TDFW: Issue #3 The Canadian Ken Kabatoff
"Being street smart is better than being book smart."
KK: I’m a writer and a producer and a golfer who lives in Vancouver and I’ve wanted to make a living in the film and television industry since I was five years old.
Any weird jobs?
KK: I was once Dolph Lundgren’s assistant for 7 months. I say it’s weird because he’s a very smart man who had a degree in chemical engineering from MIT and is a Fulbright Scholar and that all happened before he was Ivan Drago.
Are you invited to the premiere of Creed 2?
KK: Dolph hasn’t returned my calls in three years.
Talk about a time when turning something down was a pivotal moment for you.
KK: I was working for a line producer in Canada who is really one of the best in the country. We did at least 5 seasons of television, multiple pilots etc. But in all that time my résumé hadn’t grown. I stayed as a producer’s assistant, but my responsibilities and my skill set on these shows grew each season while my credit wasn’t reflective of what I was doing. To the point where a co-executive producer stopped me in the hall to ask why I wasn’t getting a producer credit. So that producer went to the network and went to bat for me but the network denied the request. I knew that I was a writer and needed to figure out how to make a career doing something creative because Vancouver is basically a service industry for American productions. Then Steven Spielberg was bringing The BFG to Vancouver, I thought I might have a shot at becoming an assistant on that movie. Went through multiple rounds of interviews, got to the point that the producer, Sam Mercer finally called me in to meet in person but at that point my job was going to be assisting Sam and the production as well as the director and his personal team. When I finally got called in to meet with Sam, the job function had changed and I was deemed overqualified for the new position. It had become a job to be an assistant to the assistants. I still met with Sam, and he said “what do you want to do?” I replied , “I want to be a writer.” He told me, “then don’t do this job, you’ll be miserable here, go write that script.” So I walked away from the job, from the MAN (Steven Spielberg!) who was the reason I wanted to be in the film industry in the first place. I took the rest of the year off, developed a script, that script got me an agent and everything else started to fall into place. I went back to work on a show as an assistant because we all need to eat! But all my past production experience and creative experience at that point lent itself to getting me into the writers’ room on the Netflix show Travelers.
To learn how to read the room. That being street smart is better than being book smart. I say that from the perspective of social relationships being the keys to becoming successful.
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