Phoning it in

Today our call for the show was uncharacteristically early.  I got up well before dark, dressed and went out to the garage to discover our seriously ailing ancient cat was dead.  I found a box and put her in it.  

A somber beginning to the day, my partner is burying her near our grape arbor.

I was to work on time, set up for almost an hour and then noted I had not seen or heard our director on set.

Apparently he did not get the changed call time, and when an inquiry was made he was still commuting from home.  However, via telephone he described how the blocking should be, the second team rehearsed the scene for cameras and audio with an Assistant Director telling them what to do.

The director arrived and we are only slightly behind schedule.

So even in high-stakes Hollywood sometimes people "phone it in."

And last night's moon rise was spectacular.

The ambassador is coming….

All day the walkies on set have been buzzing with talk of the ambassador.

"The ambassador will be here at 4" and the like.

I figured it was a code.  Meaning that someone was coming and they did not want to say who.

On another show, when the drugs for one of the stars has shown up, it is referred to as "Gatorade"  as in "The Gatorade has been delivered."

I did not pay much attention, until the Ambassador arrived.

With his kid, and the Secret Service in tow.

Apparently not only is the Ambassador's kid a fan of our show, so are the Obama kids.

They want to come visit, too.

Wild ride, this Hollywood stuff.

Easy come...

The ebb and flow of freelance bookings continues, with days being booked and released. Because I am the recordist of record on a show, I have to make sure that I can "cover" those days, bringing in someone who will do the job well enough, but not too well since I do not want to be replaced.

I was booked for most of November, December and January on a new show.  On that show they finally reached an agreement with the Director of Photography, who wants a very expensive lighting package.  That in turn had ripples thoughout the production and eventually ended up with the decision not to have someone do what I do, rather to have someone to wrangle files.

So after weeks of agonizing abouit how I was going to cover the days where I was triple booked, this weekend I had to unwind that web of bookings and release people.  I am sad about that, it is very hard for me.

I even convinced one guy to join the union to cover some days for me, I had to tell him they were off as well.  

Heading back to work today, the traffic was horrible.  But it rained last night, and outside it is a beautiful day.  

Triple booked

This month looks busy. One show continues, another is starting, another extended.  So I have been scrambling to replace myself on the production roster. You know, it would seem that there with high unemployment there should be a lot of people who want to work.  But finding someone to "be me" has been very hard.  

The web of acquaintanceship and friendship is strong.  I have been making calls and also some of the other people I work with have been making calls, to the extent that I heard some of the folks I called got calls from other people asking if they could work on my shows.  

Amazing.  

Oh, and R*** is back to work, he seems fine.  I am glad.

Serious as a...

Two weeks ago Monday morning.  Woke with a migrane at 4am.  Got up, took Tylenol and waited for it to subside.  Drifted off to sleep at 5ish.  At 6 I went back to bed only to be awakened by my phone ringing at 6:25.  am.  :/

It had stopped ringing by the time I got there but I could see it was another recordist calling.  No voicemail, so I called her back. She answered.  

"Are you working today?" 

"No."  

"How soon can you get here.  R** had a heart attack and needs someone to cover for him."

"I'm on my way."

So I dressed and was out the door in 15 minutes.  Woke up after about a half hour on the freeway.  

Traffic was light, it only took 90 minutes to get to the job.  Call time had been at 8, so I was only an hour late and the person who called me had already set up the room.

I got it figured out pretty quickly, we were ready when they asked to roll.  No delay to production.

My friend went on to her other job, I began to see people I knew on the set, and for the next three long days I worked 12 hours a day and drove for another three.  (90 minutes each way)

R** had three stents put in, and was back to work in two weeks.

The show must go on....

Day players

Regular jobs you have hours. An employer wants you to be there at a certain time, to do the assigned task, then to go home.

But then there is daily hire work in the industry.

It kind of seems like a job.  You get a call, you interview, then you go in for the day and do your task and make the TV "widgets that go to Baltimore." Except that any illusion that you are being hired long term is just that.

Stars get sick, schedules change, networks make script or production team or show cancellation decisions and suddenly all is in flux.  Just because you have a job today, does not mean that you are working tomorrow.  Cancellation feess are rarely paid. 

Unit production managers or line producers have their "team" that they bring from show to show.  Staff lists are kept and groups of people work together as a unit on first one show and then the next, sometimes for entire careers spanning decades.

These teams work together as a unit, develop shorthand based on common experiences, and often become as used to each other as athletes, teammates that anticipate each others moves based on long standing patterns.

