Totally Unauthorized

For the past couple of weeks, it’s been cool and overcast in LA, which is always something I enjoy knowing that once it really gets hot I’m going to broil straight through until Thanksgiving.

Each day that I’m not sweating profusely is a meteorological special happy place.

Since I haven’t worked so far this week, I’ve been out on the bike every day enjoying the mist and the cool air (and not using overpriced gasoline, which is always good).

Well, that’s going away now. The cool days are becoming fewer, the hot days are becoming more frequent and the news is predicting record heat over the weekend (and issuing warnings about heat stroke and general sweatiness). It’s easily 20 degrees warmer today than it was yesterday and going to get even hotter, which I’m predicting my tomatoes will not like one little bit.

I’ve already lost two to my garden’s soil borne tomato wilt (also known as “creeping crud”, “icky” and “goddammit”) - one of the two Marvel Stripe plants I had and sadly, my only Jetsetter (the perfect food porn tomato - perfectly round, perfectly red, perfectly tomato-y, perfectly hard to find. Oh, well. Maybe next year), and I’m desperately hoping the extreme temperature shift won’t finish off the rest of them.

I’m also not sure if I should call the diet a success or failure so far. I’ve only lost 5 lbs (target was 10), but my body fat percentage has gone from 26% to 22%.

I don’t think that muscle weight is any better for my knees than fat weight, so I may have to re-think my strategy of hell-bent weightlifting until I can grate cheese on my abs.

Guess I’ll sweat some of it off this weekend by just going outside.  Although if bits of Southern California keep catching fire I may have to stay indoors.

Over the weekend I did a favor job for a good friend of mine (who’s gotten me a lot of work, so gets the occasional weekend on a student film out of me. Everyone else who asks me to work on a student film? Go to hell - and I mean that in the nicest possible way) that shot in southern Orange County.

I rarely make it south of the “orange curtain” just because there’s not that much down there that really interests me. Don’t start with the Disneyland. I hate Disneyland. It’s hot, there’s endless lines, totally lame rides and annoying characters from cartoons I never liked much as a kid (now, if they had a Bugs Bunny land, I might feel differently).

Luckily I managed to hitch a ride down there so I didn’t have to worry about spending a bazillion dollars in gas, and the students were all really nice and fun, and we actually got some great helpers so the day wasn’t too bad.. except for the food. The instructor/producer decided not to provide coffee for the crew, which baffles me as Hollywood marches on caffeine since cocaine became something to which one should just say no (or something).

Not that I was expecting stellar food or anything. It’s students - I understand that they can’t afford on-demand cappuccinos or food that’s not something college-aged stoners like.

So, when I decided not to eat the provided lunch of extra-yeasty chain ‘deli’ sandwiches that had been sitting on a table in a warm room for four hours (”it’s okay, we asked for no mayo”) and ventured out, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself smack in the middle of the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam.

For me, this means one thing:

Pho.

I love pho. I could eat it three times a day every day, and over the weekend, that’s exactly what I did - except when my curiosity got the better of me and I tried the goat curry, which was also incredibly delicious.

This particular pho place was by far the best I’ve had. It seemed to be popular - at lunch on the first day, I looked up from my bowl and I was the only white person in the joint. I’m calling it a pretty good find considering I just pulled into the first place I found figuring that even if it was bad it would be better than the salmonella on white waiting back at the set. If I’m ever back in southern Orange County, I’ll know where to eat.

After a bowl of pho, some spring rolls (unlike deli sandwiches, these are better when held at room temp) and a glass of super-strong Vietnamese coffee I was ready to go back and deal with the students for the second half of each 14 hour day (plus, the commute back up to LA).

The only bad part is that the weekend of gorging on noodles and beef broth has left me lethargic and bloated up like a puffer fish. I’m trying to care that I didn’t get to the gym today, and I just can’t work up the energy.

Maybe tomorrow.

I’d been doing a day here and there on a low budget for a friend of mine, and was supposed to come in to wrap a location this afternoon, but around 6 am I got a text informing me that the entire lighting crew had been replaced.

Not that any of said lighting crew were shedding any tears over this, mind you. Most had better paying jobs lined up within minutes, and firing crews is something that happens all the time on the lower rungs of the pay scale.

