In most offices, there are enough binders to create a replica of Stonehenge entirely from supplies purchased at Staples.
My boss keeps copies of everything– every script, every draft of every script, every schedule, every crew list, every cast list, and even every memo. (”No parking in the East lot from 9:00am to 11:30am, July 8th.” Really? Do you need to keep that?) And everything goes in a binder.
I even have a couple of binders on my shelf. One for resumes (yes, we keep them; no, we never look at them), the other for menus. For some reason, I had oriented the titles on the spins differently, one top to bottom, the other bottom to top).
Last week, my boss noticed: “Hey, did you know you wrote on your binders in opposite ways?”
I had, indeed, noticed. But… so?
One philosophy that was pounded into my head as a camera assistant was, “The only thing that matters is what winds up on film (or tape).” Nobody will care that I filled out the camera report correctly if I didn’t reload the magazine fast enough to get the shot while we still had the light.
This is the tough part about production. Almost nothing we do winds up on the screen. All the paperwork in those binders? Meaningless to the folks at home.
Now, I realize that there is a place for the support staff. Even though an accountant’s work is invisible to the audience, the crew does need to get paid.
Do you ever have one of those days where you look around and think, “What the fuck am I still doing here?” I’m having a day like that today.
People always like to tell you, “You have to pay your dues.” But they never tell you how long you have to pay your dues for.
I’ve been a PA for several years. Granted, it took a little while to find my path– I was a personal assistant, I tested video games, I even worked my way up the camera department before I realized I really needed to be in the office to make it as a writer.
Still, I’ve been running sides, brewing coffee, sticking labels, and generally performing tasks that a simpleton could do for the majority of my career (such as it is).
“This is not why I went to film school,” is a common lament among PAs. What I want to know is, when will I get to do what I did go to film school for?
My freshman year at film school, I knew at least a half dozen people who dropped out of the program, if not college altogether. Even more changed majors in the years following. After picking films apart for class after class, they found that they just couldn’t enjoy going to the movies anymore, which was probably the reason they signed up for film school in the first place.
This attitude carries over into the professional world, too. I can’t tell you how many people I know who don’t go to movies, or don’t ever watch TV. They know too much about the bullshit going on behind the scenes to take any of it seriously.
It’s sort of like learning the secret to a magic trick. Once you know the trick, there’s no longer any magic.
Somehow, my brain doesn’t work that way. I can shut the analytical part off when I watch a movie. When I sit in a theater (or switch on my TV), I forget about those four years in college, and my years behind the scenes. I get transported into a different world for an hour or two, and only when I re-emerge, blinking in the sunlight, do I realize, “Whoa, wait a second. The flying suit is cool and all, but you’ve got a computer that can speak natural language, crack jokes, and make aesthetic judgments. Why isn’t this a big deal to… everyone ever?”
So, unless you’re like me, I highly recommend that you not seek a job in the entertainment industry.
The first time, he came as a guest judge for a student film competition at my school. This was before X-Men had come out, but he must have been in the middle of post, so it was pretty cool that he came by. Of course, at this point, Singer had had only one successful movie (and that was mostly due to its twist ending, not his work), and one flop. Plus, there hadn’t been a successful comic book movie in at least five years; there had never been a really successful Marvel comic movie.
Even though we film students looked up to him, things weren’t looking too great for our Mr. Singer.
After the competition, some students invited him back to the dorms. They were taking bets whether the “BJS” carved into one of their beds was, in fact, Bryan’s initials, from when he was a film student.
That’s how Bryan Singer wound up drinking beers with a bunch of my friends in the freshman dorms. At one point, someone put The Usual Suspects into the DVD player, and Bryan was so drunk, he started commenting on the commentary track. It was as awesome as it sounds.
I had occasion to meet Singer again, on May 5th, 2003. Not that I memorize the dates I meet famous directors; I just remember that it was the Monday after X-Men 2came out.
It was right around graduation time, and there were a ton of parties going on. When I arrived at one such party, my friend ran up to me and gushed, “Oh my gosh, do you know who’s here? Bryan Singer!
Yes, she was so excited that she verbally hyperlinked to his IMDb page.
I asked what he was doing here, and she didn’t know. “It looks like he’s picking up some hot young coeds,” I said, noting the throng of girls fawning all over him.
“What the hell was a A-list director doing trolling for boys sixteen years his junior at a college party on the weekend that he’s releasing the biggest film of his career? “
I understood her point. I mean, it was cute and all when he was still only moderately successful (not to mention younger), but now it’s just creepy and weird. Shouldn’t he have better things to do?