So when a UPM calls you to take a gig, with multiple days, you say yes. You get on a team.  Then another UPM calls and books you for multiple days, and you say yes.  But...some of the days overlap. 

If you are double booked, you decide which show you want to cover. It is like a guitar player in a rock band not being able to make a gig.  The performance must go on, and that guitarist has to come up with someone to take her place.

The gig has to go on, so as a day player you must find a replacement.  This is tricky.  If the replacement is too much of a rock star then they can end up being a PERMANENT replacement rather than someone to just fill in.  But then there is the opposite problerm -- if they are too inept they can hold up production and that reflects badly on you.

The line producers and UPMs expect you to find your replacement for any days you cannot be there.  On the other hand, if two productions want you for the same day, there is always chance that one will cancel at the last minute, so if you turn one of the productions down you may be out of work.  If you are double booked, there is twice the chance you will actually work.

In discussing this problem with other successful people who work on production, a sound mixer said that he has been booked on as many as four shows for one day, finding replacements for three of the shows so that all of the shows were covered.  

Yeow.  I am starting to make up a team though, contacting people to cover for me when I am not available.  How different it is than working a regular office job.  

Love it though, glad to be here!

Hollywood To Do list

Only in Hollywood -- this person got mostly everything done. From the list I think it is an AD



Here is a translation

1 -- make up the mailed out sheet that has a list of everyone who will work the next day and their contact information
2-- talk to Make Up about getting the female actresses in early
3-- call the Production Assistants
4-- call Background (extras)
5-- apparently got the extras settled with Kate
6-- double check with Make Up and Hair

Beats a shopping list for the grocery store any day

B12

Ok, so a star feels punk.  Too much to drink maybe. A few too many drugs.  Too many cigaretttes.

So this star looks at the vial of injectible B-12 in his cabinet and thinks --  a shot of that will make me feel better.  Last time it worked like a champ.  

The star rummages around in his trailer.

New disposable needle & syringe.  Check.

Withdraw correct amount into syringe.  Check.

Aim syringe at buttock cheek.  Small needles do not hurt much when used.

But if you hit something in your butt. Say a bone. Or a nerve. 

Suddenly your butt is sore and the entire crew is sitting waiting. 10 hours and counting to shoot 5 1/2 pages, a snail's pace compared to the 17 shot yesterday in the same amount of time. By actors who go to a doctor if they want a B-12 shot.

Glamorous place, Hollywood.

Get them by the balls...

And their hearts and minds are sure to follow.  Lyndon B. Johnson said it, I think maybe he was not the first.

How does it apply to Hollywood?

On the set there is a lot of  flirting. Not only between actors, but also the crew members.  Dating happens, romance happens.

We spend much more time at work than with our spouses.  That can lead to friction, and high rates of divorce.


There is a lot of stress, trying to keep relationships together when you are apart so much.

Team that up with sexual tension...


... and the fact almost everyone dresses up a bit at work....


...and tempers can explode.

One of my fellow crew members said that "for men, there are only two things on their mind -- food and sex."

I do not think so.  There is a creative spark in all of us.  For some of us, it trumps sex (well mostly.)

Food it is hard to do without, though. That is what catering is for.

The call

My history includes work  in retail sales, as a secretary, as a waitress, as an artist, as a writer and editor, plus probably a half dozen other things I cannot think of off hand.  In all of those jobs I would get told what days and times I was working, or what my hours were, Then I would show up at the assigned time, clock in and get to work.

Sometimes I would know my schedule weeks in advance, I would write the dates and times on a paper calendar in my date book and get ready to be there.  

Then I started to work in production.

The first time I got the call, I was charmed.  

"Hi this is Richard from work and I wanted to tell you your call time tomorrow is 8am,"  the voice on the other end of the line said.

"Right, thanks, I plan on being there," I responded. 

It was a new job, they did not know me and I figured that they might have gotten the idea I did not know I was booked.  I went in to work on that Friday and did not think more about it.

Saturday and Sunday were my days off, then Sunday afternoon the phone rang.

"Hi this is Richard from work and I wanted to tell you your call time tomorrow is 8 am,"  the voice on the other end of the line said.

  

Charmed, I allowed as I planned to be there. Again.

The most amazing thing is that every day I work on a show where I have not worked the previous day, I get that call.  On production, it is so essential that we all be there and do our job, If one cog in the works is missing, it can stop the whole "train."

So a production assistant or associate producer goes through the show staff list, calling every member of the crew, confirming they will be there.  

I find it charming and it is unique to the business, as far as I know.

