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.

Yesterday, I said writing is not producing.  I didn’t mean that as an insult.

When I came to LA to attend film school, I thought the writer was in charge of the filmmaking process.  It turns out, I was wrong.  People usually laugh at me when I relate that bit of youthful naiveté.  Or they tell me I should work in TV.

After much soul searching (and ego suppression), I decided directing was not for me.  I still wanted to be a writer.

When you tell a friend you just saw an awesome movie, what do they ask?  “Who’s in it?” and “What’s it about?”  Since most movie stars play the same character over and over, what they really mean is “Who are the characters?” and “What is the story?”

And guess who is the progenitor of the characters and story.  That’s right– the writer.  Everyone else is just interpreting.

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.

I’ve worked on some horrible shows. (One of the quaint anachronisms from the days when everyone in Hollywood was a former vaudvillian is the fact that everything, be it a movie, a TV series, or even a music video, is called a “show.”)

I worked on a horror movie about giant eels. I worked on a game show that required no more skill than picking a number and hoping for the best. I even worked on a Nick Nolte movie.

I’ve never worked on porn, per se, but I have PAed on movies with enough soft-core sex to make the program director for Cinemax blush.

After hearing of a recent trek into Mediocre Entertainmentland, a friend once asked, “How do you sleep at night?”

She had a point. I’ve dreamed my whole life of becoming a successful writer. I studied film and television for four years at one of the best film schools in the world. I spent the better part of my adult life working in the entertainment industry. All I have to show for it was a list of credits on films I can’t even show my mom. (“The Bloodening II? What’s that one about, dear?”)

So how do I sleep at night? Easy. I didn’t do it.

I recognize that, for the most part, a monkey could do my job. Not even a smart monkey, either. A surly, slightly retarded monkey could be a PA.

But more important still is knowing that, no matter how good or bad a job I do, it was no effect on the final product. None whatsoever.

I could be the best PA in the world, and the movie could still suck. (This has happened on more than one occasion.) The Wire may have shitty PAs, but you wouldn’t know it. Nothing any PA has ever done has ever wound up on any screen, big or small.

This all sounds depressing, I’m sure, but it’s really quite liberating. I can, and do, mock the shows I work on. Why not? I didn’t make it.

And here’s the best part– when you’re sitting at home, watching a terrible made-for-TV movie on cable, you might wonder what kind of idiot would make this garbage.

I know that idiot, and let me tell you, he’s even more dumb than you imagine.

The hours are lousy, the pay is worse. No one respects you. If anything goes wrong, it’s always your fault. And everyone tells you you’re lucky just to be here.

There is one advantage– free time.

We’re often busy, it’s true, but a lot of a PA’s job is simply to be ready. While we wait for some to actually need us, we sit around, reading old scripts, checking Facebook or, say, writing a blog.

The best use of this free time, though, is to figure out what you actually want to do when you’re no longer a PA.

Sure, you want to be a director, but odds are, you won’t be. Still, they say shoot for the moon and land among the stars. So which star do you want to land on? Do you want to be a cinematographer? A production designer? An editor?

Now is the time to figure out what department suits you best. Every department has its own personality. A grip is very different from a hair stylist, and neither are remotely like a script supervisor.

I knew an old gaffer on a game show who was the most racist, sexist, homophobic person I’d ever met. On a hot day, he would say, “Boy, it is hotter than Satan’s vagina out there.”

Inevitably, someone would respond, “But Satan doesn’t have a vagina…”

He would look at them sideways, and ask, as if speaking to a not-very-bright child, “Do you honestly think the source of all evil in the world is not a woman?”

I can’t imagine a make-up artist who would say that.

When I was a senior in film school, I met a freshman who asked me what classes I’d recommend. I suggested a cinematography course, taught by one of my favorite professors. The kid told me he wasn’t interested in cinematography. He wanted to be a director. He wanted to have a “vision.”

I asked him, “How do you know what kind of vision you have, if you don’t know how to turn on the lights?”

That’s why I think everyone should be a PA. Working in the office, I meet folks from every department, usually when they’re asking me to get something for them. In a position like that, you quickly learn the types of personalities drawn to each position. The ACs are very organized and very professional; the hair and make-up people are always friendly, but rarely know exactly what they want; the art department just wants everything.

Being a PA is the best opportunity to learn who everybody is and what they do. And, possibly, what you will do.

A PA is all things to all people. By which I mean, any shit job that nobody else wants to do is given to the PAs. Making coffee, making copies, driving all the way across town to drop off a script and thus adding unnecessary greenhouse gases to our environmental crimes. (Seriously, e-mail exists. What’s the logic to hand-delivering scripts anymore?)

I had a friend who’s first job in the business was on a porno. At the end of the day, the AD gave him a box and told him, “Clean these.” It was a box of dildos.

(On an unrelated note, I don’t know whether I’m happy or sad that Firefox doesn’t know how to spell “dildo.”)

Most departments have their own PAs. They’re still gophers, just a specific kind of gopher. It’s a way of climbing up the ladder in a particular craft. (Personally, I’m trying to work my way up to being a writers’ PA.)

I should note that a production assistant is different than a personal assistant. Those poor kids have the fun of experiencing The Devil Wears Prada, Live!, every day. I did that for about a year, and I wanted to kill myself. The only thing that kept me going was a blind optimism in my future job prospects, and a healthy thirst for revenge.

But no assistant has it worse than the agent’s assistant. Watch the documentary Swimming with Sharks, and you’ll get an idea. (IMDb lists it as a comedy, for some reason, but I’m sure that’s just a typo.)