Prestige Matters

---

"You get paid, right?" She asks. I have to confess that I do but I don't know how to explain to her that that isn't really the point. Sure, one doesn't wait tables pro-bono, but if I was doing it just for the paycheck, then I'd be better off doing something else.

This was some time ago, of course. I haven't waited a table in years but the revelation of that conversation has stuck with me. I understand that, for many people, the compensation is all that matters but for me it's not that way, going all the way back to my years in restaurants, it wasn't ever just about the money.

This whole realization happened when I discovered that a friend, who worked third shift at a Waffle House, took home nearly as much as I did despite the fact that I worked at a three-star bistro full of high-dollar clientèle and classically trained chefs. To be clear, my tips were better but she didn't have to tip out a half-dozen other staff and she made her tips in cash while I made mine on credit cards so she could dodge some tax obligation. Finally, I had to outlay a portion of my money to stay up to par with the establishment, getting my uniforms and aprons professionally laundered and starched, haircuts twice as often as I would have had otherwise, my subscriptions to two industry publications that I read religiously lest one of my diners ask how they're doing it at Les Halles this season. This is not even counting the uncompensated time I spent outside of work studying culinary concepts and brushing up my Japanese and my French.

She suggested that I say "Fuck it," and go to work with her. The standards I kept to appalled her. While she strolled in approximately when her shift began, cut lemons and made tea as it pleased her, dried her apron in the microwave, and was never expected to know whether the vegetables were organic. I, by comparison, was constantly faced with white-glove inspections, expected to know every answer, to pronounce every foreign term correctly, to anticipate my guests' every need, to stay as late as my diners cared to stay and to always be no more than one point shy of flawless. Despite the money, comparative ease and shorter hours, I would still never have traded places.

Why, because prestige matters, perhaps not to everyone, but it matters to me.

I kept the fine dining job because, even though I was part of an oft-denigrated profession, I wanted to be high in the waiters' pecking order. Now, making movies, I work very hard to stay attached to large-budget studio shows even when local indies have the same pay scale because it matters to me that my projects are recognizable. When I'm off, I skydive because bowling doesn't quite capture others' imaginations.

Perhaps I'm shallow, but I want to know that the things I do are considered important when compared against similar endeavors. Despite everything my elementary guidance counselor told me, it is not enough to simply know my own worth. Now, I don't define my entire self based on this. I'm not going to collapse into tears and cease to function because I have to take a gig that widens no eyes, but, given the choice I'll take the harder, less lucrative work that carries a modicum of eminence.

Is that wrong? I don't know, but it's what's informed the arc of my career and it's worked out pretty well for me so far. If I'm overworked or less wealthy than I would have been otherwise, I'm comfortable with that.

By a Crystal Blue Italian Stream

---

A long weekend is never quite enough. It leaves one hanging. The extra day is more a distraction than an opportunity to recharge. That unassigned Monday is always taken up with other obligations, family gatherings, public observances and that accumulating list of things that stay undone during the work week. We all find ourselves on the clock come Tuesday but just a bit out of place, shifted just far enough in time that the minutes don't add up the way we feel they should.

The better part of it is the four day week that follows, though that does as much to break the rhythm and make the following week seem disproportionately longer.

I'm lucky, in a sense. Though my workdays are half again longer than those of my friends in cubicle-farms, the freelance lifestyle means that I usually end up with several weeks off work each year. Granted, they're unpaid weeks, but they're weeks off nonetheless. That's when the batteries get recharged. That's when I get to be lazy and also when I get to take care of all those wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-I-could-only-find-the-time things. I realize that most people don't get that.

Two weeks' annual vacation isn't enough either. Bereft of free time, we try and legislate every moment of these clots of free days with cruises, road-trips, family outings or projects better left to professionals.

I think we should scrap the holidays, at least that collection of bank holidays that have been divorced from their intent, the holidays that most of America observes only through beer and bratwurst: Columbus Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Let's take all four of those and any others that I've forgotten, combine them all together, tack them onto the back side of Thanksgiving and let the whole country take a week and a half off at the end of November. Let's just shut it all down for seven business days, and I mean everything, all non-essential businesses and institutions, because retail workers, call center techs and bartenders deserve some time off as well. Without mandating a single additional bank holiday, lets just take a week away from the business of business. Let's take a week and all say, "Hey, we all get a little time to ourselves."

I think it would be much better for us than a stray barbecue Monday every few months.

Job vs Calling

---

I just got a resume that highlights the PA applicant's "flexible schedule."

Talk about just not getting it.

If there's one thing that knocks people out of this industry, it's the hours. Your schedule is from when-we-tell-you-to-be-there until sometime after when-we're-done. There is no wiggle room on this. Once you've been around for a while and you're part of an established team, you can work it out where you get to attend family events like weddings. We're not so big a bunch of assholes as to tell you that you can't attend your mom's funeral but taking the evening off to go to a concert or to celebrate an anniversary just isn't in the cards if you're a rank and file filmmaker. You just have to learn to make life accommodate work because the reciprocal won't happen.

It would be nice to go do the things that everyone else gets to do, like have drinks on a Thursday evening, arrive at or leave work while the sun is up or know what my nieces and nephews look like. But, that's just not how this works because the culture of shooting-unit film makers is much more akin to that of presidential campaign staff, deployed Marines or lifetime missionaries than it is like that of the modern office professional. We do this, all day, every day and, as long as there's still days until picture wrap, everything else is secondary. Frankly, that's the way we prefer it. Life is just simpler this way.