Day in the life on a sitcom

My 7:30 am call time is never early enough to fiinish the work I must have done before I am ready to "roll record" at 8:00 am.  On some shows there is slop time, a grace rehearsal -going - on period where I can be finishing setup but the first AD on this show likes to see if we are ready pretty much first thing and will ask to roll on a voice over or something right when we are supposed to be ready.

So I showed up at a quarter to seven -- that is o'dark 6:45, meaning I left the house at 5:30.  I turned on the tone and bars and commenced to putting a minute of bars and tone (SMPTE standard) at the top of 50 tapes, 5 at a time.  45 minutes later I was ready to start booting the five computers, five hard drives and all the hardware I run.  That process took about a half hour.

So and hour and fifteen minutes after I arrived, a half hour after my call time, I was ready to roll record.

 Production proceeded, recording files and tapes with DVD backups stopped and started, and QA for the backup of the low resolution files.  The show editor showed up as we finished recording the last scene.  He wanted the files to start editing.

We gave the drive they were on to him, twenty minutes later I got a note that the one camera's files would not load.  We copied them to another drive, those loaded.

The pattern continued.  Frenzied recording, copying files to a drive, production assistants walking the quarter mile on the lot between post and production carrying hard drives with files on them between the production truck and post.

There were intermittent problems with files not loading.  Mid-morniong I  noted one of the cameras occasionally showed a black field or two, the video stream being interrupted in some way.  I wondered about it but it was SO occasional. I did not mention it other than asking if anyone else saw it.

Then it happened while I we were recording! Yikes!!! Lack of perfection is not acceptable in any way and people get fired for even minimal inattention. There is so much competition for production jobs that  people get not rehired for lots of reasons -- things like having the wrong attitude (anything besides cheery willingness to work).  Oddly enough even tech people in Hollywood tend to be fit, attractive and well educated and on the set there are few if any truly unattractive people.

As soon as we stopped we rewound the tape to the spot where I had seen black -- though there visually had been a black frame the video was fine. But the audio vanished for a second.  Were the files ok? Call to post. Yes the files are fine.

So I got told to watch that deck carefully and why had it not been mentioned before?!!!  The first half hour of lunch was researching whether all tracks of audio disappeared, confirming the video was good on the files for editing, and discussion about what might have caused the problem.

For the next few hours I focused on watching that deck's video stream.  It happened again once during a record, the same pattern shown on the tape.  Files were ok.

Files seemed to be OK for a while. Then at about 8 pm, one of the file capture computers just stopped wanting to go into record.  But we were up against it with the child actors, who CANNOT stay beyond the time allotted by child labor laws.

The clock ticked on, the tapes rolled, we got the scenes shot.  The kids left, and we got the files loaded in to the drives from tape and gave the post production folks their drives. And waited.  After an hour they told us to leave, so I clocked out -- and walked to post to wait. Unpaid.  Of course when I got there suddenly the files began to appear properly, and everything was there.

Gratified, I walked out to my car. And a note on the door.  Hmmm.  Picked up the card, which complimented my little car (only car I ever had that people leave notes saying "If you ever want to sell this car...") and told me they noticed I had a flat tire.

Drywall screws are like leaves on production lots, I probably had picked one up earlier in the week.

So -- Siri on my iPhone found me a local roadside assistance, I called them and they could be there in ten minutes.  The cost would be $55. No, they did not take credit cards after 10 pm.  I had $44. I was owed $10 back from my parking charge for the day, so that would make $54.  I called a friend on the lot and said "Can I borrow a dollar?"

By the time I got back the tire was off, the new (mini) spare was on in five minutes and it was time for the long, slow drive home.  I got back home at midnight.

Call time for tomorrow was 9, which meant I needed to leave the house at 7:40.

Sometimes, making TV shows seems a lot like making bell housings.

Feature film without distribution

Today met with a producer who produced a feature last year. Overenthusiastic, they hyped it as it was being finished in spring of 2012, said it would be distributed in summer of 2012, and then.....it vanished.

FYI guys the release schedules for films are calculated months if not years in advance.  Every weekend, every release date -- all are calculated closely.

The producer says they are in negotiations with Lionsgate and another studio.  

Actually, I think it is more likely that the film is unable to find a distributor. Young people read about indie producers creating a low budget film that clicks with audiences and figure they can make a film that will sell. They find some friends, shoot some footage, cut it together and put on a show.

What they do not realize is that here it is script, script script. And distribution has become more elusive than ever. Tentpoles are what studios make because they think that they can make a lot of money with them. 

Its sad. I wonder whether his film is any good? I will likely never get to see it.