The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

I had a chance to see The Dark Knight last night, at a screening on the Warner Brothers lot. It was for employees, mostly executives and their assistants. Usually when I see movies ahead of time, it’s with LA Weekly or Campus Circle; the crowd is mostly wearing flip flops and t-shirts. Last night was a more staid affair, with most people in shirts and ties (or skirts and heels).

I won’t go much into what I thought, other than to say that the audience cheered, actually cheered, at a certain point in the movie. It’s quite a compliment to the filmmakers that this bunch of jaded studio folks could still get excited. (You’ll know the part I’m talking about when you see it.)

Screenings are free and plentiful in LA, which is why I went to a lot of them as a poor film student. Besides the movie itself, there are often guest speakers, too. I saw Kevin Spacey at a screening for American Beauty in my first month at school. I even got to ask him a question! If I recall correctly, it was something along the lines of, “Mr. Spacey, why are you so awesome?” (This was before 21, mind you.)

A couple years ago, I went to a screening of King Kong.  We weren’t expecting any special guests that time; just a big monkey, some dinosaurs, and maybe Naomi Watts in a skimpy white dress. But while we were waiting in line, I heard a voice I definitely recognized.  It took me a minute to place it, and then I realized it was Brad fucking Bird!

I pointed him out to my friend, who responded, “That’s not Brad Bird.”

“Yes, it is.  I recognize him from my Incredibles DVD.”

“I don’t think that’s him.”

“I’m sure it is.”

It went on like this for a while, until I finally went up and asked the guy, “Excuse me, are you Brad Bird?”

“Yes.”

“SEE?”

That’s pretty much the end of that story.  I said I liked his movies, he said thanks, the end.

In any case, my point is, if you start going to these screenings, you too can meet minor celebrities and prove to your friends that you listen to way too many commentary tracks.

I remember a director trying to give a pep talk at the beginning of a shoot. It’s going to be a great film, we have a great cast, great blah blah blah.

Then he gets to the part about how this film will be great for all of our careers. Pretty standard, until he says, “If this film is as successful as I know it can be, you’ll get all the credit. And if it doesn’t work, don’t worry. As the director, I will get blamed.”

Riiiight.

I am perpetually amazed at how often writers are blamed for things going horribly awry. Just this morning, Adam Carolla was complaining about the ridiculous plot to Ocean’s 13.

The truth is, you have no idea why a script wound up the way it did. Writers work as much on the whim of their employers as the rest of us do. In North by Northwest, Hitchcock simply dictated a bunch of sequences he wanted (a chase across Mount Rushmore, an airplane attack in a corn field), and left it to Ernest Lehman to make a coherent plot out of it. Sometimes this process leads to a classic. Sometimes, it leads to Ocean’s 13.

Terry Rossio (one of my heroes, who wrote Aladdin and Pirates of the Caribbean) has a great article on his website about this very topic. Ever see The Puppet Masters? Don’t.

Sitting in the production office, I read every script for our show. I try to visit the set a lot, and I certainly watch the episodes when they air. What you see on TV is not always what the writer wrote. That may be good. Or, it can be very, very bad.

The people in charge don’t have any idea what’s going on. They hire people like me, so they don’t have to know. That’s why it really burns my toast when my boss tells me how things are run.

Just today, our additional 2nd AD (not to be confused with the 2nd 2nd AD, which is a totally different job) asked if he could get preliminary production reports. (If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter to the story. It’s just some paperwork he wanted.)

So my boss says that he’s supposed to be getting the preliminary MacGuffins. I interjected that, no, we give them the approved MacGuffins, not the prelims.

My boss assured me that they’re supposed to be getting the preliminary MacGuffins, and, in fact, had been getting them until recently.

This, despite the facts that, first, I am the one who makes the copies and distributes the paperwork, so I would know, and second, I have documentary proof, in the form of a list of who gets what paperwork, in my boss’s handwriting, mind you, that I was never told the ADs needed these prelims.

“Just give him the prelims from now on.”

Yeah, I got that.  Thanks.  You’re the idiot, and I’m the one who’s getting talked down to.

I love being a PA.

I was reading Alex Epstein’s Blog, and followed his link to the Film Industry Bloggers’ site.

It’s a great site, since it tries to cover a lot of the crafts.  It seems that screenwriters are disproportionately represented in the blogosphere.  (I’m gonna go ahead and guess this is a result of self-selection.)  It’s fun to read a production designer’s blog.

I’m a little disappointed the site doesn’t feature blogs from two key department heads: cinematographers and editors.  DPs I understand, since they work pretty much non-stop, from call to wrap.  The lack of editors is a little bit more confusing; after all, they’re sitting at a computer all day, anyway.  (Unless they work for Spielberg, of course.)

