The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

Some people are shy. Actors, generally, are not.

A certain actor, let’s call him “Mick Molte,” would regularly show up on set wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants with the crotch worn through. And when I write, “nothing but,” I’m including underwear.

(I must admit that I didn’t witness this behavior myself; I didn’t join that production until later.)

An actress on my current show has several tattoos that need to be covered whenever she wears a revealing dress (which is often). My friend has “unintentionally” walked in on this process a number of times. I should point out that make up trailers have more mirrors than a disco ball.

I have a one up on him, though. Unfortunately.

I was working on a terrible little horror movie. The scene required the actress to jump out of her bed and sprint for the door. Sadly, the set walls were hanging from the ceiling, and the slightest touch would send them crashing to the ground.

The AD needed someone to catch her before she slammed into the wall, destroying the set and thus costing the production tens of dollars. I happened to be standing there, so I drew the short straw.

I once again tried the, “But I’m married!” excuse, and once again got shot down with, “That’s why you’ll be less grabby.”

Oh, so mistaken.

So, the director calls, “Action!”, the actress lunges at me, I throw up my hands to catch her, and…

Grab her boob.

(Or, more accurately, Dow Corning’s boob.)

I felt really bad, and apologized profusely, but she said don’t worry about it. “It happens all the time.”

Uh…

Wow.

(And don’t worry, I apologized to my wife, and her real boobs, when I got home.)

Everybody has two business: their business and show business.

Millions subscribe to People. Millions more flip through it while waiting in line at the grocery store. Then here’s Entertainment Weekly, Entertainment Tonight, and websites like TMZ and Perez Hilton, who update in intervals smaller than science is able to measure.

As someone who works in entertainment, it is a bit odd to know that everyone is curious about my business. My mom knows what the number one movie was this weekend; I have no idea what the best selling computer was.

This might be where all the egotism in Hollywood comes from. We have, after all, only one business, and everyone seems to be paying attention to it.

This is all a little silly, but there is a more pernicious effect. Due to what’s called “Dunbar’s number” (or the “monkeysphere,” if you’re into cheap jokes, like me), there is a limit to the number of people any individual can actually care about. This number is about 150.

What do I mean by “care about”? Imagine how you’d feel if your mother died. Now imagine if your best friend’s mother died. Now imagine a mother in Burundi died. They’re all tragic, but you feel it more strongly when the person is closer to you.

That’s Dunbar’s number.

Here’s the thing. The more you know about someone, the more you identify with them. As David Wong explains:

“Think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man hiding in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man who gets hungry and has a favorite food and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who has athlete’s foot and chronic headaches and wakes up in the morning with a boner and loves volleyball?

Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You think there’s an effort to build sympathy for the murderous fuck. Isn’t it strange how simply knowing random human facts about him immediately tugs at your sympathy strings?”

Do you know the names of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s kids? Do you know the names of your cousin’s kids? Or even your sister’s?

Think about how depressed some people got when Heath Ledger died. How many people got depressed over other 19,249 drug related deaths? The fact that it affected people shows that the brain can’t distinguish between a real relationship and a synthetic, televised, intertubed relationship.

A friend in the office just told me that Ashley Simpson is pregnant. I’m pretty sure I just forgot the name of my best friend in 2nd grade.

By the way, who the fuck is Ashley Simpson?

You’re not a very good writer.

You’re not smart enough. You don’t know what you’re doing.

You don’t construct engaging stories. You don’t know how to build a scene. You don’t build tension, and you don’t release it with comedy relief.

You don’t know what’s funny.

You don’t create three dimensional characters. You won’t stop writing flat characters with no motivation. You’re not witty. Neither is your dialogue.

You don’t work hard enough. You don’t follow through on the potential of your ideas. You don’t have good ideas in the first place.

You’re just not a very good writer.

Yet.

I feel so dirty writing that, but it’s true. If you can get past his poor grammar, rambling sentences, and excessive use of exclamation points, Bay has a point:

“The leaders of these guilds seem to like the limelight they get in the press, it becomes more about the ego in the room rather than something smart.”

It’s worth noting that SAG isn’t run by AFL-CIO organizers. It’s run by actors. Past presidents include Patty Duke, Ed Asner, and Charlton Heston. The current president was in 90 episodes of Cybill. I didn’t know Cybill was even on that long.

