Save Your Money

When I worked at an agency, a good fifty percent of our clients were out of work at any given time.

Those clients called almost every day, asking if my boss had work for them. I don’t know why they thought he wouldn’t call if he’d found work. He only gets paid if they get paid.

Really, the reason they were constantly calling is that they were constantly broke. I’m talking about guys who earn ten to twenty thousand dollars a week, when they’re working.

The problem is, they spent money like they’ll be working every week. In Hollywood, you don’t work every week. (Thus my sporadic posting, of late.)

It’s hard not knowing when your next paycheck will come. I understand that. But this is a known unknown, as they say. You gotta plan for the fact that you’ll be out of a job in a few months. Or a few weeks, if the show gets canceled. Or a few years, if the show gets renewed.

So, save your money. That way, when there’s a strike, or a recession, or you just have bad luck, you won’t have to call your agent over and over.

This applies even to us lowly PAs. More so, actually, since we make a fraction of what you department heads make. I know people who rent in expensive parts of town, pay for cable TV and internet, plan on buying a new car, and then wonder why they’re broke.

Because you make five hundred dollars a week, asshole!

I know one guy who’s paying off student loans before credit cards. Does 18% interest mean anything to you? This used to be called “usury;” now you’re just a dumbass.

Anyway, the point of all this is, we in the entertainment industry need to realize that our jobs are inherently unstable, even when there’s not a recession going on. Plan accordingly.

Great New Vlog!

Have you seen this great new student film?

Did he have help shooting this?  I’m glad he cut the head of the video, where you see him hitting record, then running around the desk to sit down.  Seriously, it looks like the end of an episode of Blossom.

Keeping People Happy

EastSt said:

Um, they are getting paid FAR more then you… Pizza and your gas money is a SMALL price to pay to keep them happy.

I really don’t understand this logic. At all.

Isn’t the fact that she’s getting paid more in a day than I get in a week supposed to keep her happy? Or the fact that she doesn’t have to feed herself, dress herself, or do her own make-up and hair? How about the fact that she really only works for about six of the twelve hours she’s here?

And most importantly, the fact that she’s getting paid to play pretend, like any six year old would do for free?

Yes, there’s skill and talent involved, and a lot of time and energy and even sacrifice to get to where she is.  But God damn it, her job is to have hundreds of people dote on her, and then be watched and admired by millions more.

She should be the happiest person on the planet. Why are we concerned about “keeping her happy”?

Why can she not pay for her own fucking pizza?

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Girl on Girl has an amusing assistant-related post up today.

Take Coverage!

Writing about dogs in unusual professions took me back to the good old days of reading scripts and writing coverage.

“Coverage” is basically a synopsis of a script, followed by comments on its quality. This usually involves reading the script twice: once to get a sense of the script, and again so I can get the details right in the synopsis. This is extremely painful when the script is bad, as you might imagine.

The one benefit of this task is that, when the script is really bad, I get to make fun of it. A lot. Here are some of my more amusing comments:

“This movie is so aggravatingly bad that I think it’s best not to waste any more of your time by enumerating its shortcomings. Let’s just cut to the chase: it’s a crappy, nonsensical script, written by a near-illiterate, who probably has bad breath as well.”

“It’s like Seven meets Final Destination, without any of the good qualities either of those might imply.”

“Frankie and June are also unsuccessfully trying to have a baby, though this is so irrelevant to the story that I can’t even think of an amusingly hyperbolic comparison.  In fact, I’m quite certain that, years from now, people will compare other irrelevant things to this plot point: ‘Wow, that’s almost as irrelevant as Frankie and June trying to get pregnant in Jimmy’s Day Out!’”

“Aaron’s boss Sam offers Aaron the keys to his yacht to take out to sea whenever he feels like it. Then Chekhov walks in and hangs a gun on the wall.”

Later, in coverage for the same script: “He heads for the harbor, where Sam’s yacht awaits. Chekhov yells, ‘Bang!’”

“This script is so aggravatingly bad that it’s hard not to suspect it’s some elaborate practical joke, and I’m being filmed even as I write this coverage.”

“Alas, I think someone, somewhere, poured their heart and soul into this script, printed it out, and said, ‘This is the one, baby! My ship will come in this time!’ I actually feel a little bad about all the mean comments I wrote. Not so bad that I’d recommend this crappy script, though.”

“Did you give this script to me as some sort of punishment? Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”

“Why doesn’t she spend time with her brother? Hell, why does her brother exist? This character’s almost as irrelevant as Frankie and June trying to get pregnant in Jimmy’s Day Out.”

“After reading this script (twice!), I’ve decided the only reasonable thing to do is to shred it, take the clippings, shred them again, burn those clippings, bury the ashes, and then salt the earth, so that nothing may ever grow from this script.”

That last one is my favorite.

The Life of a Juicer

This video probably makes no sense if you’ve never worked on a set:

Delivery

The other day, one of our actresses decided she really, really, really wanted a pizza.

Naturally, my boss sent me out to the nearest CPK to pick up some hideous Ninja Turtles-style concoction with goat cheese and spinach and who knows what else.

Driving back, my car smelling like a culinary nightmare, I wondered to myself, Now, if I were to get a hankering for a Philly Cheese steak next week, will this actress pick one up for me?

Keep in mind, this was late in the afternoon, maybe an hour or two before wrap.  This girl had already eaten a free breakfast and a free lunch.  Now, the production is buying her dinner, not to mention paying me five bucks for mileage.

Why does everyone think this is okay?

“‘Dog Movie’ Screenplay Needed”

The universe is somehow bending itself to my will.  I seriously wish I was kidding.

From Craig’s List:

“Dog Movie” Screenplay Needed (Anywhere)

---

Reply to: gigs-916676856@craigslist.org ^[?]
Date: 2008-11-12, 3:28PM PST

We are a Burbank based production/development company looking for a:

Dog Themed Family Film

This will be direct-to-video low budget 2009 release.
We are ready to go into production right away.

* Should be comedy and or adventure.
* Dog must be a main character.
* No period piece.
* Screenplay should be complete or close to complete. We am NOT looking for a writer to write our story.

Please Do Not pitch us other stories. We are only looking for a Dog based family film.

Thanks
(We are not a WGA Signatory and do not plan on becoming one)

The Case of the Missing Post

Sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday.  I was working on set.

I was at the stage for sixteen hours, but when I got home, I couldn’t sleep. “Exhausting but fun,” indeed.  It was all rain and green screen and waiting for the camera guys to get their heads out of their asses, but I was actually there, making movies.

My wife says I have much more fun on set.  Alas, I have long term goals to focus on.

Insert Dog Pun Here

Who let the dogs out?  The business is going to the dogs.  These scripts are dogging me.  The dog days of script reading.  Whatever.

See, I used to work for a producer at a low-end production company.  They made direct-to-DVD sequels and knock offs of real movies with budgets ranging from low to really low.

My boss was always on the look out for the next mediocre American screenplay. Even by his relaxed standards, though, most of the scripts we got were crap.

Then, one magical day, we received two scripts– President Dog and Surf Dogs.

Now, these weren’t written by the same person.  No one was writing a series of “dogs doing things they shouldn’t” movies.  Two writers independently arrived at the notion that semi-anthropamorphized dogs are what Americans crave for in their entertainment.

President Dog, as you would assume, was the better script.  It featured a senator’s dog, who could talk.  The first scene involves the whole family, dog included, sitting at the breakfast table.  Like Family Guy, only not funny.  Anyway, the senator has a heart attack while running for president.  Naturally, his dog takes over the campaign.

Surf Dogs is slightly more realistic, in that the dog can’t talk.  On the other hand, it can surf.  Kind of a coin toss, really.  The real problem was that there’s no surfing in the film for about twenty minutes (a kid moves from Jersey to Hawaii), and the dog doesn’t surf until page forty-five.  I haven’t read McKee in a while, but I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong with that structure.

Now, I’m a little less surprised when an Armegeddon and a Deep Impact (or whatever it is this year) come out at the same time.

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On an unrelated note, no squid?  (Link courtesy of TV Calling.)

Doing It In a Group

No, not like that one time in college when we were all drunk.  Well, I wasn’t drunk; I was just male.

Anyway.

I’m talking about my writers’ group.  We had our first meeting in a couple months last night, and it was great.

Being a bunch of writers, we did everything in our power to avoid the task at hand.  We talked about movies that were tangentially related to our screenplays; we talked about movies we’d seen recently; we talked about movies we wanted to see; we ate dinner; we talked about our jobs, lack of jobs, or potential, future, possible jobs; we talked about politics, monkeys, and the relative merits of the term “boobs” as opposed to “breasts.”

After an hour and a half of discussed everything of even moderate interest to any of us, we talked about our scripts.

And we actually got stuff done!  I figured out how to tie up some loose ends in my romantic comedy.  One guy got some good advice for tightening up his voice over.  Another girl found some direction to a plot that was floundering.  (I tried once again to convince her to change the depressing ending of one of her scripts, but she refuses to listen to reason.)

It was so fun and helpful that I started to wonder, is this what a writing room is like?  Dicking around until something good happens?  I sure hope so.

On a side note, a friend sent me a script that’s 126 pages long.  The title page makes it 127 pages, which frustrates me to no end, because I print scripts in sections, rather than in one huge stack.  Since 127 is a prime number, I can’t break it up into equal portions.

Is it weird that this bothers me?