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:

Semi all-purpose chain letter

So I'm lazy and don't want to write a new response for each angry email I get (you are of course always welcome to write and tell me how great I am - those emails, I love), so I came up with this handy dandy form letter which covers the most common categories of irate messages.

So, if the email you wanted to send falls into one of these categories, don't bother. Just print this out, circle the appropriate responses, and that'll be that. Really, I do this because I care.

Really I do. I swear.


Dear (INSERT YOUR NAME HERE),

I'm really very sorry that you:

a) think my blog sucks now and I've just been phoning it in lately.

b) hate all unions and feel compelled to tell me why.

c) are this month's victim of the "who's Mr. Movie Star" rumor mill.

I think the best way to deal with this is for you and I to ignore this and get on with our respective lives because:

a) I blame it on bad Feng Shui, and I'm too broke to buy all new furniture and a bunch of those eensy mirrors.

b) Really, you just don't understand what it's like to have your will to live nearly extinguished by a producer - one or two low-budget movies and you'll be screaming for that union card, buddy. Trust me on this one.

c) I think the only way to stop people from gossiping is to kill them - which I'm pretty sure is illegal, but feel free to test that out and get back to me.

The only thing I can possibly think to suggest is to:

a) Have you pay for a decorator - please send me your credit card number ASAP, so I can fix this problem and get back to being interesting.

b) Give your phone number to all those micro-budget producers and tell them you'd just love to work for them - be sure to keep me informed 'cause I want to be there the minute your soul rips in half, even if it happens at 4 am when you're knee-deep in shit on a feedlot in Acton. Especially if it happens at 4 am when you're knee-deep in shit on a feedlot in Acton.

c) You could call the stalker photographers and do something overtly sexual with a member of the same gender while they take your picture. Of course, then you'd have a whole new set of problems, but at least the hint of crew-cooties wouldn't be one of them.

But really, I don't think that's going to solve anything.

Do you?

a)Sincerely,

b) Up yours,

c) Do you have any cute friends? I'm single,

Peggy


Couch of the Day:

It was fun - sort of - while it lasted.

The past week has been very similar to a hurricane - mainly due to The Blonde having gone completely off the deep end and, as a result, my not having gotten more than four hours of sleep on any given night.

There's a thing that happens at networks and film studios: if an exec leaves under less than totally friendly circumstances, then all the projects associated with that person get buried - they get put in a weird limbo, where they're not going to get made, but can't be shopped anywhere else due to contractual bullshit ("Sure, you can shop the project elsewhere - if you pay us back ALL the money we've spent." "But if I get it made somewhere else, I can pay you back - wouldn't you rather take that chance?" "No, not so much.").

Three guesses what's happened to our show.

I'd seen the writing on the wall; normally every line of dialogue, every idea, every shot, every rough cut is second guessed by some level of network or studio jackassery - Standards and Practices (to make sure you don't do anything that will get the network fined), executives, executive's kids, the cleaning guy, various hangers-on, etc...

When all that stopped and we got no notes from anyone at all (even before we knew our exec was leaving) I knew we were doomed. Legally the only thing we can do is to wait until we can shop the show elsewhere - another year, I think.

I've turned my phone off tonight (and I'm holed up at a friend's house. The Blonde knows where I live and I'll bet that she'll be pounding on my front door at some ungodly hour), and I'm going to run the risk of missing a work call because I have got to get some sleep. I'm already hearing people who aren't actually there talking to me. I think - they might really be there and I'm just not moving fast enough.

Honestly? This whole process has put me under so much stress that I'm almost glad it's over.

I have to check with the lawyer to see how much of what happened I can write about. That may have to wait a year, too.


Couch of the Day:

Confidentiality Agreement for a Stupid, Stupid Product.

This isn't the entire document (a bit more legalese than I'm in the mood to type), but one particularly choice excerpt:

Feedback: Notwithstanding any other provision in this agreement, if Recipient provides any ideas, suggestions or recommendations to Company regarding confidential information, Company is free to use and incorporate such feedback in Company's products without payment of royalties or other consideration to Recipient, so long as Company does not infringe Recipient's patents, copyrights or trademark rights in the feedback.

Well, that's just... Wait a minute ... What?

So if I make a suggestion to improve the Stupid, Stupid Product ("you know.. you should make these with an extra long headset cord so that people can cram the entire unit up their asses. That way, they wouldn't risk mislaying them!"), and then I see my suggestion ("new and improved with ass-crammability!") in next year's product revisions, I'm just out of luck? I don't even get bragging rights?

That's just wrong, man.

