“They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad…”
The late, great T-Bone Walker

(Note: this is another reworked missive from the archives)

Monday was one of those ugly first days of the week that comes wrapped in barbed wire, when each apparently straightforward task veers off into a bloody barefoot slog across a minefield of broken glass.

It’s been a while since I worked a pilot from start-to-finish — long enough to forget just how arduous the process really is. Although I recently day-played on another pilot, those six days were a breeze compared to this. Still, wading through deep sand comes with the turf of pilot season, where the script pages morph their way through the Hollywood rainbow from white, blue, pink, yellow, green, buff, salmon, and cherry ... and sometimes beyond. The process is one of constant, relentless change — and although it’s simple enough for writers to cut, add, or re-write a scene, those script changes often mean more hard, physical work for the lighting crew. Such is the nature of the job, and although there’s a satisfaction in solving the many problems that crop up along the way, this wasn’t one of those a whistle-while-you-work Mondays.

Far from it.

My personal bete noir turned out to be a ninety-foot length of two-inch diameter steel pipe the grips had rigged over the audience grandstand. Hanging from that pipe were several big flat-screen monitors that will allow our live studio audience to see what the cameras record — and since this is a sketch-comedy/variety show pilot rather than a standard sitcom, we added a dozen 1000 watt par cans and six 2000 watt soft-lights: the former to splash pools of color on the actors and dancers, and the latter to illuminate the audience, who would now be part of the show.

Making the audience part of the show sounded like an idiotic idea to me, but that didn’t matter: I’m paid to do the heavy lifting, not agree with the Giant Brains who dream up these things.

I hung the pars and soft-lights on Friday before being called away to do something else, so one of my fellow juicers ran the power cables … then Monday brought the inevitable changes. To “spice up the show,” a decision was made to shoot the audience from a camera mounted on a Techno-Jib, which meant that a thirty foot center section of the pipe — where two big monitors, all twelve of those par lamps, and a pair of soft lights hung — would have to be six feet higher. Two grips were already up high in the perms waiting to raise the pipe, so I hurriedly unplugged all the power cables, then stood back as they took it up. Re-patching all those lamps would have been relatively straightforward except for another edict from on high, which rolled the storm clouds into this otherwise ordinary Monday. The pars had been gelled with three separate colors circuited to flash on and off in a particular order, but the powers-that-be now wanted just two colors with a different flashing pattern, which meant re-gelling and re-circuiting each lamp … and since the juicer who’d run all those cables was busy elsewhere, the task fell to me. The job wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been allowed to concentrate on it, but I kept being pulled away to deal with more-pressing issues. Every time I got back to that cursed pipe — twenty minutes to an hour later — I’d have to spend the next five minutes remembering where the hell I was in the process, then I’d get called off again.

So it went, all day long.

Two other factors turned this into such a bitch. The par cans and power cables were tied very securely to the pipe — the kind of rig we’d do when starting a nine month season of twenty-plus episodes — but this is a one-and-done pilot to be shot in three days, after which it’ll all be torn down. We had a lot to do and not much time to do it, which is why the pilot season mantra is “rig to wrap”: hanging and powering our lamps in manner to accomodate the inevitable changes that will come, then be faster to wrap once we’re done. With his obsessively meticulous ways, my fellow juicer had rigged this to survive a 9.0 earthquake … so first I had to undo most of his work and start all over again.

“Rig to wrap” doesn’t mean “quick and dirty” — we make sure the rig is safe for everyone involved — but doing just enough rather than going for rigging overkill makes a measurable difference during the course of a pilot.

The second issue was the seating area below the elevated section of pipe, which had been expanded to make the most of the idiotic Techno-Jib audience shots. The safest way to change the gels and re-rig those power cables was to use a scissor lift with the “porch” fully extended to put me up and over all the added seating. The porch wasn’t quite long enough, though, so I had to lean out as far as humanly possible, at which point I could barely reach the pipe, lights, and cables. Not only was this difficult, painful — my lower back did not appreciate it at all — and somewhat dangerous (it’s not hard to fall out of a lift under such circumstances), but it made for a slow, tedious process.

Not a happy camper

Thus did a series of seemingly innocent decisions from the Brain Trust conspire to turn a relatively simple task into an all-day ordeal. The constant interruptions precluded me from finishing the job by the time we wrapped for the day, which meant I was right back at it first thing Tuesday morning, with my lower back stiff, sore, and barking loud from the previous day’s isometric exertions.

The grips had already commandeered the scissor lift, so I had to finish the job atop an eight step ladder in the grandstands, which meant placing it very carefully amid the audience seats — with the front two legs on apple boxes — then moving the ladder and boxes back and forth between the seats as I ran, connected, and re-labeled the remaining power cables.

I managed get it done — finally — without falling off the ladder, then was immediately handed another task, because that’s the nature of the pilot season beast: an all-work, all-the-time grind pushing the big rock up the steep hill. Once there, we’ll enjoy the view for a minute, then shoot the show and tear the whole thing down.

The labors of Sisyphus, indeed.

(Another from the archives)

Some pictures really are worth a thousand words

You know you’re in for a long day when the first scene on the call sheet features a monkey wearing a dress. Actually, it was a chimpanzee — three of them, all told — each of which was outfitted in human garb, then paraded before the cameras one at a time. This was supposed to be a hilarious laff-riot for the young children of the target audience for this show, but I’ve never seen much humor in chimps dressed as people. It seems more pathetic than anything else, but my job is to help light these shows, not write them, so I’m just trying to get through each day on set.

This may put me in the minority, but I’m not particularly fond of our primate cousins. The phrase “more fun than a barrel of monkeys” has never made any sense to me, and I strongly suspect whoever coined it never actually had to deal with these hairy beasts up close and personal. They’re fine romping about in the wild, where they belong — with a wide, deep ocean between them and me — but being in close proximity to monkeys and apes holds no appeal whatsoever. I’ve worked with them on set more than once, and didn’t like it.

Then there’s the matter of Monkey Butt … which has nothing to do with the subject at hand other than the term “monkey,” but serves to underline the point: I don’t like much of anything having to do with monkeys.

Each successive chimp was older and larger than the last, with the final one bearing a disturbing resemblance to a minature King Kong. Even the wranglers seemed nervous about handling that big ape, which became abundantly clear when the camera assistant — unable to get a head slate before the shot — darted in front of the cameras to grab a tail slate after the director yelled “cut!”

“No!” barked the head wrangler, frantically waving him away. “Not with this one!”

The urgency in his voice got the attention of everybody on set. I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise as the assistant retreated, eyes wide.

What’s the big deal, you might wonder — why be so skittish about a playful chimp?

Adult chimps are extremely dangerous: if for whatever reason one takes a dislike to you, you’re in Big Trouble. Take a good look at the hairless, heavily muscled chimp at the top of this page, and if that doesn’t impress, check out this and this, and if you still want to work around uncaged chimps, read this account from 2005 describing what happened to a man named St. James Davis, who was attacked by two adult chimps — named Buddy and Ollie — while he and his wife were visiting another chimp at an animal sanctuary. It’s a longish story, so here’s the crux of it:

Buddy and Ollie destroyed a majority of St. James’ fingers, his left foot, most of his buttocks, both testicles, part of his torso, and parts of his face including his nose and lips. A paramedic who arrived said, “It looked like a grizzly bear attack.”1

The phrase “better safe than sorry” comes to mind — which to me means “stay far away from chimpanzees” — because anyone unfortunate enough to be in the path of an angry chimp certainly won’t be safe. They will, however, be very sorry for the rest of their blighted lives.

I have no idea what the person who wrote this scene was thinking, but can only hope that he or she will pause to think again the next time they dream up a scene involving chimpanzees. Nobody got hurt, but we were two full hours behind schedule by the time those chimps were back in their cages, which is why — despite plowing through the rest of the call sheet at a brisk pace — it took fourteen hours to “make our day.”

So it goes. Sometimes you just have to grin, bear it, and bank the overtime. At this point, I’m just trying to get through these last stages of my working career without falling off a twelve step ladder — or having my face ripped off by some deranged Hollywood ape.

That’s not too much to ask … I hope.

Mind if I play through?

Week Two brought an end to the pre-dawn calls, and although traffic was heavier and more frantic, it hadn’t yet congealed into the peristaltic gridlock of morning rush hour as I cruised east towards downtown LA.

A disturbing vision greeted me as I waited at a red light on the southern cusp of the Wilshire Country Club: there on the putting green of the seventh hole stood two figures clad in full Haz-Mat suits, complete with gas-mask respirators. One carried the flag away from the hole while the other wrangled a strange piece of gear from golf cart. For a moment it looked like a scene from a black comedy set in the distant future — two well-protected duffers playing a round of golf in the urban dystopia of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles.

But no, these were just maintenance workers carpet-bombing the turf with toxic pesticides and fertilizers to keep the emerald-green grass as smooth as a billiard table for the club’s well-heeled golfers. Still, the image felt like a harbinger of the week to come: a warning that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.

The day began with putting in two location rigs on the ground floor of the studio’s office building complex. That meant dealing with 4/0, 2/0, and the 76 pounds-per-braided-roll horror of five-wire banded cable to power a phalanx of LTM 18K’s, 12K HMI Pars, 4K Pars and 1200 watt pars. A big tungsten package waited for us at two more interior locations, but that was for later. Given that this studio supplies no equipment whatsoever — trucking in all necessary gear from a rental house in the Valley — we enjoyed none of the benefits of working at a studio while suffering all the disadvantages of working on location.

Such a deal. Leave it to the wizards at Disney to engineer a lose/lose situation, but after last week’s interminable march through the Valley of Cable-Rate Death, this came as no surprise.

First up was the heavy lifting: a pair of a five piece 4/0 runs from the two generators on opposite sides of the building. Just as mothers eventually forget the pain of childbirth (or so I’m told...), the sheer vertebrae-crushing weight of each hundred foot roll of 4/0 — nearly a hundred pounds — had slipped my mind, which made for a jarring re-introduction to the reality of location rigging. Fortunately, the Best Boy had fortified our crew with several young strong studs fresh off the rigging farm, each a third my age and raring to go. I did my best to keep up, but it was those kids who did the truly heavy lifting.

This brought another They Shoot Horses, Don't They? moment, but I had to remind myself that it’s is all in the great scheme of things: I’ve wrangled my share of back-breaking cable over the decades, and now it’s their turn. Still, the fact that I can no longer do what used to be routine is humbling in the worst way.

Getting old is a bitch.

Once the cable and distro boxes were in place, we assembled the lighting package, mounted each lamp on a stand, then hooked up the ballasts and head feeders. At that point we split up to deal with the mountain of detail required to get all three sets ready for an early morning call the following day, when we’d become a first-unit shooting crew while the core crew of this show shot on sets we rigged last week. Our two crews will continue to tag-team the job until this pig is all dressed up in a mini-skirt, pumps, and lipstick, then sent out on the street to make Pimp-Daddy Disney some money.

I got the job of powering twelve Par 64 cans on two lighting trees, along with eighteen LED Blasters for a fashion show runway scene, circuiting everything back through the dimmer to provide the gaffer and DP total control. The par cans weren’t so bad — requiring nothing more than stingers, mason line, cube taps, and patience — but powering the LED Blaster units was a pain in the ass. Well, knees and back, actually. Mounted low on the ground to light a fashion show runway, each Blaster had a much-too-long control cable that had to be hidden from the cameras all the way back to the electronic control units. Each lamp and cable had to be numbered to facilitate trouble-shooting, because thoroughness counts when putting in any kind of rig. If a problem crops up with the Blasters (or any other lamp), all that labeling will allow the problem to be located, diagnosed, and rectified much faster — and in a business where time is money (especially with a trigger-happy little garden gnome of a director who just wants to shoot-shoot-shoot whenever he’s not screaming “What the FUCK are we waiting for?”), minimizing down-time is crucial. So there I knealt with white gaffer’s tape and a Sharpie, labeling every one of those eighteen long, skinny cables at both ends— a tedious but essential step before tackling the painful task of running and concealing the cable from its Blaster back to the controller.

Working on my hands-and-knees gets old in a hurry, and by the time the day was done, I felt about a hundred and fifty years old — stiff, sore, and hurting everywhere. I washed-up and limped back to my car staring at a decidedly unwelcome reality: as location rigs go, this one was minimal, but it still kicked my ass. Pouring salt into the wound is having to work this hard for cable rate, but that’s how it goes when toiling for the slave-masters of Disney.

It was a tough start to another long week. That’s the way it’s been in this new year thus far: each week hard and harder. As I inched homeward through the molasses of evening rush-hour traffic, another realization settled in: maybe I can’t keep up with the young studs slinging cable anymore, but there are other ways to remain valuable on a crew. So long as I can still do all the other work that must be done — and there’s a lot of it — I’ll earn my keep. It’s a matter of going with the flow, bending to the inevitable, and contributing wherever and whenever I can.

That’s important, because I need to keep working for a few more years.

And so another Monday has come and gone. Now, on to Tuesday.

Working in a Coal Mine, by Lee Dorsey

The first of three posts recounting a rather dark stretch back in 2012

It’s Monday, all right. Up before dawn, stumbling into my rigging clothes — fly zipped? Boots tied? Sweatshirt right-side out? Check — then out the door, into the car, and on through the primordial dark towards the gleaming glass towers of downtown LA. The streets are quiet at this ungodly hour, empty but for a scattering of RTD buses, garbage trucks, and a few yawning commuters gliding from one red light to the next.

