reacted by goin back to his hotel and finding the most degrading stuff he himself could do to blot out his own tortured conscience.

This demonstrates how if you are in an abusive group, merely standing aside and witnessing someone else being shredded by the abusive leader will diminish you. Even if you stay the Guru's Pet and never get yelled at yourself, you will still lose chunks of yourself by witnessing others being fried.

Warning: Stahl wrote this memoir as a description of his own use and abuse of drugs. If you have any prior history of addction and are in recovery, you may want to give this book a pass, or have enough recovery to know to put it away if reading it triggers cravings.

Just get out of there as quick as you can and never look back.

they are all like that!!! It's all like that in the arts, it's very cult like...

good job