Dude, what's that smell?

One of the things that's really affected us is the industry ban on zip line. Zip line (lamp cord to you, buddy) is what we used to use when we had a bunch of practical lamps in the center of a room - zip line's damn near flat and it's easy to tape down so the actors won't trip on it. Because it's flat and easy to tape down it's very easy to hide from the camera even when it's running across the middle of the floor.

Now, we have to use standard heavy-duty extension cords ("stingers"), which are safer, but harder to hide from the camera and much more of a trip hazard (even when taped down). Some studios will let you run zip line for a few feet, and some won't allow it's use at all, but we can't run hundreds of feet of it anymore no matter where we are.

Most of our work today was wiring the small table lamps in the center of the club, aiming the lamps that we hung yesterday, making sure that the stingers were well-hidden and taped down, and making sure that we got power to all the last-minute lamp additions.

Yesterday, one of our guys had to leave early because of the paint fumes. He came down from the perms, told us that he felt like shit and went to see the nurse.

What he didn't tell us is that he threw up somewhere in the upper levels of the facade where he was running cable.

Now, I certainly can't blame the poor guy - there are some bodily functions that just won't wait, and sometimes you feel like crap and just forget to tell people things (had I been vomiting I don't know that I would have remembered to inform my supervisor about it - "Hey, I just hurled upstairs somewhere! Have a great day!"). No biggie, except for the smell.

It smells like, well, puke. It wasn't so bad first thing in the morning, but as soon as we turned the lights on and it got hot up there - icky, icky poo (or icky, icky puke as the case may be).

We're not exactly sure where he puked, although we can make an educated guess from where the smell's strongest (none of us were really all that eager to find a puddle of vomit, anyway).

So of course, that's where we put our dimmer board operator's table*. We even made sure it was safely secured to the deck by bolting it down.

Wasn't that nice of us?



* We all love our dimmer board operator - he's a great guy, and we've all known him for years and had some great times with him on various shows. Don't feel bad for him. It's really easy to re-locate a dimmer board, so he won't be in the smell for long, but that five minutes or so are just going to be priceless. My only regret is that we won't be there to see it.


Couch of the Day:

Trash can insides and a contact high.

Today, we were rigging on New York Street - there's a little nightclub set that's being dressed to look like a cross between CBGB and The Limelight.

Whatever the painters were using to make the fake stained glass windows made me see purple puppies and rainbows - I ended up having to run home at our coffee break and get my respirator (that I got on the last show where they were spraying something toxic). I took it home with me tonight as I'm afraid that if I leave it in our gold room (where we store small things like lightbulbs, color-correction gels, etc.), by morning one of our pranksters will have removed the filters and soaked them in something disgusting before replacing them.

Right after they did the stained glass effect, they started spray painting the graffiti on the walls, so it was a paint fume smorgasbord - it was so bad even the painters were commenting on it.

After lunch, when I finished my coffee, and went to throw the cup away - only to stop when the trashcan I was about to use seemed suspiciously clean.

Turns out, it was a prop trash can (which, of course must be returned to the rental house free of garbage) - another show was shooting a few yards away and had put out trash cans in order to make New York Street look, well, urban.

So I wandered along the 'street', peering into the trash cans, looking for the one that was actually full of garbage - one of the other show's PAs came up to me and wanted to know what the hell I was doing.

"I'm looking for a real trash can", I answered, wagging my empty cup at her for emphasis.

"Just throw it in the one that's actually got trash in it".

If only it were that easy- they look alike from the outside, and if I throw trash into a prop trash can and let it sit in the 90 degree heat all day, I'm going to have the other show's set dressers coming after me with thumb screws.

We're back in the club rigging again tomorrow - hopefully all the painting will have been done so I don't have to spend another day with that creepy rubber fetish thing on my face.

Couch of the Day:

Toy store, here I come!

Well, I failed in my mission, but the Pink Princess has learned a hard lesson about negotiation.

Some background:

Back when we all had Shawn Cassidy posters on our walls, one of my Roosevelt-era (or so) great aunts decided that toys cost too goddamn much nowadays and she wasn't going to take the bait.

In a fit of pique about those bastards charging $5 for something that was just going to get fucked up anyways, she broke out her ancient Singer and made me two dolls - an Eeyore and a standard early 20th century-looking girl doll (sans creepiness, of course. Her face is hand-embroidered so no evil little eyes). Both were made solely from materials in her rag-bag.

Eeyore was made from brown tweed (which is probably closer to the color of an actual donkey after all), and had white corduroy tummy. The best part was that his tail actually came on and off with the button. The worst part was that I immediately lost the tail, and spent the next 20 years telling people that Eeyore was sad because his tail was probably rotting somewhere in a landfill in Sunland.

