Movie City Blues, Part II: Waking Up From Reality

I'm in Los Angeles now. With gas money and a dream. The trappings of success are painfully visible all around me. Now I just have to help myself to a job as a...

...valet. Yup. My first 6 months in LA were spent parking rich people's cars at a fancy hotel. I was so broke at the time that I regarded a keyless remote as a status symbol (still don't have one as a matter of fact). In a town that runs on who-you-know, my uncle’s colleague’s daughter got me my first break in the biz.

The gig was as a runner for a post-production/trailer house in Burbank, an excellent entry-level job. I spent most of the day driving around the city and got to know the geography of movie industry Los Angeles pretty well. I also learned that being an office monkey is not my thing. Lunch orders, filing, tape labeling... ugh. I hated it. And, working in post was not my idea of a good time. I wanted to be on set.

Looking for the next gig wasn't any easier. At this point, I had a very tiny circle of friends. Fortunately, a couple former roommates from Tucson had moved out and they too had tiny circles of friends. One of these friends worked for a show called Paradise Hotel. I almost got hired as a "talent handler" for them. Bullet dodged. Another friend worked for a little show called Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. And at the time it was a little show. It hadn’t aired yet and no one knew what huge hit it was going to be. After a ton of pestering, I convinced them to hire me as a Production Assistant.

“Congratulations, self,” I thought, “you’re on a real live TV show.” And I was. It was a great experience. I stayed on for three full seasons, getting promoted first to Assistant Production Coordinator and then to Production Coordinator. I got paid to travel the country. I worked some hellacious hours in some even more hellacious weather. I got to be a defender of the faith for reality TV since I was on one of the "good" shows. It was a gig I could be proud of. And it got me nowhere closer to the aforementioned dream.

Neither did The Girls Next Door (awesome in its own right in that I got paid to hang out at the Playboy Mansion), Star Tomorrow (don't remember it? Neither does anybody else), or Armed and Famous (8 freezing, miserable weeks in Muncie, IN that I will never get back).

Here's why. Reality TV is its own beast. While there are some similarities between the production of a reality show and a traditional one, there's one big difference: a script, and and the shooting thereof. I wasn't learning that on reality shows, and I'm kind of a writer, so that would be a good thing to learn, no?

And so, I left behind the comfort and (sigh) comfortable paychecks of reality and struck out for the scripted world. Again, I had a very limited number of contacts there. But I got lucky, one of my former PAs was PAing all over the place and got me my first gig.

I won't recount them all here. If you want to know what I worked on you can go here for the complete list. I worked on some great shows like Weeds, and some not-so-great ones like Cavemen. I learned a shit-ton about how shows get made. The nice thing about being a PA is that you really do get to see everything. The not-so-nice thing is that you get paid minimum wage or just above it. But you can afford to live on that because you're working 75 hours a week and they're providing your meals (most of the time).

Being a production assistant also puts you on the road to becoming an assistant director. “I can make a living doing that,” I thought. I had a goal. And it was a fantastic learning experience. Being a PA, you get to see and hear it all on a set. I was in first and out last. I took pride in my long hours and dedication to the job.

Time went by. The novelty wore off.

A year and a half later, I was still looking at a good 300 days to reach the magic number of 600 to qualify for membership in the Director's Guild of America. At 24, this would not be a problem. At 34, it was troubling to think of another year and a half of brutal hours at just above minimum wage pay for the right to work another 150 days in commercials and out-of-town productions in order to become a full-fledged 2nd AD. I’d had enough of being labor in someone else’s dream.

Which brings me to the here and now and the business of getting on with the dream. Here is the dream: to make good movies, even great ones. What I realize – what I’ve learned – is that the only way to make my own movies and tell my own stories is to simply start telling those stories. And I simply did not have the time to tell those stories while accruing all my valuable industry experience. I have stepped out at the bottom hoping at some point to step back in closer to the top.

My goal is to land a 40-hour work week making enough money to pay the bills writing during in the other 35 hours I gain by leaving the industry. It’s going to be tough. A temporary agency at which I’d scheduled an appointment this morning called me to cancel the appointment. They told me my “expectations for work were too high” given my resume.

Of course, the dream doesn’t live at the temp agency. It lives in me. I just need someone to pay me while I live it.

Movie City Blues, Part I: The Dream Deferred

“How are you doing today?”
“Living the dream, man, living the dream.”

It’s a pretty common exchange on most sets. Depending on inflection, it’s either a hopelessly ironic dismissal or a sincere appreciation of life in the most fabulous business on earth. Despite the misery of any given shoot day, it’s impossible to refute the fact that making movies is pretty damn cool industry to be in. I was halfway through my 3rd hour of locking up a pretty desolate parking garage in Culver City when I realized I was not, in fact, living the dream.

Here's where the dream began: some time around my birthday in 1992, I saw David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. I had been a fan of movies prior to this point, but after seeing that film, I was a true believer. Do not ask me to defend, explain, or justify why this movie was the one that convinced me to go into the pictures (because, as Bart Simpson acutely noted, there are two things wrong with that title). Just accept it as one of those unnatural miracles like Rob Schneider's career or Cheesus. I was hooked. So, naturally, for the next 5 years, I did nothing to follow the dream, besides watch a copious number of films both big and small.

In 1997, I babystepped toward the dream. I enrolled in the Media Arts program at the University of Arizona. Let me tell you this about school: studying the dream is not following the dream. And only taking 1 course out of 50 or so that actually puts a camera in your hands is definitely not following the dream. So, let's say the dream is deferred for another 4 years. (Those 4 years weren't a complete waste of time, but suffice to say the only "vision" I realized in that time was a dubious and illegal feature-length adaptation of a science fiction bestseller and an even more dubious original horror film, neither of which I had a lot of creative input into. Like binge drinking and anonymous sex, both are fun yet woefully unfulfilling.)

I finally got a degree in 2001. Lest you think I was a good doobie and hung that "Mission Accomplished" banner on schedule, know that there were several false collegiate starts prior this go-round of academia, and if I had simply done what I was supposed to do, I could have been in and out of the U of A in less than 3 years. I am nobody's academic role model.

Next up, another furtive and misguided step toward the dream, right? Well, no. I spent the next 2 years awash in cheap wages and cheaper booze in Tucson. I had a job that afforded me just enough to pay rent and bask in the smoky comfort of any of the 15 bars I lived within walking distance of. Fuckin' sweet, dude. Not a total waste of time: I shared a wall of my duplex with a writerly type, from whom by osmosis I learned some of the discipline of what it takes to be an actual writer (not that I actually applied it. That would have been following the dream.) Also, in addition to the relationships of the typical barroom disaster variety that accumulate when one spends that much time in taverns, I managed to find a woman who not only has shared a bed with me for the last 6 years, but actually loves me, too. Not a bad haul.

It was my good fortune to get laid off in the summer of 2003. I was working at a nightclub as a sort of assistant manager/office bitch, and the Tucson leisure economy being the fickle beast it is in the hotter months, I was a cost that had to be cut. One phone call to my sister in LA was all it took to get me out of Tucson after that. I packed everything that would fit into my 1980 BMW 320i, sold the rest, and headed to Los Angeles with gas money and a dream.

Once I got to Los Angeles, I would learn the very difficult difference between living the dream and being a part of someone else's.

To be continued...