Monday

Part One

“Five o’clock in the morning, already up and gone, Lord I’m so tired, how long can this go on?”

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.