The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

PAs are often in the office (or on the set) before anyone else, and they’re the last ones to leave. It’s fun, because the inmates are in charge of the asylum, at least for a little while.

One of my favorite things to do at those times is to walk around the set. It’s a bit disconcerting, like being in someone’s house when they’re not there. The fact that the set is a house only accentuates that feeling.

Then you look up, and there’s no roof. Outside the windows are bare walls or green screens or fake-looking back drops. The c-stands and grip carts are just hulking shapes in the dark.

Now that I think about it, it’s so creepy, I’m not sure why I do it.

My other favorite off-hours activity is to take a surreptitious tour of the writers’ room. (Our show doesn’t have any Lost-type security. I hear they erase their boards every night, and their poor writers’ PA has to re-write the notes every morning.)

The walls are lined with dry-erase boards, and these are covered with notes. Sometimes they look like outlines, with act breaks and other things. Other times, they’re indecipherable gibberish. (What the hell does “Walk the monkey AFTER” mean?)

These are some of the best times I’ve had as a PA. I get to look at the ideas while they’re still half-formed. Later, I’ll read the script, watch the shooting, and even go down the hall to post to see the edit. There’s really no better way to learn how TV is made.

Although, “Walk the monkey AFTER” still didn’t make sense after that script came out.

The agency I once worked for was across the street from a high school. My boss said he liked the location because it reminded him of the old saying, “Hollywood is just high school with money.”

(His other favorite saying was, “Farmers farm, plumbers plumb, and agents lie.” I learned more from him than he intended to teach, I think.)

The high school analogy is trite, but rather apt. Everyone is in a little clique, only we call them “guilds.” You’ve got your cool kids (actors), your nerds (writers), your jocks (grip & electric), and so on. There’s even a faculty that nobody likes and no one would listen to if they weren’t in charge. They’re called executives.

As for the PAs and assistants? We’re the freshman class. Everyone picks on us, no one listens to us, but before you know it, we’ll be running the school.

Like all freshmen, we get wedgies. These Hollywood wedgies come in the form of getting screwed for no particular reason.

A friend of mine was making a run to our filming location, and he got lost. It was dark, and late, and we were shooting in the middle of nowhere. He wound up with an extra thirty miles on the odometer. (Did I mention he’s not good with directions?)

When the UPM saw his mileage sheet, he came to my friend and asked, “What the hell is this?” (Normally, the UPM wouldn’t know if a run should be seven miles or seventy miles, but in this case, he had the exact distance from the location department.)

My friend gave the honest answer– he was a dumbass and got lost. The UPM responded, “We’re not paying you to get lost,” and promptly deducted $15 from the mileage sheet.

Now, seriously. Fifteen bucks doesn’t sound like a ton of cash, but it’s more than ten percent of what us PA’s make in a day.

And this is TV! We’ll throw a hundred dollars at a Starbucks run for the producers. What kind of jerk would begrudge a lowly PA fifteen dollars?

So, to amend my former employer’s axium, Hollywood is high school with money, except when it comes to PA’s.