Get a Real Job

A couple of weeks ago, I worked on a make-up commercial for a large cosmetics company, shot in a field of wildflowers about two hours from the city (although in our business, it's always hard to know, were the flowers really wild or were they shoved in the dirt by the prop guys that morning?). In this situation, "worked" was a strong word. The sound guy, Greg, and I, were being brought in just to record the voice over of the commercial's star, Gwyneth Paltrow, so while the rest of the crew was leaving the city around 6 am and working for two days, staying over in a hotel and having to drive home in summer weekend traffic, we'd get to show up at a casual 2 pm, set up our gear, record a couple of lines and then go home – all for $525 for me and something in the range of double that for him. A day of chatting, eating interesting cheeses and figs (courtesy of craft service guru Rich) and watching the waves at the beach a short stroll away could be considered a pretty-much perfect work day – as long as you don't think too much about the fact that one might consider it infantilizing to shoot an adult actress with two children and a prestigious career rolling around in a field with puppies, offering this up as a lifestyle image to women everywhere. But then, as we played ping-pong and waited for our talent to arrive in the CEO's "farmhouse," which had once been a genuine farmhouse before being shipped, piece by piece, from Italy, Greg's cell phone rang:

"Hello? Oh. Oh, okay. Well, sure, I can. Let me ask her." He turned to me. "He wants to know if we can stay over and do it tomorrow."
"Oh…"

And I was back in the spirit-killing world of freelance film production, where weather, an actor's fatigue or uncooperative butterflies can suddenly change your schedule at a moment's notice. I had no change of clothes, no deodorant, no phone charger and drinks with a friend and therapy planned for the next day that I would not necessarily be able to reschedule with my dying cell phone. But the plans were for the late afternoon, and we were being told that the voice over would be done first thing in the morning. And really, I thought, isn't clean underwear the luxury of an industrialized society? More importantly, how could I not agree to another day of doing practically nothing for all that money, plus per diem?

"Okay, sure, yes, of course."

The thing about freelancing is, they always expect you to be free. And you are, or at least cheap, because you never know which job is going to be your last, or your last for a very long time. This keeps your days full of surprises, no question. Most of the time, I just show up on set not knowing anything about what I'll be doing that day, so it can be kind of fun to discover that that the DP is one of my favorites, like John Lindley (the big guys are always the nicest); or that I'm working on a music video for the Strokes (Julian Casablanca has the uncanny ability to look bored even when shouting into a microphone - which is maybe no big surprise); or that I'm working with two cultural icons: Alf and Hulk Hogan (Alf: puppetted by two people, and the guy who does his voice is really obnoxious and…okay, so maybe many of these surprises are ultimately unsurprising). But I realized something on our additional day, once Gwyneth came in and did her voice over with us – not just that, yes, she's really that pretty without make-up and normal enough to be as impressed by the digs as we were ("From Italy, piece by piece?"). When we were still not released to go home because someone had decided, now that they'd bought sound for the day, that there were sound effects that needed us, like wind blowing through the wildflowers and our actress' delicate footsteps in the high grass (provided by Greg), I found that I'm not as flexible as I once was. I used to be able to drop my outside life at a moment's notice and that was somehow cool. It made me feel exclusive and unavailable, as in, "Oh, crap, I wish I could but I just found out I have to be on set with George Clooney at 7 am tomorrow." Now it just makes me feel like what kind of 37-year-old has no control over her every-day existence, who can be told at a moment's notice that she has to put it on hold, and for what? The sound of puppies. It makes me downright cranky, not only because I like seeing my friends and, well, I'm in therapy for a reason, but because when I'm sitting around at work, which, truthfully, is a good 50% of my time, I'm always conscious of the fact that it's time I could be writing. For those of us for whom film is our passion, sometimes working in it is not the easiest way to the feel the love.

Greg was also unhappily stewing over what else he could have been doing. He represents another type of person who gets into the business: the people for whom film work is completely unrelated to their interests, a side job they can work just enough to pay the bills and have lots of free time so they can do whatever it is they really love. For many, it's music or art – sculpting, painting, under-water welding (have I mentioned the under-water welding before? I just think that's so cool). Well, Greg's art is surfing. He tells me stories of being a true surf bum on beaches in Malibu, devoted to the cause of the perfect wave, along with people of similar bent – the type of people who cut the top off of a car to make it into a convertible. I'm not sure why Greg moved to New York, which, as those of you who have spent time here may know, is not the surfing capital of the world, but whenever I bring my laptop on a day we're working together, I'll inevitably find that somebody has been checking SNN – Surf News Network – to pull up the Local Swell Tracker.

