The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

The hours are lousy, the pay is worse. No one respects you. If anything goes wrong, it’s always your fault. And everyone tells you you’re lucky just to be here.

There is one advantage– free time.

We’re often busy, it’s true, but a lot of a PA’s job is simply to be ready. While we wait for some to actually need us, we sit around, reading old scripts, checking Facebook or, say, writing a blog.

The best use of this free time, though, is to figure out what you actually want to do when you’re no longer a PA.

Sure, you want to be a director, but odds are, you won’t be. Still, they say shoot for the moon and land among the stars. So which star do you want to land on? Do you want to be a cinematographer? A production designer? An editor?

Now is the time to figure out what department suits you best. Every department has its own personality. A grip is very different from a hair stylist, and neither are remotely like a script supervisor.

I knew an old gaffer on a game show who was the most racist, sexist, homophobic person I’d ever met. On a hot day, he would say, “Boy, it is hotter than Satan’s vagina out there.”

Inevitably, someone would respond, “But Satan doesn’t have a vagina…”

He would look at them sideways, and ask, as if speaking to a not-very-bright child, “Do you honestly think the source of all evil in the world is not a woman?”

I can’t imagine a make-up artist who would say that.

When I was a senior in film school, I met a freshman who asked me what classes I’d recommend. I suggested a cinematography course, taught by one of my favorite professors. The kid told me he wasn’t interested in cinematography. He wanted to be a director. He wanted to have a “vision.”

I asked him, “How do you know what kind of vision you have, if you don’t know how to turn on the lights?”

That’s why I think everyone should be a PA. Working in the office, I meet folks from every department, usually when they’re asking me to get something for them. In a position like that, you quickly learn the types of personalities drawn to each position. The ACs are very organized and very professional; the hair and make-up people are always friendly, but rarely know exactly what they want; the art department just wants everything.

Being a PA is the best opportunity to learn who everybody is and what they do. And, possibly, what you will do.

First, a quick update on the tree-killing. Yesterday, we ran 115 copies of the script. By the end of the day, we used 9,869 pages. Or, 1.18 trees.

If it was a cherry tree, I’d feel like George Washington.

Moving on.

I was perusing the LA Metblog, and came across this article, which in turn linked to a poll from Travel & Leisure. Go ahead and take a look at those rankings.

I can accept a lot of them. Our public transit sucks. The cost of living is high. Our skyline is a joke (though with some extenuating circumstances).

Some of the other categories are a mystery. We’re the largest enclave of celebrities, yet we’re number nine in people-watching? We’re number six in attractiveness? I’m sorry, but every pretty girl in Charleston has already moved to LA to become an actress. And we’re the least friendly city?

Bullshit.

No one is less friendly than New Yorkers. No one. I’m not just playing to the stereotype, either.

A couple years ago, I called a luxury restaurant to make reservations for my boss. The concierge simply said, “No,” in this angry tone that implied she couldn’t believe I had the nerve to call for reservations. At a restaurant.

She went on, after a pause long enough to make me wonder if she was going to explain why I couldn’t make reservations: “FIRST of all, we don’t take reservations, and even if we did, we aren’t OPEN on Sunday mornings.” She left the “DUuuuUUH” understood. (Sorry for all the formatting, but it’s hard to express typographically the many degrees of disgust and condescension in her voice.)

I got lost in New York, once, when I was a teenager. I saw a cop standing on the corner, so I asked if he could tell me how to get toDO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING TOUR GUIDE TO YOU?

Somewhere in between those two, some friends and I visited New York. We arrived in Brooklyn around three in the morning. The streets were empty, with about six lanes in either direction. We were going slow, looking for the address, when this guy comes out of nowhere, drives up our butts, and honks. At 3:00am. In a residential neighborhood.

My friend says, “He can’t be honking at me. He must be honking at his own stupid driving.”

We stayed at a friend-of-a-friend’s place. He offered to be our “tour guide,” though he didn’t get up until noon. He showed us the Statue of Liberty… from the Staten Island Ferry.

At one point, while we were in the subway, I idly asked this six-year New Yorker how often they make new subway tunnels. (You know, since the redline has been under construction here for, like, decades.) Very indignantly, he said, “What?! They don’t make new tunnels!”

I stared at him a moment, then asked, “Are you saying they just found them like this?”

New Yorkers move out here and they bitch and moan about how you can’t get good pizza or good bagels, or the water doesn’t taste good outside of New York, and on and on.

If you hate it so much, why don’t you move back to New York? Because we have hot chicks and the beach and movies stars and sunshine nine months out of the year.

More importantly, we have fewer goddamn New Yorkers.

A PA is all things to all people. By which I mean, any shit job that nobody else wants to do is given to the PAs. Making coffee, making copies, driving all the way across town to drop off a script and thus adding unnecessary greenhouse gases to our environmental crimes. (Seriously, e-mail exists. What’s the logic to hand-delivering scripts anymore?)