The girl doll (whom I never bothered to name - despite my father's attempt to beat some girliness into me, I was never much for dolls, frills or pink things) lost her pantaloons immediately (I pulled them off to see if she was anatomically correct. Hey, cut me some slack - I was 7), although for some reason she still has all her petticoats under her gingham dress.

I lost Eeyore in my late 20's. My ex, The Devil (no, really, he is the devil), took Eeyore when we split up - not because he wanted Eeyore, but because he knew that was the one thing he could take that would really hurt me (I got him back, though. I burned his baseball cards in his driveway while he watched, horrified, from his deck. I even roasted a marshmallow over the little bonfire while I laughed. Don't even start with me about it. Looking back, I'm deeply ashamed of the way I behaved, but hell hath no fury, I guess).

So the only memento I have from an aunt that I adored (who died early in the Reagan administration, and who was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise completely miserable childhood) is that doll.

The Pink Princess wants the doll bad, and that was what she demanded in exchange for the basket.

I counter-offered with my entire collection of Bugs Bunny DVDs but she wouldn't budge.

"Sorry", I said. "You can't have her. She and I have history."

"But I want her!"

"Well, I want world peace and perky tits without having to have surgery, but that's not going to happen either."

"Then you can't have my basket."

"Fine. I'll go buy one."

I could tell from the look on her face that The Pink Princess hadn't thought of that one.

"Well, that's what you get for being inflexible" is what her mom said as I said my goodbyes after dinner and kicked at the tumbleweeds on the side of the road as I marched towards my car, empty-handed, wondering about the location of the nearest "Toys R Us".

Hey, sparkle glue and handlebar baskets are still cheap and plentiful, aren't they? 'Cause I haven't got a sewing machine.

Couch of the Day:

The free time's great, but the payout not so much.

When my boss called me to work on this show, he told me we were going to be working 10 hour days, but then production decided to save some money (they're over budget on the lighting package) by only allowing the rigging crew to work 8 hour days.

An occasional 8 hour day is a treat - it's like a mini vacation, or that time when you found a whole candy bar on the floor of the car and managed to eat it before your mom made you give half of it to your sibling.

An occasional 8 hour day inspires the same sort of giddiness as a really good rollercoaster, but a whole string of 8 hour days loses the charm fast and hits me right in the bank account.

I think I cried a little when I got my paycheck today. Don't get me wrong - 16 hour days hurt me as well, but in a much different manner.


The other problem with short days is that the best boy can't keep a crew - people won't stay around for the reduced hours when they can jump to a crew who are working 10's or 12's. Best boys don't like a constantly changing crew either - imagine having hire three or four new people and explain the inter-office politics to them every single day.

When the crew stays the same, then the riggers know how the gaffer likes things marked, where the carts get set up on stage, which actors we're not supposed to look at, who the UPM is (so we can look busy whenever he or she's around) and how to sneak up on the craft service guy so we can get a sandwich off his truck (rigging crews aren't normally allowed to eat at craft service). We get to know each other's strengths and weaknesses, and this helps us to work better as a team.

Then there's set dressing. Somehow they managed to get on a 12 hour day, and since this DP comes from theater, he wants a 'down light' over every practical (a practical is a lamp that you can see in frame) in the set, so we're hanging a lot of lamps and there's some freaky movie thing that if there's a practical lamp in a scene then the cord to plug it in must be hidden from camera (even if the lamp's in the center of the room with no outlet anywhere near it), which means that each practical lamp takes us some time to fix up - we have to hang a lamp over the top of it, and then power it up while making sure the cable is concealed from camera.

This is all fine, and it's part of the job, but since the set dressers are there four hours longer than us each day, they put in lamps after we leave, so when first unit walks on the set, there are a ton of lamps that aren't ready (since they were put there after we had to quit working), and it's making us look like idiots. The set dressers know our predicament and are trying to work with us, but sometimes they have last-minute changes, too.

No amount of begging or pleading on the part of my boss will make the production office extend our hours.



My job for this weekend is to convince (okay, bribe) the Pink Princess to part with her handlebar basket.


Couch of the Day:

Big Boring Day Off

I had today off, and I spent it cleaning my house, despite wanting to go to the beach.

6:30 am call time tomorrow, which means I might just get off early enough to have some fun, but not likely.

When I have a call time that early, I'm usually tired before 10 pm.

Couch of the Day:

I spent the afternoon on a bus.