Reporting for work at a new (to me) studio is always a dicey affair. Rather than cruise up and over Laurel Canyon to the CBS Radford studio — a drive I could probably do with my eyes closed by now — I actually have to pay attention to where I’m going, trusting that the Best Boy’s sketchy directions and a night-before consultation with my ancient, dog-eared Thomas Brothers Map book will indeed get me to the right place on time. *

It all works out, despite one extra trip around the block. As it happens, my destination is on the east side of the street, not the west — which isn’t nearly so obvious as you’d think given that this studio is actually a huge office building complex originally built to house the headquarters of a major oil company. Although it looks nothing like any film studio I’ve ever seen, many of the offices here have done duty as ready-made location sets for movies and television shows.** More pertinent to me, the facility includes six honest-to-god sound stages, one of which will be my home for the next two weeks.

The guard locates my name on the crew list, hands me a pass, then ushers me into the subterranean sanctum of the parking structure. Another guard in the lobby directs me to a nearly new and very modern sound stage, complete with wooden perms and catwalks up high.***

That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are three big sets under construction on this stage, which means we’ll be working amid sawdust, paint fumes, and the sonic assault of power tools — chop saws, table saws, and sanders — all week long.

In other words, the usual chaos and confusion.

This is starting to feel a lot like a pilot, but it’s not. For reasons best known to the brain trust above-the-line at Disney, a decision was made to add three episodes to this sitcom’s regular season for the show’s tweenage audience … or is it a movie based on the show? Nobody seems to know, but getting it done in this compressed time schedule will require the show’s core crew and our crew — we’re the B Team — to work with, for, and around each other during the next two weeks. Nobody has fully explained the “why” behind all this, but that’s irrelevant: the two paychecks this job will generate are what matters.

Still, the script seems to be in flux at this point, and although that sounds like a problem for the brain trust above-the-line, their issues have a way of becoming our problems below decks.

“Shit rolls downhill,” the saying goes, and it doesn’t take long to understand that an avalanche of shit is rolling our way.

Meanwhile, there are lights to be hung and powered, so my fellow juicer and I get to it, climbing into our man-lifts to work amid an atmospheric witch’s brew of carcinogenic compounds generated by all the sanding, spraying, and painting that comes with building sets. I hate having to breathe all this crap, but there’s no way around it. Lighting is a call-and-response endeavor — the gaffer calls, we respond — that can’t be done wearing a respirator-style mask of the type used by the painters and carpenters … so we just do it knowing that a price will doubtless be paid at some point down the road.

Things could be worse. We’re better off than the untold masses of Third Worlders who earn a meager living by smashing discarded (er, “recycled”) television and computer components from the First World into burnable size, then torching the detritus to extract a few grams of precious metals — a process that subjects them to inhaling horrendously toxic dioxin and PCB fumes created by the combustion process.

It’s a hard world out there.

Such is life in the down-and-dirty underbelly of most manufacturing industries, including Hollywood. There’s little doubt that all the crap I’ve inhaled over my decades in this industry — diesel fumes from countless trucks and generators on location, a variety of smoke-generating products used on sound stages to provide “atmosphere” for the camera, and the asbestos insulation that was still used in lamp heads and power feeder tails back when I got my start — will have an impact on my future life span. The only real question is how much I’ll lose to the Gods of Hollywood: a year, five years, ten?

Time will tell. As a rule, retirees in my union ascend to the Great Beyond a few years after hanging up their gloves, but the bulk of those stats come from the generation before mine, many of whom were heavy smokers and hard drinkers who worked with that old asbestos-tainted equipment over their entire careers, so I’m hoping to be an exception to the early-exit rule. Still, we each walk our own dark and winding path towards the grave, and there’s no predicting such things.

Besides, whatever’s coming is too late to avoid by now.

Although being paid 20% below union scale on this job won’t make any difference when my time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil, it’s galling to have to breathe all this toxic crap toiling for the cut-rate, cheap-ass, bottom-line obsessed cretins of Mousewitz. It might be nice to think that all the pain and suffering endured while making those shows was the service of something halfway decent, but these Disney shows are garbage. The production values are solid — sets, props, lighting, camera, make-up, wardrobe, and sound — but the shows are hopeless. At this point, I don’t know anybody working below-the-line who doesn’t harbor a withering contempt for the Disney Corporation and all it’s come to stand for.

So it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it — and in the absence of anything else on my radar, that’ll be me. One way or another, the landlord must be paid.

On such gigs, who you’re working with is by far the most important factor. With a good crew, you can endure almost anything, and I’m lucky to be working with a very good crew. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for those above-the-line who are responsible for this mess. As the week unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that they really don’t have their shit together — and as a result, each succeeding day feels like another Monday. Given the constant changes coming down from on high, there’s no sense of completion from one day to the next, only a feeling that this whole benighted project is sinking slowly but steadily into quicksand. Late Friday afternoon, just as we were hanging the last of twenty-plus lamps on the fourth newly-constructed swing set, the line producer/UPM stalked onto the stage, took one look at the new set, then started screaming. The angry little man summoned the art director and dressed him down in front of everybody. “It’s all wrong,” he shouted, going into great and meaningless detail explaining exactly how wrong it was. All this last-minute sturm und drang raised the prospect that we’d now have to re-light the whole damned thing, and this after working a long week of 6:00 a.m. calls and extremely physical days.

What the hell was this clown doing here now, with 95% of the lighting complete and the week nearly at an end? We started rigging this set two days ago, so where was this fool when all the decisions were being made?

One of the grips, a member of the show’s core crew, shook his head. “The asshole does this all the time,” he mutters, not bothering to hide the disgust in his voice.

None of us wanted to work late, and in the end — irony of ironies — it was the bottom line cheapness of Disney that saved us from a monumentally ugly Friday. Unwilling to pay the crew two additional hours of overtime, the angry little man sent us home after ten hours.

Thank fucking God.

So we kick the can down the road, which is fine by me. What happens then doesn’t matter now — I’m just grateful the weekend is finally here.

I’ll worry about next week when it comes … on Monday.

Part Two

* Why didn’t I consult my Iphone, Android, or other GPS-equipped Smart Phone, you ask? Because I didn’t have one. I was just an old analog dog barking into the howling digital wind.

** Including one of my favorites (and darling of the critics) Mad Men.

*** Unfortunately, “new” and “modern” does not equate to perfection, as the photo above (taken up high in the catwalks) demonstrates.

You can’t work in Hollywood without pondering the tug-of-war dynamics in the struggle between cinematic art and the economic imperatives that rule the film and television industry. Although bridging that yawning chasm often seems impossible, anyone who hopes to achieve something beyond merely making a living in the creative end of this business will have to find a way. Talent alone — however extraordinary — is seldom enough. Orson Welles crafted brilliant, ground-breaking movies, but like the hapless protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, eventually found himself hog-tied by mercantile studio minions who never understood — and were too frightened to trust — his protean artistic instincts.

There are plenty of big-time directors who make gobs of money cranking out formulaic, CGI-intensive cinematic garbage for the suburban multiplex mass-market (Exhibit A: Michael Bay), along with who knows how many earnest, deeply committed film-makers crafting small, intensely personal films on a shoestring. Although neither is an easy road, the former is more an exercise in cinematic logistics than an artistic endeavor, while the latter remains a bare-bones labor of love. Still, there’s a lot of territory between those two extremes, and there are a few writer/directors working in the misty demimonde between art and commerce by making smart, interesting movies that do well enough at the box office to keep their careers alive.

That’s an uneasy balance to maintain, but it can be done.

It appears that Derek Cianfrance, who made a splash with Blue Valentine back in 2010, is one such director. In a fascinating interview that ran on KCRW’s The Business, he discusses his then-new film The Place Beyond the Pines, among many other things.* Whether you’re still in school or are a recent graduate staring at the harsh realities of trying to jump-start a cinematic career, anyone interested in writing and directing movies should listen carefully to what Cianfrance says. He speaks with startling honesty about his tortuous path, the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way to becoming a bankable writer/director. There is so much distilled truth in this interview about the internal battle between art and commerce, the virtues of collaboration, and the value of continuing to work no matter what the venue, medium, or subject matter — including the importance of finding the right people to work with, and the need for those involved in any project to “crush their egos” in support of the group effort.

Whatever you think of his films, Derek Cianfrance is a man who has learned his lessons the hard way, via what I call The Joe Frazier School of Higher Education. He took his licks, then got up off the canvas to stay in the fight, find his footing, and eventually prevail — older, smarter, and mentally stronger than ever.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a more honest, real-world dissection of what it takes to survive, grow, and succeed as a creative artist in the film business. His story should provide hope and encouragement that those with sufficient talent and drive really can find their way to writing and directing feature films, so if that’s your goal, listen to what Derek has to say. Neither he nor anyone else can chart your path — everybody has to find their own way, especially now that so much has changed in Hollywood — but his story might help you avoid a few bumps and bruises on your own winding road to where you want to be.

There’s a lot packed into those twenty minutes — it’s worth a listen.

Sean Baker is another director who makes personal films about the messy lives of people, and his movies do pretty well at the box office. He strikes me as something of a Jim Jarmusch for the 21st century — and if you haven’t seen the Jarmusch classic Stranger than Paradise, then you should rectify that oversight ASAP. With his 2024 hit Anora, Baker managed to hit the critical and commercial jackpot, which should open more doors for him. It will be interesting to see what he does in the future.

So buck up, film school grads. Maybe you don’t have to sell your soul to make it in the biz — and the way things are going, that may be more true now than ever before. It’s never easy, but there will always be opportunities for those who seek them. Just keep your eyes, ears, and mind open, and when the moment appears, make the most of it.

Good luck.

* Being a show called “The Business,” the first eight minutes or so is a lot of blather about the state of the movie biz back in 2013, when the show was broadcast and DVD sales were still a big deal. You’ll have to endure that history lesson before the interview with Cianfrance begins.

Mick LaSalle, the SF Chronicle’s film reviewer, had this to say about The Place Beyond the Pines:

"The Place Beyond the Pines" is where writer-director Derek Cianfrance gets to show that his previous film, "Blue Valentine," was no fluke, that this is an artist expanding his abilities and coming into his own way of presenting the world and telling stories. His latest movie is huge in its ambition and almost as huge in its achievement.”

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley”

Robert Burns

For a recent episode of my current show, our producers hired a celebrity television chef to appear in a guest role, one of many who’ve made buckets of money the last few years by turning their culinary skills into lively, intense, and often confrontational cooking shows.

First, a brief digression: I’ve been a fan of cooking shows since way back in the day — everyone from Julia Child to Jacque Pepin to The Frugal Gourmet — but my all-time favorite is the wonderfully cheeky British chef Keith Floyd, who was never happier than while demonstrating the art of cooking on camera, be it over a crude wood stove in the European countryside or the fully equipped kitchen of a high-end French culinary school.* Floyd’s passionate but refreshingly down-to-earth approach, usually with a glass of wine in one hand, thoroughly demystified the process of cooking. He introduced one memorable show by talking into the camera — which was in the passenger seat of a car — while barreling through the French countryside with Floyd at the wheel, rarely looking at the road ahead, talking and drinking all the way.

Apologies for the lousy quality of this screenshot - from the documentary - of Keith Floyd careening through France while talking to the camera.

Adding to the this-not-your-mother’s-cooking-show credentials was Floyd’s affectionate reference to his television audience as “gastronauts,” and a fondness for the music of The Stranglers, which graced the soundtrack of the show.**

This delightful forty minute documentary explores the groundbreaking inventiveness and comedic culinary brilliance of Keith Floyd: it’s definitely worth your time.

Pause for another slight digression: The stats for the last few offerings here at BS&T reveal that roughly half of the 325 subscribers look at each post, with roughly five percent (at most) clicking on one of the links therein. I get it — we’re all busy, and who’s got time to fall down the rabbit hole of following links — but I urge you to at least take a look at that Keith Floyd documentary. Yes, it’s 40 minutes long, so you’re not gonna watch now — but just cut and paste the URL into a text file, then tune in when you have the time. Seriously, it’s a blast.

Enough digressions: we now return to our regularly scheduled program.

Although I still watch a few cooking programs these days (none of which reach the high bar set by Keith Floyd), I’ve no interest in the scream-and-shout shows that typically feature a loud bully strutting around the kitchen abusing his acolytes like an epicurian Mussolini … which is probably why I’d never heard of our guest-star celebrity chef.

Many on our the crew had, though, and for them, having this guy on set was a big deal. Given that he’d done so many high-pressure television shows, casting him to portray a pompous, arrogant chef who runs the best and most expensive restaurant in town must have seemed a stroke of genius to our show runners.

