Another Monday

The Second of Two

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.