Feed the Beast

There's a little bit of it in all of us

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard …”

John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962

(Note: This being the first Sunday of the month, here’s a chapter from the upcoming book)

Bitching about the frustrations, tedium, and occasional idiocy of our industry comes with the turf of Hollywood — it helps exorcise the demons of ego-driven absurdity that keep coming our way on the job. Sometimes I wonder what life on set would be like if every decision from on high was based on calmly reasoned logic, if all directors were competent, decisive, and pleasant, if budgets were fat and egos slim, if every script sparkled with incandescent brilliance, and if none of our days went long.

Would this be heaven on earth?

Winged hogs will glide over the frozen tundra of Hell before that comes to pass, but even if this Hollywood fantasy came true, all might not be sweetness and light. In descending from the trees to survive without the aid of sharp claws, dagger-like fangs, extraordinary speed, or raw physical strength, humans have had to contend with serious challenges right from the start. Trouble of one sort or another is a constant in the human condition, and we evolved to handle it, which suggests that people might not be wired for a fat and happy life in the land of milk and honey. Despite our technology and veneer of civilization, we‘re just overgrown apes who traded fur and prehensile tails for opposable thumbs and a bigger brain, and given our atavistic heritage, perhaps we need a certain amount of tumult and chaos in daily life — mental roughage, if you will — to stay sharp and feel truly alive.

One way or another, maybe we all have to feed the beast lurking within.

I spent two long weeks helping rig a sitcom for its second season a while back, an all-work-all-the-time grind that started every day at 6 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. — and although the gaffer was a pleasant fellow, his indecisiveness resulted in too much double and triple work. We’d hang lamps here, move them there, and more often than not, end up putting them right back where they’d been in the first place — and this was well before he’d seen any of the blocking for the first episode. Although a certain amount of change is inevitable in set lighting, this was ridiculous, and by the tenth day, I was well and truly whipped.

Then, in the last twenty minutes of my final day, he decided to add one more light. The grid above that particular set was absolutely jammed with lamps, each surrounded by bulky grip equipment to cut and shape the light, leaving no room to maneuver a man-lift where the final lamp had to go. With time running out, I leaned a ten-step ladder against the set wall, climbed to the top, then carefully picked my way along the one-by-three pine supports to a spot where I could bolt the lamp to the pipe grid, sixteen feet off the stage floor. By then I’d violated so many of the studio safety rules that one of the grips who was watching shook his head.

“Dude,” he cautioned, “that joint you’re standing on isn’t gonna hold.”

He was probably right, but this was where the work had to be done. Grasping a section of the pipe grid with one hand whenever possible, I managed to hang, power, and adjust the lamp to the gaffer’s satisfaction, but it took every ounce of strength I had left. With weak, trembling legs, I crept back down the way I’d come.

I should have been pissed. For one thing, the gaffer’s core crew — who he’d hired for the entire season — was standing around the other end of the stage yakking about their plans for the weekend while the day player climbed set walls and sweated bullets doing their dirty work. More to the point, the gaffer had lit this exact set the year before in Season One, which meant he knew damned well that lamp should have gone up early in the process. His lack of focus and dithering indecision forced me into a dangerously vulnerable situation where a fall could easily be a career-ender for me —and truth be told, I really would have been pissed if this show wasn’t such a steaming pile of crap, but I did enough day-playing on it during the previous season to know what a mess it really was, starting with the director. Two weeks on this shit-show was more than enough, so I was relieved this was my last day.

Given that, why didn’t I tell him, “Hell no, get one of your crew to do this”? After all, there were only twenty minutes left in the work day, and it’s not as if I wanted to be called back to day play on this show anyway … but here’s my dirty little secret: I got a kick out of hanging that lamp precisely because the task was so tricky. Figuring out how to do it in the moment, weighing the risks with every move, then taking a deep breath and getting it done was deeply satisfying on a primal level, because accomplishing a task that at first appears prohibitively difficult — especially when it involves such intense physicality — feels great.

It feeds my inner beast.

That quote from JFK above is not meant to compare sending three astronauts to the moon and back with me hanging a single lamp for a thoroughly forgettable TV show, but the principle holds for both. Accomplishing difficult tasks helps us grow in all the right ways, and as a bonus, delivers a heady rush of endorphins.

It’s not that I seek to confront a maximum-effort, do-or-die task on set every day — at that pace I’d be lucky to last another year — but facing a stiff challenge every once in a while delivers an artery-cleansing blast of adrenaline that keeps me from getting too fat, bored, and lazy. It lets me know that I’ve still “got it,” which means a lot at this point in my career.

Given that quenching this fire requires a level of physicality far beyond anything that happens in an office, I’ve often wondered how above-the-liners sate their inner beast. Although many people consider working above the line to be nirvana in Hollywood, driving a desk and being glued to a cell phone holds no appeal for me, and truth be told, I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what so many above-the-liners actually do up there in the first place. Working on set is something I understand — it’s where I belong — and if that makes me a lesser form of primate than those who lift nothing heavier than an iPhone all day long, so be it. But in that case, I sure wish my simian ancestors hadn’t been in such a hurry to discard their prehensile tails, because a tail like that would make the job of climbing those set walls and hanging onto the pipes a hell of a lot easier.