But many a late-night inspiration in the writer’s room collapses like a sad soufflé in the journey from script to screen, and perhaps this particular notion should have spent a bit more time in the oven before placing a call to the chef’s agent. Despite pacing the kitchen set alone for a good three hours, script in hand, diligently rehearsing his lines — or perhaps because of all that over-preparation — the poor guy morphed into a proverbial deer in the headlights when our actors and all four cameras finally rolled in. He continually forgot or fumbled his lines, and on those rare moments when the proper words were summoned, they weren’t delivered with any real authority — and this from a man accustomed to barking orders in a kitchen like a Marine Corps drill instructor. A quick scene that should have taken no more than fifteen minutes to shoot stretched out like salt water taffy, and for him — for all of us, really — it was one tortuously painfully hour. I felt bad for the guy, but had to give him credit for soldiering all the way through to the the bitter, humiliating end.

It wasn’t a complete disaster — we shot enough takes from various angles for the editors to cobble together a usable scene — but once again I was reminded exactly why actors get paid a lot of money: most people can’t do what they do. Acting is hard, which is just one more reason I’ve always been quite happy to remain well behind the lights and cameras.

I hope our show runners learned their lesson and think twice the next time somebody suggests hiring a non-actor for a role in the show. Just because something looks easy — which good actors do on set every day — doesn’t mean it actually is.

On the bright side, there’s at least one celebrity chef out there who has a new appreciation for what a real actor can do.

* Sadly, he passed away in 2009 at age 65. RIP, Keith, and thanks for the laughs.

** If nothing else, The Stranglers are memorable for Golden Brown, the best heroin song ever.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Maimonides

It’s graduation time, which means another cohort of hopeful young people will soon march out of the colleges and universities of America ready to tilt at the windmills of an increasingly uncertain future. Keep your fingers crossed for these kids, because they’re walking into some serious headwinds. Not to go all Big-Picture on you here, but I’m not sure the world has been up for grabs like this — in the realms of economics, domestic politics, geopolitics, and technology — since the late 1930s.

That’s not a period of history any sane person wants to repeat.

If this was ten years ago, a fair number of those young graduates would be heading to Hollywood in pursuit of a career — but that was then. Thanks to the streaming bust and subsequent corporate consolidation, the Covid shutdown, the WGA/SAG strike, production migrating offshore, and the looming encroachment of AI, the workforce above and below the line has thinned considerably in the past few years. Although things seem to be picking up a bit lately, the halcyon days when every sound stage in LA was booked solid seem unlikely to return anytime soon, if ever. Still, every system depends on regular infusions of fresh blood, so I’ve no doubt that a few newly-minted grads will soon be huddling in the shadow of that big white '“Hollywood” sign high in the parched hills overlooking LA.

Maybe this post — a version of which ran on the old BS&T blog back in 2014 — still applies.

*********************************************

The importance of persistence on the part of those hoping to forge a career in the film and television industry can’t be overstated, but there’s something else every newbie knocking on the doors of Hollywood needs to know to make their cinematic dreams come true.

No, not the four-digit numerical code that opens the security gate guarding Cindy Crawford’s secluded beachside home (which I learned — then promptly forgot — while working on an infomercial with the then-supermodel at her home in Malibu), but something much more basic and infinitely more useful: How to work.

Ah, Cindy, I hardly knew you … in fact, I didn’t know you at all.

You’d be surprised how many newbies arrive on the shores of Hollywood burdened with the assumption that by dint of being young and earnest, some mysteriously divine process will bless them with success — and after a short period of “paying their dues,” good things will naturally start to happen.

It doesn’t work that way — and the key word here is “work,” because in order to bring any of your Hollywood dreams to life, you’re going to have to work very hard indeed. If you don’t know how to work — really work — you’ve got a problem. It takes a lot more than simply putting your head down and grunting/sweating until someone tells you to stop.

I too was once a clueless young fool who didn’t know how to work. Despite growing up on a small farm where doing chores of the sort that would horrify your average urban or suburban film school graduate was a part of everyday life, I hadn’t really learned how to work.

Truth be told, I was a lazy slug who had to be prodded with the pitchfork of fear or the lure of a reward to do any sort of work, and even then I’d do just enough to get by. Truly unpleasant assignments — like spending my entire Spring Break shoveling mountains of pig shit out of our barn, or struggling to write a hopelessly lame paper on D.H. Lawrence in college for some god-awful Lit class I never should have taken in the first place — were performed grudgingly at best.*

I just didn’t like to work.

Since nothing in school taught me to embrace the concept of hard work, I remained an indolent lout through my post-collegiate years while editing my thesis film — which I turned in nearly three years after the rest of my graduating class had sailed off into the real world — and scraping out a minimum-wage living behind the counter of a local pizza parlor. Having yet to learn how to do a good job or take pride in my work no matter the circumstances: I was just skating through. After getting fired from the pizza job (a totally justified termination, I might add), then — finally —completing that thesis film, I stood before the world a 25 year old unemployed young man with no useful or salable skills whatsoever.

By comparison, Orson Welles was 25 when this legendary film “Citizen Kane” hit the theaters … but Orson Welles knew how to work, and I didn’t.**

Being flat broke, I was neither financially nor emotionally prepared to mount an assault on Hollywood, so I answered a want add in the local newspaper and landed a job behind the counter of a mom-and-pop deli in the hills north of Santa Cruz. There was just one Erik's Deli at the time, but Erik had big plans that did not include a lazy, unmotivated employee who was accusomed to doing a half-assed job.

Erik and I got off to a rough start. He was a burly, intense man who made it clear that certain standards would be maintained in his deli come hell or high water -- and I was to meet those standards. Behind this challenge lurked the unspoken threat that it was his way or the highway. Given my innately lazy nature and dismal history with any kind of work, it seemed unlikely I’d last more than a couple of weeks.

Much to my surprise, those two weeks passed without getting the boot, but I wasn’t having much fun. Having deduced that I was a lazy fuck-up, Erik busted my chops with metronomic regularity. I didn’t much like that, and at a certain point my resentment at his critical comments bubbled over into a powerful desire to prove him wrong.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was responding to his challenge. I began paying attention at work in a way I never had before, taking the job seriously and trying hard to do it right for the very first time. It took a while for me to shape up, at which point Erik assigned me to the crew about to open a brand new deli, a much bigger facility at a busy outdoor shopping center. Business would be fast and furious there, and he seemed to think I could handle it.

The chops-busting continued, of course. Erik was relentless in his determination that the new deli succeed and prosper. The service would be friendly and efficient, the sandwiches made with care, and the store kept clean at all times. If this all sounds completely obvious, you’re right — it’s Retail Food Industry 101 — but my previous stint at the pizza parlor taught me every bad work habit you can imagine, along with a few that you can’t.*** Negative training like that doesn’t turn around overnight.

There were plenty of ups and downs over the next year. Erik dropped in for frequent unannounced visits, and during one of those, found a marijuana seed on the kitchen floor. He made a point of bringing that up at an employee meeting, turning to fix me with his laser-beam glare. The irony was that of the entire night shift crew, I was the only one who didn’t smoke dope at work, which everybody knew but Erik.

I kept my cool. By then I’d learned to be responsible, to work with a crew as a team, and the importance of going above and beyond what was strictly required. With my sights set on Hollywood, I was happy to let the rest of the crew jockey for the soon-to-be-open assistant manager job.

When I was ready to take my shot, I gave a full month’s notice at the deli, then kept working hard right up through to the end. A few days after I’d clocked out for the last time, Erik called me into the main office. I had no idea what to expect, but there I found a very different guy. He was all smiles now, the hard edge gone. Thanking me for all my hard work — and for not slacking off coming down the stretch — he wished me luck in Hollywood, then handed me a check for a full month’s severance pay, something he was under no obligation to do.

I was floored, but what I didn’t realize then was that the lessons I’d learned in how to work over the previous fourteen months would prove far more valuable to my future than a check for five hundred dollars.

A few weeks later I threw a leg over my motorcycle and headed down U.S. Route 101 to Los Angeles with a pocket full of hope and enough in my wallet to last a few months.

Once in Hollywood, my new attitude towards work paid off. I hit the ground ready to go, and after a couple of months landed my first job as an unpaid production assistant on a very low budget feature, then parlayed that into a paid assistant editing gig. Once that job ended, I got another feature as a PA — paid, this time — and within a year worked my first feature as a grip, after which I eventually moved to set lighting.

I was on my way, but looking back now, I’m not sure any of that would have — or could have — happened if not for the hard lessons I’d learned about to how to work behind the counter of the deli.

This isn’t to paint my fence as some wonderful Hollywood success. I managed to survive the ebb and flow of the film industry for the better part of four decades, but lifting heavy objects for a living is a long way from the heady creative environment of the writing rooms and director’s chairs of Hollywood. I was never more than a tiny cog in the vast gears of the Industry Machine, but the principle I’m talking about here holds, because nobody — above or below the line — can hope to achieve their Hollywood dreams without a lot of hard work.

It’s something everybody has to learn sooner or later -- and in Hollywood, the sooner, the better. So to all you cap-and-gown grads about to embark on the journey of life beyond school, work hard, live long, and prosper. I wish you the best of luck.

You’re gonna need it.

* It’s a good thing I went to one of those totally forgiving pass/no record schools, or else I’d never have bagged any kind of college credential. Not that a degree in “Aesthetic Studies” was worth a dime in the real world, of course, but that’s a tale for another time.

** He was also an astonishingly talented, utterly brilliant, and boundlessly ambitious genius. Me? Not so much.

*** Remember these words, people: don’t ever — and I mean EVER — piss off the kids behind the counter of any food establishment. Trust me on this.

Snow Rollers in action
Photo by Sketch Pasinski

The nature of television production dictates that episodes linked to specific holidays be shot far in advance. That’s why we filmed the Halloween episode early in September, and are now doing the Christmas episode two months before Santa takes flight — thus the pair of snow rollers hung above the front porch set, along with another pair outside the living room windows, each loaded with fluffy white plastic flakes that look very much like real falling snow once those rollers start moving.

Nothing says “Hollywood” quite like plastic snow drifting down upon plastic trees and plastic grass in an air-conditioned sound stage, while the fierce SoCal sun beats down on the outside world like a thermonuclear sledgehammer.

When properly back-lit, the plastic snow looks great, but it had half our crew — including me — sneezing our heads off as if in the full grip of cold and flu season. Meanwhile, we had to carefully shroud any of our lamps that were exposed to the “snowfall” with black-wrap to prevent them from becoming coated in melted plastic by the end of the week.

This episode was something of a beast, with yet more swing-sets-within-existing swing sets (our recurring Matryoshka Doll nightmare), along with a much larger swing set of a “great room,” complete with phony forest outside the porch and windows, and a huge translight backing. Size isn’t necessarily a bad thing — one big set can be less hassle to light than three or four smaller ones — but the degree of difficulty rises considerably when the script calls for day and night scenes in each swing set. That meant we had to double up on all the exterior lights, hitting both sides of the scenic backing (warm back-light for day, blue front-light for night) in addition to rigging and powering separate banks of day and night lighting to illuminate all those trees and shine through the windows.

The goddamned trees were dragged on stage early in the week, so with no place to store the fucking things, they were in our way at every turn. The work is hard enough without having to fight through Birnam Wood every step of the way, but such is the lot of a sitcom juicer.*

The entire week was a bitch. We worked non-stop through each of the three lighting days to get ready for the block-and-shoot day and the audience shoot night, but the payoff — once the sets were lit and actors took their places in front of the cameras in their 19th Century period wardrobe — is that everything looked great. So good, in fact, that the director interrupted the first rehearsal of the pre-shoot to announce what a great job the set construction, set dressing, wardrobe and hair departments had done, and he even acknowledged the hard work by the stand-ins, who ran every scene repeatedly for the cameras the day before, reciting endless pages of dialog in heavy southern accents. The entire crew responded with a standing ovation for those hard-working departments.

The director was absolutely right: all those people mentioned did a fantastic job … but so did grip and electric, working under very difficult circumstances, and did our esteemed director think to mention that?

Of course not. Grip and electric are the Rodney Dangerfields of the multi-camera world, treated like wallpaper until something drops, falls over, or catches fire — then all of a sudden the director and producers know exactly who we are. The hardest adjustment for me to make when I moved into the multi-camera world after twenty years of single-camera shoots — where, grip and electric have a prominent place at the table — was accepting how far down the pecking order set lighting is in sitcoms. The cameras don’t roll on a feature film, episodic drama, or television commerical until the lighting is exactly right, but multi-camera shows expect the set to be lit and ready whenever and wherever the director and producers want to shoot, even when they come up with radical changes at the last minute. Naturally, we’re expected to perform these weekly miracles while remaining within the bounds of an increasingly lean and mean budget, which is why the UPM calls our Best Boy in on the carpet every week to explain in great detail exactly why our department ordered so many lights.**

No respect.

But the snow drifted down on cue, the pre-shoots looked great, and the live studio audience loved the shoot-night show. After the curtain call, our lead actor took the microphone to thank the entire crew in front of the audience, department by department, including grip and electric.

Then again, he does this at the end of every show, but you take what you can get in this business, even if it’s just another a snow-job.


* Peggy Archer discussed this eternal problem in a post over at Totally Unauthorized.

** The answer, of course, is that every light ordered was needed to illuminate the swing sets — and the more swing sets we have, the more lights we need. For reasons I’ll never understand, our UPM seems to think we order all this equipment just for the fun of it, which is just one more reason I avoid Best Boy gigs like the plague. The extra money isn’t worth the aggro.