Unfortunately, they already have their production assistant.  Yet another PA job I’ve missed out on.

Sigh.

I just had a bizarre conversation in the office kitchen. I was making some coffee, and someone came in to grab a pop.

(Yes, “pop.” Look at the drink. Do you see bubbles popping, or sodaing? You bake with soda, you drink pop.)

Anyway, the conversation went like this–

Me: “How’s it going?”
Him: “Pretty good. Our work was mostly front-loaded this episode.”
Me: “Yeah?”
Him: “Yeah. Everybody’s waiting on us. Always a lot of pressure.”
Me: “I imagine.”
Him: “It’s a big push to get it all done, but once it is, it’ll feel good to have the deck cleared.”
Me: “Mm hm.”
Him: “Well, I better get back to it. You know how it is.”

Except… I didn’t.

I had no idea who this guy was, what his department was, or what the hell he was talking about. I kinda recognized his face, but he could have been talking about serial murder for all I know.

Why do people assume I know them? I find myself acting like the guy from Memento, nodding and pretending to know them, just to avoid the awkwardness.

I suppose I could try to learn their names, but… Well, I guess, technically, I could care less. I’m just not sure how.

I was walking by the set the other day, and I saw a friend in the art department painting a sign. He was doing a really bad job, which was kind of surprising, since I’ve seen him paint some nice signs in the past.

I asked him about it, and he said it was supposed to look like it was done quickly and unprofessionally. Which it did. So, good job, then.

It must be an odd thing that sometimes you’re required to do your job badly. (Most of us do it on our own initiative.)

I once visited the set of the first Spider-Man. They were shooting inserts of Peter Parker designing his costume in one of the most ridiculous glossing over montages in film history. Anyway, on this occasion, I met Phil Jimenez, an accomplished comic book artist, who was doing the actual drawing.  (It’s his hands, not Tobey Maguire’s, that you see in the film.)

I asked him if it was easier not having to worry about drawing, you know, good. “Actually,” he said, “it’s really hard. I have to un-learn everything I’ve done over the last twenty years.”

I guess I didn’t realize how hard it is to suck, since I’m so naturally talented in that regard.

Fodd responded to yesterday’s post with this comment: “They are going to do some serious creative accounting at Warner Brother to make it look like Speed Racer made any money.” But the box office is not the only way it’ll make money.

After all the ancillary markets, it will break even, at least, but there’s more. Toys, games, flame throwers, all that stuff . My wife has a Speed Racer T-shirt. Plus, Warner Brothers owns the original cartoon. The movie is at the center of a marketing blitz to push those DVDs on both nostalgic baby boomers and ironic hipsters alike.

This is what people are missing when they talk about huge indie movies, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It cost $5 million, and made nearly $370 million, world wide. That’s a 7400% profit. Compare with Spider-Man, which had a mere 490% profit.

The thing is, you can’t take profit to the bank. Wedding netted $363 million, while Spider-Man netted $682 million. If you were the head of the studio, which would you prefer? (Not withstanding the fact that one stars a screeching harpy, and the other stars freaking Spider-Man.)

And don’t go thinking the Wedding’s success is scalable. You can’t make twenty-eight romantic comedies about foreigners and their funny accents, and expect them all to produce quadruple digit profits.

People love to point out failures like Speed Racer, but they forget that the reason these films are notable is that they’re rare. Dozens of $5 million movies are released every year, and very few make back their money. Dozens more produced, but never even released. (I know because I’ve worked on most of them.)  Blockbusters are just a safer bet.

People often regard Hollywood as a liberal place. People are often right.

When the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, approval was unanimous among people I know or know of in the business. On the other hand, nearly all of my friends disapproved of the way Eliott Spitzer was run out of office.

So, you think “liberal,” you think “open minded,” right? Not necessarily.

A couple months ago, I was ordering lunch for the office. We usually order some meatless dishes for the vegetarians, but since this was a Friday during Lent, I ordered a few extra.

I mentioned this in passing to my boss, and he said, “What? What are you talking about?”

“You know, Catholics, Friday, no meat?”

“If it’s some sort of religious thing, they can fend for themselves.”

Um, really? If you want to avoid meat out of some notion that animals are sentient, or a misplaced hatred of vegetables, that’s fine, we’ll get you a salad. But if you want use your First Amendment right to the free exercise relegion, fuck off.

Wow, that was a really serious post. Hmm. Screw it, here’s a monkey fighting a tiger.

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?

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.