Dear Friends,

Vivendi Universal, Borders Books would like to invite you to join me  at Borders Westwood June 7 at 7:30 p.m. to celebrate the dvd release of the “Fired” documentary. The dvd goes on sale that day and we’ll be signing copies at the store. Borders Westwood is at 1360 Westwood Blvd. (Westwood and Rochford)

Oprah Magazine has called the film “entertaining and slyly subversive,”  Newsday deemed it “Funny, Poignant, and Smart” and The Nation Magazine said “it’s hilarious and important. ” It’s been praised by Forbes, Talk of the Nation, Businessweek, and CNN, amongst others.

We’d love to have you there for this gathering and won’t you invite friends in the LA area? We hope to see you there!

Best wishes and much gratitude,

Annabelle

“This morning, my nine year old son and and his friends were engaged in a heated discussion. They were excitedly rehashing the plight of striking workers struggling for higher wages and more vacation time. In the end, one of the workers, emboldened by union organizing fever, (supporters of The Employee Free Choice Act beware!), destroyed the workplace and they got their jobs back but at lower rates and what amounted to a giveback of benefits. …”

Click on link to read entire story

” … Just been fired? Don’t worry, your future is wide open

Annabelle Gurwitch spins “Fired” tales of woe into book, Showtime film

Annabelle Gurwitch says she didn’t want to write her book. And you don’t want to feel like you need to read it, but you should.

If she offers the comic relief you’re looking for, it might be because you’re walking the streets and trolling the Internet looking for a job. If not, chances are you’ve been there before - or will get there someday.

In “Fired,” published last year and recently released in paperback, the actor told the story of her firing from a Woody Allen play and collected job-loss tales from two dozen A-list and B-list celebrities who happen to be her friends.

Bob Saget recounted his pre-”Full House” career on a short-lived morning talk show, including the day he arrived to discover he no longer had a chair on the set.

Tim Allen remembered getting complimented for being both popular and creative at the same moment he was being fired.

Ann Meara dished a story about being canned from her hospital kitchen job by a nun for singing show tunes while she delivered meals to patients.

All three also are featured in the film version of “Fired” set to debut March 29 on Showtime. It seems getting the boot was a good career move for Gurwitch, who also produced a stage version, “Fired: Tales of Jobs Gone Bad,” that has appeared off-Broadway and at venues nationwide.

But it didn’t feel that way a few years ago, when Woody Allen fired Gurwitch from an off-Broadway play. She experienced a career high and low all in one work episode.

“Being hired by Woody Allen, it’s like - Say, you’re in IT and Steve Jobs says you’re terrific and you get hired by Steve Jobs, and then you get told you’re terrible by Steve Jobs,” Gurwitch said last week during a talk from her Los Angeles home.

And then there’s the personal and public shame:

“You’ve probably told every person you know you have the job,” she said. “Now you have to tell everyone you know that you don’t have the job.”

Gurwitch said she went through what most people experience when they lose a job: anger, sadness, a sense of loss.

“I cried, cursed the world, cursed Woody Allen, cursed my fate, drank a little too much, ate a lot of French fires, wandered the streets,” said Gurwitch, who is a writer and commentator on NPR.

In time, she stopped cursing the world and gorging on fries, and began the work that eventually would become her “Fired” multimedia adventure, including her website.

“I’ve been doing projects like this on NPR on my show “Day to Day,” where I take things that happen in my own life and put them in the context of the larger cultural issues, so this is not unknown territory for me,” she said. “Clearly, I got obsessed by this topic.”

In a sense, “Fired” could be labeled a self-help book.

“It was really my hope that by putting this book together it would help people to feel better if they had been, like me, fired because they were in the wrong job, or if they had been outsourced, downsized or outplaced,” Gurwitch said.

“My firing was very dramatic for me because I was 40 when I was fired. I think that when you get fired when you’re younger it can be a fantastic learning experience, as it can be when you’re older. But the gravitas really sets in when you’re an older and you’re fired.”

Gurwitch toured the country talking with HR groups and gathering tales about people coping with job loss for her film. She found that even celebrity “fired” stories have universal appeal.

“As an actor, I think a lot of people have the impression that it’s very glamorous. I believe it’s glamorous for six people - those were the cast of “Friends,” said Gurwitch, now 45.

“For the rest of us, if we don’t work job to job … when I lose my job, I’m in the same boat as many people in the country, where I’m thinking. ‘How, first of all, will I pay my mortgage? How will I qualify for my health care?’”

Gurwitch had savings so she and her husband, who have a young son, were able to make ends meet. But she’s come to better appreciate what it’s like to confront job loss. After meeting “Nickel and Dimed” author Barbara Ehrenreich at a book signing, Gurwitch joined the advisory board of United Professionals (www.unitedprofessionals.org), a nonprofit advocacy group Ehrenreich founded that helps white-collar workers.

“I felt a certain amount of patriotic spirit as I’ve gone around the country and met people because we’re all talking about jobs and what it means to work and be a productive member of society,” Gurwitch said.