I’ve never really understood the quest for fame. We all appreciate a level of respect and affirmation in our personal and professional lives — who doesn’t want an “attaboy” after doing a good job? — but craving celebrity is something else, and has always seemed a bit twisted to me. The lust for fame feels less like healthy ambition than a peculiar form of mental illness.

Seriously: take a good look at the odious Kardashian clan, then explain to me how any remotely normal adult could actually want to be a celebrity?

Granted, the famous rock stars of my youth seemed to enjoy a wonderful life with the most beautiful women, the best drugs, limo rides everywhere, never having to wait in line for anything, and every night on stage a high-octane, crank it up to eleven, balls-to-the-wall blast. What’s not to like about that? Nothing … while you’re young, but that’s a hard road to ride over the long haul. As the gone-too-soon members of the 27 Club might testify, there are very real perils to a life elevated by fame.

Then again, there’s the Ageless One, Keith Richards, who probably had more fun than all the rest of rockers and blues artists put together, then lived to tell the story and still plays a mean guitar. Go figure.

I never thought much about the true cost of fame until seeing a great documentary called Jimi Hendrix back in the early ‘70s.* Put together from concert footage and interviews with family and friends, that film absolutely blew my young mind, haunting me for days afterwards. Jimi’s talent was beyond belief, his star rising over the music world like the sun, relegating the reigning guitar gods of his era to the shadows: nobody else was even close. One of the film’s interviews was with Mick Jagger, who — speaking from experience — observed that attaining great fame shrinks your world. The only people you can still relate to and relax around are immediate family and your fellow rock ‘n roll royalty who live in the same gilded cage … because everyone outside those golden bars wants something from them. The rest of the world doesn’t care who they really are: to them a “rock star” is some kind of super-human who damned well better live up to the expectations of their fans.

I got to thinking about all this while listening to a podcast interview with Justine Bateman, an actress who came to fame on the show Family Ties, a huge hit back in the ‘80s. Being too busy working hard to build my own career at the time, I never saw the show, and had no clue who Justine Bateman is — but in the words of the podcast host, her book “Fame” examines our culture’s love/hate affair with those who’ve achieved extreme celebrity status.

I’ve never been particularly interested in hearing famous people complain about the downside of a life they chose and has rewarded them so handsomely — that strikes me as the ultimate First World Problem — but a line in the interview caught my ear:

“I wanted to explore that ephemeral mist that seems to come into a room when a famous person enters, and why that makes everybody adjust their posture and demeanor — and for some, to part ways with what they understand to be themselves.”

There’s a lot to that, because our culture really does have an unhealthy obsession with fame. If you doubt it, look no further than the White House, where a man who achieved nationwide fame as a Reality TV star now occupies the Oval Office, having made an unlikely ascent to power roughly akin to Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, the character Andy Griffith portrayed so memorably in the 1957 classic A Face in the Crowd.

A lesser-known film dissecting the high price of fame (among other things) is Peter Watkin’s Privilige, released in the late ‘60s. Watkins made a series of terrific docu-dramas back then (he may well have invented the genre), from the gritty Culloden to the utterly chilling The War Game, which won an Academy Award. Privilege tells the story of an English pop star whose orchestrated rise to fame establishes him as the cultural idol of an entire nation. At the peak of his power, he begins to question some aspects of his ascent and role as a national icon, then suffers a brutal fall in a modern incarnation of the Icarus myth. This is not some predictably bittersweet story like the various cinematic incarnations of “A Star is Born,” but a cautionary tale of how innocents can be used, abused, and cast aside by powers greater than any indiviual. In its own way, Privilege is just as scary as The War Game.

If you’re interested in film, you owe it to yourself to check out the groundbreaking work of Peter Watkins. It’s worth the effort.

And when it comes to fame, be careful what you wish for…

Image courtesy of Islay Stoutjesdyk

(Note: A version of this, which first posted shortly after I retired, is in the book)

It’s May of 1988, Oxford, Mississippi, a little after 8:00 in the morning as I weave down the red carpet hallway of a no-tell motel on the edge of town with a can of Budweiser clutched in one hand, utterly exhausted after another full night working a low-budget feature called Heart of Dixie. A month and a half of shooting day interiors and exteriors — six days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day — has brought us to the final three weeks of night filming. Every afternoon at 4:30 we report to the crew van outside the motel, then return well after sunup the following morning.

A chubby forty-something man walks toward me in the hallway, freshly showered and shaved in a beige off-the-rack suit, crisp white shirt, and navy blue tie. I figure him to be in sales of some sort — insurance, annuities, maybe office supplies — a world far from mine. He eyes me warily, his bifocals glinting in the overhead fluorescent lights as he wonders what and who the the hell I am.

I don’t blame him. He’s rested, well-scrubbed, and ready to tackle another day, while I sway gently from port to starboard in my dirty jeans, soiled sweatshirt, and tattered work boots, looking more like a homeless derelict who’s wandered in from the woods than a legitimate motel guest with a room key.

I drain the last of my beer, then crush the can in my hand as he hugs the wall to slide past, at which point I offer a loopy smile — the only facial expression I’m capable of summoning at the moment.

“How you doin’?” I ask, but it’s not a real question. How he’s doing is no business of mine, nor do I care … I’m just trying to put this nervous civilian at ease.

With a quick nod he’s gone, doubtless heaving a sigh of relief on his way to a heavily caffeinated breakfast. He’s got hands to shake, backs to slap, bad jokes to tell, and maybe a few commissions to make, and at the end of it — just about the time I’ll be yawning in the van with the rest of the grip/electric crew heading into another long night’s work — he’ll drive to the next town down the road, check in to another cheap motel, then call the wife and kids to tell them all about his busy day.

Well, good for him. My destination is the opposite direction: another beer followed by a hot shower, after which I’ll face-plant on the bed and pray the motel maid honors the “do not disturb” sign dangling from the doorknob — but first I have to confront the bathroom mirror and convince myself that this life is normal, despite the evidence staring back at me.

Image courtesy of Chase Northrip

Trouble is, there’s nothing remotely “normal” about any of this, because no matter how you look at it, working nights is a bitch.

For grip and electric, nights are a massive amount of work. We have to supply every bit of illumination required for every shot, which requires a truckload of lights and tons of cable. Big shows with fat budgets have a separate crew to rig and wrap location shoots for the first unit show boys, but a low-budget, non-union feature like this has just one crew — us — who exert a maximum effort to get the lights up and burning on set. Only when the filming commences can we gear down as the director, actors, and camera begin to grind through each scene.

Absent rain, snow, strong winds, or some other meteorological horror, the first half of working a night isn’t so bad — in fact, it’s kind of fun. Shooting days is typically a matter of establishing and maintaining the proper balance of light from one shot to the next within each scene, but lighting is everything on night shoots: without lights, as the saying goes, it’s radio. A well-lit night scene looks great, and is something to feel proud of.

The cast and crew dinner six hours after call comes as a welcome break, then it’s back to work again ... and that’s when the going gets tough. All too soon we enter the Dead Zone between 2:00 a.m. and dawn when time seems to stretch out like salt water taffy. My brain dulls, my hands become clumsy, and my boots feel like they weigh ten pounds each.

Deep in the Dead Zone, it seems like the night will never end.

Everybody gets through it in their own way. Some guzzle coffee at craft service, while others resort to a surreptitious snort of cocaine — and back in the ‘80s, there was always cocaine around during night shoots. Used sparingly, these stimulants aren’t a problem, but over-indulgence in either compounds the sleep-deprivation over the course of a week, and by the sixth night you’re a wreck. But drugs or not, nights induce a strangely altered state of reality: the set becomes a world unto itself as we work while the civilized world sleeps, further strengthening the sense of being in a cinematic circus, a tribal unit far apart from the rest of society.

Finally, just when the night begins to feel like an endless purgatory, the eastern sky morphs from black to gray with the approach of dawn, but now the pressure mounts to get the remaining shots done with darkness — and time — running out. In the worst-case scenario, this can lead to the absolute last thing any crew wants to hear:

“Tent it in, boys.”

This command means the grips have to surround the set with as many big blacks — 12-by-12s, 20-by-20s, whatever they’ve got —as necessary to block the offending rays of sunlight, thus preserving the illusion of darkness while leaving enough room for the camera and our lamps to do their work. I only had to suffer this a few times over my career, but friends who worked on Titanic told me that tenting-in as dawn broke was routine on that shoot. Jim Cameron was determined to get his shots no matter how much the crew had to suffer.

Auteur or asshole? Sometimes there’s not a dime’s worth of difference.

Other than extending an already long work night into the day, the worst thing about tenting-in is that it robs the crew of the one true joy in working nights: the endorphin rush that accompanies sunup, when a second-wind surge of energy carries us through wrap with a burst of crude humor and laughs fueled by relief at finally making the turn toward home. This is something you have to experience to understand and fully appreciate.

The last all-nighter I worked came nearly thirty years after Heart of Dixie wrapped, at the end of a week day-playing on an episodic called Criminal Minds. Our days started early and ended late, usually running around 14 hours, but the final day had a 4:30 p.m. call on Friday afternoon at Knott’s Berry Farm in Anaheim, fifty-five miles from my apartment. That meant a two-and-a-half hour drive to location through some of the worst traffic in America, then a long night of punishing labor followed by a huge wrap before the bleary-eyed drive home. That night really was a bitch, but by the end of it the whole crew was laughing in the warm rays of the rising sun.

Although I’m happy to be done with all that now, I really do miss the communal spirit and giddy sense of relief that came with enduring a grueling ordeal with a good crew. There’s nothing quite like that in retirement, and if all I have are memories of those times, that’ll just have to do.

Maybe it’ll be enough.

We were on our last shot after four hours of filming an episode of “Melissa & Joey” at CBS Radford in front of a packed studio audience. Shoot night on a multi-camera sitcom is usually fun — the energy of the live performance radiates out from the actors to affect the entire crew — but it’s also the end of a long work week, and the accumulated fatigue from all that concentrated effort can occasonally send the stress needle into the red. After endlessly lighting, adjusting, tweaking, and re-adjusting the lights under the verbal lash of our Director of Photography for five days, we were fully geared up to put this show in the can, and do it right … and more than ready for the weekend.

I take my place next to the lens of “C” camera — the third camera of four, each on a rolling platform called a “ped” — just a few feet from our lead actress, Melissa Joan Hart. My job is to keep a flashlight equipped with a long narrow tube (a “snoot”) aimed directly into her eyes, which are dark with make-up. This means holding the flashlight steady as a rock while moving with the camera as it glides from left/right or in/out, making sure the proper light intensity is maintained. Depending on the situation, I’ll push the flashlight in or pull it back as needed, or else cup two fingers of my left hand over the end of the snoot, holding them closer together to reduce the light, or spreading them apart to increase it. If done wrong, it’ll look like some fool is waving a spotlight around her face, so I concentrate on keeping that flashlight on target as our O.C.D.P. in the “Bat Cave” talks me through each take with a steady stream of patter via his walkie-talkie and my CIA-style security earphone.*

“Steady now … there you go… a little more — no, less, less… okay, now you’re cooking’ … that’s it, easy now, keep ‘er steady…”

This is a quiet, sensitive scene for which Melissa does some poignant emoting, but near the end of the shot, a big fat fly buzzes in out of nowhere and lands on her head, clearly visible on camera.

The DP’s voice crackles in my ear.

“There’s a fly on Melissa’s hair!” he yells.

The take has already been ruined by that fly, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so I keep the flashlight aimed into her eyes while watching the small creature walk around her blonde hair ... and that’s when the Best Boy’s voice comes through the earpiece.

“So, do you want us to light it?” she asks.

It’s all I can do to hold that damned flashlight steady and not burst out laughing.

The director yells “Cut!” — he finally spotted the fly — and we reset for another take while a PA waves the fly away.

I don’t know … maybe you had to be there and know the people involved, but that snarky reply from the Best Boy earned her the “Line of the Week” award, and had the entire lighting crew — all of us on the same walkie channel — in stitches.

And since our DP has a sense of humor, she didn’t get fired.

We got the shot in the next take, then came the curtain call, after which my fellow juicer and I spent the next 45 minutes in our man-lifts wrapping the lights from the swing sets before we all went home for the weekend.

And the fly? Who knows. We never saw it again.

* Obsessive Compulsive Director of Photography. The man has a great eye, but he’s never satisfied … he just runs out of time to keep lighting. The “Bat Cave” is a small darkened room where he sits with the Digitech man watching the feed from all four cameras on a $27,000 high-def OLED monitor.

Indeed

Making movies and television is hard work, involving long days and nights of seemingly endless toil, often in miserable conditions. Still, if there are plenty of bad days — and every show puts its crew through the wringer one way or another — we usually manage to have a pretty good time. Otherwise, I’m not sure there’d be a compelling reason to do this kind of work.

Although it can be a serious business involving tons of equipment, complicated logistics, and the relentless heat of top-down pressure, it’s all essentially make-believe. While cops, firemen, soldiers, and medical workers deal with very real danger and people in desperate trouble every day, we create elaborate illusions to portray a dramatically enhanced illusion of real-world life on screen. We can even make the work days of a lawyer appear sexy and dynamic — and from what I’ve been told by the lawyers I know, that’s a huge stretch of the truth. But for all the body-wracking effort, stress and sweat that it takes to create these illusions, working on set can be fun.

