Annabelle Gurwitch Is Fired Up

While I was in Austin last weekend, I got to meet up with Annabelle Gurwitch, who was in town for the South by Southwest film festival for the official debut of Fired!, a humorous documentary with a very close thematic connection to the book of the same name. Both have their roots in Gurwitch’s experience getting fired by Woody Allen from an Off-Broadway production of one of his plays a few years back, which led her to talk with other actors and writers who opened up about the jobs they’d lost over the years. That in turn led her to notice just how many people were getting fired in all industries. “I became convinced that we should destigmatize the experience of being fired,” she said of the process that led her to interview auto workers in Michigan, a former White House chef, and ex-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. (I finally got to watch the 71-minute film yesterday afternoon, and it’s a lot of fun in a Morgan Spurlock sort of way; it’s a bit short for theatrical release, but I imagine you’ll probably see it on cable before too long…)

And the A-list contributors certainly help achieve that goal; as Gurwitch points out, “People in show business are experts in rejection.” But she’s also excited about some of the less familiar writers who shared their essays, gushing with praise for Real Time producer Scott Carter’s tale of getting sacked from a pornography house for writing too-erudite captions, or stand-up comedian Paul F. Tompkins’s discovery that you really aren’t supposed to steal inventory from low-paying retail employers. And yet the path to publication wasn’t entirely easy; Gurwitch’s proposal went out several times before landing with an editor at Touchstone, who managed to trump all the firing stories Gurwitch had heard before: She’d been given notice while riding in an elevator…which promptly got stuck between floors.

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