Why Didn’t You Remind Me That I Reminded You?
Some days, I think my boss is a blithering idiot. (By the way, did you know “blither” means “to blather”? Thanks, dictionary.com!) Other days, I think she’s pants-shittingly crazy. We have a production meeting tomorrow, so my boss wrote up a memo with the time and room number, and had me copy it fifty times […]
Unhappy Birthday To Me!
Birthdays are always fun on set. My birthday, a few weeks ago, was a workday this year. There were cake and balloons and singing and all that good stuff. For the DP. Whose birthday was the same as mine. The best I got was, “Hey, isn’t it your birthday, too?” Whenever balloons or flowers or […]
On Location
I love shooting on location. Mostly because it’s an excuse to get out of the office. On my current show, we usually go to nice places, like the park or the beach. It’s not like The Shield, where we’d be filming in Compton all the time. (If you work for the The Shield, and I […]
Missed Opportunities
When you work on a studio lot, you see people you may not see elsewhere. When they were shooting Rush Hour 3, I saw Jackie Chan rolling around on a segway all the time. (Of course, I wasn’t allowed to rollerblade on the lot, because it was too dangerous.) The other day, I passed Larry […]
Anti-Semitism
We have a new AD, and he seems like a douche. Of course, I think everyone’s a douche, so my impression may be skewed. Then again, maybe he is a douche. So, I asked my fellow PA, and he said, “Yeah, that’s what you get when you have someone who’s an AD and a Jew.” […]
A Moral Quandry
A conundrum, if you will. Today, I overheard the showrunner talking to some other person who gets paid enough to not know my name: “I don’t know what _____ is going to say when she finds out she doesn’t get one. We’ll just keep assigning them until there aren’t any left, and then we’ll see.” […]
Jinx
The other day, we had a stunt where a truck was supposed to crash into a tree, flip over on its side, then explode. For some reason. Everything was set up and ready to go, and I noticed there was an extra guy at each camera. I asked the stunt coordinator what the deal was, […]
The Highest Up
Today, I was on location, to get stuff signed by the UPM. While I was standing around, a set PA asked if I could go grab the executive producer (who was in a coffee shop down the street that had free wifi), and bring him to set. I wasn’t doing anything, so I said sure. […]
Giant Tennis Ball of Uselessness
This post goes in the “Things That Will Change When I’m In Charge” file. When you’re a producer, or a director, or even a department head, your every whim and wish is attended to by scores of underlings. You want a crane shot? How high? You need crystal plates on the table? Six or eight? […]
But What I Really Want To Do Is Direct
People often ask me what I eventually want to do. It’s a tough question to answer without resorting to platitudes. It’s an old Hollywood cliché that everyone wants to be a director, so I try to avoid that, even though I graduated from what amounts to a director factory. What surprises me, though, is that […]
Parking
As much as I love Los Angeles, I truly hate parking in this city. It’s hard to find, and expensive (two things that I suspect are related, somehow). Street parking is the worst. Downtown, a nickel gets you two minutes. Which is about enough time to get to the door of the building, turn around, […]
Killing the Joke
Here’s a classic joke, told on film sets around the world, that I absolutely love. A producer, a director, and a DP are scouting locations. As they’re wandering around, one of them spots a lamp. Naturally, they decide to rub it, and, just as naturally, a genie pops out. The genie says, “Since there are […]