The very notion of a "flexible schedule" gets snickers of derision because it smacks of someone unprepared for the lifestyle and you have to be prepared for the lifestyle if you're going to be any good or at all happy doing this.

In Which I Pick Some Nits

---

Not to be an elitist asshole, but there are certain twists of phrase that absolutely give you away as an on-set first-timer. It's not that there's anything innately wrong with being new at a job, it's just that, in this business at least, a distressing plurality of the greenwoods are cocky and entitled well beyond what their level of experience would justify. If you're going to be that guy, fine, but try to remember these things:

Length of a script or of a scene is articulated in eighths of a page and not by some common denominator. We say that a scene is one and six-eighths long, not one and three-quarters.

The vacuum tube and filament in a light fixture that actually produces the illumination, it's called the "lamp" not the "bulb."

Those products that we use up in the course of shooting a film: tape, sash cord, recordable media, canned air, office supplies, razor blades, p'touch tape, cleaning supplies, batteries etc. are collectively referred to as Expendables, like the 80's action homage. They're not 'consumables,' 'disposables' or 'supplies.'

PR means "Production Report" -- Not Public Relations

Time, especially for the purposes of payroll, is articulated on a decimal clock, the minimum unit of which is a "tenth" of six minutes. So, if I get to work at seven in the morning and leave work at seven thirty in the evening, my time card will read 7.0 - 19.5. Also, the clock does not reset at midnight so if I come in at noon but don't leave until ten after two in the morning, it will read 12.0 - 26.2 .

NDB stands for "Non Deductible Breakfast." What that actually means is a discussion for another time.


These are just a few little bits of jargon but they're a few of the ones that seem to be misunderstood the most often and they're the ones that I've noticed today. Learn the lingo is all that I'm saying.

Corp-Speak

---

Going Forward

On the Same Page

Goal Oriented

Synergy

Prioritizing

Team Player

Metrics

Productively Actualized

On Deck

Outside the Box

Core Principles

Action Items

Critical Mass

Dovetail



Go. Fuck Yourself.

Pretty Little Soldiers

---

Dash and I went to junior high together but we went to separate high schools. We flew in similar circles, went to all the same parties and had lots of friends in common but we weren't all that close. Fifteen years on, though, he's one of only two childhood pals that ended up in the movie industry and our two lives, while superficially similar, could hardly be more different.

First, I planned for this to be my life since my earliest days. Once I got over those half dozen when-I-grow-ups that all little boys have: astronaut, fireman, paleontologist, president, I knew that I wanted to make movies. Dash, on the other hand, wanted to be a stage actor, to be a Broadway triple threat.

We spent fifteen years wandering our respective early adulthoods. He did a spate as part of a roaming troupe that did educational theater all across the country. He was a stage hand and then a PA. I did the rounds as a bartender, customer service rep and then a boom operator. Ultimately, I landed in the production department and he found himself an East Coast AD.

Owing to the different roads we've taken, we have huge differences of opinion as to the nature of each other's careers. He works in indie world, helming small shows destined for the festival circuit and second-tier DVD release. He manages edgy, original, artistically daring films made by aspiring auteurs and small crews that are lauded by critics, coo'd over by kinophiles and ignored by the world at large.

I'm at the other end of the spectrum. I work on mult-million dollar studio pictures. Behemoth movies created largely by committee that are often forced to side-step grit and gumption in favor of spectacle and profit. But, the food is always good, the accommodations always comfortable and the checks always clear.

The cultures of these two worlds are different. His colleagues are mostly young and eager idealists, people who are looking to do what has not been done before. One perpetuates a career through enthusiasm and willingness to suffer, in the form of long days and low pay, for the artistry of the endeavor. My compatriots are slightly older, deeply jaded, fantastically ambitious, mercenaries who covet the number one slot at the box office. One keeps working in the studio world through one part luck, one part schmooze, one part grit and three parts professional flawlessness.

We've never worked together and we probably never will. On the rare occasion that we see one another, there's always a bit of tension, a complex tension built of posture, opposing experience and perhaps just a touch of envy. He ranks higher than I do but I make more money. I get to rub elbows with celebrities but he's integral to his productions in a way that I am not. On some level, he thinks that I'm a sell-out and, on that same level, I think that he swims in the shallow end.

In a way, though, we sometimes look at each other with eyes for what is greener. Dash's work will never have the prestige or recognition that mine has and mine will never have the legitimacy of his. I wonder what it would be like to make a movie without having to kiss above-the-line ass and I bet he wonders what it would be like to know that you're going to get paid on time and that the catering isn't going to suck.

It's of no consequence, though. We've each carved out our niche and, despite some puffing of chests to one another, we're making the careers that we want and we're both doing better than most at it. It's just funny how careers turn out, how our intentions brush with and sometimes push against reality, how our opinions of our work evolve as we learn and mature in our fields. It's strange how we end up in places we never thought we'd be and places we always knew we belonged and it's even stranger that sometimes they're the same place.

I'll Won't Hug Your Elephant and I Won't Kiss Your Ass

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.