Not riding it around the city seeing cool things and meeting interesting people (and one does meet interesting people on city buses in Los Angeles), but changing the fluorescent tubes in the bus to a movie-friendly type of tube.

This is more complicated than it might seem - to prevent passenger breakage, the tubes are sealed in screwed-down plastic covers that get brittle over time, so they have to be removed very carefully since I can't imagine that's an easy item to replace. Once the tubes are changed, the covers have to be very carefully re-installed with one person holding the cover in place while another one screws it down, which is fun in a bus with limited floor space. Damn good thing we're all thin.

Of course, the type of tube in the bus was a type (single pin connecter) that we don't use, so it had to be ordered through a vendor, and the bus had three different sizes of tube - 4', 5', and 6'. No one could find a 5' tube, so we had to do some re-wiring to make a 4' work (yes, the bus company knew about it).

Also of course, the bus was parked in the sun on a hot day and most of the windows wouldn't open, but the upside is that I think I sweated off a couple of pounds.

At some point today (I think it was on stage while we were all breathing paint fumes), we decided that our boss' slick new chopper-like lot bike (it's one of those that look like a motorcycle and is very, very manly) needs a pink Hello Kitty (tm) handle bar basket to really spiff it up.

Now, as it happens I know where there's a very pink Hello Kitty (tm) handle bar basket (with aftermarket sparkle glue hearts). The trick is just going to be persuading it's current owner to part with it, but her mom tells me she's just about out of her "pink princess" phase, so if I replace it with one that suits her current tastes I'm golden.

So, while we were waiting for our tube order to arrive, we sat around trying to figure out how we could attach the basket to his bike so that it would be difficult to remove, but not damage the paint or chrome on the handlebars.

We think we've got something worked out, but my boss knows all the tricks so once he sees the basket, it'll have about a five minute life span - so it's all about parking the bike where the most people will see it as they come into the stage.

Couch of the Day:

Friday Photo

Today, we were wrapping out the house that first unit have been shooting in for two days, and the very nice homeowner let me pick some of the figs from the tree in her backyard.

I love figs, and I'm not the only one:





These fellows do, too.

Anyone know what the green beetles are? I've never seen one before, and know nothing about them other than they were chowing down on the biggest, yummiest looking fig on the whole tree.

It's all about the inventory

Returning a stage package isn't psychically difficult, inventory (which was today's big job) just requires more concentration than I like to muster up when I'm at work and the coffeepot's all the way on the other side of the lot.

Each stage has it's own equipment, which may seem excessive, but this is way easier than hauling the shit around from stage to stage. In addition, each lamp has stuff that goes with it (for tungsten lamps, that's scrims. Other types of lamps have more accessories), which also must be counted.

We're returning this stage's equipment because production think they're going to save money by getting equipment drop loaded (brought to the stage each time it's needed) each time we use the stage instead of having it sit there all the time. I don't know what kind of deal they're getting from the lamp dock (normally, you don't pay a five day week on an equipment order - they usually give you a three day week, but if you really have the rental house over a barrel, they'll give you a one and a half day week. This means you pay one and a half day's rental for a week) or how often they plan to use this stage - it may not be cheaper to have the stuff dropped off, due to labor costs to unload a truck and do an inventory before we can start work, and then do another inventory after we tear the rig out.


Each lamp is barcoded and assigned to an equipment package. If the barcode on the lamp doesn't match the paperwork, we have to climb into the rig to find it so the lot best boy can put it on the correct paperwork. This may seem overly anal, but trust me - it's better this way. Waiting until the end of the show will result in a big, evil nightmare.

We did have some entertainment today - right across from where we were working was "America's Got Talent". All the "talent" were strolling up and down the street in front of our stage, rehearsing or giving interviews. Right before we went on our morning break, there was a guy in an orange mechanic's suit with bicycle horns strapped all over his body playing the "Star Spangled Banner". We thought it was funny, but the AD's are going to throw a fit if that shit starts tomorrow while they're rolling sound.

Couch of the Day:

Guard Gate Hassle Wednesday!

Of course, not only did my old Paramount ID not work but my name hasn't been in the computer at all - each morning, I've pushed my bicycle up to the gate, given the guard my name and had him tell me I've not been issued a pass. My boss has been calling his crew list into the production office every night, they just don't seem to think that riggers are important enough to call our names into the security office.

Each day, I've sat there at the gate, called my boss on his cell phone and had him exchange angry words with said security office (our call times have been way earlier than the production office staff come in, so we've not been able to call them).