"Oh my God, I can't believe I didn't bring my board, I could have gotten in a session!"
"'A session'? It's called 'a session'?"

I learned a lot about surfing that day – why real surfers have both long and short boards for different conditions, why it was a good surfing day but not a great one because the wind was blowing into the shore so that the surface of the waves wasn't quite smooth, and why the next day was going to be The Day, the day that Greg had been waiting for all week, possibly all summer, and probably the last good day for a long time. And now we were going to be stuck here, five minutes from the beach, for two days, without a surfboard.

"I can't watch," he said finally, after we'd been watching the ocean for at least an hour. "It's too depressing." But we kept sitting there. One of Greg's most endearing qualities is that he is a bit self-flagellating. Among his most frequent comments, despite the fact that he always gets good sound, are, "Oh, I've really screwed it up this time, they're never going to hire me again," or, "Yeah, I saw that spot we did on TV, and it really didn't sound too terrible." (He also likes to say, "Come on, don't get us kicked off another job," but somehow I don't find that all that funny.)

Not everyone's a whiner like us. There is another subset of folks who are basically born into what we do: the people from union families. The Funduses, the Finnertys, the Dolans, all are famous New York dynasties of props and grips and electricians, some of them actually spreading their progeny across many departments. For them, film is the family business, like Pop's butcher shop, it's the summer job where they can make $25,000 that then becomes full-time. They are always busy and never have to worry about where their next gig will come from because, aside from the fact that they know their jobs like they've been doing them since they were kids since many of them have been doing them since they were kids, someone in the family will always call. Sometimes, walking on to a set is like walking into their house: you'd better wipe your feet and mind your manners or you won't be staying for supper. But generally, they seem to enjoy, if be slightly amused by, those of us who come from elsewhere, like we're benign Martians visiting their planet, perhaps kidding ourselves that it's more inhabitable than it really is.

And then there are crew people who are in the business while they are working on setting themselves up in another business. I know a VTR guy who is slowly becoming a Caribbean hotel and real estate magnate, an AC who, now that he has a baby, is working his way away from pulling focus into insulation and aluminum siding. Neither of these are things I want to do, but I admire the fact that these are people who seem to understand how to make real money. Although not always. Sometimes, people's attempts to get out fail and they find themselves right back in, like with the other VTR guy I know who sold his gear and bought a car wash, only to find that the place was a money pit. But in a way, it was for the best. He had been so sick of being on set that he was miserable all the time, and when he came back, he was happy: he had the new perspective that having a real job can be worse than film production.

The closest thing to a regular job that we have in the New York film community is Law & Order. Those folks know they're going to be working five days a week, ten months out of the year, and that half of their time will be spent in that series of labyrinthine stages and backdrops at Chelsea Piers that they come to know like the backs of the hands that they stare at during all those hours of sitting around. I've worked on the original series a few times, and it's a little secret society of ropes and routines: where the "rat holes" are that you run cable through in the walls of the set, how to talk to the camera operator, how to cut through the squadroom to get to the bathroom quickly (we often parked the sound cart in the interrogation room, it's quiet in there). I'm always only just getting the hang of things by the time I have to leave, but for the crew who have been there the full 15 years, or even half that, it's either reassuring or awful. Many of the grips and electrics I knew hated courtroom days because everything is always the same: you light your attorneys and clients, then you turn around and do the judge and the witnesses, and how many different ways can you do that? In fact, the whole show seems so standardized at this point that the only thing that really changes from week to week is who's going to get killed and how. But then there are advantages: you have a schedule, albeit one with 12-13-hour days, but that's short, for television; you know you're going to work enough that you can not work the two months you're off and still have the maximum number of hours banked for your health care plan (although, like the compulsive workhorses TV and feature people are, most of them do); and amazingly, for our business, there is a ladder for people to move up – not just from camera operator to DP, or boom to mixer, which are standard, but from grip to DP, or camera operator or script supervisor or even sound mixer to director, all of which have happened at L & O. But even for that carrot, there's no way I could stick it out. A show like that pretty much becomes your whole identity – in the way that the actor who's Sam Waterston's stand-in does only that: stand on a piece of tape so they can do lighting for another guy - they've even made him platform shoes to make him Waterston's exact height. There's community, sure, but it's sort of a like a feature that never gets to have a wrap party: a powder-keg waiting to blow. I went out one Friday night with the crew to Tortilla Flats, and one of the electrics who was going through a break-up with one of the grips was dirty dancing with the camera trainee, the actress who came out with us was clasping the hand of the married 2nd AD, who tried to get her to go home with his friend, who she had to physically kick out of her cab at the end of the night – and they all had to be back at work Monday morning, pretending that nothing had happened. I think the thing that said the most, for me, was the "Law & Order Favorite Recipes" box that hangs on the wall by craft service, hand-painted by someone with too much downtime with what are supposed to look like homey fruits and vegetables. One day, when I had too much downtime, I went and looked in it.