I was reminded of this by a co-worker who sent me a copy of a memo and response saved from her time working on the feature Charlie's Angels back in 2000. You’ll appreciate it more knowing that the term “L&D” stands for “Loss and Damages,” and that one of the film’s stars, Lucy Liu, apparently experienced a moment of confusion at the wheel of an expensive picture car during the filming.

The unofficial statute of limitations has probably long since expired, but I’m taking no chances: names have been redacted or shortened to protect innocent and guilty alike.

Here’s a little glimpse of life on a big, expensive movie.


“Charlies’ Angels”

To: All Crew Date: 3/23/00

Re: L&D

FYI: Loss and damage to date. We will occasionally update this list as necessary. Read it and weep.

Construction: $ 2,446.00
Set Operations: $ 238.00
Special Effects: $ 1,870.00
Set Dressing: $ 799.00
Props: $ 1,838.00
Wardrobe: $ 1,916.00
Electric: $ 6,769.00
Camera $ 1,786.00
Sound: 0
Transportation: $ 12,044.00
Picture Cars: $ 36,365.00
2nd Unit Camera: $ 396.00
2nd Unit Sound $ 1,407.00

Total: $ 67,874.00


You can imagine the bemused derision with which this memo was greeted by the crew. Some of the more creative among them wrote and distributed the following unofficial response.

Charlies’s Angels Semi-Annual Loss and Damages Tournament

To: All Below the Liners

Dear Foot Soldiers of BTL;

With the publishing of yesterday’s halftime results in the“CHARLIE’S ANGELS LOSS AND DAMAGES TOURNAMENT,” I would like to take a moment to warn our “Below the Line” teammates against fostering some false sense of security.

Although a midway total of $67,874.00 might sound impressive, you have to be one hamburger short of a Happy Meal to think we have a chance of matching our “Above the Liners” in the Total Funds Wasted Tourney. Facts are, we are being toasted by TEAM ATL. In order to avoid a complete rout, I offer a few simple observations.

First of all, Picture Cars and Transportation... you’ve put more points on the board than anyone else combined, but this is no time for gloating and showing off. By my loose calculations, Lucy “Where’s the Brake” Liu would have to ram at least 20 more Gullwing Mercedes into at least 20 more collector Ferraris to match the $2,000,000 in overruns due to scheduling difficulties incurred by hiring her in the first place. “Above the Liners” have outscored you 40 to 1, so wipe that silly grin off your face!!! Word around the TEAM ATL water cooler is that you guys are strictly bush league.

To the slackers in the Sound Department. What gives? Looking past the big game to the Oscars???? Willie, Marv, Bob... where’s your enthusiasm!!!!! My suggestion... by merely pouring one measly cappuccino over the sound equipment you can up your L&D contributions to $23,000. I know this pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of dollars we will willingly spend next week shooting scenes at the Gala that will never even be in the movie, but hey, what the hell. You guys have coughed up nothin’ but goose eggs. I want to see some points on the board... Now, Dammit!!!!!

To the rest of you... what can I say? The truth is never easy, but we may not have the gray matter or guts to start a multi-million dollar production that has no viable third act, thus paying millions of dollars to a small army of “$800,000 a pop” writers to “fix it” while the production paints itself into a corner and stalls daily as scenes get made up “on the fly.” Fact is, we’ve been routed from the field. The 68,000 points we’ve managed to muster is a drop in the ocean to the TEAM ATL juggernaut. We must have been dreaming to take the field against a team whose motto is “GO BIG OR GO HOME.”

Remember, the winners move onto face an imposing opponent in the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2 production team.

That crew knew how to have some fun while sticking a retaliatory shiv between the ribs of a UPM who saw fit to point out the relatively minor financial damages incurred by the below-the-line crew, while conveniently ignoring the truckloads of money squandered by those higher up the food chain.

Well played, ladies and gentlemen: it makes me wish I’d been on that crew.

***********************************************

PS: A brief 2026 addendum here, underlining the current reality of working in Hollywood. I’d have thought being a successful writer with several shows under one’s belt might be enough to keep a guy working, but — like Bogey’s “Rick Blaine” in Casablanca — I was misinformed.

(photo courtesy of Maysles Films)

“Making a film isn’t finding the answer to a question, it’s trying to capture life as it is.”

Albert Maysles

The name “Albert Maysles” might not mean much to the current generation of film students, but Albert and his brother David were a big deal when I was studying film. They’d made their mark with Salesman, a gritty documentary following door-to-door bible salesmen, then went on to make — among many other docs — Gimme Shelter, which focused on the drama surrounding a free concert the Rolling Stones put on for the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969, where four people died among the vast crowd of 300,000, including a man murdered by the Hell’s Angels. Taking place on a chilly Saturday in December, Altamont was a dark book-end to a year that saw the first man walk on the moon, the legendary good vibes of the Woodstock festival in New York State, the beginning of the Chicago Eight trial, the Manson murders in Los Angeles, then culminated in that long, cold day in the bleak rolling hills hills east of San Francisco.

If Woodstock marked the cultural high point of the late‘60s, Altamont put an emphatic end to it, driving a wooden stake through the heart of the “peace-and-love” era.*

This obituary from the NYT offers a sketch of the Maysles’ life, career, and filmography. The streaming services of our Brave New Digital World enable a few documentary filmmakers to scrape out a living nowadays, but docs were art house curiosities back in the ‘70s. In those days, most movie goers flocked to their local multiplex to hoover down a giant tub of hot buttered popcorn and half gallon of Coke while watching the latest technicolor offerings from Hollywood, not to sit through a documentary shot on grainy black and white 16 mm film. Documentary filmmakers had to scramble to survive, so the Maysles Brothers helped finance their production company by making television commercials. I worked on two that they shot in the LA area back in the early ‘80s: a spot for Kal Kan dog food and another for Business Week magazine.

Albert and David came across as thoughtful and reserved, but were very nice guys with a great sense of humor. They were patient men — an essential quality for any documentary film-maker. With a camera on his shoulder while perched on a chair, apple box, or big, jagged rock in an open field, Albert would roll whenever his instincts dictated as David cajoled the appropriate answers from a variety of civilian dog trainers for that Kal Kan spot. I’ll never forget walking into the home of one trainer out near Riverside just as a Whippet sailed past my head above eye level, all four legs canted off to one side like a biker performing serious aerials at the X Games. I was six feet tall, but had to look up to follow the flight of that dog.

That’s one of the cool things about this ridiculous business: you get out in the world and see things most people don’t. It’s not always pretty or pleasant, but sometimes it blows your mind.

We made the long drive out to Edwards Air Force Base for the Business Week spot, there to film the CEO of Rockwell pontificating under the wing of one of four B-1 bombers then in existence. The B-1 program had been cancelled by President Carter, leaving only those four prototypes, one of which was wheeled out of the hanger as a backdrop for the commercial.**

I’d been fascinated by airplanes and rockets while growing up, so that day at Edward’s AFB was like a little kid being set loose in Disneyland. Everywhere I looked, another jet would come blasting by every few minutes — an A-10 Warthog practicing loops, rolls, and simulated attack runs on ground targets, an F-15 doing full-power vertical S-curve climbs, and an F-104 Starfighter flashing past on a low-altitude speed run.

It felt like they were putting on a show just for me.

The B-1 was a sleek, dark death machine, with all the form-follows-function beauty of a Great White Shark. We set up the camera and lights under the wings, then waited for the talent to arrive. And waited, and waited … which was fine by me, since I was happy watching all those jets flying overhead. The camera assistant, however — a thin young man who bore an uncanny resemblance to the youthful Leon Trotsky — became restless, and decided to snap a few pictures with a tiny 35 mm camera that looked a lot like something a spy might carry. He wandered back under the rear of the plane, then framed a picture of the jet engine’s exhaust nozzles.

Seconds later, four heavily armed security police raced up in a jeep to confront the assistant, demanding to know what the fuck he was doing and why. A long, earnest discussion ensued, during which the producer finally managed to convince them that our camera assistant was not in fact a Soviet agent working for the KGB.

I run into this assistant every now and then — he still shakes his head at the memory of that day.

The public radio program Fresh Air re-ran a short-but-sweet interview with Albert conducted in 1987, which offers insights to the man as a cinematographer and film-maker. I wish it was longer — at only ten minutes, the interview is twenty minutes too short for me — but it’s worth a listen.

The photo above (from the Maysle’s website) is how I’ll remember Albert: slightly owlish behind those big glasses, always with a bemused, engaging smile. He was good man and a great filmmaker, and like so many of his passing generation, he’ll be missed.

Albert Maysles, November 26, 1926 -- March 5, 2015


*I was at Altamont all the way to the bloody end — just another human cork bobbing along that great seething mass of alcohol and drug infused humanity. It was one memorable day.

** Ronald Reagan later cancelled Carter’s cancellation, and the B-1 bomber remains in service to this day.

An appropriate, albeit dated, representation of the above the line/below the line dynamic.

You hear it at every level of society: “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” Whether seeking employment flipping burgers at the local Golden Arches, as a CEO steering a major corporation, or to snag a seat in Congress, it helps to be connected — and there’s no more fundamental connection than blood.

Family takes care of its own.

A universal truth in the film industry, above and below the line, is that relationships — connections — are crucial to opening doors that would otherwise remain locked. Whether you’re a wannabe grip, juicer, actor, director, or producer, you can’t do it alone. An unknown screenwriter with the world’s greatest script will get nowhere without the help of someone who can open those doors, and even then, odds are some grinning hyena in a three thousand dollar suit will take the credit, leaving that young writer sadder but wiser to the bruising, dog-eat-dog nature of life in Hollywood.

Those born to film industry royalty have it easier. Laura Dern, Jane and Peter Fonda, Jeff and Beau Bridges, and Michael Douglas are among those for whom the doors opened with relative ease, as are Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson, Mariska Hargitay, Dakota Johnson, Wyatt Russell, and Jack Huston — along with most of the Skarsgård clan — but each of them still had to deliver in front of the lights and cameras. A famous name may grant entrance to the arena, but the hard work of building a successful career remains to be done.

Having spent forty years working down in the trenches, I can’t tell you much about the breezy opulance of life above the line. Word has it that trust is a rare commodity up on deck, a zero-sum world where success for one usually spells failure for somebody else. The quick, thin smiles in the executive suites are not meant to convey warmth or affection, but to mask the shake-your-hand/stab-your-back reality that comes with playing for high-stakes. In such a Darwinian jungle, the biggest and baddest — or the most clever and devious — rule, while a swarm of minions ceaselessly jockey to acquire and maintain position at their feet.

Or so I hear, anyway.

Who you know certainly matters below decks, where connections tend to be tribal. The hierarchy among those who do the heavy lifting on set is not unlike that of our primate cousins in the jungle, with camera, set lighting, and grip crews each run by a department head — the Silverback — whose blessing is required to join the tribe. There’s room at the feeding trough for those lacking blood ties so long as they work hard to forge the bonds necessary to remain by the fire and out of the cold: the I’ll-scratch-your-back, you-scratch-mine rituals that bind most societies. These range from subtle to brutally straightforward. I knew one Key Grip who insisted that his crew work an occasional weekend repairing and maintaining equipment on his grip truck, which he’d then rent to production companies on each job. In a stark quid pro quo, his crew wasn’t paid for their maintenance labor, nor did they receive a cut of the rental income, but they got hired to work the gigs … and refusing to participate wasn’t an option. Another Key consistently refused the excellent catered lunches provided by the production companies — which he referred to as “beautiful people food” — instead demanding that he and his crew be brought burgers, fries, and cokes from the nearest McDonalds. His grips knew better than to join the rest of us at the lunch tables where the good food was: as in the jungle, the penalty for crossing a Silverback can be harsh.

Most working relationships on set are more casual. A Director of Photography, Gaffer, or Key Grip needs a crew that takes the job seriously, does it right, and won’t cause needless problems on set, which allows him or her to relax knowing they won’t screw up. That’s one reason it’s hard for newcomers to crack the starting lineup of any crew. Unless a newbie comes with solid recommendations from within the tribe, the department head is reluctant to give them a shot.

Connections matter.

Working with a good crew offers the very real satisfaction of doing teamwork quickly and well, but toiling on a bad crew plagued by incompetent, fractious, or lazy individuals is like doing prison time. One bad apple really can make life miserable for everyone else, and if the jerk happens to be related to the boss, there’s not much to do but take up the slack where necessary, endure the job with all the professionalism you can muster, then try to make sure your next gig is with a different crew.

Still, there’s a self-correcting dynamic that tends to limit the tenure of truly bad crew members. Most Hollywood freelancers are only as good as their last few jobs, including department heads, who can’t afford to risk future employment prospects by hiring a problematic crew. Among other things, a department head is judged by how quickly their crew gets the work done, and how smoothly they interact with the other departments, including the production staff. A production manager remembers a crew that’s fast, pleasant, and makes no unnecessary waves — but a crew that mouths-off, squabbles with other departments, and makes endless petty demands will also be remembered. As one Gaffer I worked for put it: “No flies on electric,” meaning that any of his crew who made a habit of screwing up or caused needless problems would soon be gone.