It usually happens like this:

Low Budget Producer (LBP), after four or five go-rounds of producing micro-budget cluster fucks and then foisting them off on some of the less-fashionable film fests, decides it’s time to run with the big dogs (so to speak) and gets a gig as Line Producer or UPM on what (for him or her) is a HUGE show, but is, in reality, just over million dollars (which, in movie world, is equivalent to the change you find under the couch cushions).

Now, LBP is used to dealing with small amounts of equipment (most of LBP’s previous shows have had lighting packages that fit nicely into a minivan that’s seen better days) and 10 person crews (two electric, one grip, three camera, director, two production assistants, and him/herself), so he or she takes a look at this show’s numbers, becomes horrified at how much the dirty toolbelt people are costing the show, and freaks out.

LBP can’t understand why we keep asking for more people (”can’t they come down out of the condor and work the set? Why do we need a wrap crew? Can’t the set guys just do it after we’re done? What, now you want water, too? It’s only 110 degrees out.”) and more equipment (”just pull the cable off the last set. I know we’re going back there tomorrow, but you can put it back in just before we shoot, right?”) and at some point decides that it’s a vast conspiracy (possibly right-wing, LBP’s not sure) to drive him or her crazy and run the production into the ground just for shits and giggles.

At this point, LBP starts making completely unreasonable demands - usually cutting crew and equipment orders to the bone while expecting things to get done more faster and more better with fewer people and less equipment - and when warned by the best boys of what’s going to happen (”We can try to rig three sets in four hours with two people who are ‘breaking away’ from the shooting crew when they have the time in between lighting set-ups, but we probably won’t be ready and you’ll all have to sit and wait while we scramble around trying to catch up”) if they stick to the plan, freak out again and decide to deal with the vast conspiracy (right wing, LBP’s now dead certain) by firing the crew and bringing in people who are more co-operative (read: less experienced).

Let me just take a moment to address any of you producer hopefuls that might still be reading:

Your crew is not trying to screw you over.

We are trying to do things in the most efficient way we know (based on experience. We’ve done this a lot), and sometimes that involves a scary amount of oddly-named stuff upfront (yes, they really are called ’snakebites’ and we really do need a dozen of them). If an equipment list we’ve turned in really starts to make you dyspeptic, you can always come to us and ask us to try to get the numbers down for you and we’ll do the best we can.

We don’t want you to go over budget, really. We want you to help you impress your evil Porsche-driving overlords so you’ll get better-paying gigs and hire us to come work on them, but you have to trust us.

And I don’t mean that in the “fuck you” sense of the saying. I really mean it. Demanding that we defy the laws of physics and then throwing a temper tantrum when we can’t do it may be entertaining, but it’s ultimately unproductive.

DISCLAIMER: Just because someone is a producer on a low budget show does not mean they’re incompetent - I’ve worked with several who can shave the skin off a nickel and not kill the crew while doing it. These are the folks who trust their crew and let us do our job.

The wooden wedges under the dolly track are to keep the track perfectly smooth and level - you’d be surprised how many bumps and craters there are in any supposedly level ground.

Since movie cameras don’t have image stabilization, even the slightest little divot in the track, on screen, will look like the camera operator got picked up and shaken mid-dolly move.

My call today is noon, which means I’m not getting home until well past midnight (the split: half day, half night. Also known as “Fuck You Friday”. You wanna have a weekend? Afternoon call. Fuck you). As long as I get home before the Friday night drunk drivers descend on my neighborhood, I’m fine. A couple of weeks ago there was a three a.m. drunken drag race right in front of my house. Ah, Hollywood…

I’ve almost got enough hours to make sure that I keep my health insurance in the event of another protracted work stoppage. Yay!

I usually bitch about working for much less than scale, but this particular job was a favor for a good friend of mine, so I just couldn’t say no. The rate worked out to considerably less than half of what I normally make, but the day had a 10 hour guarantee, which meant we got paid for 10 hours whether we worked that long or not, so the plan was to get there early, ‘hit it hard’ and get the hell out before it got too hot (also, working shorter hours would make us all feel better about the low rate).

We got there just after dawn, and with only a few hundred feet of cable to run and some lamps to rough in*, I figured I’d be out early enough to do laundry and get home in time to watch The Simpsons.
Not so much.