"Anything good?" asked the PA guarding the door to set.
"Nothing. Empty," I replied.
He laughed ruefully. "That's because none of us ever cook. None of us are ever home."

But maybe this looks especially unpalatable to me because I have never held a real job. In high school, I had the occasional babysitting gig. At college I worked at the library a couple of days a week and during the summers I temped, I scooped ice cream, I waited tables, I had a couple of cool internships, with Amnesty International (from whence comes my jaundiced view of international politics) and with a city beat reporter at a local TV station (whereby comes my equally negative view of local politics). And in film school, as I've mentioned, I explored the world of financial management via the file cabinet. But I've never held a job where I had to show up to the same place, with the same people, every single day, for more than six weeks at a stretch, and these days, I rarely spend more than five days on anything. And I've only had one real job interview that I can remember. It was to mix a film that was being bankrolled by the Guccione brothers, and I pretty much knew I didn't want the job from the moment I read the direction on the second page of the screenplay that read, "Two WOMEN WITH LARGE BREASTS enter the room, followed by a DOMINATRIX."

But now, trips to Latin America not withstanding, I just don't know if I can handle the spontaneity-as-lifestyle any more. There's a time in a girl's life when she's got to recognize she's no longer a girl, that the clock is ticking, and that stability has its privileges: steady paycheck, paid vacation, you don't have to worry about what you're going to do with your kids if you suddenly get a job. Once you have kids, that is, and to that end it wouldn't hurt to have a man with a stable career, and where are you going to meet him if not at work? So I always thought, given my (to this point useless) degree from a prestigious institution of higher learning, that one day I might go the other way and chuck all this madness for the real thing.

Then I worked on an industrial for a large corporate entity, so large and corporate that I'm not even sure what they do. The video was a series of scenes meant to dramatize problem situations that employees might find themselves in, like sexual harassment in the workplace, whether or not to access another person's computer, trying to decide whether to take an outside job when money is tight, and then the right ways to deal with these problems – aka, don't do it, don't do it, and don't do it, and tell your supervisor everything. I remember, in particular, the scene where the woman contemplating moonlighting leaves her boss' office, perkily cheered up by the whole experience.

"Thank you so much! I'm so glad I consulted you, and you're right, what was I thinking?"

Oh, I dunno, maybe that she needed the extra income so that her family wouldn't be eating rice and beans all winter? It wasn't so much that the video made the people I'd be working with in corporate America look like dumb automatons, because I know enough people who work there to know that they are not dumb and automated. It's more that everything is designed to beat you into the precise shape of your cubicle, even if it's the corner office. And I just don't think I look that good under florescent lighting. So where's that leave me?

"Clear, blue skies."
"The sweet air."
"The notion of being so small."
"Laughing for no reason."
"Time to think about nothing."

This is the copy we recorded in the not-so-rustic farmhouse. It was supposed to be about enjoying life's simplicity. I appreciate the sentiment, but I had to ask myself, who lives like that? It's not that women don't want their lives to be simple, it's just that who's got the time? If you're putting on make-up, you're probably beyond the simple pleasures of lying in a field, thinking about how small you are, and on to the not-so-simple ones: parties, men, and having to go to work. That's where most of us spend our time. So you do it, you drag yourself out of bed, you put on the make-up (although the best I can do at 6 am is mascara and even that's an effort), and you show up and hope that your workday will be decent and interesting, but not too interesting, not interesting in the way of the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." You try to enjoy the simple pleasures that you encounter while you're there, be they figs, idle conversation, or the sound of crickets in a field of wildflowers when you're forced to stay late. And you hope that, eventually, whether it's for a weekend or a day or an evening, you'll get to enjoy the little sliver of freedom you have between work and sleep to make movies, surf, travel, drink with your friends, play with your kids, or write that blog that, for some strange reason, gives you satisfaction.

Things Not To Do When You're Wired For Sound

Yell.
Ouch.

Sing.
Thanks but no thanks. No need to prove in between takes that you almost made it into the touring company of Spamalot.