Having connections makes a difference, but if you don’t consistently deliver on the job, only the most gold-plated family connections will keep you employed. Over the long run, who you know doesn’t matter as much as what you know: your performance on set, and how gracefully you handle the pressures and frustrations endemic to film industry work. To thrive as a free-lancer, you need to know what you’re doing and have good connections — and the former creates the latter. A solid worker with a professional attitude earns a reputation that helps build the web of connections essential to success, while a lazy or obnoxious jerk who relies upon family loyalties to remain employed often leaves a trail of burning bridges in his wake. Once a bad reputation has been earned, it’s almost impossible to shed.

The value of maintaining good connections as your career unfolds is obvious, but connections mean a lot near the end of a career as well. Like a shark that must continually move forward to maintain the flow of oxygenated water through its gills, industry free-lancers have to stay near the top of their game to keep working, and even that isn’t always enough. The wisdom that comes with age and experience may be respected on set, but it only goes so far — “gray-listing” is a fact of Hollywood life. Without strong connections, the older worker who’s lost a step or two is in a difficult situation. Although it might not add up to a bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They? scenario, when your phone stops ringing, it no longer matters who or what you know — you’re done.

And you’re usually the last to know.

“Nepotism: favoritism shown to a relative (as by giving an appointive job) on a basis of relationship.”

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary

(Note: This is another dusty item from the archives, circa 2008 — reworked, of course.)

Nepotism — the clannish ritual of jobs being doled out via family connections — has long been rife in the film and television industry. Although the term “nepo babies” had yet to enter the social lexicon when I rode into Hollywood back in 1977, it was no secret that the tendrils of familial favoritism extended from the top levels of craft unions and guilds down through the roots and into the very groundwater that feeds the industry. Nepotism is more than a stubborn weed thriving under the hot LA sun: it’s a basic fact of industry life.

One of my early sitcoms — which lasted just half a season before the network pulled the plug and kicked us off the sound stage — employed the usual set lighting crew of a gaffer, best boy, dimmer operator, and two juicers. The father of my fellow juicer had spent decades in set lighting before retiring as a gaffer. The dimmer operator’s dad was a career grip, the best boy’s father was a studio teamster, and the gaffer grew up watching his dad pound out screenplays, one after another, in the shadow of Warner Brother’s Studio in Burbank. Our Director of Photography — sitting atop the camera/grip/electric crew pyramid — got his first union card with the help of his father and uncle, both long time members of IATSE local 728.

I was the odd man out: the only one who didn’t grow up in Southern California with family connections to the industry.

Nepotism — blood lines dictating who wins or loses — feels like the kind of underhanded practice our ancestors thought they’d left behind in fleeing the class-stratified, socially sclerotic world of 17th century Europe. It seems un-American, conjuring up images of weak-chinned, under-qualified twits being promoted over square-jawed, hard-working men whose only fault is not being related to the boss. According to Sanctified Myth, that sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen in America, where anyone by dint of his or her own hard work can become a success … but here as elsewhere, myth and reality walk opposite sides of the street.

I came to detest the word “nepotism” during my early years in Hollywood, working whatever non-union gigs I could land — jobs that offered no protection or benefits beyond a flat-rate paycheck at the end of the day. Eventually I was able to join NABET, a small union whose members worked mostly on television commercials, which meant I could finally get overtime when working over ten hours a day, and had health insurance for the first time since leaving school. Meanwhile, the big union — the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, which handled big-budget feature films and the vast majority of television shows — remained out of reach until NABET merged with IATSE in 1992, which at last got me an IA card … but even that wasn’t quite enough. While Local 80 allowed their newly minted grips from NABET to work under the IA contract and accrue benefits, the dinosaurs who ran Local 728 back then followed their long tradition of Jurassic-era obstructionism by refusing to grant NABET members “roster status” — without which we couldn’t work union jobs — until we’d logged thirty days of union work. Thus we were caught in a classic Catch 22, required to pay union dues to maintain membership without being allowed to take union jobs: a twist of the knife that was damned near enough to make a mild-mannered guy go postal.

The only way around this was to land a non-union show that “turned” — signed a union contract with IATSE after production commenced — or accumulate thirty days of work as a “permit” over the course of twelve months. When the industry is so busy that all eligible union members are working, studios and production companies are allowed to hire off the street — this has long been the traditional route into the industry — but accruing those thirty days can be a steep hill to climb. I heard many stories over the years of permits being laid off a day or two short of the goal. Indeed, it happened to me in the early ‘80s: after logging twenty eight days working as a permit grip at Warner Brothers, I was handed a yellow lay-off slip.

Close, but no cigar, kid — maybe next year. Cue the backstage laughter.

Three years after the merger, I did a television movie that turned union mid-stream, and at the ripe old age of 45 — a good twenty years later than most career juicers — finally got roster status allowing me to work IA jobs. It was only then, shoulder-to-shoulder with members of various family dynasties, that I realized how deeply nepotism is rooted in the bedrock of the industry — and I learned to be careful what I said at work. In a business where many people are related, loose talk can put you in the doghouse.

I also learned something else: nepotism will get you in the door, but it won’t keep you inside if you don’t perform.* Working below-the-line is a punishing business where the hours are long, the physical demands relentless, and working conditions can be atrocious. Anybody who thinks working on movies is a glamorous endeavor ought to ponder the reality of slaving all night in a driving rain, muscling heavy cables charged with enough pulsing electricity to vaporize steel, all the while moving and re-adjusting extremely hot movie lamps — and doing it until the sun finally rises to put an end to the misery. The money can be good for a job that doesn’t require a formal education (and certainly not a college degree), but this work isn’t for everybody. Still, people flock from all over the country to Hollywood every year, hell bent on getting into “the movies,” most without a clue what they’re in for.

One of them was me. Like so many who’ve rolled into Tinsel Town fresh off the turnip truck, mine was a face-first, sink-or-swim education in the realities of industry life. Clueless but motivated, I worked long and hard to build a good reputation, and in the process, began to understand what those before me had long since learned: talk is cheap. It’s easy to say you’ll work your butt off doing whatever it takes to make progress in the business, but actually doing it is something else. Industry veterans have good reason to regard the earnest-but-ignorant enthusiasm of young wannabes with such a thoroughly jaundiced eye. After taking my lumps for a few years, it dawned on me why I’d been greeted with such naked, lip-curling skepticism by the old-timers: you don’t know ‘til you know … and then you know.

Industry kids grow up unencumbered by starry-eyed fantasies of life in the movie biz: they know exactly what the industry is, what it expects, and how much will be demanded of them — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and if scaling the walls of Hollywood from the outside is tough, sliding in under the wing of nepotism is no walk in the park. Every father’s son who enters the business has a reputation to live up to — or live down. If his dad was a good worker, the kid will have to work even harder to prove himself, but if the old man had bad habits — and a fair number of the older generation were raging alcoholics — his son will need to make a sustained effort to overcome the bias that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Many of the true legends of the biz, actors and crew alike, were known for burning the candle hot and bright at both ends. Stepping into the oversize shoes of such a legend can be a daunting task.

Unlike outsiders who leave the eternally contentious father/son dynamic at home, an industry kid often ends up working alongside his dad, learning the nuts-and-bolts of the trade from a hard-driving father who never seems to tire of reminding his son that he damn well better not embarrass the old man. Learning under the weight of such expectations is a bruising process, but out of this crucible comes the backbone of the industry: solidly-trained pros who know how to do the job right, do it safely, and do it fast. Workers like these make everyone around them better, and in the process, save time and money for production companies in a hundred unseen and typically unappreciated ways. It’s all part of being a professional.

Things don’t always work out quite so neatly, of course — some industry sons come into the biz bitter, then live out their entire careers with a bad attitude. They’re a drag on everyone around them, making long work days even longer, but few of these bad apples rise high enough to do much real damage.

They’re the proverbial exceptions who prove the equally proverbial rule.

Nepotism will never shed the stigma of being inherently unfair, but among the ranks below the line, it serves a purpose. The ongoing evolution of the digital arena poses a challenge to everyone working in Hollywood, above and below the line, with no clear endgame in sight. Still, one constant will remain: so long as workers are needed to do the heavy lifting that puts television and movies up on the screen, nepotism will be part of the process.

* And the same applies above the line.

Next week — Part Two: Who You Know or What You Know?

This Trojan horse meme has been drifting around the internet for several years now, and recently surfaced over at Crew Stories on FB and Instagram. If you’re in the biz and haven’t yet tuned in to Crew Stories, you should rectify that oversight. There’s all kinds of good stuff there, including a recent post that asked for stories of Bad Things that happened when innocent civilians were seduced by the lure of Hollywood’s “easy money” to allow filming in their house. A flood of funny/horrifying tales flowed in — here are a few samples:

Lighting attached a few too many lights to a massive chandelier in the main house of a VERY fancy ranch. Chandelier dropped onto a huge glass table and both shattered.

Filming in a multi-million dollar mansion where the upstairs was blocked off to crew, but someone went up and used the bathroom anyway, clogging the toilet and causing it to flood, resulting in 6 figures worth of damages

Filming nights at a mansion where the electricians didn’t feel like using plywood when moving the condors. They destroyed the concrete walkways costing over $100k to replace.

ANIMAL TRAINER: “We will be having a tiger in the kitchen and it’s declawed.” AD: “Locations, please come inside the house.” Claw marks all over the wood floors. ME: “I thought you said the tiger was declawed?!?” ANIMAL TRAINER: “he is, but only the front claws.”

Burned a 117 year old church to the ground.

Was doing a commercial where we had a bunch of pigs running around a multi million dollar house. Yes, real, live pigs. We even put one in the chandelier. Locations learned that pig hooves sprinting on hardwood floors equals the homeowner getting their floors refinished. None of the neighbors understood why there was such loud squealing at all hours of the day.

In a fancy mansion filming a reality show, the executive producer started yelling at a PA causing him to panic and drag a stone plant stand across an expensive wood floor. Had to be replaced. That was a $10,000 mistake.

We did a one-week shoot in a a newly renovated home. Grips used screws that were too long on the plywood under the dance floor, and carved up the beautiful wooden floors while sliding it around. Then we collapsed a kitchen cabinet with the weight of the lights on top of them. Grass and landscaping gone, carved into mud, and to top it off, the DP used the bathroom upstairs (which was off limits to crew) on a Friday at wrap. The toiled clogged, flooded, and water ran for the whole weekend, so Monday morning the kitchen ceiling was on the floor, the water still running.

A pig in a chandelier … now THAT’s a compelling image.

On and on the horror stories go. It’s not that film crews barge into rented locations like Visigoths hell-bent on destruction, but in a business where time = money, and shoehorning an ambitious shooting schedule into a day or two is often problematic, bad things can happen.

Once upon a time I worked a beer commercial in Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine in the midst of a hot LA summer. The grips set up a 12-by-12 black over video village to shade the director and producers, but it was a breezy day, so when we broke for lunch, they set the frame flat on the grass and secured it with sandbags. By the time we were back from lunch forty-five minutes later, the hot sun beating down on that black — all 144 square feet of it — had thoroughly cooked the lush green grass underneath … and the key grip knew it.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

The full extent of the damage wasn’t apparent by the time we wrapped, but when I tuned in a Dodger game on TV over the weekend, there was a 12-by-12 patch of dead brown grass near the on-deck circle.

Oops.

My contribution to that Crew Stories post was in a similar vein.

Doing a commercial on location, one of our new production assistants named “Dave” was assigned to take the case of walkie-talkies home and charge them overnight for the next day’s work. Apparently he set the case on the electric stove in his kitchen — God knows why — then took a shower, and it seems one of the burners was on. By the time he’d dried off and changed into clean clothes, the case was melting and the walkies ruined, thus earning him the name “Chef Dave.”

The next day’s work was in the living room of an older home in a nice area of LA, where “Chef Dave” and the other production assistants diligently taped layout board over a hardwood floor before we brought our lighting, grip, and camera gear inside. The floor had recently been refinished, with the caveat that the wood was now too thin to be refinished again — if damaged, it would have to be replaced. At wrap, “Chef Dave” helped pull apart the layout boards for removal using his razor knife, thus ruining that brand new floor and costing the production company another $8000. Needless to say, we never saw Chef Dave on set again.

My guess is he’s probably an executive producer by now.

The lesson in all this is clear: you should never — NEVER — allow a film crew to work in your house. The location manager will dangle a tempting sum in front of you, swearing on a stack of bibles that “We’ll be very careful, and of course any damage will be repaired.” He or she doubtless means well, and might even believe those words, but there’s a reason the bumper sticker “Shit Happens” was created — and seldom does shit happen more often than when a film crew is involved.

Stand firm, ignore temptation, and “just say no.”

You’ll be glad you did … and sorry if you don’t.

(Image courtesy of Crew Stories)

I stood at the craft service table contemplating the selection of donuts arrayed before me, feeling like a horny “john” eyeing the lineup of baby-dolled hookers in one of those pay-for-play pleasure palaces that have made Nevada a destination for male tourists from all over the world.

“How may we fulfill your desires, sir?” cooed the Donut Madam in my head. “We have glazed, chocolate, jelly, powdered sugar, candy-sprinkled, or plain.”

Decisions, decisions … which of these high-fructose, trans-fat-laden, artery-clogging heart attack bombs did I desire?

