Unlike most other industries, the entertainment industry runs on scarcity. The unemployment rate in the United States is 4.2 percent right now. But for people who want to go before the cameras or stand at center stage, it’s closer to 90 percent — always has been, always will be.

What’s more, the jobs performers do get are mostly short-term and evanescent. This means the power imbalance between the person who doles out the work and the person who is looking for work is more extreme than in almost any other situation you can think of. Unless you’re a huge star, you’re often a supplicant. You live a life of almost constant rejection.

Unlike other creative endeavors, you can’t even ply your trade for free. Writers get rejected but they can still write. You can’t put on a play without a theater. And until the advent of cheap high-quality digital cameras and YouTube made the release of inexpensive self-made short movies possible, there were astoundingly few routes to just getting yourself on film.