Needless to say, this has made me late every single day. No matter how much extra time I allow, it all seems to get eaten up at the guard shack, where an increasingly frustrated guard has tried to do everything he can to help me. I need to bake him some cookies or something.



Today, my boss finally snapped and got me paperwork for a new pass (he wasn't going to get me one, as he's only allowed to issue badges to so many crew members and the rigging crew's not going to be on this show full-time, but this whole debacle has really been annoying him), so when we went for our morning coffee break I stopped in at the operations office and got my new badge.

I don't know why, but everyone looks bad on their Paramount IDs. I usually take a decent photo, and even I look like a fucking convict.

I think it's the lighting.

At least I won't have the hassle at the gate tomorrow.

Today, the company was on location (a half mile or so from the studio), so we ended up cleaning up after first unit (they get busy lighting and don't make everything neat, which is fine - it's keeping me working) and getting the stages ready for when they come back on the lot.

Tomorrow, we're working on stage 12, which, it turns out, used to be called stage 13 - the old DC cans are still labeled 13 although the stage is now numbered 12. The other day, when one of the fluorescent fixtures we were powering up caught fire (flames and everything - exciting!), it was jokingly blamed on the stage's being unlucky.

I wanted to go into the perms to check for good graffiti, but there's no backboard on the ladder* and it freaked me out.


*Most stages with permanents have had stairways installed, but on the smaller stages where there's no room they left the old ladders, but installed backboards (it's like a big tube around the ladder) so if you fall backwards, you'll just lean into the backboard and not fall 40 feet down to the deck.
For some reason, quite a few of the older stages at Paramount have not had backboards installed - including Stage 7: the tall stage (four stories or so up to the perms, and no backboard on the ladder - yikes!)

Couch of the Day:

Happy Monday!

Our crew spent today loading first unit's truck (they're on set, someone has to do it) - although this show's shot mostly on a stage, they do go out on occasion and when they do they have to have a truck.

Our boss managed to browbeat production into giving us a 40 foot trailer - he told us that they'd wanted to give us a 10 ton, but our lighting and cable package would not have fit into such a small truck (a 10 ton is about the size of a large moving van, and a 40 foot trailer is the back portion of those 18 wheelers you see on the highway. While such a big truck might seem excessive, we really do have to be able to keep the equipment readily accessible so we can work - this means the stuff can't be jammed in too tightly, because then we'd never find anything quickly, and no one -absolutely no one- wants to be scrabbling through the truck trying to find a piece of equipment that's been buried while the gaffer's screaming "Hurry up, you fucker!" into the walkie).


It took us all day to load the truck, as we were waiting on first unit to wrap their first scene (they were scheduled to finish it at lunch, which would have been 1 pm, but they actually finished at 4 pm), so we could go and pick up the HMIs off that set - they had to go into the truck. The time was well-spent, though, as we all got to watch my boss take a sledgehammer to the old grip racks* in the front of the trailer.

Heh, heh.. Destruction is cool, man.


* Our truck used to be a grip truck, and now it's been reborn as a lighting department item. Grip equipment and set lighting equipment are different (natch, as we do different jobs), but grip have a lot more small items that need grip department-specific storage areas than we do - so when we get a truck with lots of cute little cubbyholes that are perfect for those grip items, we see it as space that could be put to better use for stacks of cable. Enter my boss and his sledgehammer.

I'm sure it made some of the grips cry (they were really nice racks), but that's the way it goes, and I have to admit that it is a hell of a lot of fun to watch a grown man smash something to bits at 8 am.

Ain't life grand?


Couch of the Day:

Friday Photos

That's right - plural.

I got some really good ones this week.

First - the best perm graffiti EVER:



Ever wonder what your crew thinks of that brilliant dialogue you slaved over for weeks?

Yeah, this pretty much sums it up.


Aaaaannnd:

Paramount has all this super old camera gear stashed in the "basement" of one of the facades on New York Street (where we were working today). The layer of dust just makes the stuff look even cooler:

Well, I know what the next couple of weeks will be like.

So I got added on to the rigging crew for this show - which is kind of weird in TV as it's not a full time crew (most movies carry rigging crews full time. Sometimes the crew is smaller than other times, but they're always there - good riggers are hard to find, and when you release your riggers for a week they go get other jobs and sometimes you can't get them back), so I'm looking at a few days each week, guaranteed, which is a good thing - this is a group of guys that I really like and have a good time with.

They only do 10 hour days, which is both good and bad. Good because I can have a life, bad because I won't make the big overtime bank.

It's also good because I'll get my Paramount ID renewed, so I won't have the daily guard gate hassle. I could also buy cheap DVDs in the lot store, if they had anything good, which they don't (okay the South Park box sets for 12 bucks each are cool, but that's about it).

