The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

Yesterday, the writers’ assistant asked me if I wanted to be a production coordinator.

The question puzzled me. Who actually wants to be a coordinator? I can’t imagine anyone stepping off the bus in L.A., and thinking to themselves, “I can’t wait to coordinate some productions!”

I know some people roll off the turnip truck wanting to be actors, and, thanks to the cult of the auteur, others want to be directors. I get those (sorta)

People’s interests vary, so I can even understand someone wanting to be a DP, a costume designer, or any of the creative department heads. (On a side note, I am a little confused as to why they would want to work in movies, rather than in their own unique field. Why not just become a photographer or a clothing designer?)

Personally, I always knew I wanted to be some kind of writer. It took me a while to figure out I wanted to be a screenwriter, but once I did, I’ve focussed on nothing else.

But I really can’t imagine someone devoting themselves to becoming, say, a UPM or an AD. It doesn’t seem like a dream. It strikes me more as something you fall into, when you realize you’re organized, and not much good in any other department.

Do people really want to be coordinators, or do they just become them?

Maybe I’m just prejudiced. I don’t know.

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?

(First, I’d like to point you to an amusing post on Amanda’s website, about how soon you forget what it’s like to be young and poor.)

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.

But the orientation of the spines of some PA’s binder is so far removed from anything that matters, I just can’t bring myself to care.  Am I wrong?

I was overcome with curiosity by my fellow PA’s statement yesterday, “You don’t know who I know. I could make your life a living hell.” (Seriously, though, he’s a nice guy. This is waaay out of context.)

I knew he had been hired because the coordinator was told she had to hire him. So today, I asked her who, specifically, instructed her to do so.

She responded, “I’ll tell you if you tell me what happened yesterday.” (Of course, I hadn’t told her about our discussion, despite the fact that, I’m told, my face was as pink has the third draft of a script immediately afterward.)

So, I told her my colleague felt that I was condescending to him, and issuing orders when we are, in fact, on the same level. “So, who told you to hire him?”

“It was a political hire.”

“I know that. A political hire from who?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

…

I felt like a cartoon character, suddenly realizing the Warner siblings were in front of me, and no longer behind me.

“Wha- but… I just told you.”

Finally, she admitted the higher up works at the production company overseeing our show, but she declined to name names.

That’ll teach me to trust her.

This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten a bad feeling from her. On my first or second day, she was telling us PAs that we’re going to have to keep the kitchen clean. “Keep it neat, like you would your own- Well, not your kitchen. You’re guys. But keep it clean.”

Haha, very funny, whatever. I don’t mind. In any case, she’s right.

Seconds later, literally, as she was going on about cleaning stuff, I joked, “We’re going to need a girl PA.”

My boss stared at me like I just ran over her puppy. “We do not need a girl PA. Don’t ever talk like that in my office again.”

I failed to utilize the “you started it” defense.

And the weird, confusing politics goes on.

Several accountants have started this week, and I don’t yet know all of their names. I was trying to tell my boss that one of them wanted something. She asked which one, and I said, “Oh, shoot. I forget her name. The Asian one.”

Again, her jaw dropped to the floor, like I’d just said, “You know, the slant-eyed gook, sneaky jap, oriental one.”

Come on! It was an immediately accessible, clear, obvious characteristic. She knew who I meant. “The short one with the dark hair” wouldn’t have worked, because we also have a Middle Eastern accountant. Or possibly Hispanic. I’m not sure.

See, this is why I couldn’t be a racist. I can’t tell if I’m hating the wetbacks or the camel jockeys. Hell, I can’t even tell Jews from white people half the time, and what kind of racist doesn’t hate the Jews?

A Polish one.

They say you hate in other what you hate most about yourself.

I recently came off a show where I had one of the worst bosses of my entire life. Besides having the emotional maturity of a four year old (he once yelled at the script coordinator for bringing him pages, when we had just distributed pages the night before; what the hell is she supposed to do about it?), he was also unrelentingly condescending and sarcastic.

For example, someone came in the office and asked for the wireless password. Since I was using a desktop, I asked my boss what the password was. He responded thusly:

“GYWAAAAAAHHHHhhhhhhhaaaaa. [That's the closest I can approximate his drama-queen sigh of feigned exasperation without using the Klingon alphabet.] You don’t know the password?!”

No, asshole, I’m plugged into the wall. My password is, “I’m plugged into the fucking wall.”

Equally annoying was his little sidekick, a PA who’d worked for him on a few shows. She was constantly telling me things I already knew, or reminding me to do things I’d already done. This was all very annoying, of course, but I dealt with it. I wasn’t going to be working there forever, after all. Besides, she was an idiot, so why should her opinion bother me?

Fast forward to the present. Now, I’m the one with more experience. In fact, it’s the other PA’s first show.

He’s a good guy. A nice guy, too. He doesn’t always know what’s expected of him, but he’s trying hard and asking questions. Pretty much all you could ask for. Things are going great.

Then, today in the copy room, he confronted me. I asked if he had put the bagels and stuff away, and if he had, he should put the cream cheese in the fridge, not on the shelf.

He whirled on me, and said, “Look, you’re not my boss. I don’t need you telling me what to do all the time.” He went on to say that he knows I’m trying to make him look bad, by waiting until our bosses are around when I ask him if he’s done something yet.  (He failed to notice I was asking him in the copy room, when no one else was around.)

He was visibly shaking as he said this, too. It got really weird when he told me that I didn’t know who he knows, and he could make my life a living hell. Plus, he went to military school, so he could knock me on my ass. “Not that I’m threatening, but just know that.”

Which is not to say he overreacted (barring the threat of physical harm). From what he said, this has been bothering him for a little while. Plus, there was an unfortunate confluence of events–

On Monday, our boss gave him a stern talking to, about thinking ahead and picking up the slack, blah blah blah. Totally unwarranted, in my opinion, but whatever. Then, when I was gone yesterday, he told me he had his best day working here, since he didn’t feel he had three different people looking over his shoulder all day.

The truth of the matter is much more banal. When I ask, for example, if he’s checked the mail, it’s not because I want him to look bad for not having done it already. Nor am I checking up on him. I just don’t want to go out to the mail box if the job’s already done. Far from bad mouthing him, after he left on Monday, I defended him to our boss, saying basically, “He’s trying hard.  He’ll learn.”

I told him all of this, of course (except for the part about defending him, which seemed inappropriate to say). I don’t really know if he believed me, but I got out of the room without being punched.

Somehow, I went from being annoyed to being the annoying one. I don’t mean to be obnoxious or condescending, but I always seem to come off that way. I hear this all the time from people. I once had a therapist tell me she thought I was a jerk for the first few weeks of therapy.

So, I’m aware this is a problem. Last week, I even thought about telling him, “Listen, if I’m telling you things you already know, or if I’m talking down to you, or whatever, just let me know. I’m just trying to help.”  I don’t really remember why I didn’t, other than the opportunity didn’t present itself.  Now, of course, it’s too late.

I honestly don’t know what to do about it at this point. So far, I’ve just avoided talking to him, for fear of offending, but I can’t very well do that for the rest of the shoot.

What should I do?

I walked into the writers’ office yesterday and saw a ping pong ball and two paddles sitting on the assistant’s desk.

I paused, staring at the ping pong ball.

This was one of those moments you see in indie movies, where the character is contemplating his life, but you don’t know exactly what he’s thinking because, you know, “show, don’t tell.” But, since this isn’t a movie, I can tell you. I was thinking:

This is where I should be– counting how many times I can bounce the ball while idly bullshitting with the other writers about whatever this week’s story is. Then, suddenly, the story breaks, and we leap to our computers and start furiously pounding out the script.

Now, I know this isn’t how it always works. Writing can be frustrating and dull and lonely. But it can also be engaging and exciting and social, in the right circumstances.

I told my wife about ping pong ball, and she rolled her eyes. “That’s not really writing.”

You see, my wife is under the misapprehension that “writing” consists of the time spent at the keyboard. In fact, she uses “writing” and “typing” interchangeably. “Do you do any good typing today, sweetie?”

She does this mostly because she knows it annoys me.

The truth is, there’s much more to writing than the actual typing. An electrician’s job is to light the set, but the entirety of his job is not encompassed in the moment he switches on the lamp. He has to lay cable, position the light, set the dimmer board.

When I’m playing Portal for the eighteenth time, or calling up friends, or just staring at the ceiling, I can see why that’d look like goofing off. What I’m really doing is laying cable.

Although, sometimes, I am just goofing off.

Yesterday, Nathan wrote, “You want to write… write!” This is the best, most important advice any aspiring writer can get. But if you’re sitting at a desk in Nome, Alaska, typing away on an Underwood by candlelight, filing your scripts in a drawer, you’re not going to have a writing career.

There’s an old saying that goes, “You’re the average of the people closest to you.” This is why I stopped working on shitty cable shows and direct-to-video movies. I took both a pay cut and a lower position so I could be on a real network show with real writers.

No, the show runner isn’t going to ask the office PA to write an episode. However, WGA rules dictate that he has to ask someone who’s not on staff at least twice a season.  (The number is something like that, anyway; I can’t find the exact rule, because when I google “WGA Rules,” I get a bunch of old crap about the strike.)

Often, this means hiring the writers’ PA, script coordinator, or even the executive producer’s assistant.  Basically, if they’re going to hire someone, they want to hire someone who’s sitting in the writers’ room with them every day.

So, how do you get to be a writers’ PA? Well, one way is to be an office PA, and hang out with the producer/writers down the hall.  When the script coordinator becomes a real writer, the writers’ assistant moves up to coordinator, the writers’ PA moves up to assistant, and all of a sudden, there’s an opening at the bottom.

That’s my plan, anyway.

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.

First of all, Ken Levine somehow stole a blog post idea directly from my head. (This fits with my theory that Rupert Murdoch has a chip my brain, and he’s stealing all my good scripts before I even write them.) Ah, well, it’s probably for the best– he’s a better writer than I am, anyway, and his views on the writer/director subject are more insightful than mine would have been.

Anyway, on to my real post.

I like making movies. It’s why I moved to Los Angeles, why I went to film school, and why I’m willing to work for idiots for less money than what a grocery clerk makes.

The problem is, making movies is a collaborative art (unless you animate it and do all the voices yourself).

Growing up in a small midwestern city, I didn’t know many people who were interested in making movies, let alone willing to put the time and effort it takes to actually write, shoot, and edit one. But once I got to film school, finding collaborators was easy.

That, to me, is the main advantage to film school. You’re surrounded by people who don’t want to do anything but make movies. I was shooting all the time, sometimes my movies, sometimes other people’s. Sure, they were universally lousy, but at least I was filming.

The problem I had working at a production company was that I was the youngest person there. Nobody else was interested in spending their weekends with a DV camera and actors cast from Craig’s list. Once I got into PAing on movies and TV shows, I finally got back to filming just for fun (or artistic expression).

This year, I’ve worked on two friends’ projects, and done two of my own. It’s always a fun way to burn a weekend or two.  It’s hard to get stressed, like you do on a real shoot, because everyone’s working for the love of it (and maybe a slice of pizza).

Even better, in the years since film school, the projects have ceased to suck, and progressed to merely disappointing. In a couple more years, I may attain the vaunted sphere of “adequate.”

Here’s hoping.