All kidding aside, most of us know damn good and well that any suggestions we make will not be credited or compensated (or paid attention to, especially when it's a suggestion that could save production time and money). That's why most of us don't make them - that, and it just slows things down (ad agency flak: "Ooooo... that's a great idea! Can we cram one of these up someone's ass? Call casting right now!" First AD: "Godammit, will you please shut the fuck up so I can see my kids sometime this week?").



While I can't reveal what the Stupid, Stupid Product is - I can tell you this:

Ten thousand years from now, when archaeologists are pawing through the flotsam of our civilization, they're going to wonder what the hell was wrong with us that we had to make so many of these worthless (and non-biodegradable) things.


Couch of the Day:





Although I disabled it when I started moderating comments, I'm going to have to turn that awful 'word-verification' thing back on. For the past week, I've been getting about 15 comment spam attempts a day, and it's wearing on my nerves.

I see a lot of coffee in my immediate future.

One of the things that's so difficult about night shoots is trying to sleep during the day. I got home from work at 7 am, slept for three hours and am now wide awake with no hope of getting any more shuteye.

Ugh. I have to be back at work at 8pm.

I'm hoping that if I lay down and pretend to be asleep, I'll actually fall asleep, but I think the sticky sweat-soaked sheets might keep me awake.

At least we're on the West side tonight. Last night in the San Fernando Valley felt like a furnace*.

*For my non-LA based readers, the West side of the city is normally cooler than everywhere else, since it's close to the ocean, and the Valley is at least 10 degrees hotter than downtown.

Couch of the Day:

Weekend fun for when it's too hot to go outside:

From Unfogged:

Think you're clever? Well, fuck you, clown.


The comment thread is so funny it's frightening.

Couch of the Day (see, I told you I'd be back to the same old shit):

It's really totally fixed now - I think.

I'm not really digging the piss-yellow template, though.

So what happened was my template got corrupted somehow - hence that display of gibberish you saw.

After getting ZERO help from blogger's usually wonderful tech support, I actually had a Live Journal user suggest changing the template.

So, hopefully it's fixed.

Just so you know, this blog is (and has been for quite some time) mirrored on Live Journal (I hate their compose interface, so no moving over there), although I've been lazy about archiving over there, so it's not quite up-to-date yet (please don't link there, either - it's just a backup and I don't update it very often).

Don't even start suggesting services that cost money - early on I made a deal with myself that I wouldn't get all type-A and empty my bank account on pimping out a weblog (or paying for traffic spikes, you hotlinking motherfuckers).

Blogroll will be back as soon as I can muster up the courage to start editing the template again.

I have no idea what's going on.

I'm trying to get Blogger's tech support to look at it.

UPDATE: It's fixed, but at the cost of my entire sidebar (not such a big deal - I was thinking about taking out all the blog-rating buttons anyway - all they do is piss me off, and the blogroll's easily rebuilt).

Thanks a lot, Blogger.

Actually, no thanks at all to Blogger - they were absolutely no help despite my frantic emails, and that's unusual, since I've found their tech support to be pretty good given that I don't pay anything.

I guess they were busy today.

Anyways, I'm off to bed (it's now almost 11 pm).

I'll be back to the same old crap before you can say "What the fuck happened?".

I'm too hot for my tool belt.

From an article in the LA Times:

"The cool ocean breezes and clouds that meteorologists call Southern California's natural air conditioner broke down this year, creating record heat that is expected to continue through October."

Oh, I don't want to hear that - it's way hotter than normal for this time of year, and two people I know have gotten heat stroke in the past ten days.

The Local 80 Goddess was working at one of those 'movie ranches' (you know the ones - with the photogenic 19th century Western-style facades, artfully rutted dirt roads and nary a power line or highway overpass in sight - yeah, those are all located in the city's hottest suburbs) and collapsed in the 110 degree heat, which resulted in her being a guest in the ICU. Last I talked to her, she'd progressed to being allowed to walk around the block - only if it wasn't too hot out.

The other person didn't collapse, but started to feel really crappy in the lunch line and was able to recognize the signs of heat-related problems in time to get to the hospital before things got really bad, but still admitted to not feeling so great a few days later.

I'm sitting on the couch with a fan aimed directly at me, moving only in order to go sit someplace with air conditioning (I've used up all my movie passes and I've seen all the summer movies twice, but cool air's cool air), but I'll be working soon enough and Murphy's Law being what it is, I'll probably get sent to some far-flung inferno where I'll be expected to remain alive for 14 hours despite the heat.

Production doesn't stop just because it's insanely hot - just like it doesn't stop when it's freezing cold, windy, or raining toads (they'd just have the set dressers clear them off with a shovel).

I think you have to fuck up an actor before a show temporarily shuts down - but not always even then. Mr. Movie Star had a story about getting hit in the head so hard that he saw double and being expected to complete the scene anyways because they were running behind that day.

Or maybe Mr. Movie Star was just being overly dramatic.



Couch of the Day:

Holy delayed reaction Batman!

During my foolish youth, I decided I didn't need to wear flip-flops in the gym showers ('cause I was a rebel like that) and as a result have Plantar warts on one of my feet. They're not very large - mostly due to my doctor being pretty vigilant about removing them before they get to the point where they might cause pain - since I do, after all, spend a large portion of my working life standing.

For some reason, I picked up a really tenacious strain and the little bastards are completely resistant to any treatment besides cutting them out, so I have to have it done every so often. It's not a big deal - they numb the foot, cut the wart out and then for a week I can't wear any shoes but those horrible Crocs things.

When the doctor gave me the news today, I burst into tears at the idea of another procedure - completely out of character for me. I'm not normally weepy, and this really isn't all that big of a deal (the worst part of the whole thing is the injection into the nerve to numb the foot). I just sat there in the chair with tears running down my face as I said "Yes, Friday's fine. No, really... it's fine" while the doctor gave me that concerned look.

Ten bucks says that as I'm on my way out of his office tomorrow, he hands me a prescription for Prozac.

The only explanation I have is that it's a delayed freak-out from the dog bite. For the few days right after it happened, I had nightmares where I'd wake up thinking the dog was biting me again - I could actually feel the teeth closing on my leg - but they went away, and I thought it was fine. When I told a friend (whom I called for a ride home from the hospital) about my little meltdown today she said "I'm not surprised - you were way too calm just after it happened."

Post-meltdown, I had to do a freebie for a gaffer I work with a lot who's trying to jump up to DP, and needed a few of the normal crew to help light a blue screen shot for a micro-budget feature (Freebies suck, but when someone gives me a lot of work I'm kind of karmically obligated to do them).

Keeping an even exposure isn't as important in this day and age of digital (back in the day when effects were shot on film and composited on optical printers, an evenly lit bluescreen was critical), but it has to be pretty close and the light on the actor can't spill onto the screen, nor can the actors throw shadows onto the screen due to unfortunate light placement.

A bit much for a Craig's List 'copy and credit only' crew, so we showed up, set up the lights, shot the shit with the nice folks and then took off once we were no longer needed.

I was the butt of the jokes all day, as anytime I lost my train of thought during a conversation, mislaid my gloves or couldn't make a decision, it would instantly be blamed on the case of rabies* I've now got. This escalated into jokes about my howling at the moon while turning into a werewolf and... and... well, there was one more, but I forgot.

It's not a full moon, so it must be the rabies.

*I do NOT have rabies - but next time I work with this group, I'm going to stick an Alka-Seltzer (tm) tablet in my mouth at breakfast so I'll walk onto the truck foaming at the mouth, while acting really nonchalant about it ("What are you staring at? Do I have something stuck to my teeth? What?").

Couch of the Day:

I love the internets, yes I do.

I have done nothing today except keep my leg propped up (it's almost stopped bleeding but I stood on it for awhile tonight and that didn't help) and laugh like hell at some poor clueless guy - which, since I think he's the number one site on the web today I'm sure you've all seen, but here's the story in case you missed it:

It all started with an article in The Onion.

Guy gets his panties in a wad, thinks The Onion is a legitimate news source and posts a rant to his scary blog (I don't care which side of this particular issue you're on, this guy is unbelievably frightening, and since the media attention started he's added EXTREMELY graphic images to this post, so consider yourself warned).

People slaughter him in his comments (HIGHLY entertaining).

Guy realizes he's made a mistake and tries to spin. However, Guy still seems to think that The Onion is real - even after about 400 (update: almost 800 now) people tell him otherwise.

People slaughter him in his comments (HIGHLY entertaining).

What will Guy do next? Who knows?

(Update: He deleted all his comments and posted a finger-wagging rant about how 'a few people spoil everyone's fun'. Spoilsport - although he was getting the biggest internet bitch-slapping, well, ever so I guess I understand why he's felt the need to put a stop to it, but if you want to read the mostly hilarious comments, they're available in the google archive here,(the original post) here (the even funnier follow-up post), here, and here).

Sweet lime-flavored Jesus, those comments just keep getting funnier. I haven't laughed this hard in years.

Pillowcase full of hammers? Meet Guy. Seriously, go easy on him. You're a lot smarter than he is.

This is way, way better than TV.

Oh, and note to self: Next time I have a date with a Eurotrash (and I mean that in the best way) male model, don't take him to Amoeba to see Cut Chemist do an in-store show.

That... that did not go well.


Couch of the Day: