"I just wanted some coffee. I'm still not sure how this happened to me."

Today, we had a scene which required a security guard. The guy that the casting agency sent over didn't look much like a security guard, and the producer (and the director), at the last minute, decided that he just wouldn't do - he was more 'underaged hall monitor' than 'menacing authority figure'.

One of our juicers is the nicest, most fun guy in the world (and completely harmless), but he looks like he'd kill you and eat your skin for fun on a Friday night. Our producer ambushed him at the craft service table and talked him into playing the security guard role (no lines, of course -then they'd have to pay him more and possibly taft-hartley him into SAG).

His first question, of course, was "How much extra are you going to pay me?"

His second question was if our boss was okay with it - if you have one of your crew in front of the camera, then you're down a guy, and some gaffers are not okay with stuff like this.

Our boss said we were set up for the shot and he was fine, and the producer said that she'd pay him non-union background actor wages (I think it's $50 or $75 - and that's on top of what he's getting paid today), so he agreed.

They put him in wardrobe, he did the scene (where he looks menacing - and he did it really well. He didn't look stiff at all, even though he told us later that he was nervous as hell), and afterwards graciously endured about an hour of catcalls and wolf whistles from the crew.

As soon as he got back into his real clothes and onto the walkie, his first statement was "I just wanted a cup of coffee. I'm still not sure how this happened to me."

Quote of the night.

We have a 10 am call tomorrow. If I can, I'm going to go to one of those cheap tourist joints on Hollywood Blvd. and get him a fake Oscar (tm).

I promise I won't kill anyone. Today.

I was cranky as hell Friday. The teenagers were driving me mad, my co-workers were driving me mad, the director was driving me mad, hell - the color of the walls in the school was driving me mad. Craft service and the caterer just about sent me over the edge, and a simple request from another crew member to read my newspaper sent me into a near-murderous rage.

The topper to the day was my accidentally locking myself in a bathroom (don't ask) at wrap and then having to pound on the door and scream for help until someone came to let me out (given how big a cunt I'd been all day, I'm really surprised that they didn't just leave me in there). I cursed at other motorists all the way home, and upon getting there the discovery that my saved take-out had gone bad (not surprising - it had been in the fridge for a week) resulted in yet another temper tantrum (and my having to scrub the walls of the kitchen at 2 am after I calmed down).

Although everyone's cranky near the end of a movie (spending too much time crammed into close quarters for 14 hours a day every day will do that) I figured out that my crankiness is because I haven't worked out consistently since this movie started. When I'm not working, I'm doing some kind of workout damn near every day (weights four times a week, cardio of some type six days a week).

I guess I've gotten addicted to it, as after two days of doing weights (arms yesterday, legs today) and swimming (both days), I feel much better -so much better that I don't want to kill anyone, and I even baked a bunch of cookies to take to work tomorrow as an apology for my being horrible on Friday.

Three more days - our last shooting day is Wednesday, and we wrap the truck on Thursday and Friday.

Attack of the Teenagers

For the rest of the show, we're going to be shooting in a high school in the San Fernando Valley. Although the school goes on Christmas break next week, for the next two days it's full of students.

I've managed to spend most of my adult life avoiding teenagers. Even the 'teenage' extras in our movie are actually in their 20's due to restrictions about working minors long hours.

These actual teenagers would stick their heads into the room that we had our equipment or into the set (us, grip, camera, sound, wardrobe, beauty* and video village** all in a medium sized classroom) and demanding to be put in the movie, be given something off the craft service table or to meet one of the actors:

Teenager 1: "Ohmygod, I HAVE to be in your movie. Put me in your movie!"

Teenager 2: "That actor is so superhot - you have to put me in the movie now! Ohmygod!"

Teenager 3: "Give me some of that food! What do you mean you don't have enough?"

Teenager 4: "Ohmygod, that actor is so totally superhot! Ohmygod - what's he like?"

Teenager 5: "Hey, put me in the movie! Hey! HEY!! Why are you ignoring me?"

