April is the Cruelist Month

Soy un jugador, I'm a juicer baby, so why don't you kill me?

(With apologies to Beck)

Yes, I know — we’re still in the merry, merry month of May — but this one’s from the Wayback Machine: April of 2008

Not having been one of those giant-brained English majors in college — those whose intellectual reach far exceeded my own limited grasp — I’ve never been sure exactly what T.S. Eliot had against the first true month of Spring. On the Home Planet of my youth, April meant four weeks of warm sun, crisp, rain-washed air, and lush green hills splashed with the lurid colors of wildflowers in all their promiscuous glory. Even the urban desert of Los Angeles — a wasteland in ways the long-dead poet could never fathom — is something of an Eden-on-wheels in April, bombarding the senses with brilliance at every glance: the intense orange of California poppies emerging from parkways and front yards, the vibrant crimson, hot pink, and deep purple of bougainvillea sprawled across red tile roofs, the soft lavender kiss of wisteria dangling from arbors, and mockingbirds everywhere singing loud and proud.

April is a time for hope, not to worry, but the events of the last week make me wonder if Eliot wasn’t on to something after all.

Even in a strike-poisoned year that left so many stillborn projects rotting in their network wombs, April is still pilot season. Although a few pilots are undergoing the painful birthing process, it’s nothing like past Aprils when soundstages were booked solid for six weeks. Set construction crews are usually bleary-eyed at this time of year from working a relentless string of back-to-back pilots, but not now … which means landing one of the few pilots still slated for production is a last chance to salvage something from this bleak new year and go into the summer hiatus with enough in the bank to keep the wolf from the door until the new television season kicks off in late July.

Then again, the possibility remains that the actors will go on strike in June to further pummel those of us who depend on this most undependable of industries for our livelihood. Nobody really knows what the hell’s going on in the world of television these days.

My phone rang in the last week of March with the most unexpected and welcome news: we had a pilot. Well, we probably had a pilot, since our director of photography (the Silverback leader of our lighting tribe) was one of two finalists for the job. His only competition had recently bumped up to D.P. after many years as a camera operator, and thus has almost no experience lighting multi-camera sitcoms, so I figured this was a done deal. Formalities would have to be observed, of course — no high-fiving until the official word came — but with the line producer and the production manager openly pulling for us, it looked like we’d be among the lucky winners of this April’s Pilot Sweepstakes.

Therein lies the dark beauty at the heart of this boom-and-bust industry: no matter how long you’ve been sitting there drumming your fingers on the breakfast table waiting for the unemployment check to arrive while silently praying the landlord will let the rent slide another month, the phone can ring and turn those gray skies a bright, sunny blue. When that call comes, it brings a giddy rush of pure adrenal euphoria — the much-sought-after false sense of well-being — and for a few sweet minutes, you damned near feel you can fly.

Maybe that’s why we do it. Maybe all of us in Hollywood are gambling junkies who just haven’t yet figured out that we’re well and truly hooked on the saved-by-the-bell, outhouse-to-the-penthouse thrill of it all when the phone finally does ring.

I really don’t know.

What I do know is this: for a set lighting crew, a sitcom pilot means three solid weeks of work. With all the rigging of cable and lights — typically two hundred and fifty to three hundred lamps — each of which must be hung, powered through a dimmer system, roughed in, then tweaked through countless adjustments — it takes ten or eleven days to fully prepare for a one day shoot, followed by three days to take everything down and wrap the stage. It’s a lot of physical work, pushing the rock uphill the entire way, but in this free-lance, catch-as-catch-can industry, three straight paychecks means getting back on the employment horse in style — particularly in my case, after nearly four months off due to the strike and a stint under the surgeon’s knife.

More important, it’s a show. Not that I’m complaining about rigging, mind you — God bless the studio rigging gaffer, who truly has saved my ass these past two years — but a pilot getting picked up for the new Fall season means steady work on a show that could carry us to Christmas. If it pulls in decent numbers, the network might then order the “back nine” starting in January to complete a full season and keep the paychecks rolling in through March. At that point we could start dreaming about Season Two, when a more remote but tantalizing possibility looms: the show becoming a hit on the scale of “Cheers,” “Frasier,” “Seinfeld,” or “Will and Grace,” with strong enough legs to run for a decade. For those who work in sitcoms, a hit series like that represents the Holy Grail, all but guaranteeing employment for the foreseeable future. For this Hollywood juicer, it would mean the ultimate wave to ride all the way onto the sunny beach of retirement.*

Such were the cotton-candy fantasies playing out in my head over the weekend. After a couple of tough years and a particularly bleak winter, things were turning around at last.

We got a pilot.

The phone rang Tuesday afternoon, and for once I picked it up without the usual screening for friend-or-telemarketer-foe, figuring this must be the confirmation call. And that's exactly what it was … confirmation that we did not get the pilot.

The news hit like a sledgehammer. It seems all the good karma and support we had wasn’t enough — the other, infinitely less experienced D.P. got the nod over our guy to do the show — and that was that, game over. Rather than doing a pilot and all it could mean, I was going back to the rigging crew.

You never know why things work out the way they do in this business. It’s seldom a matter of being good enough — at a certain point, anybody up for a given job is good enough — but rather that someone high up the food chain loaded the dice to roll a certain way. Working below the line in Hollywood can be a bit like life for the Greeks of ancient mythology, powerless mortals subject to every capricious whim of the Gods up in Olympus: bestow a favor here, hurl a thunderbolt there, and watch those puny humans scramble to cope. It’s all in the game.

What galls me is that I knew damned well not to get my hopes up. I’ve been around long enough to learn the hard way that it’s never over ‘til it’s over. All you can do is hope for the best, assume the worst, and don’t count on anything until it’s in the bag. In a town that sometimes seems determined to drive us all crazy, it’s the only way to stay sane.

But human nature is what it is: as the song goes, “A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”

I wonder what T.S. Eliot would say about that?

* Yeah, I know how pathetic this sounds, but such are the realities of life in Hollywood. Stick around long enough in this business, and I can promise that you too will someday begin thinking in those terms. That’s just the way it is.