I’m not sure what lesson I (or you) am supposed to take away from this little story. It’s great to see that power, money, and fame don’t necessarily change you, but could they also impede your maturity?
How the hell would I know? I’m just a PA. I have none of them.
I once worked for a guy who told me that he’s never had a job he wasn’t fired from. This was a point of pride for him, as it “proved” he had an entrepreneurial spirit, and he would never be successful until he started his own business.
I’ve heard it said that it’s healthy to be fired at least once in your career. I have no idea why. I was fired from a show, and I found no value in the experience at all.
I was working in the office, and doing a pretty good job, too. The coordinator was moving on, once the season was over, and the APOC was getting a promotion; she asked me if I would be interested in being her assistant coordinator next season. (This was a non-union show.)
So, like I said, I was doing a good job, but there was this one guy, the UPM, who really didn’t like me. I’m not sure why. Whenever I’d crack a joke, he wouldn’t laugh; when I smiled and asked, “How ya doin’?”, he’d give me a terse response. Generally, we just didn’t get along.
One day, I was on my way back from a run, and I got a call over the walkie to come to stage whatever right away. I called back that I’d be there as soon as I could.
“I don’t want you here ’soon,’ I want you here now.”
“I’m parking my vehicle. I can’t be in two places at once.”
Now, granted, I shouldn’t have talked back like that, but still. He obviously didn’t like me, personally, and was just looking for an excuse to get rid of me.
Plus, the bastard didn’t even have the balls to fire me directly. At the end of the day, six hours later, the coordinator took me aside and told me I wouldn’t be coming in tomorrow.
Oh, and did I mention that “tomorrow” was the last day of the season? And we had spent much of the morning unpacking the crew gifts, to be given out on the last day? So, after four months on the job, I was the only one who didn’t get a crew jacket.
I’m still bitter over that one.
Sometimes shit happens, and you learn something from it. Sometimes, shit just happens. This was the latter.
Anybody who works on set and who is slightly immature, by which I mean grips, just giggled at the title.
You see, channel 1 is the main production line on the walkies. Anyone could be listening, so you shouldn’t say anything that you don’t want other people to hear. You’re also supposed to follow certain rules of decorum, like not swearing and not saying, “I have to go take a piss.”
Besides being inaccurate (you’re actually leaving a piss), it’s rude. Instead, you’re supposed to say, “I’m going ten-one.”
This seemed strange and arbitrary, so I did some poking around to figure out where this curious term comes from. Several people told me it is short for 10-100. A quick search of Wikipedia tells me that they must have rounded up. 10-99 is the actual code for “Need To Use The Restroom (urinate).”
It’s also the code for “officer needs assistance/held hostage,” so that can be confusing, I imagine.
“This is officer Williams. I’m 10-99″
“Oh, God, he’s 10-99! He’s 10-99! We need back up now, God damn it, now! He’s 10-99!”
“Dude, I’ll be back in a minute.”
Not that 10-100 is much clearer. It can mean, among other things, misdemeanor warrant, hot pursuit, and dead body.
“We’ve got a 10-100 here.”
“Is he moving, or not?”
I used to work on a game show; we had contestants of all shapes and sizes. After this little Wikipedia binge, the other PAs and I started calling out 10-85 when certain, uh, plus-sized contestants were brought to set.
Come on, we’re PAs. You don’t expect us to be more mature than the grips do you?
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.”
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.
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.
You work strange hours when you’re making a TV show (or a movie, for that matter). You’ll come in at 7:00 one day and 10:30 the next. Sometimes you’re there for twelve hours, sometimes sixteen. You just never know.
One artifact of this, I believe, is that “morning” is whenever call time is, be it 6:30am or 2:30pm. It can be a bit strange, rolling into the office at a time most people are just getting done with work, and your boss says, “Good morning!”
The first meal of the day is always “breakfast,” even if they’re serving hamburgers at noon. The second meal is always “lunch,” and the third meal is, as you might assume, “second meal.”
When you work in the office, your eating schedule can get screwed up, since the office has to be open during normal business hours, regardless of the shooting schedule.
Some days, I come in at eight, but breakfast isn’t served until 10:30, by which point I’m about ready to eat my own foot. Then lunch is at 4:30, which confuses the hell out of my stomach, since it’s too late for lunch, but too early for dinner. If I eat now, I won’t be hungry when I get home, but then I won’t get breakfast again until maybe 11:00 the next morning. But if I don’t eat, I’ll be starving by the time I’m let go. What to do!
It’s existential quandaries like these that keep us tortured artists up at night.
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.