“All the people that I’ve met really want to work. They want to be useful. They want to provide for their families. And we’re really united by this sense of insecurity. Just being able to get together and laugh about it is very helpful. It’s comedy in the face of a very serious subject, laughing through the tears.”

And you have to learn to laugh, especially when you hear about the latest euphemism for being fired.

“I met someone in HR recently who told me what they’ve been saying lately is, ‘We’re freeing you up for your future.’ I said, ‘Oh, my god! Don’t tell me you really say that.’”

Mike Cote is the editor of ColoradoBiz. E-mail him at mcote@cobizmag.com.

Dear Barbara,

I was reading the paper with interest over the last week and saw that the labor department has told us that job growth is up, however, as anyone living in the country today knows, so is our collective anxiety level about the jobs we are headed to or trying to hang onto.

As you know, I’ve been traveling around with my Fired project for over a year now and I feel very privileged that people share their stories with me. Okay, privileged and a little jet lagged.

Here are some stories from the road. It turns out that old adage that truth is funnier than fiction is really true as evidenced by some of these tales I have been told: here are a few of the truly inventive ways people have learned the news that their company was repositioning itself out of their position:

>From Orlando:
I worked in retail and my supervisor told me, “we’re promoting you to customer.”
A new euphemism from HR world,” We’re freeing you up for your future. “

>From Scottsdale:
“I was fired from a job in a cigar factory because I couldn’t stop crying the day John Lennon died.”

>From D.C.:
“Can you help me to get fired? I work for the IMF, we never fire anyone, that’s our problem!”
“I had given 30 days notice to my employer after securing a new position, thinking I had done the right thing. After about ten days went by, my supervisor called me in to say, “Your quitting just isn’t working out for us, we’re firing you!”

Countless people tell me that losing one job led them to a better job in a more appropriate workplace or provided the opportunity to start a new career even, and I am thrilled and impressed to hear how people take losing a job and turn it into an opportunity. I wasted much more time feeling sorry for myself when I was fired by Woody Allen than anyone I’ve met on the road. On the other hand, I can’t tell you how many people ask me to sign a book for their recently made redundant mom, dad, spouse, or for themselves as they feel they are about to be, as I heard recently, “unexpectedly leisured” and are quite frankly terrified. I just read Lou Uchitelle’s book “The Disposable American,” by the way, which chronicles the very devastating effects of being outsourced in riveting and disturbing detail — I couldn’t put it down — too bad it’s not fiction!

I hope people will enjoy my book, and it will give their spirits a lift — providing some humor and inspiration, but I also hope people will take my experience as a model and go out and talk to people about their experiences and take actions that can impact the lives of all of us. That is what the “getting fired” experience has done for me, for sure. This is one of the reasons I’m so excited about UP. For instance, I had heard about the legislation that the house passed to make it possible to form unions and not suffer punitive measures for doing so, and I wanted to read more about it, so last night I went to the site and an article was on the front page of the UP site — very useful. I know you have many goals for UP and I hope I can be a small part of this.

Okay, I have to tell you another story. I was speaking at the Bar Association Luncheon of Labor and Employment Attorneys in LA last week, and I was handed this story:

“ An employee of my law firm was fired after being promised a partner position. “Poor research skills” was the reason cited for his termination. He challenged this decision but the board found his presentation to them to good but “poorly researched.” Sometimes, you can’t win.

You know, as the mother of a child born with a severe birth defect, I share the worry that so many people I talk to share — that losing their job will mean losing their health care. After all, with his pre-existing condition, no one wants to insure my family except our union, so I hope we can build some momentum with UP that will ultimately lead to our country adopting a universal health plan.

Okay, I have to tell you one more story.

From D.C.:
Fired from job at Roy Roger’s restaurant for refusing to say “Howdy Partner” with enough enthusiasm.
You just can’t make that up!

Best,
Annabelle Gurwitch

ANNABELLE GURWITCH is finally done being fired. Four years after Woody Allen abruptly dismissed the L.A.-based actress from a play he was directing — telling her, among other things, that her reading of the part made her seem “retarded” — Gurwitch has come to the end of her multifaceted, multimedia journey of self-discovery.

Like all good baby boomers, Gurwitch took the personal and made it political. And professional. First was the stage work — “Fired: Tales of Jobs Gone Bad,” which began at Comedy Central Los Angeles, moved to off-Broadway and has appeared in venues throughout the country. Last year, the book “Fired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized and Dismissed” came out, along with www.firedbyannabellegurwitch.com/. And now “Fired!” the documentary is opening Friday at the Laemmle Grand.

“Finally I can walk away,” says Gurwitch, who, though she’s best known as the host of TBS’ “Dinner and a Movie,” has gotten used to being referred to as “the fired lady.” “I’ve done what I can, I did what I set out to do.”

That was, at first, to make herself feel better. By telling everyone she knew, and even people she didn’t, that she had been fired by Allen, a man she considered, even after the whole Mia Farrow/Soon Yi scandal, a demi-god. She discovered to her surprise that almost everyone she knew had a story about being fired, and she began collecting them, through staged readings and then the book.

