The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Blog

In film school, I worked on a sitcom pilot for the campus TV station. It was for a class, so if you wanted to be either the director, the writer, or the producer, you had to interview with the professors. They made three highly questionable choices.

There were a lot of funny people on our crew, but the writer wasn’t one of them. It’s not that he had a strange, Andy Kaufman-type sense of humor; nor did he make obscure, Dennis Miller-style references. No, his dialogue was just… words. That weren’t funny.

The director had terrible instincts. We found an actor who was able to draw some humor out of the terrible script by creating a layered performance. He essentially treated his character’s public persona as a different person from his private one, and that tension built comedy. (Trust me, it was funny.) The director saw this and naturally decided the actor should do it completely differently. And less funny.

To complete the trifecta, we had a lousy producer. He was totally disorganized. He never knew what was going on, or when it needed to happen. It was amazing we got the show finished at all.

Did I mention I was the producer?

So, you see, Dawn, there’s a very good reason why I don’t want to be a coordinator, UPM, or anything along those lines. Besides the very obvious fact that I’m not good at it, I don’t enjoy it, either.

Being good at, and enjoying, producing is so far removed from my own experiences, that I really do not understand people who are good, and do enjoy it. Of course, my parents don’t understand how I can stand finding a new job every six months.

It’s not an insult. It’s genuine confusion. But I am glad there are people out there who do produce. Nothing would get done without them.

Well, I didn’t get to send anyone to the electric chair.  (Or whatever it is they do nowadays.  Hang ‘em?  Shoot ‘em?  Are we still stoning people?)  It’s been a long, boring day, so I’ll keep this post short.

I was going through some old e-mails, and I uncovered a dream I had totally forgotten about.

I dreamt I was writing for a TV show, and all the writers were sitting around, pitching episode ideas.  As I slowly awoke, I thought about a brilliant story one of the other writers had pitched.

In my sleep addled state, I was disappointed, because it was someone else’s idea, and I couldn’t use it. A moment later, I realized, “No, wait, I can use that…

“Who will know I stole it?”

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.

John August has another one of his Scene Challenges up.

The goal is to write a scene where one character explains to another what investment derivatives are.  It was a difficult writing problem, since I have no idea what investment derivatives are.

I’m #48.

First, Amanda the Aspiring TV Writer has an inspiring post. If you’re interested in writing, you should check it out.

In that vein, I’d like to write my own heartwarming blog post. My wife told me that these posts have been really negative. That’s unfortunate, because I really do like my job. It’s certainly better than having a real job.

I’ve been a stock boy, a legal services clerk, a paperboy, and a caddy (among other things). While being a PA can be just as degrading and pointless as those jobs, nothing compares to walking on the set every day. You’re surrounded by beautiful people, lights and cameras, cool special effects, and sets that look like real houses on the inside but like a staging of Our Town on the outside.

Okay, it’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of stress, and a lot of angry, angry people. But there’s also a lot of people who genuinely care about making great television. I’m proud of the job I do, and even though I have a zen belief in the mu-ness of my work, I take comfort in that fact that I make the real creative work easier to do.

The purpose of this blog is not to give advice. After four years of film school, and four more of real industry experience, the only thing I know for sure is that I don’t know much. (Which is not to say that youth necessarily equals bad advice; check out Amanda’s blog for a fine example.)

Instead, I mostly plan on regaling you with stories of Hollywood, as seen from the bottom rung of the industry ladder–the production assistant. You know that old saying, that the measure of a man is how he treats those he doesn’t have to treat well? I’m that guy you don’t have to treat well.

As a quick example, I was once a producer’s assistant (which is different from a production assistant, but I won’t bore you with the distinction). My boss wasn’t much into technology. He kept a paper schedule, rather than an electronic one we could both look at; I had to reprogram his new phone whenever he broke an old one (which was frequently); and he never quite understood how e-mail forwards work.

On more than one occasion, he forwarded me an e-mail with some bit of pertinent information, not realizing there was a whole exchange attached to the end. These discussions would often include mentions of me, referred to as “my idiot assistant,” “my dumb assistant,” or the grammatically confusing “my moron assistant.”

I’m quite sure he didn’t realize I knew he talked about me this way. Certainly, it hurt my pride to be considered an idiot by an idiot, but on the other hand, I no longer felt bad about making fun of him.

Back on the first hand, he was the producer, and I was the assistant. He lived in Brentwood, and I lived in Van Nuys. He drove a Mercedes, and I drove a Corolla. Two years later, not much has changed.

So, really, who’s the idiot?

Yesterday, I read an essay by Paul Graham, “Good and Bad Procrastination.” Among other things, Graham summarizes Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” thusly:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?

I like the third question, because it assumes an answer to the second. I like even more the fact that that assumption is probably correct.

I work in the entertainment business, where we don’t have “problems” in the same sense the physicists or mathematicians do. We have “projects”– TV shows, movies, music videos, and so forth.

The criteria for “most important” varies wildly from one individual to the next. (I consider Battlestar Galactica to be much more important than Sex and the City. My wife disagrees.) Still, everyone has that list of projects they’d like to work on, even if those projects exist only in their heads.

What does all this have to do with blogging? Surely, tossing my thoughts out onto the series of tubes is not a good answer to number 1?

No, it’s not.

What it is is a way for me to change my answer to number 2. I’m an aspiring writer (not an amateur writer), and like many writers, I have difficulty with choosing good procrastination over bad. So, is blogging good procrastination?

No, it’s not.

But it’s less bad procrastination. It is less bad than falling into the rabbit whole that is TVTropes.org, clicking random article on Wikipedia, or simply refreshing my Facebook page?

Oh, hell yes, it is.

I may not be writing the next great American screenplay, but at least I’m practicing expressing myself in written form. It’s a step in the right direction. Or, at least, a step in a less wrong direction.