The Anonymous Production Assistant

Foreign Experience

Max writes: I work as an office PA in Malta, which has a small but steadily growing film industry largely based on foreign films shooting here rather than our own local production. We have all manner of shoots here from music videos and small commercials to high-budget, high-profile American films and TV, and everyone pretty […]

Pet Peeve

Scripts change in TV. They change a lot. The first draft distributed to department heads is usually just a rough guide. You know, so location managers can start scouting, construction crews can start building, casting directors can start casting. That draft will be rewritten at least a half dozen times before filming begins. Sometimes these […]

Time Lords

When you work in Hollywood, whether in features or TV, your time is not your own. For starters, a normal day is twelve hours.  And that’s twelve hours of filming.  Several departments (production, make up, locations, transpo) have to come in before call or stay well after wrap. So, half the day gone just working.  […]

Simple Etiquette

First of all, let me apologize for not posting in a while. Rexwas almost right. Nobody’s found out that I write this blog, but that’s only because I’ve been very, very careful of late. One of our set PAs fell sick, and I had to fill in for him. (The other office PA had no […]

No Jerks

Yesterday, Desiree said: His outburst was cocky and out of the map. But when you say “astonishingly, this outburst did not get the operator fired” I get a little scared. Everybody must also be allowed to have an own opinion, a freedom of speech and by all means a bad day. Maybe I didn’t properly […]

The Inverse Relationship of Seriousness and Gravity

I met a former Las Vegas police officer, and he told me the following story: We got a call for a suicide. Self-inflicted gunshot to the head. You could see the victim from the front door. He was sitting at the kitchen table, kinda in profile. The entry wound was on his temple. The gun […]

Titles

There’s a curious inconsistency I’ve noticed in the way film industry address each other. No one is ever called “Mr. Spielberg,” or “Ms. Ephron.”  It’s “Steve” and “Nora.”  Even if you’ve just met the person, you’re instantly on a first-name basis.  This is particularly hard to get used to for a polite boy from the […]

Unemployment

David wrote in about a subject everyone in the industry can relate to.  He was making small talk with a clerk at an oil change place, and mentioned that he was out of a job, momentarily– it’s no biggie since the production season is winding down anyway and that I should be able to pick […]

Networking

After working in low budget film for a number of years, I started running into people I’d worked with before. At a certain point, I realized this was a bad sign. As they say, you’re the average of the five people closest to you. Professionally, the five people closest to me were all working on […]

What’s in a Name?

For tax reasons that I don’t really understand, studios generally create limited liability corporations for each individual film and TV show they make. Often, these LLCs are just “Stupid Michael Bay Movie, Inc.” or “Yet Another CBS Procedural, LLC.”  Sometimes they’re jokey; I believe Starship Troopers was “Big Bug Productions.” Sometimes, if it’s a really […]

On Screen

(First, I’d like to point you to an amusing post on Amanda’s website, about how soon you forget what it’s like to be young and poor.) In most offices, there are enough binders to create a replica of Stonehenge entirely from supplies purchased at Staples. My boss keeps copies of everything– every script, every draft […]

Really Writing

I walked into the writers’ office yesterday and saw a ping pong ball and two paddles sitting on the assistant’s desk. I paused, staring at the ping pong ball. This was one of those moments you see in indie movies, where the character is contemplating his life, but you don’t know exactly what he’s thinking […]