Anyway.

The point is, nobody is more desperate for attention than actors (other than bloggers who think people actually care enough about who they are that they make themselves anonymous). It’s why they became actors in the first place.

I think the folks at SAG saw how much attention a group of ugly writers got. Can you imagine how much interest the media will have when real, actual celebrities walk the picket line? And they won’t even have any writers telling them what to say, or any directors telling them what to do!

Oh, dear.

It is an immutable fact of nature that everyone is smarter than their boss. Sure, there are exceptions, but not everyone can be Mr. Alley.

I remember when Google Maps first unveiled its satellite view. I entered the address where I was working, then called my boss over. “Hey, look. That’s our office!”

My boss stared at the screen in disbelief for a moment, then pointed at our building and asked, “Is this live?”

Before I could explain the complexity and expense of such a task, my boss added an even greater layer of stupidity. He looked up. At the ceiling.

To this day, I have no idea what he was expecting to see.

On another occasion, I was helping out our payroll accountant. She asked me to grab twenty checks from her drawer. I started counting by hand, but she stopped me and said, “Just use the check numbers. They’re in order.”

Ah! Great idea! I looked at the top number, then flipped through to the 20th one. I handed it over, saying, “Here ya go, checks 2046 through 2065.”

She gave me a disappointed look that told me I’d done something very silly. “Now, Anonymous, what’s sixty-five minus forty-six?”

“Um, are you telling me that, if I gave you one through twenty, that would be nineteen checks?”

She didn’t know how to respond. How could she? She was an accountant. Named Penny!

Today might be the most egregious example of a PHB in my young life. Last night, after most of the cast and crew and producers had left, we changed the front door lock to a key pad. This morning, my boss told me to write a memo to let everyone know the code.

So, they’ll all have a nice, neat memo, with the code to get into the building, waiting for them on their desk. Inside the building.

Have you ever worked for someone dumber than you?

Yesterday, I was more than a little surprised to find my readership had quintupled over night, and Monday’s post had more responses than all my previous posts combined.

It’s thanks to the Polybloggimous blog, and Nathan’s little web 2.0 game. I’d like to continue the meme, but first I’ll have to come up with a blog who is lacking readers as I much as I was. That’ll be tough.

Even though he’s from New York, Nathan seems like a nice guy. When I checked his profile, I saw why. He’s a location manager!

Location managers are always cool. I think it’s because they spend most of their time sweet talking people.

You have to take a complete stranger from, “Who the hell are you and why the hell are you knocking on my door?” to “Sure, you and a hundred and fifty of your friends can set up shop in my house for three weeks!”

That’s not even the end of it. The location manager also has to deal with the property owner’s complaints even after filming has begun. A location manager told me a story of how a college professor once asked for more money half way through the shoot. His response was for too clever for me to remember correctly, but it went something like this:

“You’re a tenured professor at Caltech. You probably make a hundred thousand dollars a year, right? And you don’t even have to drive up to Pasadena every day, if you don’t want. We’re giving you five thousand a week. I’m just a working man, but seven grand a week to watch a movie get made sounds pretty good to me. Still, if you think you need more money, I can go and talk to my boss. I’ll be in some hot water, since I told him one price and now I’m telling him another, but I can do it. If you want.”

The professor said forget it.

Man, I wish I could do that.

The other day, one of our actresses was so sick that she needed to be driven to the doctor. By this, I mean she had a minor fever and wasn’t feeling very hungry. I’m pretty sure my mom would have made me go to school with those symptoms, but when it’s an actress, the producers insist she be driven to Woodland Hills immediately.

I always seem to be the one stuck driving actresses places. I used to object: “I don’t want to be driving this ingenue around. I’m married!”

“That’s why I want you to go,” my boss replied. I guess he didn’t think very highly of the other guys in the office.

This particular actress isn’t a diva, so I wasn’t to put off having to drive her. When I pulled up to her trailer, she said “Hi,” and climbed in. And my eyes started watering immediately.

At first I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then I realized, it was her perfume.

She must have just bathed in it, or something. Or maybe she was bitten by the zombie corpse of Coco Chanel. In any case, I was driving 70mph with the windows down, and the smell was still cloying.

Even after I dropped her off, I couldn’t get the stink out. My car smelled like a hooker’s vagina for a week.

When I got home, my wife gave me a hug, then said, “Why do you smell like another woman’s perfume?” I swore up and down that I had just given an actress a ride. I’m not sure she believed me, until the next morning when she opened the car door and promptly passed out from the fumes.

I’m not sure why the actress was wearing any perfume at all, let alone enough to make actual, visible stink lines around her. No one in the viewing audience can smell her. Maybe she wanted to smell good for the doctor?

A few days later, I picked up Baja Fresh for 2nd meal. Now my car smells like a Mexican hooker’s vagina.

Department heads often speak of themselves as if they are the entire department. I ACed for a DP once who was continually saying things like, “I’m going to put the crane over there,” or “I’m gonna set the camera here.” No, you’re not. You’re going to tell the grips and ACs, and they’ll do it.

This “I” is a peculiar thing. It’s like the inverse of the royal “we.” I know heads who do use “we,” at least. My current boss will say, “We’ll set up the table read.” Of course, what he really means is, “You’ll set up the table read.”

These verbal ticks have always bugged me. Telling someone to do something is not the same as doing it yourself. Which is why I was surprised to find myself falling into the same habit.

I was directing a short film, and I said to the actress, “Just one moment, while we make some adjustments to the camera.” But “we” weren’t doing anything. My DP changed the settings; I just watched her push buttons.

Observing this behavior in myself, I wondered if this is really where auteur theory comes from. Is it possible that all this talk of a director’s “vision” is really just a bizarre kind of metonymy?

Well, no, directors are still tools, but it’s good to remind myself how easy it is to judge from my seat of no-power.

PAs are often in the office (or on the set) before anyone else, and they’re the last ones to leave. It’s fun, because the inmates are in charge of the asylum, at least for a little while.

One of my favorite things to do at those times is to walk around the set. It’s a bit disconcerting, like being in someone’s house when they’re not there. The fact that the set is a house only accentuates that feeling.

Then you look up, and there’s no roof. Outside the windows are bare walls or green screens or fake-looking back drops. The c-stands and grip carts are just hulking shapes in the dark.

Now that I think about it, it’s so creepy, I’m not sure why I do it.

My other favorite off-hours activity is to take a surreptitious tour of the writers’ room. (Our show doesn’t have any Lost-type security. I hear they erase their boards every night, and their poor writers’ PA has to re-write the notes every morning.)

The walls are lined with dry-erase boards, and these are covered with notes. Sometimes they look like outlines, with act breaks and other things. Other times, they’re indecipherable gibberish. (What the hell does “Walk the monkey AFTER” mean?)

These are some of the best times I’ve had as a PA. I get to look at the ideas while they’re still half-formed. Later, I’ll read the script, watch the shooting, and even go down the hall to post to see the edit. There’s really no better way to learn how TV is made.

Although, “Walk the monkey AFTER” still didn’t make sense after that script came out.

I’m bad with names. I know, I know, you’re bad with names, too. But really. I’m bad with names. Comparing your memory to mine is like a high school student who says he’s really good at basketball, then builds a time machine to travel back to 1991 and play Michael Jordan one-on-one.

I write notes to myself like Leonard in Memento, otherwise I’ll forget to do just about everything. If I need seven reminders from my wife to make a dentist appointment (which reminds me, I should do that), then there’s very little chance I’ll remember your name.

I’m bad with names.

This tends to be a problem in a number of ways. First of all, there’s a lot of turn over in the film and television business. I’m working on a new show every three to six months, and each show is a new crew of a hundred or more to meet. That’s a lot of new names.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I was in one of the departments. When you’re an AC (like I have been in the past), you really only need to know the half-dozen people in the camera department, the AD, and the PAs. Everyone else is someone you nod to while waiting in line for catering.

The problem with being a PA is that you’re there to help everyone, and so everyone knows you. And if they know you, they assume you know them.  People frequently refer to me by name, and I barely know what department they’re in, let alone their actual name.

What I’m really afraid of is when I’m no longer a PA. I eventually want to be a writer/producer, which means everyone on the crew will know who I am. I really don’t want the crew to think I’m that jerk who’s too important to learn the names of the little people. I’ll have to make flash cards or something, with pictures on one side, and names/titles on the other.

Maybe I’ll have a PA do it.