The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

I was walking down the hall at the studio, yesterday (as is my wont to do), when one of our producer/writers came out of the bathroom just as I passed it.  We did that awkward thing where you’re walking at the same speed to the same place, without actually walking together.

Feeling the need to make small talk, I asked him how things were going down the hall (where our writers’ offices are).

“Pretty good,” he said. “Making progress.”

“That’s good.”

Awkward pause.

Then he asked, “Are you on [the expensive, and much better, cable show whose writers' office is down the hall in the opposite direction]?”

Even more awkward, for me, at least, pause.

“No, I- I work for your show. I’m in the production office” fifteen feet down the hall from your office.

“Oh.”

I don’t begrudge him not knowing my name. I can’t remember his, either. To me, he’s just Balding, Socially Awkward Producer Who Wears Flannel Like He’s In An Early Nineties Rock Band, Despite Being Old Enough To Remember When The Beatles Played On Ed Sullivan’s Show.

Hell, I don’t even care if he doesn’t know what position I’m in. There’s at least a hundred positions on a TV crew, and he can’t know who does what. But seriously, shouldn’t he at least remember the face of the guy he walks by every day on his way to writing terrible scripts?

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.

Do you ever get this from your boss–

“Did you do the this-and-that?”

“This is the first I’ve heard about it.”

“I told you to do it, already!”

It’s surprising how often this happens. Now, I know I have a bad memory, but realistically, which is more likely? You told me to do something and I specifically, consciously ignored your request, or you simply meant to ask me and didn’t get around to saying it out loud?

The worst case, for me, was a time I was shooting on location. My boss came out of the house, looked around the yard, and demanded, “Where’s the hole?”

I thought he was kidding, like, “Somebody put dirt in my hole!”

Everyone, not just us PAs, but everyone, asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I said, ‘Go get the shovel and dig a hole.’”

No one remembered him saying that, but he persisted. He definitely told us. He remembers telling us. He told us, and he just doesn’t understand why we ignored him.

It must have something to do with being a producer, or a boss in general, that you just forget that you’re fallible. I don’t know how else you can believe that you’re right and a half dozen other people are wrong.

How many times can you witness mass hysteria before you have to wonder if there’s something wrong with you?

No, I didn’t say that about being a PA.  That’s Jane Espenson, talking about “producing.”

I produced a sitcom pilot in film school.  I asked my professor what, exactly, was a producer’s job.  My professor said, “The producer is the guy who, when something goes wrong, fixes it, even if it means picking up a screwdriver and doing it yourself.”  He happened to be, at that very moment, fixing something with a screwdriver.  He was a simple man.

His simple declaration was one of the most important things I learned in that class (that, and the fact that I’m a terrible producer).  But deciding who is a producer is not always that simple.  Studio executives, script doctors, and, God help us, managers have all tried to lay claim to the title, despite the Producers Guild’s best efforts.

But nothing violates my erstwhile professor’s dictum more than a television series.  The show I’m working on now has no less than a dozen folks with “producer” in their title– we have Producers, Executive Producers, Co-Producers, Co-Executive Producers, Supervising Producers, and Associate Producers.

About two of those people actually fit the definition of a real producer.  Most of them are writers with enough experience to demand a cooler title.  Of the eight writers on the show, only one has the word “writer” in her title.

Don’t get me wrong, I love our writing staff.  They do a great job, and work long, long hours.  But the work they do is writing, not producing.

At least, that what it seems like, from the perspective of one production assistant.