The cynic might say that Gabler wrote this provacative and controversial article to generate publicity. How many have subsequently googled about the man and his writings? I bet a few more Disney biographies have been sold this week. Now he’s back in the spotlight doing interviews. No such thing as bad publicity… Regardless of the intent, the conversations generated have been worthwhile.
I thought about this last night. I did glean an important bit of advice from Gabler. What happened in '85 still resonates today.
Henceforth my moniker is “former movie executive”. I like the sound of that.
Come to think of it, I need to go shopping. I’ve now got a real image I need to maintain.
@MWCDSS How true. A Google search of Neal Gabler brings up 374,000 results (probably half of those from CC!). ^:)^
Reminds me of this one from a few years ago.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2014/11/04/harvard-grad-48-loses-job-and-insurance-gets-rejected-by-container-store/#77f68b065331
Actually, his job loss was just one of many factors in his loss of income - it wasn’t the only reason for his difficulties
He couldn’t sell his co-op and carried two mortgages for years. He didn’t slash the price on the co-op soon enough. He lost his job (quit, lost… WTTW did say that his TV contract “was not renewed.”) He wrote so slowly and his books weren’t successful enough. He wasn’t honest with his wife about their financial situation and so she didn’t get another job. Plenty of reasons, plenty of blame.
The wife had to have kept her eyes tightly shut if she couldn’t figure out they had problems when bills couldn’t be paid. Lots of wistful thinking and selective blindness.
@Pizzagirl, I am not going to bother responding to you. Except for this post.
@Cheeringsection, thanks for your post. I appreciate it.
In a way, this thread (and the directions it has taken) remind me of a thread earlier this year about this article, “Too poor to retire and too young to die”:
While many posters were sympathetic, there were those who criticized the subjects of that article for wasteful spending and living beyond their means, even though that story had very little to do with profligate spending.
That particular thread still make me wince. I can’t imagine my eighty-year-old mother – who has very little retirement savings of her own – driving around the country in an RV working at minimum-wage jobs.
Maybe next will be unsolicited offers on his Hamptons home from satellite viewers or those who drive by out of curiousity…
Blame? When you are part of the “creative class”, “job loss” is a constant. This is nothing new.Walking away 31 years ago? My H has over 50 TV and film credits to his name. That means 50 “job losses”. All these things end one way or another. As I stated previously, Gabler has never faced up to the realities of working in the creative class. He was not “squeezed out”.He was just oblivious and now feels sorry for himself.
Re: job loss or not. I’m going off what is posted in the OP. Whether he lost his job or quit… The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. As one of my friends says, "he did not leave his job - he “was left” 
I am not saying that this was the devastating event, I am saying that it was an event that if it had not happened, he might have been in a different situation today. Just one in a chain of many. Couple that with the other things he mentions… I am not trying to defend him, but a lot of things people point out as poor choices might not have looked like poor choices at the time they were made. Hindsight is 20/20. How many of you never made a financial decision that was truly unwise in hindsight?
Did you know that the person renting the car to you likely has a college degree? Enterprise requires it and at Hertz, the folks I spoke with (slow time, I was the only customer at counter) also had college degrees. It’s not what most folks I know aspire to when we go to college–“Gee, I need to get degree so I can be rental car agent.” The Hertz counter guy even relocated to take the job because the options available to him in neighbor island with his degree were less attractive. Now HE would have been a more believable poster person for the squeezed middle class.
Many of the clerical and secretarial staff have bachelor’s degrees in HI. The people who work on programs in public health for the state have masters degrees, lots of experience, and often gross about $50K in a very high COL area, Hawaii.
I thought Gabler was explaining his working life. I don’t think he said that losing his tv gig was the source of his problems. He bought the house almost 10 years later.
I do think he values the East Hampton lifestyle and he has endangered his financial future as a result. I am repeating myself but he is working 7 days a week.
Some people just love their homes or their lifestyle and they don’t want to give those things up until they are carried out.