While the facades on backlots do have installed power, this production didn’t want to use it, so we had to run our own cable from the generator, over spider-infested piles of junk and through the maze-like interiors - inside the facades, there’s no such thing as a direct route from point A to point B. Although working inside the facades gave a break from the sun, everything was covered in dust.

I guess this part of the lot doesn’t get used much as there was at least a half-inch of dust everywhere. On the floor, on the window sills, hell, even the cobwebs in these particular facades were thick with the stuff.
When we walked across the floors, big puffs of dust rose and hung in the air before settling on our clothes and into the creases of our skin. By lunchtime, we all looked like those old photos of grime-coated coal miners - even my teeth felt gritty. Of course, running cable through the dust stirred up more huge clouds of it.

As the clock ticked and we crawled in and out of the facades, trams full of tourists passed by our set, leaning out over the side, frantically snapping pictures of us working.

I imagine their conversation went something along the lines of “Gawd, why are they all so dirty? The nice studio must be trying to help out some homeless people.”

Although I wanted to whip out the camera and shoot photos of the tourists shooting photos of me (and pointing. I seem to remember it being rude to point at someone and whisper while you’re looking directly at them), any action that can even remotely considered to be aggressive towards the trams will result in banning from the lot (and any associated work that takes place there. Try explaining that one to a best boy)

The thing about short days is that they’re almost never as short as promised. Somehow the work will find a way to expand - our boss will find more things to do, more little stuff that’s got to be rigged, more stuff that’s got to be changed after he talked to the gaffer, so day ended up running the full 10 hours instead of under 8. This isn’t really a problem - after all, 10 hours still feels, to me, like a fairly short day, but the dust and the sticky and the general uncomfortable made the time just crawl.

Isn’t it funny how the dust looks grey on the ground, but at the end of the day the shower water runs off black?

*Rough in means the lights are set up roughly where the gaffer thinks they might work, but the placement’s not exact.

After a weekend of unseasonal heat here in Southern California, I was glad to hear that today’s call would be on a stage that’s normally air-conditioned to the point that one needs a sweater.

Except today. Today, the air conditioner just couldn’t keep up and it was even hot inside the stage.

Not as hot as it was outside, mind you, but still hot enough that I started to get worried about the combination of sweat and my thin cotton T-shirt, especially when I had to go up to the perms (heat rises, so the walkways above the set are like a dusty sauna) searching for a burning something. I use the term ’something’ because when there’s a burning smell, it’s either a Bates connector or something else. Many Bates connectors are still made of Bakelite (although some are made of a hard plastic which smells a lot like Bakelite when it burns), which can only withstand so much heat before it starts to scorch and makes a very distinctive smell.

Coming down from the perms, in a moment of heat-related insanity, I agreed to go work for a friend of mine who’s rigging on one of the city’s hotter backlots.

And, of course, the crew screening for the movie I did last year is tomorrow night, and I can’t go. When I sent the RSVP I knew I’d probably have to work. Why do they have these screenings on weeknights, anyways?

Hopefully the weather bots are right and it’ll be a bit cooler tomorrow.

I’m off to bed.

A sure-fire way to be certain a best boy never calls you back again is to refuse to do something, even if there’s a really good reason.

Yesterday, I was asked to go up in the condor and I had to do exactly that - over the walkie, no less.

“Um.. I’ve got a.. health situation right now that’s going to prevent me from doing that”.

One of the guys standing next to me immediately started teasing me: “What.. you got yer peeeeriod?”

Why yes, actually. That was, in fact, why I couldn’t get in a condor,  raise the basket to eye level of upper floor apartment dwelling yokels and then sit there for 10 hours. Thanks for asking.

Of course, I couldn’t actually say that, so I made some crack about not being able to get off the shitter because I’d eaten his mamma’s cooking the night before, but this was ill-timed.

Hopefully, it won’t be held against me and this particular best boy will call me back again.

Oh, well. It was probably better for me to refuse to go up than to go up and then have to come back down a few hours later.

In the ‘damn, I’m glad I wasn’t on that show’ department, one of our drivers told me another show that’s shooting a few blocks away had almost a quarter of a million dollars in cable stolen.

Since the copper market (cable is, of course, copper with a rubber coating) has skyrocketed and the scrap metal buyers downtown don’t ask any questions, unguarded cable lying around pretty much has a ‘free money’ sign on it.

Bet that security guard’s salary isn’t looking so expensive now, huh?

I’ve not been posting as often lately, I know. I’ve got some other writing related stuff going on and after a while I just can’t sit at the computer one second longer.

So today, I’m recycling a post that’s on LAist right now:

http://laist.com/2008/04/22/lets_make_earth.php

The posted version is much tamer than what I originally wrote, but I was in a good mood (work tomorrow: Yay!) so I pulled some punches.

I’m currently having some photo uploading issues as the USB port on my computer has decided to take the day off. I’m not sure why.

One of the things that still remains tough to adjust to after all this time is the unpredictable hours that I sometimes have to work.

Under normal circumstances, if I’m so tired that I feel I’m not safe I’ll turn down the call, but since my policy right now is to only turn down work if I’m dead, I’m taking anything at any time I can get, which means if I have to go without sleep I’m just going to have to deal, since the shadow of another potential work stoppage is still hanging over all our heads.

Thursday: 2 pm call time. I got to bed around 2 am and got up around 7 am in order to keep on a day schedule. I figured I’d stay up all day and just go to bed early.

Then, on Friday around noon I got a last minute call to report to work at 2 pm (missed seeing Nezza on her last day here, but a girl’s gotta pay the bills), so right out of the gate I was completely wiped out and the best boy will probably go to his grave being convinced that I’m either perpetually stoned or exceptionally slow on the uptake.

Monday: 7am call time, which adds up to one of those one-day weekends since I totally lost Saturday. I’m sure I did something, but I have no idea what that something was.

I was off today, and I got up early hoping to stay on a day schedule, but no such luck.

Tomorrow: 5 pm call time, so although I got up at 6 am today, I’ll have to try to stay up until at least midnight in the hopes that I’ll sleep until at least 8 am.

8, for me, is the magic number. I can’t seem to sleep much later unless I get home from work at 7 am.

What will probably happen is that I’ll fall asleep at 10, wake up at 6, be unable to get back to sleep and then be up until sunrise Friday morning, which means I’ll have to down enough coffee to kill Juan Valdez and his donkey in order to stay functional.

It’s all going to be fine. I’m just happy to be working, and worse comes to worse I’ll catch a nap in the back seat of my car after work. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that.

On the bright side, I got my refund checks from the unemployment fracas:

I have big plans for this money. First, I’m going to trowel on enough makeup so that I topple over when I try to stand upright. Then, I’m going to don an obscenely tight dress, make a beeline to the trendiest nightclub in town and sit at the bar while I bat my eyelashes and fan myself with $2,000 in twenties before going home with four or five cheap male models. Or maybe one really expensive one.

Just kidding. I’m going to use it to pay bills and rent. Whatever’s left over goes in the savings account in case the actors decide to strike.

Although when I think about it, if I have four or five cheap male models, do I really need a place to live? Or food?

Yesterday’s location was in a 1950’s era house that was being remodeled. While we were rigging the house for the night shot, we found these bottles that had been set outside by the construction crew.

I don’t even think they make this stuff anymore, do they? I seem to remember sneaking a taste at a grownups-type party when I was a kid, and I thought it tasted like carbonated radiator fluid.

Left on the patio to gather dust were not one, but two ‘vintage’ bottles of Cold Duck:

Someone made a joke about giving it a home in the gold room (room on the stage where we have all our expendables, a couch and a place to stash personal items while at work), and most of us just looked at the bottle and shuddered.

You know it’s nasty when even construction workers and film crews won’t touch it.

In the “happy to be working but this is going to suck” category, I got to bed this morning around 2 ish (got off work at 12:30, came home, showered, etc.) and in an effort to keep myself on a day schedule, dragged my sorry ass out of bed at 7 am.

That, and I had to take the trash out because I hadn’t wanted to do it at 1 am.

Which would have been fine, I’d have just gone to bed early tonight, but then I got a call to work today with a 2 pm call time, which means I’ll be there until at least 3 am. I’m not about to turn down work with the SAG factor still floating around, so I’m just going to have to suck it up and guzzle coffee to stay awake.