“Desire” is too strong a word, really. After all, they were just donuts, not a bevy of scantily-clad young beauties ready to fulfill my every carnal fantasy in exchange for a fistful of cash – or credit, so I’m told – and having downed a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and hash browns from the breakfast spread barely an hour before, I wasn’t the least bit hungry. Still, that didn’t stop me from taking a long look before I chose a lovely glazed donut. Calories and cholesterol be damned.

Making movies and television is a tedious endeavor. The cameras can’t roll until everything is exactly right, so each department works hard and fast to get their ducks all lined up, then steps back as another department takes its turn in the barrel. This is a time-consuming process, and given the watchful-waiting nature of the job, the temptation to graze at the craft service table – hungry or not – is powerful. Truth be told, we stuff our faces more out of boredom than hunger, which is one reason a few veteran crew members resemble Fatty Arbuckle more than Brad Pitt.

Civilians get excited at the prospect of visiting a film set, but are usually disappointed at what they find: rather than witness a thrilling car chase, gun battle, or massive explosion, they see a group of people wearing tool belts working with odd, unfamiliar equipment. When the camera finally rolls, the result is anticlimactic — a line or two of dialog followed by several re-takes, then the cycle begins again. It’s a slow, painstaking process that holds all the drama of watching paint dry.

Still, one thing never fails to amaze and enthrall visitors: the cornucopia of comestibles arrayed on the craft service table. The offerings vary in quantity and quality from job to job, but even in its most elemental low-budget form, craft service represents free food, the most basic and irresistible of perks. A variety of snacks are provided for those working on set – some healthy, most not – along with coffee, soft drinks, and water. Meal breaks are required every six hours, but the craft service table takes up the slack in the meantime.

Like so many things in life, this is a double-edged sword. One of my three struggles with dependency over the years came in the form of an uphill battle against “Nutter Butters,” a devilishly mouthwatering blend of peanut butter and edible industrial polymers formulated to tantalize my taste buds while neutralizing my dietary defenses. What Kryptonite was to Superman, Nutter Butters were to me. Back in my fat and happy years working on television commercials, the craft service tables were well stocked with these deadly cookies, which I inhaled at a pace that would put Jabba the Hut to shame, and eventually I came to resemble the Hut himself. While back on the Home Planet over the Christmas holidays that year, my mother appraised me with a critical eye, then gently poked a finger into the flabby spare tire around my waist.

“My, you’re getting portly, aren’t you?” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

Portly … the word pierced my heart like Ahab’s harpoon. “Portly” was for middle-aged insurance salesmen with their placid, cud-chewing wives, three wailing kids, and a four-bedroom house in the suburbs. “Portly” was the working stiff who plunks down in front of the TV with a six-pack and a fistful of Slim Jims after another suffocating day down at the plant. “Portly” was the pear-shaped presence of Robert Morley in “The African Queen,” Sidney Greenstreet in “The Maltese Falcon,” Orson Welles in “Touch of Evil,” and Alfred Hitchcock surreptitiously eyeing another blond starlet on set.

I’d been skinny as a rail all my life: six feet tall and barely a hundred and fifty pounds according to my 1980 driver’s license. Sure, that was ten years out of date, but no way could I be considered “portly” — until an unflinching look in the mirror confirmed my mother’s diagnosis, and that if anything, she’d been diplomatically polite. I stepped on the scale and watched all those Nutter Butters peg the needle at a hundred and ninety pounds. In the bleak glare of the bathroom light, my pale, doughy body resembled Melville’s Great White Whale itself. That was all I needed to see — the shock of that moment imbued me with the strength to resist the seductive petrochemical delights of Nutter Butters from then on.

Not that it was easy. Swearing off Nutter Butters proved almost as hard as quitting cigarettes ten years before, but it paid off as fifteen pounds melted away over the next year. “Rail-thin” might remain forever in the time capsule of 1980, but at least I was no longer “portly.”

The free-lance life below the line is one of a hunter-gatherer, riding the roller coaster of Hollywood’s feast or famine existence. Driven by the knowledge that the current job won’t last forever, we grab what we can while we can, and — along with the usual swarm of extras — raid the craft service table like sharks gorging on the bloated carcass of a dead whale. If you serve it, we will come, because God only knows when the next job/paycheck/free meal will happen.

The spread at craft service depends a show’s budget. While working on a hit like Will & Grace, those treats were very good indeed, and they just kept coming. Lower budget shows offered less enticing treats, and when it’s the same stale bagels, BBQ chips, and diet sodas day after day, ignoring the craft service table is a lot easier.

I can’t recall the absolute worst craft service table I ever came across — and there have been some bad ones — but the worst lunch is burned into my memory. Our first day of filming a low-budget non-union feature titled “Full Moon High” took place at a high school in the San Fernando Valley. We broke at the mandated six-hour mark to find “lunch” waiting atop a folding table: a jar of mayonnaise, a squeeze bottle of mustard, two loaves of Wonder Bread, and a few packages of supermarket cold cuts. The paper plates and napkins were already blowing away in the hot wind.

This would have been a weak offering on the craft service table of a micro-budget feature, but for lunch? No. Fucking. Way.

The Screaming Cameraman was not amused, and immediately launched an intense high-decibel assault in the face of our suddenly backpedaling producer/director. By the time the screaming stopped, we had a firm promise this would not happen again.

Which, to his credit, it didn’t.

Having banished the Nutter Butter demon back to the highly-processed Hell from whence it came — and finally able to maintain a steady 175-to-180 pounds — I had the craft service demon under control. Still, while playing out the string of my career in the relatively low-stress backwater of multi-camera sitcoms, I’d stop at crafty every afternoon for a cup of coffee laced with sugar+cream, and whatever cookie looked good.

A coffee and cookie — no big deal, right?

Two years later I pulled the plug on Hollywood and paddled in to the sunny beach of retirement, where no craft service table could tempt me … and two years after that, found that I’d dropped another twenty pounds with no effort whatsoever, going from a size 38 waist back to 35 inches.

I guess the little things really do add up after all.

A 6:00 a.m. call in Malibu means a blaring alarm clock at 4:30, then crawling into my work clothes, staggering to the car, and making the thirty minute drive to Santa Monica, where Interstate 10 makes a sharp right turn as it morphs into California State Route One. I head on up the coast for another half hour to arrive at crew parking with minutes to spare, then slurp a cup of very bad coffee before climbing into the passenger vans with the rest of the crew to be driven all the way back to … Santa Monica.

Sometimes this business makes no sense at all.

We’re in the midst of three weeks shooting pickups for Showtime’s sapphic soap opera The L Word, which films in Vancouver — doubling for LA — but makes the pilgrimage to Southern California every summer to crank out scenes needed for several episodes in recognizable LA locations. I have no idea what the show schedule is like up in Canada, but these pick-up shoots wring every last drop of blood from the cinematic turnip, each day a bruising march from well before sunrise to long after dark. This is the third summer I’ve worked this gig, where the days often involve four locations and three company moves over the course of 16 to 17 hours — and many of these are heavy locations, with tons of cable and a truckload of lamps.

The saving grace is that we’re getting full union scale, so these long days mean fat paychecks at a time when too many shows in Hollywood pay the cheap-ass cable rate of 20% under scale, with double-time only after we’ve worked 14 hours.

Cable rate sucks — I hate it.

Back in Santa Monica, we prepare to shoot a series of “walk and talks” — long walking dialogue scenes — in Palisades Park, a thin strip of grass graced with tall slender palm trees at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway. We don’t need much lighting here — it’s just me, the senior juicer, wearing a battery belt to power a Sun Gun held high behind the camera to brighten the actors faces — so the rest of our crew is driven back to Malibu to rig the next location.

The long, busy morning stretches well past noon before we pack up and hop in the van to Malibu, where a catered lunch is being served an hour-and-a-half late. The effects of our early wake up were now being felt — everybody is dragging. Shoots like this are a serious grind during which you’re always tired, but you just keep going, putting one foot in front of the other. That’s the job.

Exhausted and famished, I inhale lunch, then am headed for a quick nap when one of the rigging crew stops me.

“Sleep later,” she says. “You’ve gotta see this.”

I follow her reluctantly, tracing the cable she’d helped run from the generator through a well-manicured garden, then around a sprawling two-story house into the back yard where I behold this … the sheer beauty of which damned near drops me to my knees.

For a moment I feel like one of the mortals of Greek mythology who’s been transported to the playground of the gods in Olympus.

“So this is how the other half lives,” I mutter.

“Yep,” she nods. “Must be nice.”

I can’t help wondering what it would be like to live here, to swim in that pool each afternoon, and enjoy the serenity of this view every day. Would I become bored after a while, missing the good old days of life amid the car alarms, traffic, and the relentless din of police helicopters carving angry circles in the sky — the cacophony of the city — in my Hollywood apartment?

I’ll never know. We’re here to look, not touch, so none of us will be diving into this lovely infinity pool today or any day. Instead, we work another ten hours into the night before making the long drive home, then catch a few hours sleep before getting up in the pre-dawn dark to do it all over again in a different location.

It’s just another day in Hollywood.

P.S. Yes, it’s Oscar Sunday, so … whoop-de-do. I’ve had my say on the old blog— several times, actually — about Hollywood’s annual exercise in self-congratulation, and won’t repeat myself here. If you’re interested, here’s my first take on the Oscars from the Wayback Machine.

Highway 14 overpass after the Northridge quake.

(Note: This might make more sense if you’ve read Part One)

In the pre-dawn dark of January 17, 1994, an LAPD motorcycle officer raced south on Highway 14 toward a city that had just been rocked to its core by eight seconds of 6.7-on-the-Richter-scale shaking from the Northridge earthquake. Scores of people were dead or dying, many thousands more injured, and countless buildings turned to rubble, but the road ahead was clear, enabling him to speed through the darkness as fast as his motorcycle’s headlight would allow. He had no clue that the quake had collapsed an overpass ahead, and by the time he understood what had happened, it was too late: Clarence Wayne Dean, age 46, plunged into the yawning void and was killed.

I’ve thought about that poor bastard many times in the years since, but never more than now, when — in a figurative sense — something similar is happening to Hollywood, where thousands of skilled workers are plummeting into the abyss of a new reality brought about by tectonic shifts in the foundation of the film industry. As US productions chase incentives (read: bribes) overseas, and domestic production moves toward the brave new world of AI, thousands of people who’ve worked hard to master skills that kept them working through good times and bad now find themselves in free fall. What happens when you’re 50 years old — twelve years from being able to tap your union pension and/or Social Security — with a mortgage to pay and family to support in a town that no longer values, needs, or wants your hard-earned skills?1

That’s a brutal place to be.

Every revolution leaves blood in the streets, and Hollywood’s shift toward digital is no exception. The guilds and unions will fight it, but that’s like yelling at the ocean to stop the incoming tide — and there’s an ocean of money betting on AI. I doubt the downsizing of below-the-line crafts will be be total — production crews will continue to work on set into the future — but if I was a young person looking to plant my flag in Hollywood, I wouldn’t aim for a career working on set any more than I’d seek a job shoveling coal on a steam-powered locomotive.

Humans are adept at meeting the challenge of new circumstances — otherwise we’d never have survived a world full of predators without the aid of sharp fangs, razor-like claws, raw speed, or powerful muscles. We don’t even have fur to survive bitterly cold winters, yet here we are, 3.5 million years after descending from the trees, driving around in cars while yakking on cell phones, because we’re good at adapting. When a veteran key grip I’d worked with on a number of shows saw the writing on the wall, he shifted gears and became a real estate agent. A fellow juicer upgraded his training and now installs electrical panels and wiring in new houses and remodels. Adapting isn’t easy or fun, but people rarely do it by choice: they do it to survive.

So where does that leave young people hoping for a career in the film and television industry? Every major workplace shift since the invention of the wheel has created new and different jobs while wiping out the old, and AI is no exception — the emerging digital technology will offer many opportunities for those with the aptitude and appropriate skills — but how long will those new jobs last before they too are swallowed by AI? Will these cycles of creative destruction start coming at us so fast that only the machines can keep up?

Nobody knows, nor do we yet understand how all-encompassing AI might turn out to be. Veteran agent Steve Jacobs argues that AI is too clunky and expensive to dominate Hollywood anytime soon. As a talent agent representing actors, his skepticism stems from a conviction that computers will never be able deliver the range of emotional nuance as human actors, and he’s right — for now, anyway — and so long as human actors work on set, so will below-the-line crew.

The nightmare scenario is a fully-evolved AI that requires nothing more than the plot and character outlines of a film (essentially a detailed treatment) be fed into the AI Machine, which then generates a movie with minimal human involvement. Whether this will become a practical reality that produces movies an audience will pay to see is unclear … but someday it might.

Part of the romance — the fun — of making movies and television has always been the group effort of so many people coming together on set to collaborate in a difficult but satisfying job. That dynamic will vanish if AI takes over, and although the corporate overlords in the executive suites will continue to rake in buckets of money, I wonder how satisfying it would be for their underlings to spend their days feeding prompts into computers churning out a series of brain-dead, formulaic Rom-coms and soulless superhero/fantasy movies? The first half dozen times might be entertaining — like playing with a new toy on Christmas morning — but can you imagine doing that over the course of a career?