We all know these people, don’t we? 
The OP has endangered HIS, wife’s, his parents, and possibly his kids’ financial futures by the choices and decisions he describes. To me, those choices are a train wreck and show no knowledge gained from repeated poor choices.
@dstark That’s a fair observation. He was explaining his working life. From the article:
“But the problem with finances is that life doesn’t cooperate. In our case . . . there were unforeseen circumstances. . . . I lost my television job because, I was told, I wasn’t frivolous enough for the medium.”
I think what is frustrating for so many of us is that 31 years later life STILL isn’t cooperating for him. Although the rest of us have adapted, he hasn’t. He is almost defiant in his denial of reality.
It is hard for me to take someone seriously who sees the writing on the wall for 31 years, but does everything in his power to deny what that writing is saying.
“Some people just love their homes or their lifestyle and they don’t want to give those things until they are carried out.”
And we should feel sorry for them because?
If they don’t want to give up their lifestyle fine - but then don’t go around whining about the sad state of your finances and blaming it on something other then what the reason is.
Plenty of people work 7 days a week. Plenty of people need to have 2nd and third jobs to make ends meet. Gabler is not working minimum wage jobs like most of those people are so they can afford a roof over their heads and food on the table. Gabler is sitting home when not teaching working on his books and articles.
@emilybee, there is a difference between not feeling sorry for somebody and attacking somebody.
Don’t feel sorry for him. I don’t feel sorry for him I think.
My guess is some of those school jobs are liw paying jobs.
My friend worked at Goldman Sachs. He retired. He was asked to teach a course at a private college. The job paid $5,000.
“We all know these people, don’t we?”
Get cast in a TV show? Buy a new house that depends on you having that role FOREVER . [-X
Unfortunately it feels as though I know hundreds of these people. And that’s why my compassion and understanding is tapped out.
BTW I overestimated H’s credits, it’s more like 32. I count the yearly W2s and he just counts the titles.
"@busdriver11, you remind me of Gabler. Expensive house. You spent a lot on your kids educations. You didn’t save much for years. You did have serious issues that he did not have.
If your union was crushed like many other unions who knows."
No, not like Gabler. Not everyone who has spent a lot on their homes and education is like Gabler. When we had problems, we were very young. We had no house, an inexpensive lifestyle, and many people typically do not save much when they are young. We waited to buy the expensive house until we had a good bit of savings, and have a large amount of equity in it. Our experience did turn us into savers, though.
I’ll tell you how we could have been like Gabler. In 2008 during the recession, many people were laid off, including large numbers of people in the airline industry. Our investments and home value plummeted, and if we had gotten laid off for a long time—if we had stayed in our house, kept our spending habits the same, had only one of us working and not earning much income, kept our kids in private schools, sent them to private universities, and did this for several years, we’d be like Gabler. There is no way we could have continued to function the same, without the income coming in, that would have been insanity. I have never asked my parents, (nor has my husband) for a cent. Ever.
I have lived low, with little expectations of rescue. I have also listened to Dave Ramsey long enough to know how to take care of myself if it all fell to crap.
A few quotes from the first 15 minutes of his “On Point” interview yesterday:
“Someone in some publication said, well, ‘obviously he blew through a lot of money.’ That’s just utter nonsense.”
Responding to a question from Ashbrook: “I wanted no gold-plating. I didn’t even want aluminum plating. I wanted to send my kids to college, obviously. And that’s an enormous expense, which more than anything else in my life took a bite out of my savings, took a bite out of my living expenses, took a bite out of----” (topic changed, after acknowledging that he required parental help to get his daughters through school)
“Do I live lavishly? I haven’t taken a vacation in 10 years. I never go out to eat.”
“We moved [to the Hamptons] from Brooklyn because it was a way of lessening our expenses. And I rented a house for a while, and then we were able to buy the house. But actually we reduced our expenses by living there. We didn’t raise our expense.”