I had a friend who’s first job in the business was on a porno. At the end of the day, the AD gave him a box and told him, “Clean these.” It was a box of dildos.

(On an unrelated note, I don’t know whether I’m happy or sad that Firefox doesn’t know how to spell “dildo.”)

Most departments have their own PAs. They’re still gophers, just a specific kind of gopher. It’s a way of climbing up the ladder in a particular craft. (Personally, I’m trying to work my way up to being a writers’ PA.)

I should note that a production assistant is different than a personal assistant. Those poor kids have the fun of experiencing The Devil Wears Prada, Live!, every day. I did that for about a year, and I wanted to kill myself. The only thing that kept me going was a blind optimism in my future job prospects, and a healthy thirst for revenge.

But no assistant has it worse than the agent’s assistant. Watch the documentary Swimming with Sharks, and you’ll get an idea. (IMDb lists it as a comedy, for some reason, but I’m sure that’s just a typo.)

Hollywood is considered a progressive place, concerned with environmentalism, global warming, and “green” things like that. Judging by the number of hybrids in the parking lot, that’s generally true.

Except when it comes to paper.

I’m not much of an environmentalist myself, but even I’m shocked at how much paper we waste. We’ll use half a ream of legal paper on call sheets alone, every single day. We copy memos and forms for the entire cast and crew, going through hundreds of pages at a pop.

And then there’s the scripts. A TV script is about 50 pages, maybe 55 once you include the cover, cast list, and location sheet. When we have a new script, we copy it at least 120 times. That’s more than 6000 sheets of paper.

Or nearly 3/4 of a tree. For one TV show. For one week.

Today, I decided to keep track of how many pieces of paper I personally use today. All the copies, all the printing, everything. As of 6:45, fifteen minutes after I started, I copied 25 pages.

It’s going to be a long day.

UPDATE: As of 1:00 (lunch), 427 pages.

UPDATE 2: At the end of the day (8:00pm), we used 2,965 pages.  At that rate, we kill a tree every three days.  Which, to be honest, doesn’t sound that bad.

Is it wrong for me to think that?

The purpose of this blog is not to give advice. After four years of film school, and four more of real industry experience, the only thing I know for sure is that I don’t know much. (Which is not to say that youth necessarily equals bad advice; check out Amanda’s blog for a fine example.)

Instead, I mostly plan on regaling you with stories of Hollywood, as seen from the bottom rung of the industry ladder–the production assistant. You know that old saying, that the measure of a man is how he treats those he doesn’t have to treat well? I’m that guy you don’t have to treat well.

As a quick example, I was once a producer’s assistant (which is different from a production assistant, but I won’t bore you with the distinction). My boss wasn’t much into technology. He kept a paper schedule, rather than an electronic one we could both look at; I had to reprogram his new phone whenever he broke an old one (which was frequently); and he never quite understood how e-mail forwards work.

On more than one occasion, he forwarded me an e-mail with some bit of pertinent information, not realizing there was a whole exchange attached to the end. These discussions would often include mentions of me, referred to as “my idiot assistant,” “my dumb assistant,” or the grammatically confusing “my moron assistant.”

I’m quite sure he didn’t realize I knew he talked about me this way. Certainly, it hurt my pride to be considered an idiot by an idiot, but on the other hand, I no longer felt bad about making fun of him.

Back on the first hand, he was the producer, and I was the assistant. He lived in Brentwood, and I lived in Van Nuys. He drove a Mercedes, and I drove a Corolla. Two years later, not much has changed.

So, really, who’s the idiot?

Yesterday, I read an essay by Paul Graham, “Good and Bad Procrastination.” Among other things, Graham summarizes Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” thusly:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?

I like the third question, because it assumes an answer to the second. I like even more the fact that that assumption is probably correct.

I work in the entertainment business, where we don’t have “problems” in the same sense the physicists or mathematicians do. We have “projects”– TV shows, movies, music videos, and so forth.

The criteria for “most important” varies wildly from one individual to the next. (I consider Battlestar Galactica to be much more important than Sex and the City. My wife disagrees.) Still, everyone has that list of projects they’d like to work on, even if those projects exist only in their heads.

What does all this have to do with blogging? Surely, tossing my thoughts out onto the series of tubes is not a good answer to number 1?

No, it’s not.

What it is is a way for me to change my answer to number 2. I’m an aspiring writer (not an amateur writer), and like many writers, I have difficulty with choosing good procrastination over bad. So, is blogging good procrastination?

No, it’s not.

But it’s less bad procrastination. It is less bad than falling into the rabbit whole that is TVTropes.org, clicking random article on Wikipedia, or simply refreshing my Facebook page?

Oh, hell yes, it is.

I may not be writing the next great American screenplay, but at least I’m practicing expressing myself in written form. It’s a step in the right direction. Or, at least, a step in a less wrong direction.