Hit on all the PAs.
Because not only might the sound department be listening to you, we might be broadcasting to other people on wireless headsets, thereby sharing your little dalliances with a much wider audience. The mixer generally turns this feed off between takes, but heck, we're human, sometimes we forget, so don't embarrass yourself.

Sweat, much.
I can ask, can't I? Mics don't like perspiration. This is why you will find condoms in the kits of many sound people, not because they're hoping for a quickie during the turnaround, they're actually useful for wrapping mics and wireless transmitter packs to protect them from moisture. They can do a fair amount, but it's also best if you don't

Go out in the rain, snow, sleet, jump in the surf fully clothed, etc.
See above, only more so.

Go really really far away.
There is no easier way to get a sound guy to freak out than to walk out of range of his receiver between takes so that your reception starts to go. I, with my subtle powers of perception, can tell this is happening when I start to hear static and pops on the line and the actor's voice going in and out, and the sound guy yelling, "WHERE IS SHE?! IS SHE IN THE TRAILER?!!" Because his concern is that you might actually still be on set and your microphone is crapping out and then he's screwed. Actually, if you like to watch another human being have a meltdown, it can be fun to watch in a sort of fucked up way.

De-mic yourself.
Oh, okay, this might also rate as the easiest way to cause a sound guy to have a meltdown. Look, it's hard to wear a body mic all day, it can be uncomfortable and we understand the need for privacy, or the need to change your clothes, but heck, we don't like the damn things and aren't too fond of putting them on you either (not that there aren't some actors I would mic for free…). So we wouldn't be wiring you if we had a choice, we do it for a reason -- aka, so we can hear you during the shot -- so if you want it off for a little while, let us do it. If it were all that easy to do it and undo it, we'd be out of a job. And if they call out "Roll sound!" and your mic is in the trailer, we will be. Plus, it's not that we don't trust you to take care of our high-priced audio equipment, but, well, we don't trust you to take care of our high-priced audio equipment.

Brawl, wrestle, do stunts, play sports, etc.
I know, again, this is not necessarily within your control, depending upon the role. But twisting, crushing, yanking on the cable, these activities are a guaranteed way to damage your average wireless mic -- and did I mention that these things are pricey? And that mic pack sure will dig into your back/side/groin if you fall on it, so if you want to play a little tackle football, or think something spontaneously violent is going to happen in the next shot that we may not be privy to despite all of our eavesdropping -- and this is one big reason why we eavesdrop, because nobody ever tells us anything -- give us a little heads up.

Fidget
We want to get the sound of your lines. Not the sound of you moving around in that creaky chair, or playing with the wax paper around the hamburger the food stylist gave you, or the uncontrollable tap-dancing of your toes on the tile floor, or your chest hair rubbing against your starchy shirt because you just can't keep still. Are you 5? Do us both a favor and stop it.

Drop your pants
As I believe I might have said already, wireless microphones don't like to fall, and they don't like water. Well, they especially do not like to fall in the toilet. Plus, even if they don't fall, you don't really want us, and perhaps everyone else, to hear you doing your business. So come on over and visit the sound cart before you decide the visit the facilities. Although of course, there are other reasons for dropping your pants that might supercede rational thinking on your part.

Get a blow job
There's a story that I've heard so many times that I don't even know who told it to me or what film it happened on, and it may not even be true, but pretty much everyone knows it anyway, so here it is. One day on a film he was working on, Sylvester Stallone convinced a PA to give him a blow job. All well and good I suppose, only he was wired. And he also, apparently, kept saying over and over again the words, "Say my name" during the event. (This was way before American Pie, mind you -- like I said, this story is film business legend). Of course word spread like wildfire and it became such an in-joke on the production that, I'm told, they put "Say my name!" on the back of the t-shirts they made for the crew at the end of the job.

Talk about your sex life
In a lesser-known incident, I've been told that when Nicholas Cage was on Adaptation doing a driving scene, in between takes director Spike Jonze asked him why he seemed so tired. Well, it was soon after Cage's marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, and Cage responded that being a newlywed was taking its toll on him. Apparently, he started to go into some detail. Which would have been fine, except that he was wired, and not only were the normal people (writers, producers, script, boom) listening, but Jonze's parents had come to set that day, and they were also on cans. Oops.