Couch of the Day:

Bubble wrap

Bubble wrap
Originally uploaded by Peggy Archer.

For when the owner of the location we're shooting at absolutely, positively refuses to move the car.

Oooo.. I must be psychic

"Same old shit" indeed...'shit' being the key word here.

Today's rig was at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Our crew got there about four hours before the shooting crew, so we could run cable to the day's first set in the hotel's nightclub, change lights that needed to be swapped out and get first unit's carts off their truck - first unit had about 8 pages to shoot today, so our taking the time to get them set up meant that they could just walk on the set and start the day's work.

The direct line from our trucks to the set was through the hotel's lobby, but management didn't want us walking through the lobby with equipment (I can certainly understand that), so we had to use the service corridors - narrow, hot, winding, filled with dirty linens piled in huge carts (in some spaces, we barely had room to squeeze our lighting carts through. One steers these carts by pushing and peering to the side to make sure one's still on course and tight quarters where there's no room to actually see where the cart's headed is the ultimate test of cart-pushing skills) and harried hotel employees who were remarkably nice to us, given that I'm sure we were ruining their day.

The hotel is really nice and clean, but once you get outside the walls, it's the old-style Hollywood; dirty, poor and run-down - and in this particular neighborhood, there's dog shit everywhere - residents of the apartment buildings just behind the hotel don't clean up after their dogs, so whenever we had to walk on the grass (and if we had to get something out of our truck's jockey boxes we had to walk on the grass) we were on constant "land mine" alert - this meant screaming "POOOOO!!!"(let's face it, yelling "shit" doesn't really get any kind of reaction on a movie set) whenever one saw a co-worker about to step in something, and the co-worker would freeze, one foot in the air, neck craning frantically, trying not to step in the shit or drop the equipment he or she was carrying (hey, no one wants to be the person who tracked dog shit all over the hotel's expensive floors or be the one having to clean shit off of lighting equipment so it can be used inside. Wait, you didn't think we'd be allowed to bring filth-covered equipment inside a hotel that's just had a multi-million dollar remodel, did you?).

We got lucky and no one stepped in anything, but the whole street was thick with flies because of the piles of shit everywhere - although the smell wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been.

When first unit got settled in, we went to rig the day's second set, which was around the hotel's pool. Since the Roosevelt's remodeling team were inconsistent in their placement of handicapped ramps, I just about finished my knees off by carrying coils of banded* up stairs.

We left right after that, and I'm sure first unit will be there well past midnight. I tried not to gloat as I walked to my car.

I'm off to bed - I have a 6 am call tomorrow (and they've added me for Thursday as well, so I'm now getting five days this week).


*It's called "banded" because, as you can see from the photo in the link, it's several cables banded together. Some types of banded are heavier that other types, depending on how heavily the cable is insulated. One 50 foot piece of five wire (meaning there's five cables banded together) banded weighs anywhere from 65 to 75 lbs. Of course, we had the extra-heavy type.

Couch of the Day:

Finally, I'm back to the same old shit.

Sometimes the work season starts off slowly, and I start to panic. I fret over how much money I've spent, how I've left the fans on when I'm not home and run up the electric bill (a big deal in California, but I worry about the cat when it's hot), how I've gone out for sushi once too often, how I'm going to have to buy another car in the next year or so.

This is the standard paranoia of the self-employed, and I'll certainly take it as a trade-off for a job that I really, truly do love. Somehow, everything always works out in the end, and although I may yet end up shuffling down Hollywood Boulevard with all my possessions loaded into a shopping cart, I'm reasonably certain it won't happen this year.

As I was standing on set today (grateful for that last-minute call which got me a day's work since I'd been kind of panicked about my not working enough last week), waiting for the gaffer to release the rigging crew (we'd stayed on past our allowed 8 hours to help first unit move from one set to the other), the rigging best boy booked me for tomorrow's rig on this show (some forgettable mid-season replacement comedy).

Not five minutes after that, a friend who's pushing* a crew on a Paramount show called me and asked me if I could work Wednesday and Friday for him.

Four days this week, which covers my rent. Plus, Paramout is super-close to my house so I have a five minute commute time. Okay, ten since I bet my ID card's expired and that means a delay at the gate when I'm trying to get on the lot.

Back to the same old shit, and I'm very glad to be posting it.



* "Pushing" a crew means being the supervisor of that particular crew. Generally, when a show has more than one rig going in at the same time and the best boy can't supervise them all, he or she will appoint a "pusher" for each rig.


Couch of the Day: