The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

(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 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?

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.

He seemed to be right. He started his own business and became exceedingly rich. Of course, he also believed that Google has a live video feed from a spy satellite accessible from any home computer.

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.

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 used to be an personal assistant. I did it for about a year, until I realized I didn’t like living two lives.

A personal assistant (which is not a PA) does the things you might expect– answer phones, schedule appointments, fax, copy, file, blah blah blah. But most assistants take control of every aspect of their boss’s life. I had to pick up his prescriptions, drop his wife at the airport, forward his mail, sell his car.

Once, I even had to make reservations from across the country. He was in New York, I was in LA. He saw a restaurant across the street from his hotel, and he called me to make a reservation for him. It took me a half hour to find the damn place, because he gave me the wrong name. And he was looking at the damn restaurant. He could see it from his room!

I was fed up, but it took me a while to work up the nerve to tell him I was looking for another job. Once I interviewed and got the new job, I knew I had to tell him. I steeled myself for an extremely awkward phone call (he was in Canada by that point, if I recall).

“Hey, Boss. I’ve been thinking, I’ve been here for a while. It might be a good idea for me to move on. Don’t get me wrong! I like it here. It’s been fun, and I’ve learned a lot. You’re a great boss. I just think… it’s time for me to move on.”

“Huh. Okay.”

…

“What?”

“You have been here for a while, Anonymous. Do you need help finding a new job?”

“Um, no, not really.”

“Okay. Good luck!”

At first, I was a little hurt. Was I a terrible assistant? Was he glad to be rid of me? Was he just looking for the right time to fire me, and I saved him the trouble?

Then I realized, this was my first real job out of college. Finding a new job was a pretty big deal for me. But I was probably his sixth or seventh assistant. It was not a big deal at all for him.

Perspective is a funny thing.

Those in the art department aren’t the only ones who are required to suck sometimes.

In the episode we’re shooting now, there’s a scene where one group of characters is teaching another how to dance. All four actors were required to take dance lessons, which is a little strange, since two of them are not supposed to know what they’re doing.

So, you have to learn how to dance well before you can dance badly? Whatever happened to method acting?

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?