Talk shit about the director
I had my first experience of this when I was still in the wireless-headset-free world of film school, where nobody was listening except me and my boom operator. Ah, life was simple then. Although insane. We were shooting in a swamp in Virginia Beach in the middle of summer where we were constantly sweating and being feasted upon by nasty, unidentifiable insect life and eating cheese sandwiches for dinner if we were lucky -- sort of your worst student film nightmare, if you can imagine what that's like, and I know a few of you can. Anyway, on this particular film, one of the actors started saying negative things about the director, who, in all fairness, was kind of losing it. But this actor, who was doing a pretty miserable job of overacting himself, which was probably why he was in the position of doing a student film in a swamp, started talking about what a bad job the director was doing to one of the other actors. So I, none too happy myself from the humidity and the mud up to my knees and getting flirtation but no love from the gaffer I'd followed down there because he was cute (I know, I know, story of my life), went over to him:

"You know, I can hear everything you're saying," I said.
He tried to take it in stride. "I assume you'll be discreet."
"I guess," I said, "but I don't want to listen to it."
I walked away. And he didn’t do it again.

But in a way, he was lucky he was on an idiotic student film. I myself have not always been so lucky. When I'm booming and the mixer and I need to communicate, I talk to him/her through the boom mic. We catch up, we plot strategy, we speculate about what and when lunch will be and whether it will be edible. Mind you, the mixer can blab up a storm because their line to me is always private, the bastards, so it's just my half of the conversation that everybody hears. I always hope that this gives me a little bit of room to mouth off, since whatever I say will be only half of a conversation, but I still don't watch it the way I should.

The first and worst time I got burned was when I was young and stupid and on a low-budget movie, and the DP and director changed the shot on me and I didn't find out until after we did a take which was completely different from the previous one. Pissed that I had screwed up, I pulled down the mic and growled into it, "They never fucking tell me when they change the fucking shot!" only to look up and see the script supervisor staring at me, appalled. I don't think the director was listening -- frequently directors are off in their own little worlds, and this can save your ass. But that taught me my lesson. Oh, who am I kidding, I'm always doing a lot of extracurricular chatting into the microphone, hoping that it's offline. But I don't bad-mouth the director, or

Talk shit about the agency or the client.
Most actors don't do this, but a lot of directors and producers do, and while they are never wired themselves, they will do it within a foot of people who are. For instance, they'll give direction to the actors that they know the agency won't like, or they'll tell them something like,
"I don't know why they want to do it this way, they're idiots, but just do it,"
or, "Just do it the way you were doing it, don't listen to them, they're idiots,"
or they'll just throw a general hissy fit along the lines of, "Those fucking idiots need to figure out what the fuck they want before we do another 50 takes!"

Now, I don't believe in directing by committee, I think directors should be allowed to direct the way they want, but the world of commercial production is not a perfect one in any sense of the word, and in this sense least of all. So if you want to converse privately with anyone within, say, 5 feet of a wired actor or 10 feet of the boom, think first, check with the sound department, usually we've got your back but I'd make sure the walls don't have ears connected to video village.

Talk to your agent on the phone
There's another famous story that involves a movie with Robert DeNiro, where he was having a private cell phone conversation with his agent. He was wired, but naturally he assumed, since he was off set, that his mic would be turned off and nobody would be listening. Only then he saw the sound guy looking at him. With his headphones on.

DeNiro looked at the sound guy and said, "Can you hear me?"
The sound guy shook his head.
De Niro said, "You're fired."

Actually, I think the moral of this story really applies to the sound person, aka, DUH. I mean, if you're going to eavesdrop, and you will, just don't be an idiot about it and blow it for the rest of us. Maybe a lot of these cautionary tales really apply to sound people, because you, the wired, should be able to trust us. But help us out a bit, show a little courtesy and respect. And oh yeah, don't

Talk shit about the sound department
Now you know: we can broadcast you to anyone who happens to be listening and pretend it was a mistake. We can also make it so nobody can hear your lines by, for instance, failing to point out the passing bus that just obliterated them and that somehow everyone else has failed to notice (this never ceases to amaze me). Although we probably would never do either of those things on purpose, we hate to do a bad job. Or really, we hate getting a reputation for doing a bad jo because let's face it, our work is not creative, it's not inspiring, it's mainly about not screwing up so we can keep working. But theoretically -- not that this is true of anyone I know -- we can do that and still find ways to get revenge. Like, additionally, "tweaking" your mic by coming over and sticking our hands down your pants or up your shirt, or pulling off the moleskin we stuck to your chest without much concern for your personal pain threshold, or "accidentally" pricking you with a vampire clip (that's a mic clip with little pins and, yes, they do draw blood), or just eavesdrop to our hearts' content until we know you better than your mother. These are rather unimpressive threats compared to rolling a dolly over your foot or using creative lighting to add 15 years to your age like other departments can, but still, do you really want to be wondering what we're smiling about?