“With the book, I thought it would make a great present, you know, for someone who had just been fired,” she says. “Because when it happens you feel so devastated, so alone, it’s important to know that you aren’t.”

Along the way, Gurwitch says, she began to notice that getting fired was a bit of a national trend — that corporate mergers and the downsizing of American companies meant an awful lot of people were facing life without a paycheck or health insurance.

“The month I was fired something like 160,000 New Yorkers lost their job. Maybe not all by Woody Allen,” she adds with a laugh, “but that’s a lot of people. It really opened my eyes.”

Gurwitch is small and slender with attractively mussed hair and a Spider-Man T-shirt under her black pinstriped suit. Sitting in the Alcove in Los Feliz, she is surrounded by hip mamas and guys in black T-shirts and retro aviator shades, people who all look as if they might have gotten fired by Woody Allen and wound up getting a book and documentary out of it. It’s a discrete demographic, native mostly to L.A. and New York — the creative type with just enough insight, chutzpah and narcissism to see within the unfolding of her daily life a message for the world, whether delivered through NPR essay (which Gurwitch also does) or documentary film.

“Fired!” the film follows Gurwitch’s personal journey in form as well as content. It opens with a dozen or so entertainers, including Tim Allen, Illeana Douglas, Anne Meara, Sarah Silverman, Jeff Garlin and David Cross, sharing their stories of being fired.

“All of the people I interviewed were my friends,” she says. “I didn’t consider calling people I didn’t know. I had all these great stories from doing the stage shows already.”

But “Fired!” then moves past the comfort zone of having successful entertainers share their embarrassing moments and dives into the less soothing world of “real people” — office and factory workers who have lost their jobs — and their health insurance. She goes to Lansing, Mich., deep in Michael Moore territory, and finds more of the same — factories closing, corporate downsizing, layoffs in the double and triple digits.

“I could have done several different films,” Gurwitch says. “I could have done all serious, or I could have done all funny. But I, we — the directors and I — decided to follow the narrative of how I got fired and then what happened, including how I noticed suddenly that everywhere I looked there was downsizing.”

In the film, this is at times an uneasy marriage, with strange albeit interesting connections — Gurwitch interviews a former White House chef because he is, she says, the only person in Washington to admit to being fired. Fortunately, Gurwitch never pretends to be more than she is — an actress who got fired, had a sort of epiphany and is interested in following its ripples. She intentionally, and wisely, left the analyses to professional economists (although one of these is Ben Stein, as well known for his movie and television roles as any Greenspan gravitas).

“There are so many nights when I lay awake and wonder if I put the right things in the movie,” she says. “Jeff Garlin asked me what percent of the movie that I wanted to make got in there, and at first I said 90. Now I think it’s closer to 70. Thank God for DVD extras. Mine are like 90 minutes, which is longer than the film.”

She takes issue with those who say she took her firing and turned it into a cottage industry. “Believe me, no one makes a documentary to make money,” she says. “You make a documentary because you believe so much in a subject that you can’t not make it.”

There is no doubt that Gurwitch is passionate about the issue that has taken over the last four years of her life. Far beyond her original hope of making people feel better, she hopes her film will start a national conversation that will lead to some sort of reform; the fired stories she continues to collect, she says, prove this country desperately needs to address unemployment. She recently joined United Professionals, an organization begun by Barbara Ehrenreich that, according to its website, provides support for “all unemployed, underemployed and anxiously employed” white collar workers.

“We’re very excited because there’s a new Congress,” Gurwitch says. “We hope to give labor a voice. People who don’t have unions. We’re hoping to found a healthcare fund.”

After her four years listening to tales of the outsourced, she has a few pieces of advice. First, try to get other people fired with you “so you have some drinking buddies.” Read the newspaper, so you aren’t the last to know that your company’s merger is going to mean your dismissal. And don’t be complacent — the days of a gold watch at the end of 30 years are gone.

“You should always be thinking about what you can do next,” she says.

As an entertainer, she has a natural empathy for that sort of uncertainty. “We’re all essentially freelance,” she says. “So we’ve constantly reinvented ourselves. You have to. I read this column about how older women who are fired should dye their hair and cut 10 years off their résumé. I mean, actresses have known that for years. Of course, IMDB has totally blown it for us now, but still…. ”

Her stint in quasi-political activism now over, Gurwitch is returning to her “normal” life. Her essays appear on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Day to Day,” and she and her husband recently sold a pilot idea to Lifetime. They are also working on a book together, tentatively titled “How Not to Have a Marriage Like Ours.” She’s also back to acting, doing auditions for pilot season, with a new attitude toward things she took for granted.

“I think every actress should produce a documentary,” she says with a laugh. “When you’re the one raising the money, when you are writing the check, you really appreciate the people who do it for you. In the middle of all this, I did a ‘Boston Legal,’ and I was so grateful to have a dressing room, as opposed to changing in my car. To have a hair stylist and makeup, it was just amazing.”