Me: "Look, I'm just an electrician. The biggest favor I can do for you is to tape down all my cables so that you don't trip and fall on your ass in front of that so totally superhot actor (who, for the record, is cute in that non-threatening boy kind of way, but I'd hesitate to call him 'superhot'. Maybe I'm just old)."

Teenager 5: "Ohmygod! I so totally need to be whatever you are so I can get put in the movie."

Me: "Fine, call me when you get your union card and I'll give your number to my boss."

Teenager 5: "BITCH!!!"


If I'd ever wanted kids, today would have killed that desire. Like totally. At least they were all gone by about 4 pm.

Today was only 12 hours, due to the producer cracking the whip, and we finished everything on the call sheet, which is a good thing - no added work tomorrow.



*Beauty, sometimes called "Primp and Crimp" is the hair and makeup departments.

**Video Village is the monitor where the director, producers et al. sit and watch what's being shot. It's always in our way.

Ten Hour Turnaround!

Call time: 9 am

Wrap time: 11:45 pm

We left at 12:30 am

Call time tommorow (in the west San Fernando Valley - about 35 miles from my house): 10:30 am.

I really feel bad for the grips. They're still there, trying to wrap out of the stage. We left everything for our rigging crew. They'll pick it up tomorrow and sent it out to the Valley in a stakebed truck.

I'm off to bed.

That went suprisingly well

Moving from one stage to another always takes time. We loaded up all our stuff the night before, but still there's transit time from one place to another - and everyone's trying to hurry to get the good place to put their equipment. Generally, camera goes closest to the set, and grip and electric are in a rush to claim whatever good space is left. Some crews are ruthless about getting in there and claiming the good real estate, but this stage is so packed full of stuff that there's really no good place - no matter where we put our stuff, we're running an obstacle course to get to the set, but at least we didn't have to keep moving our carts all day.

The major fuck up of the morning was the guy with the lighting balloons got sent to the wrong stage and had to break down and then set up again, which took some time, but since today was our first day with a really big blue screen ( I mean really big. This one is 30' by about 100 '. The big hanging screens have to be set up properly - they can't have any wrinkles and this takes some time and effort on the part of the grips), there was enough going on that it didn't matter. I think we ended up starting a half hour behind schedule, which isn't bad for a huge move from one stage to another with a really small crew who weren't given a pre-call*.

Once we got set up, two of the guys who didn't want to be on set with the raging cold went back and wrapped up the other stage, although the rental company's not coming to pick the stuff up until tomorrow (Wednesday).

Everything went pretty smoothly, which I'm very happy about - the last thing I wanted to do was have to call my boss and say "Hey, there's been a huge catastrophe on the day that you left me in charge!"

Speaking of my boss, he's feeling better (that weird Chinese shit he's been taking must have worked), and will be back tomorrow.

* A pre-call is when the crew comes in early in order to get set up on time.

The Mysterious Stage Syndrome

There's a phenomenon that occurs when a director who's used to shooting on location gets on a stage for the first time - they slow down. However fast they were working, they'll work at about half that speed once that stage door closes.

I think it's the static lighting. On a stage, you can't see the sun moving across the sky, so it's impossible to tell how much time has passed; meaning it's very easy to slip into thinking you have much more time than you actually do.

This director, who's the nicest guy in the world but isn't very fast even on location, has slowed to damn near a full stop since we've been on stage.

Scenes are being cut and added to the next day's work in an effort to keep the hours down, which just means that we'll have a super long day on the last stage day (Wednesday). We had a second unit today just to help us catch up, as we're moving to another stage first thing in the morning.

Inertia is frustrating. When you sit and do nothing, it makes the day seem longer - although after all these night exteriors, I'm happy for the opportunity to sit and read the paper.

The cold from hell is still raging around set (when you work 14 hour days your immune system doesn't work well). My boss got it today, so he's staying home tomorrow (in a much appreciated effort not to get the rest of us sick), which means that I'm the best boy until he gets back.

For the humble re-rate of $1.00 per hour, I get to return stacks of equipment from two different rental packages, wade through piles of paperwork, and fill out timecards instead of sitting on my ass, staring slack-jawed at a spot on the wall while we do 17 takes of every angle.

Hey, it'll make the day go faster.