Maybe I’m selling AI short, but that doesn’t sound like much fun to me.

Rather than eliminating the human infrastructure of the film industry, AI might wind up as another techno-arrow in Hollywood’s bulging visual-effects quiver. As Jacobs posits in a subsequent post, there may be very good reasons to use AI as part of the film-making process. Ben Affleck expressed a similar view, and although he and Jacobs may be whistling past the graveyard, one thing is certain: the world’s appetite for screened entertainment is not going away — quite the opposite.

(Note: shortly before this post published, Affleck announced that his own AI company would be joining forces with Netflix — make of that what you will.)

I’ll play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and assume the worst-case scenario — that AI gets better and cheaper until the Hollywood we’ve known for the past hundred years disappears: no more cameras, lights, sets, or crews. In that world, consumer AI will allow anybody with an idea to generate a slick little film on their laptop. Features have been shot on Iphones and edited on laptops over the last ten years, but those projects required actors, locations, props, and the considerable efforts of many people: AI could end all that.

We’ve all heard the cliché: “Find something you love to do, and you’ll never have to work again,” which sounds great until you examine the flip side: if you turn something you enjoy into how you make a living, it becomes a job — “work” — which can eventually leach the joy from that activity. Sometimes it’s better to keep the hobby a hobby and find some other way to make a living … so rather than tilt at the increasingly dodgy windmills of Hollywood, young people with an itch to make films — but who lack the skills or drive to thrive in the dog-eat-dog arena of the All-AI world we all hope won’t happen — might do better to avoid the the professional ranks altogether in favor of a career that pays enough to provide a decent life and can’t be jerked out from under them by AI.

Here’s where most of you will conclude that I’ve totally jumped the shark and lost my frickin’ mind, but hear me out: plumbers in my part of the world charge more than $200 an hour these days, while providing a truly essential service people are grateful to receive. Young people with an interest in film might be better off going to trade school to become a carpenter, electrician, or plumber — skilled jobs that pay well and can't be replaced by AI — then make films at home on their laptop with AI.

Who says plumbing can’t be sexy?

Look, I get it: a “real job” sounds like the mind-numbing drudgery of a dead-man walking, while making movies seems exciting — which is exactly how I felt fifty years ago — but there’s a reason my original blog, this Substack incarnation, and the upcoming book are titled “Blood, Sweat, and Tedium.” Working on set is really just another type of construction industry, where a crew with disparate skills comes together to create something new: construction crews build houses, skyscrapers, and bridges, film crews build movies and television shows. A lot of heavy lifting is required either way, and beyond the fact that construction crews don’t enjoy well-stocked craft service tables, aren’t plagued by an army of overly serious production assistants hissing at them to “hold the work!”, and their workplace is called a “job site” rather than a “location,” there isn’t that much difference between the two.

There’s one big difference, of course: construction workers put in eight hour days, while film crews routinely work twelve to fourteen hours before going home — then wake up the next morning after not nearly enough sleep and do it again. If that sounds like fun, try it for ten years, then ponder the reality that you still have two to three decades of the same relentless grind before you can even think about retiring.

Granted, I’d have laughed in the face of anyone who suggested I go to trade school fifty years ago, but that was a very different world. I had my share of laughs working long hours on features, music videos, episodic television, and commercials — sometimes in rain, snow, or blistering heat — but those brief moments of grace were the highlights. The vast bulk of my time on set was spent doing hard physical work, then waiting, and waiting, and waiting … before doing more hard physical work. That was fine — it’s what I signed up for, however unwittingly — but the Hollywood I knew so well is shrinking, which means the careers my generation of industry workbots experienced aren’t likely to be an option for most young people in the future.

So why not trade school? Becoming a plumber, carpenter, or electrician doesn’t mean your imagination withers up and blows away — I’ve met some very smart, well-informed, and engaging members of each profession. Films are nothing more than stories told on screen, and the raw material for stories is found in the people and experiences encountered in everyday life. Working in the real world will expose you to a wider variety of both than you’ll ever find in the exclusive and expensive cloister of a film school. As much as I’d hate to see it come, an AI future would allow you to dream up stories all day long at work, then put them on screen once you get home, and with a degree of artistic autonomy only the most bankable of big-name directors enjoy today. Consider this, which shows how to use a suite of AI tools allowing your imagination to take wings. Although the results aren’t to my cinematic taste, that doesn’t matter — the only businesses aiming at my demographic are Big Pharma and the local undertaker — but these AI visuals are right in tune with much of modern cinema. With a little luck, you might even make a home-brewed AI film as charming, engaging, and whimsical as Windy Day, crafted the hard way by John and Faith Hubley nearly sixty years ago.

As the Rolling Stones sang so long ago, “You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might get what you need.”

So ask yourself, what do YOU really need? That’s worth giving serious thought.

Lest you think I’ve become a cheerleader for AI, no — remember, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here just for the sake of argument. Being old and cranky, my feelings are more in sync with Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and his new show Pluribus — each a sparkling example of non-computerized cinematic creativity — who said this:

“I hate AI. AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit. It’s basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world’s first trillionaires. I think they’re selling a bag of vapor.”

Still, hating AI won’t stop it from playing a major role in the future of Hollywood. How big an impact remains a mystery. That’s the thing about revolutions: while in the midst of one, we can’t always see where things will end up — all we know for sure is that we’re in for big change.

There’s another wild-card. A recent piece in The Atlantic — titled Film Students Won't Watch Films Anymore— suggests that the attention span of the younger generation has become so fragmented after being raised on cell phones, tablets, and laptop screens, that they literally can’t watch an entire movie anymore without consulting those phones. Ponder this:

“But other professors, perhaps concluding that resistance is futile, are adjusting to the media their students grew up on. Some show shorter films or have students watch movies over multiple sittings. One who primarily teaches film-making courses, has moved from teaching traditional production methods to explaining how to maximize audience engagement. He now asks students to make three of four-minute films similar to the social media edits they see on line. After all, that seems to be the only type of video many young people want to watch.”

A future where short video clips supplant episodic dramas, comedies, and feature films as the dominant form of visual entertainment sounds too much like Idiocracy to me, but that’s probably just the generation gap, to exhume a term from the crypt of ancient history. Also, The Atlantic may be full of shit here … but if a generational shift in media really is underway, then young people making clever AI shorts at home in their spare time might find their hobby turning into a creative gold mine rich enough to quit the day job.

Yeah, I know … that sounds crazy to me too, but anything’s possible at this point.

Look, I’m just spitballing here — I don’t know what’s going to happen or how any of this is going to turn out — but current trends in Hollywood suggest that it’s time to start thinking outside the proverbial box. If you’re a young person with film industry dreams — and haven’t already clicked away to a less depressing Substack — I’m hoping you’ll take a minute to share your thoughts. What do you think the digital revolution and AI will bring? Do you see a place for yourself in the film industry as it continues to evolve in the medium and long-term future, and if so, in what role?

Inquiring minds want know.

PS: Now that I’ve bummed-out and/or pissed-off everyone who read this far, here’s some great advice on directing from a source with whom many of you are very familiar. I had the chance to chat with Matt a few times near the end of my time in LA, and he’s one smart young man, so when it comes to the future of Hollywood, listen to him, not me. I’m just an old guy who lives in the woods and spends his days yelling at every passing cloud.

PS2: For a little background on how Hollywood got here, check this out, assuming Harper’s will let you through the paywall.

“It’s a hard world to get a break in, all the good things have been taken”

The Animals

(Note: a few links among the following are from Instagram, so if you’re not on IG, you might not be able to view them.)

Turning the channel knob, (he says, carbon-dating himself ), I’ll offer an unpopular opinion: Most young people thinking about entering the film industry these days would be better off seeking careers elsewhere. Although some will certainly have the acumen and persistence to find their niche in the industry’s digital future, current trends suggest that many fewer hands will be needed to generate screen entertainment in years to come. Hollywood has always been a zero-sum game where many knock and few enter, but AI threatens to seriously tighten the screws on that equation.

Before plunging into the mosh pit, consider this from Brightness Falls, Jay McInerney's 1992 novel in which the lead character, a young and ambitious literary editor in LA on exile from New York, offers his perspective on those who live and work in Hollywood.

"For all the hours of work, the community was infused with a sense of its own glamour. The end product of all their labors cast a reflected glow back onto the meanest laborers in the industry. The typist was animated by the consciousness that her drudgery transmitted lies that might be spoken by stars on screen, while agents and producers, driving their expensive cars to important meetings, were understandably tempted to believe that they were the stars of the real drama, of which the public saw only the puppet version."

McInerny is a good writer (I loved Bright Lights, Big City) but as a creature of the East Coast upper crust, he’s almost certainly never soiled his hands doing anything resembling actual work, so it figures he’d consider a typist to be among Hollywood's "meanest laborers."

Jay … dude: if you think typing is tough, try wrangling cable sometime.

Photo by Mike McKinnon

Still, there's a grain of truth in that paragraph. Although we who toil in the belly of the Hollywood beast are intimately familiar with the down-and-dirty reality behind the bright lights, we’re equally aware of the "reflected glow" radiating off the big and small screen — and that there's a difference between driving home dirty and sweaty after twelve hours on set, and clocking out from another day of working for the Department of Water and Power. Granted, that difference is all in our head, but self-delusion is an integral part of the Hollywood experience.

Truth be told, the work done by DWP employees plays a vastly more crucial role in our daily lives than anything produced by Hollywood. Sure, everybody wants their daily dose of big or small screen entertainment, but try doing without electricity, drinkable water, or waste disposal services for a couple of weeks, then tell me what really matters. One’s priorities tend to shift when the power goes off, the taps run dry, and the toilets refuse to flush.

There was some logic in attending an expensive film school back after Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola blazed the trail to build a new Hollywood, but given the challenges confronting the industry these days, spending ginormous sums of your parents’ money (or worse, taking out massive student loans) for a film school degree doesn’t make much sense. Although some grads may achieve their cinematic dreams amid the shifting sands of digital era, most won’t. This has always been true, but in the Before Times, those unable to grasp their particular brass ring could usually find a place elsewhere in the industry: wannabe directors could work as ADs, would-be DPs might become camera operators, while those who’d hoped to become art directors or production designers could earn a living working on prop or set-dec crews. You’d be surprised how many of the people I ran cable and hung lights with on set came to Hollywood with shiny academic pedigrees that could have led to high-flying film industry careers, but for one reason or another didn’t.

Exhibit A: I did several sitcoms with a grip who’d graduated from the USC film school, where he made a short that won film festival ribbons, but his professional directing career never took flight, so he carved out a career working below the line.

Exhibit B: One of my fellow juicers on a sitcom was a graduate of the AFI, one of the most prestigious film schools in the country, with a degree in cinematography. He followed the rules of the game and built his “reel” — a compilation of scenes shot as a cinematic resume for potential employers — then personally delivered copies to every production house in LA. His reception was polite, but one of the secretaries finally opened the door to a back room to reveal a massive stack of similar reels from other young DPs seeking work.

The harsh truth remains: there’s only so much room at the table in Hollywood, and thanks to AI — and the corporate overlords who are pushing it — that table seems destined to shrink. Ponder this, from a recent piece in “The Ankler”:

“In just three years, Los Angeles County has lost 41,000 film and TV jobs — a quarter of its entertainment workforce — according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. “We’ve just come out of the worst year on record, excluding Covid, for on-location filming,” FilmLA president Paul Audley said this spring. “And as we come to a close on the first quarter of 2025, it looks like this year is doing even worse.”

“That collapse doesn’t stop at the studio gates. It’s radiating outward — into marketing firms, PR shops, craft services, freelance editors, and the entire constellation of suppliers that make the business run. Add in 130,000 actors (most of them unemployed) and another 20,000 writers (whose available gigs fell 42 percent from 2023 to 2024), plus lawyers, agents, accountants, financiers, and you’re talking about a million people whose livelihoods depend on traditional film and television — just in Southern California.”

The demand for skilled on-set labor in Hollywood these days is lower than anything I saw during my forty-year career. Given the offshore exodus of production and the rise of AI, it seems the conditions that allowed me to gain a toehold in the film industry fifty years ago no longer exist. There’s been a slight uptick in production this year, but nothing like the balls-to-the-wall level of the pre-Covid era, and the malaise is not limited to Hollywood: every zone of production across the country is hurting as more shows are lured overseas by tax incentives (read: bribes) and cheaper labor. Although New York and California are fighting the outgoing tide with increased tax credits, production is down all over the US.

It ain’t like it used to be — and neither is the future.

If you’re already established in the biz and working enough to survive, more power to you, but the tsunami of change is coming, with the only question being how fast and high the waters will rise. The recently concluded Godzilla vs. King Kong battle between Paramount and Netflix for Warner Brothers was just the latest round of industry consolidation, the eventual impact of which will be felt by every film industry worker and streaming subscriber watching at home. Disney’s billion-dollar deal with Sora AI points to where things are going, and although that arrangement is currently limited to animation, it’s only a matter of time before AI simulates live-action on a large scale. Whatever the future holds, AI has already created massive disruption, with much more to come. The only thing we can count on is that the film and television industry will look very different in ten years.

So what’s a young person yearning for a Hollywood career to do?

This may require a readjustment of expectations — and since this post is already too long, we’ll get into that next week.