My big half weekend

There's been a cold/flu going around the set, and in an effort not to get sick, I've been swallowing fistfuls of supplements all day every day. While this has succeeded in that I haven't gotten sick, I did go out for drinks after work Friday night, and I got thrown for the proverbial loop by two martinis - lucky I wasn't driving.
I guess it shouldn't surprise me that taking that stuff makes you more sensitive to alcohol. I just wish I'd been smart enough to figure it out beforehand.

After being incapacitated all day yesterday, I'm now left with half a weekend. I have to finish my shopping, ship all of my gifts (which I was going to do yesterday and now won't get to do until next weekend which means I'll have to pay extra for express shipping), do my laundry, get the car serviced, and try to clean the house.

Guess which one of these I'm going to let slide. That's right - the house. I'll just have to live like a pig for another week (although I'm not home more than a few hours at a stretch anyways).

I also have no food, and that's not an exaggeration. There is absolutely nothing edible in my house - I used the last of the coffee this morning, and although I'm tempted to dig into my earthquake supplies, I'm not going to do it.

I'm going to go to the Hollywood Farmer's Market and get a tamale from Corn Maiden. I'm not going to buy more food as it's just going to rot in the fridge - this movie's going another two weeks.

So not cool.

If you remove the handrail from the catwalks (to load equipment into the perms), you really should re-install it when you're done.

Whomever took this out didn't bother to put it back (yes, it was like this when we got there) - and, if you're wondering, this photo was taken from about 35 feet up in the air.

The Lying Sack of Shit

Walkie talkies are so much more than a simple communication tool. Without them, we'd not have nearly as much fun as we do.

At some point during the early afternoon today, someone accused the set lighting department of 'being dishonest with production'.

I have no idea why it happened, how it happened or what led up to the accusation. At the time, I was on the truck and only heard about it second-hand - in the form of "Wait 'til you hear this!" from one of my co-workers.

Of course, this immediately caused a lot of mirth in our supposedly dishonest little department. My boss started it by jokingly calling one of the other juicers a "lying bastard", which sent us all into hysterics right there on the lift gate of the truck.

It quickly escalated on the walkie when we started referring to each other as "lying sack of shit" - as in "Hey you lying sack of shit - where are those stingers?" or "I know you told me you wrapped those lights, but I should probably double check because you're a lying sack of shit."

If someone didn't respond to his or her name the first time (and sometimes you don't), the next step would be to yell - you guessed it - "Clock in*, you lying sack of shit!"

By the end of the day, I was breaking up halfway through "Sack of shit", and one of the other guys couldn't even say that much because he'd start laughing right after he managed spit out the word "You".

This has officially usurped the "Cheez Nips and a punch in the mouth" joke that had just about run it's course (it had actually gotten out of control - I have a water bottle holder on my toolbelt and yesterday, someone removed the water bottle and filled the holder with Cheez Nips while I wasn't looking).

On the way home, my boss called to tell me that he'd moved me to the rigging crew tomorrow (they're day exterior and don't really need three people since they'll probably not do any lighting). The stage is three blocks from my house, so this is a huge favor - tomorrow's location is a half-hour drive for me.

When I said that I would miss them (so not true - I'll have an eight hour day and my call's two and a half hours later than theirs), he said "Don't worry - I'll call you every 15 minutes and lie to you".

If only I could believe him.

We are, after all, a bunch of lying sacks of shit.


*"Clock in" being what someone says to you when you're daydreaming and should be working - as in "punch the clock, you're at work."

Nothing tonight (okay, maybe something)

I'm in 10 hour turnaround - we wrapped after 8 pm, and my call in the morning is 6 am.

There's actually a lot to write about, but I'm off to bed.

UPDATE: This LA Times article (which, today, I've really been regretting - I'd dug myself into a nice little rut and now I'm all out of sorts) has spawned some fantastic emails.

Here's one from tonight: Chris Hager's Local 80 Photographs

These are fucking amazing. Local 80 are grips - and these are some fantastic portraits of my grip brothers and sisters. You want to see what "we" look like?

Here we are.

At least the weather's nice on this guilt trip.

I hate turning down work.

If you turn someone down too often, they stop calling you at all ("Oh, she's booked all the time, I'm not going to even bother"), which is a very bad thing.

The job I had to turn down today (my day off) would have been working until 9 pm and then I'd have to be back on the low budget at 6 am tomorrow. The problem with that is that a 9 pm wrap (if they wrap at 9) means I'm not leaving the stage until 9:45, I don't get home until 10:15, and I won't get to sleep until 11:30.

A 6 am call means 5:30 for breakfast, which means I have to leave my house at 5 am, which means I have to be up at 4:30 am. No matter how I crunch those numbers, I'm left without enough sleep, and I used up my carte blanche to be cranky last week.

That and I put off doing my laundry until today, so had I worked I'd have had to walk around in rank clothing all week. Eeew.

I did the laundry, and went to see Jarhead with the Boy Who's Really Cute But Is Way Too Young For Me.

Right after the movie let out, I got called to work on the scale show that I helped load in a week ago. It's a week of work downtown at night - but I'd have to bail off the low budget for those five days (starting December 11th).

Five days at scale is a considerably larger amount of money. Five days on a scale show with a full crew and good coffee. Five days on a show which runs beyond Christmas (the low budget ends December 23rd), so there's a chance of getting work in January, when I know it's going to be slow. Five days with a best boy that I really would like to keep calling me, so I don't want to turn him down.

Five days on a show which would leave my boss on the low budget - whom I like a whole lot - scrambling to find someone to replace me.

I know what he'll say when I talk to him. He'll say "of course you should go to the higher paying show. You'd be silly to turn down that kind of money. We'll find someone", and he'll mean it, but I've seen him in the truck, making phone call after phone call because no one wants to work for this rate when it's busy and there are so many shows paying scale.

So now I feel guilty.

Dammit.

I told the best boy on the scale show to pencil me in, pending my ability to find a replacement for myself. If I have to turn him down, hopefully he'll understand.

If not, I'll have potentially burned a bridge (so to speak), and that sucks.

I'm off to bed.

Holy Crap!

I knew there was going to be an article in the LA Times about me, but I had no idea it was going to run on the front page of the Calendar section.

Wow.

Although I still feel the attention isn't justified (I am, after all, just a worker bee), I'd like to welcome any new readers and raise the following points:

I welcome reader responses, but sometimes can't reply to them due to a seriously overloaded work schedule (or an exhaustion-blown brain). Don't take it personally if I don't reply to your comment or email right away.

I try really hard not to lapse into techie jargon here, but I sometimes slip. If there's a term you don't understand, please ask and it will be explained.

Swear away. I have a potty mouth, why shouldn't you?

Speaking of potty mouths, this blog does sometimes raise adult subjects and uses adult language. It's probably not appropriate for children, although I doubt any of them would want to read it anyway.

I'd also like to apologize to the writers of all the wonderful blogs out there that I haven't had time to read lately. I still love all your blogs, I just don't get the computer time when I work 14 hour days.

Since I have Monday off (woohoo!), I'm going to a friend's party tonight.

Here comes the sun

There's something vaguely unwholesome about drinking a post-work beer at 7 am.

The world is just waking up, parents are dropping their kids off at school (well, not on Saturday, but you get the idea), lines are forming at coffee places, and I'm cracking open a cold one while I watch the morning traffic report, grateful to have made it home in one piece.

We shut the doors of our truck just as the sun was coming up - the end of our weeklong night exterior extravaganza.




Thank the deity of your choice that it's over. Night work is tough - just staying up all night is a pain, and when we're outside after dark, it's a lot of work for us (there's a huge difference between the movie version of dark and actual dark. Movie dark involves a surprisingly large number of lights).

People get tired and cranky, tempers get short - it's a contagious case of what one of the camera assistants calls "the pissy-pants".

Last night, however, the crew were not the crankiest people around - and I actually felt shamed into not complaining about being cold.

This movie takes place in the summertime, so last night we shot an outdoor pool party scene.

An outdoor pool party on a cold night in a pool that despite the rented water heaters never got over 68 degrees.

A pool that was full of actors pretending to be having fun on a balmy summer night which was actually 48 degrees with a very cold wind.

Poor bastards.

They did a good job, though. They didn't even visibly shiver on camera.

I came home, slept for about three hours and am going to try to stay awake until 8 or 9 tonight. I have to get back on a day schedule - we have a 6 am call on Tuesday (they're giving us an extra day off over the weekend to get re-adjusted, which is very, very nice of them).

I'm back!

For the past few days, my favorite person in the world has been whomever invented Polartec fabric. I wrapped myself in about four layers of the stuff and was pretty damn warm at Castaic Lake.

The only thing that was cold was my face. My boss suggested one of those ski masks that cover your face, but aside from the bank robber look not doing it for me, how am I supposed to drink coffee while wearing one of those things?

The location itself was a pretty tough one - we had our trucks in the campsites just above the lake, and the set was 30 feet down the hill on the shore of the lake itself. The production company had stairs built (which was a good thing - that hill was steep), but they were really crowded (that and I don't do stairs well because of my knees), so I ended up just running up and down the hill all night (there was a little trail and it ended up being faster anyways). We kept two guys downstairs on the set and two guys upstairs by the trucks so we could meet in the middle with equipment - that way we were only running up and down half a hill all night.

I lucked out and got posted upstairs near the trucks - which also happened to be near the space heaters and the coffeepot. Maybe that's why I was warm.

On night one, we had some lights placed underwater (they make special lights for this), so one of the guys had to go into the water with them. Right before he went in, he asked our boss what his dive rate was on this show - normally, you get extra money for going in the water - and I jokingly turned to him and said "The dive rate's a cup of Cheez Nips and a punch in the mouth." (this is sort of a riff on the fact that there's a really low 'dive bump' on this movie).

It reads really lame now, but it was hilarious at 3 am. Now it's mushroomed into a huge joke on set ("Hey, great job! Come to the production office for your rate bump*!")

I went straight from my motel room in Castaic to last night's Granada Hills location - in a neighborhood that doesn't get filmed in very often (I can tell because the residents are putting up lawn chairs on the sidewalks to watch the movie being filmed. Normally the residents where we're filming shout curses at us while they're calling the permit office trying to get us shut down).

We're back there tonight, for a night exterior in the rain. That same guy's got to get in the pool tonight - and the water's just as cold as the lake was.

Don't worry, he'll get his rate bump.


*A rate bump is a temporary raise - generally for doing something extra shitty, such as wading into a cold body of water at night.

Brrrr!

The thing about the winter's first night shoot is I always underestimate how cold it's going to be - I've gotten used to summer, when a long sleeved T-shirt is enough. I bring a few warm things and think I'll be okay, but I usually have at least one body part that feels like it's going to freeze off.

Last night, in Chatsworth, the temperature was in the very low 40's (if you think that's not cold, then try standing outside all night in low 40's), and I didn't bring enough clothing (my torso was fine, but my legs were really cold). I also got stuck baby-sitting the condor (it's being sent up unmanned, but someone has to stay with it just in case). Had I gone up, I'd have had my sleeping bag and would have been fine. Instead I got colder and colder and ended up trying to burrow under the camo netting* to keep warm.

Camo netting is not an effective blanket.

I ended up having to hike the half mile back to the truck and get my rain gear because I needed the extra layer.

Call time: 2:30 pm
Wrap time: 4:30 am

For the next two nights, we're in Castaic, which is going to be super cold (the predicted lows are in the mid-forties, but we're shooting right on the shore of the lake, so it'll probably feel colder than that), but I'm ready. I've packed every warm thing I own, and if I have to, I'll wear them all at the same time.

Since Castaic is so far away (and we're on nights, so we'd be fighting the traffic both ways), we're being put up in hotels. I'll be back Friday morning.




*When a large piece of equipment which can't be moved might be in the shot (last night it was the condor base - it's normally our trucks), it's draped with military-style camoflauge netting. It looks cheesy as hell to the eye, but the film can't read it. Sort of. If you know what to look for, you can see it - but if you're looking at the background trying to see the camo netting, the movie's got bigger problems than a truck in the frame, now doesn't it?