Life Below the Line

2010-08-31T20:47:00.006-04:00

What the f*** is wrong with us?

Working in commercials really shows you how fucked up our society is about food.

For one thing, when you see food in a commercial, you've probably figured out by now that it ain't exactly what you're getting when you chip the thing out of your grocer's freezer. It's a beautiful facsimile made out of the same ingredients, only better, by somebody the same as you, only better, at cooking things that look appetizing -- aka a food stylist. These are people who deploy tweezers, glycerin spray, and the occasional last-minute blow-torch action in the interest of making the stuff look like it does on the package: hot, moist, containing particles of victuals that you might recognize; in short, edible. Not to mention that there may be some digital color enhancement or air-brushing later on to remove anything that shouldn't have been there, and I'm not going to go into what that might have been. But of course, when you see something on TV, you can't smell it or taste it, so you are judging the potential yumminess of the foodstuffs presented purely based on looks. That's what gets your salivary glands going and destroys your impulse control -- which is both exactly what they're counting on and sad, considering that the looks you're seeing have very little basis in reality, and the fact that you shouldn't really judge what you should eat based on prettiness. I'd like to say that James Franco is so cute I could just gobble him right up, but really, I couldn't.

Then there's the fact that a lot of ads for eatables hawk it specifically by attempting to show you that the "food" being advertised will not, if you eat it, actually affect your body the way that actual food would. Take for instance anything with "light" in the product name, or, worse, its dreaded step-cousin "lite." Light n' Lively, Crystal Lite, Tasti-D-Lite. Generally these products are spokes-modeled by a woman who appears as if all of the growth that was supposed to happen at puberty was channeled vertically -- such as Heidi Klum, currently seen in ads for Dannon Light n' Fit, which is the name of a yogurt, not a Chinese gymnast. While we all do love Heidi for her perkiness and slightly dictatorial accent, the main reason she's the one selling this yogurt is because she looks like she doesn't actually consume food at all. So in effect, advertisers are selling you something you should eat by telling you that if you eat it, it will be just like you didn't, or at least like you ate it and then threw it right back up.

Then there are the foods that are sold with the tag-word "healthy." Healthy Choice, Healthy Request (because we all know that healthy people are demanding with their choices and requests, just look at those vegans), Hearty and Healthy, Light and Healthy, Le Menu Healthy (I'd like to have been at the pitch meeting for that one: "It's Frenchy and healthy, get it?!?!!!??!!"), etc etc. With ads for these products, the food stylists snap into overdrive because "healthy" naturally connotes "sans taste" to an American audience that is used to all flavor coming from fat and salt; those food tweakers spend a lot of time on the set primping the noodles to make the dish look at least not un-delicious. But it's not entirely clear to me what "healthy" is supposed to mean to people in these ads. In one I recently worked on for microwavable _________Healthy ________, the selling points they had to mention in the copy were the reasonable cost, how quickly it cooked, and that it steamed the vittles in the package to make them "tender" or "crisp," depending on whether they were talking about chicken or vegetables (and NOT "crispY," as one actor who sent us into overtime kept saying, no doubt because "crispY" is part of the advertising vocabulary used to describe potato chips and chimichangas). But not once in the spot did anyone actually say the product was good for you. Was that because "good for you" evokes your mom force-feeding you lima beans or because they weren't allowed to say it, because it didn’t meet certain standards?

Because there are rules about these things, and I just have to share with you as an aside some snippets that I found in my research -- What, she does research? -- in a book called The Handbook of Food Science, Technology and Engineering. Basically, it's what you can and cannot do when you name a food product. Here are some excerpts, because you can't make this shit up:

"GERMAN POTATO SALAD WITH BACON
This product must contain at least 14% cooked bacon in total formulation.

LASAGNA
Sauce is an expected ingredient of lasagna products and its declaration in the product name is optional.
Cheese Lasagna with meat: 12% meat.
Lasagna with Meat and Sauce: 12% meat.
Lasagna with Meat Sauce: 6% meat in total product.
Lasagna with Poultry: 8% poultry meat.

CUTLET, PORK
'Pork Cutlet' may consist of pork temple meat, inside masseter muscles, and small pieces of lean from the tip of pork jaws. These are flattened and knitted together in 'cutlet' size products by means of 'cubing' or 'Frenching' machines, or by hand pounding with 'cubing hammers.'

LOAF
A 'Loaf' (other than meat loaf) consists of meat in combination with any of a wide range of nonmeat ingredients. These products are not identified with the term 'Meat Loaf,' 'Beef Loaf,' or the like but with designations, e.g. 'Olive Loaf,' 'Pickle and Pimento Loaf,' 'Honey Loaf,' 'Luxury Loaf,' and others that are descriptive.

DUTCH BRAND LOAF
A nonspecific loaf that must be qualified as 'Made in the USA.'

CHEESE (PASTEURIZED PROCESSED CHEESE FOOD OR SPREAD) A cheese food product with a standard of identity, but is not considered a cheese. Therefore, it cannot be used in meat food products where cheese is an expected ingredient, e.g., 'Cheesefurters' or 'Veal Cordon Bleu.' It is acceptable in non-specific loaves, etc.

GUIDELINES FOR LABELING OF MEAT AND POULTRY STICK ITEMS
1. If sold in fully labeled bulk containers, i.e. canisters, caddies, or similar containers, stick items do not have to be fully labeled unless they are individually wrapped.
2. If sold in bulk containers, i.e. canisters, caddies, or similar containers that are not fully labeled, stick items must be fully labeled.
3. If sold in small, fully labeled cartons, boxes or similar containers, (e.g. 3 oz net weight) that are only intended for retail sale intact, stick items may be individually wrapped and unlabeled."

There are so many things wrong with all of that that all I can say is, Wow. I've never heard of Luxury Loaf, Cheesefurters or Frenching machines, but now that I know they exist, the world is a much freakier place. Basically, though, it just shows you the rules that have been created for how you can find a way to call things you want to pass off as food but that have very little actual food in them something that at least sounds like something that won't send you screaming into the night.

Oh, and then there's how they advertise eating establishments. I'm not talking about the local ads where Sal the pizza guy stares into the camera like a deer in the headlights of a teleprompter while pronouncing stilted copy accompanied by flabby gestures of excitement. No, the ads I work on are for national chains, like Olive Garden or Red Lobster, or for fast food like Taco Bell, Burger King, McDonalds, Dominos, Subway -- there's a lot of it out there, believe me. The funny thing about these ads is that, while they do have images of food that is as pretty and plentiful as any you've ever laid eyes on, their advertising strategy generally rests more on the experience of being in close proximity to the food than eating it. For instance, McDonalds' current campaign, "I'm lovin' it!", shows images of busy soccer moms squeezing in a little fun time with the kiddos. Olive Garden commercials, which employ the tagline, "When you're here, you're family," show groups of people laughing and cavorting and saying dialogue you can't hear (One entertaining part of those ads for me: if they cast sassy and easily bored actors, the dialogue often quickly spirals downward in taste, creating improvised scenarios having more to do with things like bondage or incest than your standard restaurant chit-chat. Sometimes the clients freak out when they hear the actors talking about herpes while smiling and twirling their product on their forks...which just makes it funnier). The idea is that these families are having a super-awesome experience that really has very little to do with those stale breadsticks and that glop-covered cardboard they call pasta. Chili's is similar, only it's dudes hanging out with their buds and talking smack; Dominos' ads are about how many pizzas you can get for your small investment and how fast you can get them; and Taco Bell used to be all about that little talking Chihuahua, until people finally got sick of that, so those ads are now are asking you to "think outside the bun." In short, you're not deciding what or where you want to eat so much as deciding, Am I the kinda person who's lovin' it, the kind who likes to eat fresh, or the kind who knows when it's real?

And lest we forget, there are the food ads that are all about sex. These are ads with some deep-throated siren describing to you the taste of something really really good, most likely chocolaty, and at some point assaulting you with an extreme close-up of lips being licked. The strange thing is that most of these ads are directed at women, trying to tempt them with the naughty, naughty vice of eating things with calories, which all of us good girls who want to be bad must associate with other naughty naughtiness. In other words, forbidden food is hot. Oh, but the ads for alcohol? Those are directed at men. They nearly all feature scantily-clad babes making eyes at the drinking dudes, the implication being that 1) only men drink beer, which really pisses me off as a beer-drinking female, and 2) the only way a man will score with someone this hot is to get her drunk. And since Knocked Up, the idea that this is really and truly possible has taken root in the male consciousness to an even more absurd degree, and so ads seem to feature it even more. Thanks for that Judd Apatow. Every time some really wasted guy leers down my shirt and tries to buy me a drink, I'll think of you.

But aside from that, what really disturbs me in all this is, if aliens were to intercept these ads, what would they think that humans actually do for sustenance? Because they certainly wouldn't think that we use food for that. And then of course if they came across terms like "hide the salami" or "drink your milkshake," they'd be even more confused. But I think this just reflects the general confusion we have as a society about what food is for. Not that other societies don't have it too, based on foreign commercials. According to their ads, food in Spanish-speaking countries is really 85% about sex, and food in Japan is for…well, I'm really not sure what, but it definitely involves throwing, yelling, and American celebrities embarrassing themselves. Most ironically, if we didn't have all these issues around food and what entices us to eat, we probably wouldn't be so fat while simultaneously worshiping women who look like stick figures; we wouldn't have hyperactive children who are allergic to everything but high-fructose corn syrup and chicken nuggets; and we wouldn't think that our enjoyment of life hinged on where we went to dinner. And God forbid, if we didn't have all of these messages telling us what and how to eat and how it would make us feel, we would actually learn to figure that out for ourselves.

2010-08-15T18:43:00.006-04:00

Improv Lines Said By The Woman in the Eyeglass Commercial Whose Breasts Grew Five Sizes When She Tried On New Eyeglasses

Large.
Nice.
Yes!
No!
Yay!
Giddyup cowboy.
This is pornographic. And I like it.
I look pretty.
These are nice glasses.

2010-05-14T11:41:00.006-04:00

Ruined

People always ask me, "So, does working on movies and TV spoil watching them for you now?"

I've always replied that it doesn't. At least, not if the movie or show is halfway decent. It's only if a film is kind of, well, bad that I start to watch the gears turning -- meaning that the formula the filmmakers used was so incredibly obvious that you can't not pay attention to it. The gears are pretty much sticking out of the screen like a 3-D ikran (that's one of those flying creatures from Avatar, get with it people). Otherwise, I find watching movies as absorbing as you civilians do. I am certainly more analytical about them, so when I do or don't like something about a movie, I can usually pinpoint what it is -- a weak performance, a great directing choice, a screenwriting hiccup in the second act (that hiccup often being that the second act is a directionless and never-ending pile of mush -- yes, I'm talking about you Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Matrix Reloaded, X-Men: The Last Stand, and pretty much any film where they bring on five writers and bring in some new hack director -- yes, I'm talking about you, Brett Ratner), etc. But for me, that doesn't diminish the enjoyment of watching it, if it's worth watching. The same with sound issues: I don't notice the bad sound or a boom shadow unless it's pretty darn bad, at which point it would've taken you out of the movie too. In fact, friends I go to the theater with are generally pointing out to me the egregious mike pack on a person's back, possibly because I am so used to looking at them that I think they look perfectly normal.

There is always, however, the "I can't forget I was there" problem.

I have been working with celebrities for years, and if you know somebody is a jerk, that certainly does make it harder to enjoy their performance. Ever since I worked on a film where William Hurt complained about how much he hated the crew and gave me his piercing and contemplative look of disdain every time I had to boom him (you know the one), I've had a much harder time enjoying The Big Chill. After Jennifer Coolidge (aka Stifler's Mom) almost got me fired when she had a hissy over my telling the director that she was overlapping someone else's dialogue (aka, doing my job), I found her distinctly less funny in Legally Blond, or Best in Show, or…well, let's just say it sucks a little because she's in a lot of funny movies.

By the same token, there are also positive if perhaps no less distracting effects to brushes with fame. Whenever I see a Johnny Depp movie, I often find myself distracted by the fond memory of our romantic moment together: him pretending he was going to tickle me while I was booming. Whenever I see David Strathairn in something, I remember killing time doing the crossword puzzle with him on long days shooting in a New York City courthouse; with Michael Imperioli, I flash on talking with him about the Emmys while standing on a countertop at Satriale's Pork Store. But because in these cases the I.C.F.I.W.T. effect is just a nice if not exactly motivated afterglow surrounding the characters they play, I can't really complain. Plus, when a performance is really good, it doesn't matter. It's very easy to forget that Stanley Tucci is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet when he plays a creepy psychopathic child murderer because he can act. And very often the truth is so close to reality that finding it out in the flesh it enhances an otherwise not-so-impressive performance. Blake Lively from Gossip Girl actually is kind of good-hearted but spoiled, and Matt Bomer from White Collar is charming and hot. Yeah, I know, major newsflash there, quick, somebody call OK Magazine!

Then there are the experiences with talent that forever alter your worldview. Working with supermodels the first few times was something of a revelation. For one thing, I realized what total freaks of nature they are. Most models are absurdly tall, dangerously thin (some of them look like their legs oughta just snap out from under them like twigs) and have huge eyes and lips that, in person, are actually a little frightening. If I were on their home planet, I'd be worried that they would eat my head in one bite -- luckily we have laws about that sort of thing here. But okay, the truth is that most of them are not aliens, or even sex kitten fantasy babes, but actually pretty normal human beings. They don't eat, true, but they do make conversation, which even, sometimes, extends to making jokes about how stupid the ways that they are made out to be sex kitten fantasy babes -- wearing giant wings, trying to act normal while staring into a wind machine -- can be. Believe it or not, Heidi Klum doesn't like to be stared at in her underwear by a crew of a hundred men who can eat their weight in red meat any more than you would, and Tyra Banks doesn't enjoy walking around all day in 6-inch heels -- even if they will both suck it up and do those things because that's their job. In general, knowing this has had the effect of making me hate them less, and less hate is always a good thing. It also reinforced my general feeling about what we worship as beauty in this country being really fucked up, because we worship freaks.

To be fair, though, I've had a lot of other experiences on sets that re-educated me about certain facts of life, many of them involving animals, inanimate objects and foodstuffs. The very existence of food stylists, for example, a whole profession of people who primp, plump and spray food to make it look desirable to eat -- and nothing like it actually looks when you purchase and/or cook it -- taught me quite a bit about the boundaries between truth and fiction in advertising. As in, what boundaries? I've also learned that cows are huge, cats are far more unlikely to be tricked into doing something ridiculous than dogs, and skunks are probably not going to do anything you want them to do, period. And that any object you see in the background of a shot was probably put there by a prop person, and is therefore somehow fake, and often held together with gaffer tape and safety pins. These are all good life lessons which have improved my day-to-day existence. Well, maybe not the information about the cows and the skunks, but you never know when that might come in handy.

No, I think that there is truly only one thing that is unshakable and affects my viewing pleasure: the pain of working in episodic television. It doesn't help that TV shows have a very short turnaround time, so I can watch them within a few weeks of working on them. At that point it's still fresh in my muscle memory that the scene I'm watching took a grueling eight hours to shoot -- the second half of a 16-hour day, which put us outside in the rain at 4 am on a Friday night, aka Fraturday. And I wonder why I've started shivering and trying to curl up in the fetal position on my couch. But even if I get past that, I move on to the sensation of being really pissed off, when I see that all of the unnecessary coverage we shot, which made the scene take the eight hours to shoot, didn't get used -- or it did get used, but it makes no sense whatsoever. That's the worst, because it's really distracting when you're trying to watch a scene and find yourself thinking, WHY are we cutting to the completely unmotivated shot through the glass table??? Or, Why the extreme close-up when we already had the close-up, the medium, the two-shot, the over-the-shoulder, the over-the-other-shoulder, the over-the-other-other-shoulder-of-the-other-actor, and the shot through the glass table? Are we just trying to see the actor from every possible angle and test how good his hair continuity is? And then you remember, Oh right, because we went into meal penalty on those shots and the director just had to use it to prove that every single one was necessary. The bastard. Back to more hate.

And yet, I also remember the fun we had talking about how much we hated the bastard. The nicknames we gave him, what we joked about doing to him, mimicking his pretentious and unidentifiable accent behind his back. And I remember the weird solidarity among cast and crew that working 16-hour days builds, even if a lot of it is built on misery. I remember the lead actress sticking up for us and forcing them to wrap at 14 hours one day when she couldn't take it any more, which, in my opinion, made her worth every dollar of her $5 million contract. Good times!

I guess the conclusion I'm coming to in my very roundabout pondering way is that my viewing experience hasn't been spoiled, it's just been altered. And as with most things in life, you have to take the good with the bad. Plus, is my take on a movie or TV show more altered than anyone else's who has a day job? Like have you ever watched Grey's Anatomy with a doctor? Man, is that annoying. So I just try to keep my pleasure and pain to myself, because nobody wants to hear about it…except for maybe you I hope.

2010-02-26T11:24:00.005-05:00

Second Hand Fame -- on Revolving Floor

Do you want to know the secret to becoming cool at your school, a social sophisticate, and the center of attention at any party? No, it's not dye your hair blond, get a piercing in a really interesting spot, or work out on the Roboflex -- which you can buy for just $299! The real answer is in my latest blog "Second Hand Fame," which is now up on the group forum Revolving Floor.

This month's topic is "Blank Slate," and there's all sorts of other cool stuff to check out there too. So go there now, and we'll add this free cubic zirconium necklace as our special gift to you at no extra charge!

No, not really. But you may find out what's up with this picture of Flava Flav and Jon Lovitz...

2010-01-20T18:31:00.009-05:00

My Brush With Kink (And Then Some)

Several months ago, I was at brunch with my friend Raani.

"I went to this festival last week and I really want to go to the closing night party," she said. "Do you want to go?"
"Sure," I said.
"It costs $30."
"Forget it." I'm cheap, lest you forget.
"But I met this really cute filmmaker at the festival and I told him I'd see him at the party, before he leaves town," said Raani. "And I don't want to go alone."
"Why not?"

Raani reached into her bag and took out what looked like a fancy invitation. It read, "Sexalicious Film Festival Closing Night Party: The Chariot Couples Club."

It turns out that Raani had just attended a sex film festival. Or, as described on the Sexalicious NYC website, a festival "featuring a specially-selected program of films and videos that celebrate and explore a wide diversity of sexuality." Raani described a few of them for me. Some sounded like silly sex comedies, others pretty much like straight porn.

"Mostly the films were really bad," she said, dropping her voice the way she always does when criticizing a movie, even a big movie – like she's worried McG is going to be sitting at the table next to us. "I mean, bad. We could have made something way better."
"But why would we have wanted to?" I asked.
Raani shrugged. "Why not?"

As far as I knew, Raani had never written a scene that had gotten beyond a hot make-out with added innuendo. Raani is a screenwriter from a traditional Muslim family. She didn't drink until her 30s and still mostly confines herself to Bellinis -- although I have seen her catch a healthy buzz off of them. I knew her dating history contained very little casual sex, much less casual pornographic kinky sex.

"Okay look, what if I pay for your ticket?" she asked.
"Really? Okay." Free stuff! Free stuff!
"Great! What are you going to wear?"
"I don't know," I replied, contemplating for a moment. "I don't think I could possibly own the right thing to wear."
"Well, we don't want to give anyone the wrong impression by wearing something too sexy anyway."
"True. We wouldn't want anyone to think that we were at the sex party for sex. Honestly though, it's probably just going to be a bunch of filmmaker wannabes."

When it comes to uninhibited sexual behavior, I've seen a bit and heard about a lot more -- but most of my stories are about actors and easily-coerced PAs...and occasionally people in the art department. Filmmakers themselves? By and large, conservative and fond of rules. They like to think they can think outside the box, but in terms of actually stepping outside of it themselves, not so much. Truth is, they prefer the box. I mean, have you ever read a book on how to write a screenplay? I rest my case.

I arrived at 8 pm at the address Raani had emailed me, which corresponded to a shabby office building that couldn't have looked less like a den of iniquity. But then a group of three people arrived, including one guy who was checking me out in a really obvious way that seemed to say, "Hey baby, are you going to the same sex party I'm going to?" So I felt fairly sure I was in the right place.

Raani arrived and, on her heels, the two guys she'd met at the festival. Harry was the cute Australian she'd had her eye on, and the other was an American named George. Just as I'd expected, they were your kind of average filmmakers who had made some sexy comedies just to be edgy. George's was a pilot about a couple that opens an S&M club to make money. Harry's was a short about a guy who thinks he's foiling a kidnapping, only to find that he's beaten up the husband in a consensual bondage scenario. Apparently this second film had caused some controversy at the Q&A.

"Were people upset at the violence against women?" I asked.
"Sort of," Harry replied. "This woman stood up and asked, 'Why is this a comedy? This is our lifestyle, it's not funny.' Then someone else got up and started attacking me about the same thing." He looked a little demoralized. "I think the humor was just too Australian."

We arrived on the third floor, where we handed our coats to an extremely tall transvestite. "We don't serve alcohol but you can order beer from the deli next door," she related as she hung them up. "There are showers on the right and lockers in the back."

A healthy, uninhibited buzz definitely seemed called for, so Harry and George got on the phone. Raani and I each gave them a couple of bucks.

"I guess we can't order Prosecco," Raani sighed. "Come on, I want to get a locker. I don't feel like carrying my bag around with me."

We passed a "bar" where a fulsome woman in a tight leather bustier was selling soft drinks; the afore-mentioned, grey and institutional shower; a couch area where a bunch of rather unattractive men, most of them middle-aged, turned away from the porn playing on the tv next to them to stare at us as we walked by; and a bunch of tiny rooms which had chairs, pillows and some lumpy little foam beds. Nothing was separated from the main room by more than a flimsy curtain. My first impression: not very sexy. Not even the porn. But my personal feeling on most straight porn in general is that it's directed at men who like women who have been physically enhanced to the point where certain parts of their anatomy look like they might just explode at any moment. I mean, really, why not just get an inflatable?

We arrived at the lockers, where a very nervous, young, slightly overweight woman in a short black skirt and low-cut blouse was trying to unlock one.

"Do you know how these work?" Raani asked her. "Do we just pick any --"
"I--I–-I don't know!" stammered the woman. "I've never been to one of these before!"

She quickly turned and walked away.

After Raani stored her things, we rendez-voused back with Harry and George and the beer and continued our look around. In one of the dim rooms toward the back, we were lured in by the sight of an impressive set on handcuffs chained to the wall.

"Hey, put those on, I've got to get a picture," I said to Raani.

She obliged, smiling in an "If this picture gets out I'll kill you" kind of way. Then we all gathered around something that looked like a gymnast's vault. George, who, like any self-respecting filmmaker, had done a fair amount of research for his S&M film, knew the ropes already, so to speak.

"It's a spanking horse. You climb up on it and get spanked. And you know what this is for, right?" George said, pointing at a set of stocks that fully evoked The Scarlet Letter. "Here, put your head in here, and your arms here," he said to Raani.

She did, and he closed them up.

"Ow," she said.
"It's supposed to hurt," said George. "These were used for punishment --"
"Well right now they're punishing me," said Raani, "so can you let me out?"

As George released her, the busty bartendress entered.

"Let me know if you guys need anything, if you have any questions."
"What do you have for spanking?" asked George, trying to impress us with more of his expertise.
"Well, you're supposed to bring your own," replied the bartender. "But there are people here who may have something you can borrow. Are you looking for something stingy?"
George shrugged. "Yeah."
"Well, let me ask around. And we have tablecloths if you'd like them, Saran Wrap..."
"Okay."
"Anything you need, just let me know," she said, this time directing her smile, laser-like, at Harry.

Uh oh. If Raani had to compete in a one-night-stand situation with a woman who wore a leather bustier and knew her way around a spanking horse and Saran Wrap, the odds might not be in her favor.

We all headed back into the main room, which was definitely starting to fill up.

"Those middle-aged men are creepy," Raani commented.

There were a large number of them now, ogling us and pretty much every woman in the room like they actually thought they had a shot.

Little did we know that they actually did. I soon noticed that one of the middle-aged guys, who wore an unbuttoned orange shirt with a wide collar that more or less screamed "Swinger here!" was rubbing himself up against an attractive 20-something Asian woman in semi-see-through attire. And she seemed to be okay with it. When, a few minutes later, she started kissing his navel, I concluded that she was definitely okay with it. Then there was the chubby, rather pasty guy in the bowtie who started feeling up the tall, geeky-looking girl in a kilt who seemed to have come with her boyfriend. But her boyfriend, who also was tall and geeky-looking, was standing right next to her, watching, seemingly unperturbed. Oh, and holding a cat o' nine tails.

I think this was the point at which I started thinking to myself, Um, okay, what the fuck is going on here? But don't get me wrong, I was fascinated. Two genuinely consenting adults can do whatever floats their boats to each other as far as I'm concerned. I just didn't quite get the appeal. Well, okay, the spanking thing I kind of got. You could look at it like a sport almost -- only a naughty and therefore, for some, titillating sport that you could only play with certain people in an environment like this. And I am not unfamiliar with the one-night stand, I know the appeal of a hot, no-strings-attached sexual experience when you're drunk and horny, and then you leave in the morning (or that night, which tends to be my personal preference) and never have to see that person again. But this was not that. For one thing, the men were extremely un-hot. So was the dingy and public setting. Where was the romantic music, the satin sheets, the candles, or at least the light switch? Although with the open plan and all of the open ogling going on, I was starting to realize that public was at least part of the point.

Now, when I get into situations that make me uncomfortable -- which generally means parties full of people I don't know, should impress, or who are distantly related to me and cover their furniture in plastic -- I snap into research anthropologist mode. This involves a certain level of alcohol consumption and a willingness to talk to anyone about just about anything, but it allows me to mingle in a way that a former social outcast like myself would normally not be able to. And it works because people love to answer questions, and I like to be nosy.

"Is that yours?" I asked the geeky lad, in my studiously non-flirtatious, curious-but-only-in-the-interest-of-science tone of voice, pointing to the cat 'o nine tails.
"Yeah," he said. "We brought it." On closer examination, it was kind of like a leather feather duster.
I turned to George. "You could borrow that."
He eyed the flapping tassels dubiously. "That would not be stingy," he said. "That would hurt."
"Oh," I said, realizing that "stingy" was a technical description regarding the whipping power available in the implement. I wondered what the term was for the category that the cat o' nine tails did fit into. Hurty? Painy? I was learning a lot tonight.

Just then, the guy with whom I'd had the stare down in the downstairs vestibule appeared. Only now he was wearing a red silk kimono. Which made him look pretty harmless, not to mention slightly embarrassed.

"Did you bring that?" I asked.
"Yeah, I did," he replied. "It's actually very comfortable."
"Oh, huh…Did you, um, have a film in the festival?"
"No, a friend of mine did. I work on Wall Street. Are you a filmmaker?"
"Yeah, but, my film wasn't in the festival."
"Oh. Well, is it a feature or a documentary?"

Aside from the kimono, this was starting to feel like normal party conversation. Just then, George & Harry reappeared. They checked out Kimono Guy. Harry smirked mischievously.

"Hey, what you got under there?"
"Nothing."
"Really?"
"Oh yeah. I mean, literally nothing. It's like a Ken doll under there, just totally flat, wipe it down with Windex."

I appreciated that he had a sense of humor about the situation. But at the same time, he had brought his own kimono.

Then all of a sudden, people started heading to the dungeon room. Raani, George and Harry were quicker on the uptake than I, so they actually got a viewing position on the leather couch ("We had a front-row seat!" Raani later told me), but by the time I got there, it was too packed to get in. I heard slapping and yelping, and over people's heads I could make out the bartendress astride the spanking horse doling out punishment to a woman who I thought I recognized as the one we'd seen at the lockers. She didn't look quite as nervous now, but maybe that was because her skirt was pulled up over her head.

"Pretty crazy, huh? Ever been to one of these before?"

I turned to see a 30-something guy in a goatee and button-down. Because he wasn't wearing a kimono, leather or something transparent and wasn't ogling, I assumed he was another civilian.

"No," I said. "Have you?"
"I came last year for the first time. I'm a producer, this year I had a film in the festival, about fetishes."
"Wow. That must've been interesting. I have to say I don't really get most of that stuff."
"Yeah, I never really understood the whole fetish thing either until I got involved with this film. But once you talk to people it kind of makes sense. Like in the film," he continued, "we have this guy who likes to have his girlfriend stick him with needles, in his arms and chest. It looks really awful."
"Yeah, wow."
"But then he explains that when he was a kid, he went to the doctor and watched his sister get a shot. And he swooned, and this nurse caught him and held him to her breast. And that was his first erotic experience."
"Interesting…" This is my favorite word, naturally, when in social anthropologist mode. It fills a lot of gaps in conversation. "So he knows where his fetish came from. I'd think that talking about it would kind of demystify it."
"No, actually, for fetishists, talking about fetishes is a very big part of the process. It gets them turned on. Anyway, from a distribution standpoint, there's a huge market for this stuff, and learning about that, I started to get more into the scene...Hi Lisa!" he yelled to a woman walking by in a very short skirt and revealing a leather thong. "She's the director of the festival. So what's your film about?"

Now if you're the kind of person who likes to answer the question, "Oh, what's your film about?" and watch people's eyes glaze over immediately -- and come on, who doesn't! -- go to a sex film festival party and try to tell people about your film, which has nothing to do with sex. The producer/distributor dude tried to be polite but kept looking over my head in the way that people do at networking parties when they're looking for the person who actually can help their career. Although I think he was looking for a different sort of opportunity, because a short time later, Harry said, "Oh look, there's the producer you were talking to getting spanked." I had never heard that sentence uttered before, but sure enough, it was true.

There was a lot of spanking. With that cat o' nine tails, but also with belts, gloves, and so on. At one point I was watching a woman lay a man in lacy, bright purple lingerie (no, that's not a grammatical mistake, it was the man wearing the lingerie) across her knees and spank him with various implements.

"Is that a brush?" I asked of nobody in particular.
"Yes, it is," replied a distinguished-looking older gentleman who was also observing the process. "People often use a brush for spanking." He pointed at the brush-wielding lady, who looked rather normal and middle-aged, aside from the lascivious grin on her face. "She's very experienced, she's written several books on spanking. Her last book was a how-to to teach men how to explain to their women how to spank them properly."
"Huh. I could see how someone might need help with that."
"I have a whole collection of silver Victorian brushes myself." He somehow managed to say this like it was the most normal thing in the world, the way someone in my world might say, "I have a collection of Bolexes," or, "I have a collection of original 35mm Hitchcock prints."
"Really…" This is another one of my favorite social anthropologist words. "How did you get into that?"
"Well, I've been a lifelong fetishist. But I was involved in a very vanilla relationship, and when I told her about my fetishes she was completely disgusted, so that's when I started looking into things. I've been in the scene now for about 11 years. I'm into Victorian pornography, which is very bondage oriented. An uptight society is very into punishment. It has a huge following in Britain."
"Why don't I find that surprising."
"I'm a longtime supporter of the festival and a close friend of Lisa's --"
"The woman in the leather thong?"
"Yes. Now what's your film about? I'm not a filmmaker myself but I'm very interested these sorts of things."

I sighed, but my inner publicist (who also only shows up after a few drinks) said, "Pitch! Maybe he's a rich dirty old man who also has an interest in non-fetishy topics."

I launched into a description of my film yet again and of course the conversation went nowhere very quickly. Also, the spanking the man had been spectating had ended and he was looking around uncomfortably.

"I don't generally come to the play parties."

I turned to to look where he was looking and saw that the dumpy guy in the tuxedo was performing conalingus on a different woman than the one he'd been pawing earlier -- next to another couple who were having full-on, doggy-style sexual intercourse. A few of the creepy men were looking on, while others had started to make their moves on other women, who seemed receptive.

"Wow," I said. "Wow." It wasn't pleasing to the eye, but it was hard to look away. Like with a train wreck. "So this is a play party? Are there other kinds of parties?"
"Oh yes," replied the man. "Haven't you seen the list?" He handed me a flyer, which read:

Chariot Club Winter Calendar
Feb 1st NYC Swingers Party
Feb 7th Jack and Jill Party
Feb 8th NYC Swingers Women Who Love Men Glory Hole Party
Feb 20th NYC Swingers Women Who Love Women Party
Feb 28th Sinsations.com Party
Mar 5th All Asian Swingers Party
Mar 9th Adult Socials Club Party
Mar 20th School of Sec Club Party
April 3rd Brother D All Women Party

My thoughts upon seeing this list were, in order: sex with buckets?; are there really that many Asian swingers or are there just a lot of men who like Asian swingers?; wasn't this all supposed to be for social adults?; unless they're advertising "School of Seconds," which does not evoke positive sexual connotations in either use of the word, that seems like the kind of typo you wouldn't make at a sex club; and why does Brother D get to throw the All Woman Party?

Basically, I still couldn't wrap my head around the appeal of what was going down around me. So to speak. Aside from the unattractiveness issue with the guys, which also involved their overall sleazy demeanor, if you were a member of this club, you'd see these same people again. Wouldn't that be just a bit strange once they'd all seen you have an orgasm? And what about the person you'd had sex with? Would you just be able to say, "No thanks, once was enough" the next time you saw him or her, and not have it be uncomfortable? Or have him or her say it and not feel like dirt? In other words, even in a world where this is all normal, can you really keep your emotions out of the fray? I could see men managing, perhaps, because men are good at stuffing their feelings away and leaping right in. Like Kimono Guy, he just said "What the heck, I'm gonna go kimono and see what happens!" In contrast, Nervous Locker Woman clearly was feeling all sorts of conflicting shit.

And that's the thing about us women. I do know plenty who sleep around as much as men do, but honestly…most of them really are looking for intimacy. And whatever this party was, it was the opposite of intimate. I guess I have a hard time believing, at bottom, that that isn't what we all want. Don't we all, as human beings, want a good cuddle afterwards? I just couldn't see anyone getting a good cuddle here.

I caught sight of Raani, also looking like she was in overload.

"I think I've had enough," I said.
"Yeah," said Raani. "Should we say goodbye to George and Harry?"

George was sitting on the porn couch watching the porn. He seemed bored but wasn't ready to leave yet. We looked around for Harry as we headed toward the door. He was sitting on a couch in one of the side rooms, deep in conversation with the bartendress. He looked up long enough to wave. We headed out.

"Sorry that didn't work out," I said.
"It's okay," said Raani. "I wasn't in the mood any more."
"I know," I said, "Who could believe that a sex party could be such a turn-off?"
"Yeah, all I really wanted was to make out with him," sighed Raani. "You were talking to that old guy for a really long time."
"He knew a lot about spanking. You never know when that sort of information will come in handy."

I saw the odd look Raani was giving me. "For material!"

And I started writing this blog on the train on the way home.

2009-12-06T21:50:00.007-05:00

Naked, with a Nagra -- Now playing on Revolving Floor

To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub.

Those of you who don't have stress dreams, aren't Hamlet, or have never seen that particular episode of M*A*S*H* (you children of the 80s know the one I'm talking about) may not quite understand this quote, or the connection that I have found between this month's Revolving Floor topic, "Lost and Found," and my blog about nightmares, "Naked, with a Nagra." See, in most of my dreams, I tend to be either metaphorically or physically lost; I can't find the room where I have to take the SATs that I haven't studied for, or I'm wandering around some endless warren of soundstages with a broken boom, or I'm on a bus in a foreign country and my suitcase has been replaced by a chicken, etc etc. And sometimes I'm being chased around that warren of soundstages by a guy who looks like this.

You might also not understand what the naked part has to do with anything, and I'm not entirely sure that I do either. I knew I should have been a psych major. But you can find out at least a few answers at

http://revolvingfloor.com/issues/4/naked-with-a-nagra/

And while you're there, poke around and look at some work by other contributors -- poetry, fiction, and artwork of various sorts can generally be found revolving around the topic as well.

2009-11-23T11:28:00.014-05:00

Snippets
yes, from actual conversations

#1: Why you should never talk with prop people about dental hygiene, or
Why we're glad that all set conversations must come to an end before too long
Prop guy: You ever use that shit?
Me: What, fluoride rinse?
Prop guy: Yeah.
Me: Sure, sometimes. My dentist says I have a lot of tartar build-up.
Prop guy: You know what's wrong with fluoride don't you? Causes cancer.
Me: No...
Prop guy: Swear to god. You know how they say 4 out 5 dentists recommend it? Well those fifth dentists they know -- that's why there's this huge split in the ADA. It's very controversial.
Me: But you don't swallow it.
Prop guy: Doesn't matter, goes right in under your tongue. And you see all this silver here? (shows me his fillings)
Me: Uh huh.
Prop guy: I'm getting it all taken out because you know what they make that out of? Mercury.
Me: That's not --
First AD: Can we see the hero bottle please!
Prop guy: Excuse me.

#2: Why you should never get into party conversations with certain actors about anything
Actress: I like it here. I was here the other night having a lovely conversation with Noah Wylie --
Writer guy: Oh, why were you here the other night?
Actress: There was this event I was invited to. Well, it wasn't an invitation thing but I was on this list of people who were allowed to come. Anyway, I should spend more time here, it's right around the block from where I live --
Me: I thought you live on the East River. We're on Park Avenue.
Actress: Yes, just a few blocks away. Anyway it's very friendly here, I just said, Oh, there's Noah Wylie, and we had such a nice chat. So, you write screenplays?
Writer guy: I've co-written one, this one I worked on for --
Actress: Oh, do you know that producer, the one who produced, oh what was that movie, the one with Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman, when they get divorced --
Me: Kramer vs. Kramer.
Actress: Yes. Do you know him?
Writer guy: No, I don't know him personally.
Actress: But you know, you know who I'm talking about?
Writer guy: Um, yes.
Actress: Well, his son's a very good friend of mine!
Writer guy: Oh.
Actress: Anyway, I just need a good supporting role, one that I can sink my teeth into. Today I'm so tired because I was shooting a film.
Me: Oh, really? Today?
Actress: No, yesterday, but you know, it's just so exhausting. It was a short film, with just a wonderful script. We were shooting out in Princeton, New Jersey and it was so lovely out there. Although the man who was directing was this history of film teacher who I don't think had ever directed anything, so I was giving him all these ideas. Oh, this is a good story: we were shooting this scene where we were on this date and he shakes my hand and says I had a wonderful time and then after I leave he puts his wedding ring back on. So he dropped his wedding ring and we could not find it.
Me: Who are we talking about the director? He was using his own ring?
Actress: I'm telling the story.
Me: Sorry.
Actress: He was just like, "Oh well, it's gone." So we couldn't shoot. So I called my husband and said what should I do, should I come home? And he said no, you go back and you find that ring. And so I went back and combed every inch of the grass until I found it!
Writer guy: Wow.
Actress: And then shooting the next day was so wonderful because he was so warm and happy and relaxed.
Me: The director.
Actress: The actor.
Me: Who was using his own ring --
Actress: Yes. But he didn't seem very upset that he lost it. I think maybe he's really tired with his marriage, you know he has two kids, I mean we just had this wonderful chemistry, and I was thinking...I don't really want to know of course --
Me: Maybe he was just, you know, acting. Ha ha.
Actress: Anyway, I should give you my card, just in case anything comes up. I just really need a good supporting role…

#3: Why indie film directors should not introduce their films after having had a few drinks
Director: I want to thank you all for coming. You know, yesterday I was trying to come up with some remarks, and I started doodling. And I started doodling my producer's face. And then I started stabbing it. So I said, This isn't going to work, ha ha, so I figured I'd just come up with something on the spot. Anyway, I'm going to apologize because occasionally you're going to see these words on the screen, "This film property of, etc etc, any unauthorized screening of this film will be blah blah blah." I guess they were worried that we would run off and try and steal the film -- which we almost did, ha ha. But we figured we'd have to let everyone know we canceled the screening, that would have been a pain, ha ha…Anyway, we're so glad you could come today to see the film. I'm pretty happy with this version of the film. Although it's not my version. There is a director's cut, which is better than this version. And there are some things that I wanted to get that we were never able to film, because we ran out of money for the re-shoots, or my producer wouldn't let us shoot them because she didn't think they were necessary. But you can't have everything I guess, ha ha…Anyway, I hope you enjoy the film. I'll be outside.

2009-10-09T09:04:00.008-04:00

Shit Happens Now on Revolving Floor

Heh, I kind of enjoyed writing that without punctuation, but the truth is that my blog, "Shit Happens," is going up today at some point on the group blog Revolving Floor.

For those of you who may have forgotten, Revolving Floor is a group forum I've joined, along with a lot of other great writers, poets, and artists of various sorts, where we choose a topic each month and then do our own peculiar spin on it. The topic of October is "This is a Test," and so my riff on that is about the process of troubleshooting that is soooo much fun and sadly soooo much a part of our everyday work lives as film technicians. And then I get into various related topics, such as "Smacking People in the Head With the Boom, Actors Hurting Each Other, and Other Things That Can Go Wrong On a Film Set," and "Why Most Sound People Should Be Institutionalized." Or something like that, you've really got to go there to find out the full story:

http://revolvingfloor.com/issues/3/shit-happens/

And check out some of the great work by other contributors while you're there...

And I will blog here again soon, promise, about the sex party.

2009-09-13T17:30:00.009-04:00

A Few Fun Facts About South America

A. Bolivia
1) Llamas are plentiful, and cute. And tasty, although a bit chewy.
2) Coca tastes like tea leaves. If you try it, be prepared to pull masticated green stuff of your teeth for hours.
3) Bolivia lost its coast to Chile in a border war. Don't talk about Chile in Bolivia.
4) If you have to go from 2700 to 4500 meters in one day (and you probably will at some point), take it slow.
5) There is a good chance that you will be woken up in the middle of the night by a sheep bah-ing outside your window, even if the best hotel in town.

B. Peru
1) Alpaca tastes better than llama. Mmm, alpaca...
2) You can buy pretty much anything here (hats, scarves, blankets, t-shirts, sweaters, postcards, notebooks, mugs, belts, keychains, centerpieces, etc etc etc) with a llama on it. Or an alpaca.
3) Despite the fact that the Incas were little people, the steps on their trail are fucking huge.
4) Peruvians say they originated Pisco in the city of Pisco, Peru.
5) The Inca flag looks an awful lot like the gay pride flag, which probably isn't something the Incas anticipated.

C. Chile
1) Chileans say that they originated Pisco, in the city of Pisco, Chile.
2) Peruvian Pisco Sours are better. Don't say this in Chile.
3) Chileans are wine snobs. They have the best boxed wine around, but they refuse to drink it.
4) There is excellent sushi in Chile. Only it doesn't look or taste like sushi, and everything is called "Kana" something, or something something "California roll."
5) Chileans hate Argentinians because they had a border war, and because they think Argentinians think they're hot shit.

D) Argentina
1) Argentinians do think they're hot shit.
2) Argentina does have the best steak, empanadas, chocolate, fashion, and nightlife in the region, so this is understandable.
3) It's more difficult to have dinner in Buenos Aires before 9 pm than after 1 am.
4) It's impossible to walk around Buenos Aires for a day without seeing one or two women who have been surgically enhanced. (I also hear the Botox is very cheap.)
5) Don't talk about the Falklands War, especially if you're British.

2009-08-09T19:09:00.006-04:00

I'm Proliferating

For those of you who haven't heard about it directly from the Twitters or the e-mails, I've joined a group blog called Revolving Floor. Each month, we all choose a topic and blog in some way related to that topic, and a different person's blog goes up every day. There's a wide variety of talent on the site -- poetry, cartoons, & dramatic writing in addition to us good old wacky essayists -- and the blogs I post there, while similar to the ones I post here, won't be available anywhere else.

Our first topic is, "How Do You Like Your Eggs?", and my response is a blog called, "What's For Chicken?" It's about being a captive audience for the good, the bad and the ugly in film production catering, and why eggs sometimes feel like freedom.

But I'm not telling you any more than that, so you'd best go check it out at:

http://revolvingfloor.com/issues/1/whats-for-chicken/

And poke around and read some of the other folks' stuff while you're at it. There are a lot of ways to cook an egg...

2009-07-22T13:43:00.010-04:00

Don't Let the New New Be Normal

A few months ago, I was on set with nothing to do, as I often am when I'm employed. Whereas when I'm unemployed, I seem to have too much to do. Like recently, when I sit at home and work on grant applications and e-mails and Facebook -- but no, I know, not blogs, I've been bad, I admit this. (But have I mentioned that I've recently been UNEMPLOYED??? IN JULY??? When I need to be earning my health insurance hours so I won't have to rely on Congress to pass a health insurance bill that would actually help freelancers like me, instead of leaving us to twist in the wind with the rest of the uninsured who show up in emergency rooms every day when their common cold or swine flu turns into pneumonia???)

Anyway, I was looking for reading material. I always have a couple of New Yorkers with me on set for such occasions, but sometimes, I just don't want to get sucked into reading about how all the bats in the world are dying off due to killer fungus, or children growing up in an immigrant detention camp. When you're trying to boom someone talking about how all they need to make their day is a Pepperidge Farm biscuit, having more weighty matters on your mind that really drive home the fact that the work you're doing is pointless and idiotic can be a bit distracting.

So at times like these, I often look to see what pointless and idiotic crap I can steal to read from the client coffee table. Generally, I'll go for the lowest level of brain candy, People or Us Magazine, because I know I'd never buy it and because I know that the comparison of Who Wore It Better, Mary Kate Olsen or Kim Kardashian (who IS Kim Kardashian??? Did I mention that I'm UNEMPLOYED???) won't even make a dent in my psyche.

So one day, I decided to go highbrow and read New York Magazine, having been drawn in, like all good cash register impulse buyers, by the cover. The title of the cover article was "The New New Face," and it showed a close-up of the face of a woman who, based on the dotted lines and circles and arrows drawn all over her countenance, had probably had plastic surgery. She also happened to be Madonna, which made it even harder to resist. What woman who came of age in the 80s can not want to be dished dirt about the Material Girl?

The article detailed how new innovations in plastic surgery had been based on a revised concept. Rather than face "lifting," the new new surgery required face "volumizing." No more tightening of skin that pulled it into a reptilian, cheekbone-bearing death grimace and put women's eyes practically on the sides of their heads, yet with incongruous, anaphylactic lips (examples pictured included Faye Dunaway, who already had cheekbones the size of Kansas to begin with, Cher, and Melanie Griffith). Now, based on the success of Botox, the new design concept was to make the face look fuller by restoring the dewy plumpness of youth. In other words, not changing your face but putting back what you'd lost so you truly looked like you used to look -- examples, aside from Madonna, being Demi Moore, Elizabeth Hurley & Michelle Pfieffer.

The odd thing about this "new you = old you" thing is that this surgery is actually more invasive. Rather than simply making tiny incisions by your ears and pulling the skin back, this surgery is real surgery, involving basically going under your cheek skin and fat to the layer of muscle that holds together and lets you move the lower half of your face, disconnecting that layer, pulling it higher and stitching it in so it stays there. Then you add the Botox or collagen or butt fat (yes, butt fat -- but at least it's generally yours) to sculpt and plump everything else to match.

I have never had elective surgery, but, as those of you who follow this blog already know something about, I have had some minor health problems leading to a few non-elective procedures. Some of the side effects/results of these have been pain, swelling (once to chipmunk proportions), headaches, leaky wounds, absolutely unbearable itchiness, fainting, all-night diarrhea, and having people stare at me on the subway, probably thinking that I was a victim of domestic abuse. I've even had kids point and laugh. It's not much, really, but it's certainly been enough for me to ask, Why would anyone choose to go through that?

Plus, I know stories of people who have gotten talked into elective procedures that were, let's say, un-fun. Like the friend of a friend whose husband did a favor for a plastic surgeon and got offered a free boob job, only to be told that she "had" to get liposuction as well to make her figure "proportional" (and explain that to me: bigger breasts mean you need a smaller ass?). She was in pain and draining through tubes for months. Then I have a friend whose dermatologist said that, to deal with her sun damage -- aka freckles -- she had to get a chemical peel that left her skin carnation red and burning for days.

Of course, both these people lived in L.A., where everyone always wants the new new everything, but here as well, Botox brochures can now be found in nearly every GP and dermatologist's office. And when I went to my dermatologist recently, while sitting by the receptionist waiting for them to bring me in and cut into my nose, I was forced to watch a series of videos on a giant flat screen TV. These alternated between infomercial-style frozen-smiled spokespersoning by the doctor himself and videos showing giant animated flowers blooming and bees buzzing, while the soothing woman's voice of a tampon commercials told me this:

"Life is Beautiful, Chapter One: The Ageless Face. Nature is beautiful. But like nature, your skin can have elements that break down over time, reducing its youth and freshness. Reducing the inner beauty you feel inside. But what time takes away, your dermatologist can restore. Microabrasion and chemical peels, dermal fillers and botulimotoxin are now available to make your skin reflect your beauty to the world. In fact, these treatments are often used in combination! So talk to your doctor about how you look and feel. We can make your outer appearance reflect your inner beauty. After all, life is beautiful!"

And then there would be a fade to black, followed, after a brief pause, by,

"Life is Beautiful, Chapter Two: Dermal Fillers..."

Heck, who needs therapy, when you can talk to your dermatologist about how you look and feel and just get him to inject cow toxins, originally called "fatty poison" by the German man who discovered them making people sick in 1817, into my facial muscles, so that they can't contract for three to four months -- at which point, I'll get him to do it again!

Think about it: if you'll consider that, where will you be willing to go next? Which brings us to the stories of faces gone truly, horribly wrong. Like the Lion Lady, New York socialite and commonly known plastic surgery addict Jocelyn Wildenstein. Can she really think she looks attractive, or even human? Or Jennifer Grey and Meg Ryan, who got surgery that made them look so little like themselves that it effectively ended their careers. Or Diane Hershey, whose face shriveled around her collagened lips to form a grotesque and permanent pucker. Or Michael Cimino, who looks like he's in the witness protection program (though, thanks to Heaven's Gate, maybe he is). I won't even go into the Jackson family, because that just seems wrong at this point in time, but God knows I see someone on set or on television or in the style pages (although then it's more like ten people) every day who has definitely had work done.

Of course, once you start to see the work, then you see it everywhere. I went to a party soon after reading the article and could hardly talk to a woman I met because I was so focused on her oversized lips and sumptuous babycheeks. Ever since a friend told me she'd gotten a nose job for her 15th birthday "because that's what Jewish girls in Westchester do," I can't help seeing when someone has the nose, that perfect little ski slope that every mediocre nose job results in, that makes all of its wearers look like members of the Von Trapp family.

That's one major scary thing about all this: all these women, who are supposed to look so much like the way they picture themselves looking at their best, now look alike. That's how you can tell they all have the New New Face, they all look like they're part of the Cabbage Patch Family. Same thing with Botox, everyone has the same, immobile, expressionless expression. The nose, the lips, the cheeks, the chin (oh yes, the chin), the straight blond hair that all actresses have to get at least for a phase early in their careers -- it's all about sameness. There is a type that, once it becomes beautiful, is what everyone wants to be. And it's not exactly like a supermodel, because supermodels actually look like freaks. Have you ever seen one up close? Boney Amazon super tall twig people, with giant eyes and cheekbones that could give you a paper cut. But what they share are big eyes, big lips, heart-shaped faces with wide foreheads and narrow chins, small noses, and most of all, thinness, and youth.

You might say, What's the big deal? If these women want to go under the knife, that's their business, what's it matter to me? And in general, I agree. It's their bodies, their faces, they can refigure or disfigure them as they see fit.

But, there's more to it than that. The fact is, the way these women look matters, because it becomes the way everyone expects us to look. We see them on TV, on the big screen, on every billboard and in every magazine, and if they don't age, we're all expected not to age. If they have phenomenally thin and muscular bodies with enormous breasts, we're expected to have all that too. Even though it's not normal -- unless you have a personal trainer you work out with 4 hours a day and a team of stylists and make-up and hair people and a good, expensive plastic surgeon and dermatologist at your beck and call -- it becomes the norm. And in an age when we are constantly confusing reality with unreality, when airbrushing and soft focus are everywhere, when we believe that anyone can become an American Idol and Jon and Kate get more tabloid time than Brad and Angelina, it becomes easier and easier to see the people we see on TV and in magazines and think, That's what 40 is supposed to look like -- so why do I have wrinkles, cellulite, a belly, graying hair and bags under my eyes if there's not something wrong with me? If you're a woman, you may say you don't do that, and if you're a man, you may say you don't care, but that's all bullshit. If those are the images out there, it's also in there: inside your head.

I'm not saying don't dye your hair. I used to say that, but now that I have gray hair, I get it. And I'm not saying don't use moisturizer or night cream or toner or Retin-A, even if nobody knows if those things really work. But know that it's a slippery slope. How many steps is it from facials and chemical peels to Botox, from Botox to collagen, from collagen to an eye lift, and from an eye lift to a tummy tuck to some neck tightening to the New New Face? I mean, once you start seeing the things happening in the mirror as flaws rather than the natural effects of age, you're never going to stop seeing the flaws.

Because you're not going to stop getting older. And why should you? Life is getting older and changing and becoming a different person over time. If you want to look like yourself, then look like yourself. It's hard to resist the pressure, I know. When a woman gets to that age when her age is not just a fact but an impediment, one that means people won't date you or hire you or sometimes even talk to you because it suddenly seems to make you invisible, how do you not want to fight it?

But I believe the only way to fight it is to not fight it. It's to get old and still know you're beautiful, and make sure everybody knows it, and that that kind of beautiful is normal. You think Madonna is the norm? I mean, the woman has been more people over the years than Sybil, including the one who adopted a British accent to move to London and marry a film director, who she's now divorcing because she slept with a man who makes something like $10,000 every time he swats at a ball with a piece of wood. And even though she and Hollywood and fashion magazines and the Real Housewives of Anyplace are fighting for your subconscious, don't let them win.

We may not be perfect, we may not be famous, but WE are the norm. And we need to keep it that way.

2009-05-03T14:44:00.013-04:00

The Kind of Conversation You Can Only Be Part of in a Video Art Booth on a Gallery Crawl With Free Wine, Vodka, and Gummi Bears

OUTSPOKEN FRIEND and I, clutching plastic cups of cheap chardonnay, enter small booth to find DARK-HAIRED MAN sitting on velveteen-covered bench, watching 4x2 foot screen. We sit as well.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Oh. That's interesting.
Beat.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Do you know what's going on?"
DARK-HAIRED MAN: Not really…
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Are those his balls?
DARK-HAIRED MAN: I think so. I've seen a few of his works and he always has those, the dangling giant balls. It's a recurrent motif.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Oh, wait, now that guy in the sailor outfit's not wearing pants either...
ME: Well, he's clearly done his homework. It looks like a lot of old silent films, Murnau, Buster Keaton... (Yeah, I spent $90,000 on film school so that I could sound like I know something)
DARK-HAIRED MAN: Kind of a cross between Chaplin and "Last Tango in Paris."
ME: Exactly.
DARK-HAIRED MAN: I always wonder how people can afford to put all this money into these things.
ME: Really? It looks pretty cheap. I mean, um, on purpose.
DARK-HAIRED MAN: Yeah, but it's an hour long.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Oh, God, really?
WOMAN IN DOROTHY HAMILL HAIRCUT and CONSIDERABLY LESS HIPSTERESQUE DATE peek in, hesitate.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Come on in. Don't be shy, just because the man's not wearing any pants.
They stumble in, somewhat tipsily.
DARK-HAIRED MAN: And like finding these locations, all that space, and the giant oven. I mean, where would you find something like that?
ME: Well, Brooklyn.
DOROTHY HAMILL: But Brooklyn's not cheap any more.
DARK-HAIRED MAN: True. There's nowhere cheap left.
ME: Queens. Jackson Heights isn't bad. (Yes, all conversations in New York City eventually turn to real estate. Or cell phone plans.)
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Washington Heights. That's where I live.
DOROTHY HAMILL: Really? Me too. 175th.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Oh, I'm at 143rd.
Uncomfortable beat of having revealed too much personal info to roomful of complete strangers.
ME (reading): 'The uterus'? Really?
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND (annoyed): Oh, so the oven is the uterus, uh huh, of course. That's why he's sticking his balls in there, so they get burned up. Lovely! Why does the uterus always have to be negative!
DOROTHY HAMILL: I wonder where the vagina is. I wonder if that's the whole nautical thing, you know, since it smells like fish.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: It does not! I teach kids sex ed and the boys are always saying that because they don't want to go down on the girls. It's really just a cop out.
DOROTHY HAMILL: Well, you smell like whatever you eat. I do eat a lot of salmon.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Right, but everybody's vagina is different.
DOROTHY HAMILL: They always say the nicest thing you can do if someone's going to go down on you is drink fruit juice and eat a lot of vegetables.
CONSIDERABLY LESS HIPSTERESQUE: I just know that smell asparagus makes.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND (scornfully): Um, yeah, that's urine? Not the same. They don't come from the same place.
ME: Speaking of urine, is that a bathroom?
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Is it? Oh good, I need to go next.
Film ends. DARK-HAIRED MAN gets up.
DARK-HAIRED MAN: Well, it was wonderful meeting you all, and discussing all…this.
OUTSPOKEN FRIEND: Yeah, have a good crawl.
DARK-HAIRED MAN leaves. I go to bathroom, return. OUTSPOKEN FRIEND goes in. TWO FASHIONABLE GIRLS enter and sit on the bench to watch film, which has started again.
FASHIONABLE GIRL: Wow.
ME: He's the black plague, and that oven is supposed to be the uterus.
FASHIONABLE GIRL: Huh. Did you figure that out or --
ME: Intertitles. But it was toward the end, we came in at the end of the last showing. Apparently it's an hour.
FASHIONABLE GIRL: Wow.
Beat.
FASHIONABLE GIRL 2: Well...I just came in to use the bathroom.

2009-04-11T10:45:00.008-04:00

Ten Reasons That I Am Happy This Interminable Fucking Winter Is Over

1) All of my wool sweaters are starting to pill.
2) I have no money to buy new sweaters because I've had next to no work and unemployment doesn't allow for a budget that includes the occasional trip to Anthropologie. (Or eating, really, but that's another story).
3) I don't want to get desperate enough to have to work in episodic.
4) I'm sick of having to wear so many layers when I do work (cotton socks wool socks snow boots long johns jeans snow pants t-shirt long-sleeved shirt wool sweater fleece jacket outer jacket scarf hat gloves that aren't warm enough) that my appendages are immobile. It's especially hard to boom when you can't turn your head.
5) How am I supposed to maintain my reputation as a glamour girl if my nails keep breaking? And having the skin on my nose flake off doesn't exactly help.
6) I miss going to the Red Hook pool and getting fresh ceviche at the soccer fields afterwards, then heading up to that place with the snotty French waiters, sitting in the backyard eating mussels and drinking white wine while watching hipsters play boules. Cuz BROOKLYN ROCKS, only it kinda rocks less when you don't want to leave your apartment.
7) I hate it when my hair freezes.
8) I've already lost one black glove and one brown glove so now I have to wear one of each. Again, this lack of color coordination is messing with my image. (GLAM GLAM, GO GLAM!)
9) I'm so pale I glow in the dark. Which could have its advantages in certain situations. But those are situations I'd rather avoid...
10) I hate living in fear of getting called to work a night exterior, knowing I would have to say "yes." (I still live in fear of that, but at least now I don't have to worry about frostbite! Yay!)

2009-02-28T16:29:00.020-05:00

My Favorite PAs

(Note #1: I know this wasn't the blog some of you were expecting after the twittering of last night, but this one was already in the done pile. Sorry, you'll just have to wait a bit for the salacious details).

(Note #2: I thought about writing this entire blog in verse so that it could be sung to the tune of "My Favorite Things," but then I decided that A) I really wasn't up to the challenge, and B) Nobody would actually sing it, and C) If anyone did, I'd feel personally responsible for inflicting that torture on the unsuspecting. So -- I think it was a good decision for everyone involved.)

I'm terrible with names. It's just a fact, and it stems, really, from another fact, which is that, deep down in my soul, I'm an extremely socially awkward geek who often experiences brain freeze when meeting new people. So when someone introduces themselves to me, I'm so focused on not making an idiot out of myself, and being able to say my own name in an ungarbled fashion, and worrying if I've got pieces of greenery stuck in my teeth, that I inevitably am too flustered to actually listen to the other person's name.

Needless to say, in a business that lives and dies by the shmooze, this can present a problem. It's also especially bad when you work on a different set every day or two and are constantly meeting new people -- or running into people you haven't seen in, say, two years, so that they might as well be new for all the likelihood that you're actually going to remember their names, if you're me.

(When they've lost hair or gained weight or grown beards or dyed their hair a new color, this gets extra tricky. One grip who I did an entire movie with back in the day, and spent a good chunk of that four weeks flirting with, showed up recently on a commercial set I was working on and it took me practically the entire day to realize that he was that svelte, clean-shaven boy I knew in 1996, now doubled in size, with long hair and a goatee).

My biggest problem, for the longest time, was PAs. I know this sounds terrible, but at the beginning, it seemed like there were just so many of them, scurrying about, and I hardly ever had contact with them anyway -- other than when they occasionally helped carry my heavy cases of equipment to set at the beginning of the day, something for which I was (and am, eternally) grateful, but never really had the chance to properly thank them for before someone on the walkie forced them to scurry off somewhere else. Even when I did get to thank them, I would never get names because I'm often late and flustered even more than the usual amount given the prospect of having to set up said equipment in record time. Generally speaking, in my world, the beginning of the day, when the sound mixer is freaking out over our late call being a little too late or the location being next to a construction site is not the best time for formal introductions and hand-shaking.

Although sometimes I don't even get names at the end of the day. Once, I got severely busted for this. After spending two hours one night driving home in the van and gabbing the entire time with one particular PA about jobs where we'd known the same people, I ran into her on set a few weeks later.

"Hey, ___!" she said cheerfully.
"Oh! Oh, hey...Hey!" I stuttered. "How's it going?"
"You don't even remember my name, do you?"
"Sure I do, Hilary."
"It's Kimberly."
"Wow, really? Gosh, sorry, I could have sworn it was Hilary."
"Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure since it is, you know, my name."
"Oh...right."

Since that little humiliation, I've gotten a lot better. In fact, at this point, I have my own personal catalogue of favorite PAs. This is based, as you might imagine, not only on general helpfulness and the ability to do their jobs well, or at least correctly, but on quirky and distinctive personality traits that make them especially entertaining, and of course, blog-worthy.

First of all, there's Nora. Nora always seems to be looking for both a new guy and an apartment, and so, at a time when I was similarly homeless and unattached, the search for those the two things was the subject over which we originally bonded. Although our attitudes tend to be a bit different.

"Yeah, I just met this one guy, he's been calling me," she'd say, stopping then to bark, "Copy that, going back to one!" into her walkie before continuing without missing a beat, "But I'm really into this other guy I've been sleeping with. Oh, and then I gave my number to some guy in a bar the other night. He was hot, but I don't know if he's going to call."
"Yeah," I'd say, "I've been dating this guy for a couple of months, but he's kind of ignoring me right now."
And then I'd have nothing else to say, but that was okay, because she did.

I've noticed that we tend to flirt with the same men on set, albeit, as you might imagine, with different results. This difference can also be seen in our Facebook pages, where Nora is inevitably replacing one provocative profile picture of herself sprawled, come-hitherly, in bed, with another of her in a bikini, whereas mine tend to be of me in a Super-8 hotel room in some unflattering state of exhaustion, or a baby picture, or a friend's shaved Persian cat, which I put up just because it looked so ridiculous (although nobody seemed to get it when I had status updates that read, "Does this haircut make my head look big?" They would just comment things like, "I could tell you if you put up an actual picture of yourself!")

Then there's Matt, or Goldstein, as I like to refer to him. For some reason, we always greet each other at the beginning of the day by shouting each other's last names across the set like a pair of old Jewish men. He started it. I don't know why.

But Goldstein is really one of the most helpful, friendly and competent people I have ever met. If he doesn't know the answer, he'll find out. If you need something, he will get it. If you need a better lock-up, he will go out and break some heads (although not really because he's too sweet and totally non-threatening like any other nice Jewish boy). But the man knows how to get things done, usually with a smile. Forcing me to wonder, as I do with many of my favorite PAs, what the hell he's doing in the film business.

Then there's Ken. Ken is also super helpful, but this is not just because he's a good PA, but because he's a big fan of my blog. I'm not used to having fans, so of course, while I am very flattered, it also embarrasses the shit out of me. Not to mention that it can lead to the occasional uncomfortable situation on set.

"How's the writing going?" he'll say eagerly and loud enough for everyone, including my boss, who definitely does NOT know I do this, to hear. "I loved the last one! It was great what you said about --"
"Ix-nay on the talk about the og-blay," I'll mutter out of a corner of my mouth as I try to occupy myself with checking Comtek batteries.
"Oh, right, right," he'll reply in a stage whisper with a knowing nod and a smile. Only to return later in the day to bring me a water when I'm standing next to the producer, chirping, "So why haven't you written anything in a while?"

Then there's Lorenzo, otherwise known as, "The Voice." Lorenzo does the most incredibly powerful and seductive lock-up you will ever hear in your life. I don't know anyone else who can shout out, "VERY QUIET PLEASE" in a commanding baritone that both can be heard through concrete and makes you weak in the knees. It doesn't hurt that he's also tall, dark, and a Yale graduate who's far too brilliant to be a PA.

And, actually, he isn't one any more. In fact, the thing about most of my favorite PAs is that they're so damn good, they don't stay PAs very long. While the film business may not be a meritocracy, and it contains some of the most half-baked people in positions of power that you will ever meet, enough of those people start as half-baked PAs that ADs are always looking for good ones to second for them. So a smart and competent multi-tasking wonder like Nora or Goldstein earns their DGA hours and moves up quickly to 2nd AD, or to coordinator/production manager. And then I see them less and less, because they do more prep days and fewer production days, or end up in the moho handling paperwork or running talent all day, either way spending less and less time on set. And then if they move up to first AD, they're so busy spying on the director and trying to keep the DP on track and yelling at their PAs that they have very little time to stand around and bullshit with me any more. (Contrary to what you might think based on some previous bloggage, there are first ADs who I like, and with whom I would gladly stand around shooting the shit all day long if possible. But they have no time for me!)

But then there are always new PAs. My latest fave is Ezekial Wong. Ezekial is a very large guy with a baby face and Chinese parents who were fond of Biblical names. I took an interest in Ezekial because of that odd combo and his totally sweet and helpful disposition, but it wasn't until he showed up to set one day in a tux that we really got to talking.

"It's for work," he said, looking a bit bashful. "I have to leave straight from here to go to my second job."
"What are you, like, in catering?"
"Event security," he replied. "You know, parties at clubs, dinners. Nobody famous, though. Or at least, nobody you'd know. Chinese movie stars and sports figures, mostly. The fifth richest man in China, he always hires me."
"He hires you directly? So you have your own company?"
"Well...I am the company. It's just me and my guys. I should probably incorporate. I kind of just fell into it, but I'm trying to get out, do more of this."

I had a hard time seeing how this kid, even if he is huge, could intimidate anyone. But then I checked out the photos on his Facebook page, and decided that I was quite glad that we were on the same side. (Not to mention that he has 667 friends. Then again, as you might imagine, all my favorite PAs are pretty friend-heavy).

So of course, I friended him too. Because if there's one nice thing about the film business, and having to remember the new names and new faces with which you are constantly bombarded as the new blood comes in and the old blood moves up and over -- and I seem to stay exactly where I am -- it's that you get to make a new friend every once in a while. And they may even help you carry the sound cart up the stairs, or get you breakfast when you don't have time to go to the catering truck, or just keep you awake and lighten your day with good conversation about the secret lives they lead when they're not attached to a walkie.

2009-02-20T21:38:00.005-05:00

I Know I Owe

...cuz it's been a month, but for now, at least those of you who have been following the twittering may appreciate these.

2009-01-20T09:22:00.010-05:00

Observations from Inauguration Weekend in D.C.

1) D.C. is not New York
Everyone knows this, but I think what struck me was exactly how D.C. was not New York. I expected it to be wonky, for everyone to be talking about politics. But no, the people I met were talking about the people who they hate in their offices, and what they did last night at the bar, and Facebook (naturally), and how they met their wives.

The closest thing I had to a policy conversation was with the guy -- who looked a bit like Hunter S. Thompson, and cultivated it by smoking those skinny cigars -- who had just inherited a bunch of money and wanted to use it to create a completely self-sustainable community. I thought that was a cool idea. Until we started getting into the details.

"So you want to create something like this and then replicate it?"
"Oh yeah, and there are already a lot of them, all over the place." At this point, he sidled closer to me by the fireplace. "It's this whole idea of community that I really dig. A community that's truly open, sharing everything, including sexually."
I leaned in the other direction. "Huh."
"Yeah, a lot of the whole idea of the hippy communes was being polyamorous. I've been looking into that."
"Right. But, I mean, isn't it sort of contradictory, that sustainability is about taking complete responsibility, and free love is about totally evading responsibility?"
"Well, I don't know about that. You know, if everyone knows about it and it's all out in the open and everyone's into it…Though, actually, I've been having trouble finding women who are into it."
"Yeah, I can imagine you might. Have you tried California?"
"Yeah, the California women are especially not into it. I don't get it."
I looked at his balding, pony-tailed head, this man pushing 50 and using sustainability to get sex, and had to admit that I did get it.
"Well…good luck with that!" I went to get more red wine.

The second closest thing I had to a policy conversation took a really long time to get to the policy.
"Oh, so you're a filmmaker?"
"Yeah, I'm making this film about --"
"I've got a film you should make."
"Really."
"Yeah. It'd be about the drug trade, but it wouldn't really be about the drug trade, it would be about all of these conversations that would happen along the way. You know, these little vinuets --"
"Vin -- vin whats?"
"-- kinda like Pulp Fiction, but not exactly. More of an exploration of, you know, interesting stuff."
"Interesting." Which generally means the opposite when I say it, because I say it because I have nothing else to say.
"I mean, it might not have the panachay of your Hollywood movies --"
"Hmm."
"-- but I think it would make a lot of money. I think it would be really good. With really good music. Do you have music for your film yet? Because I write music."
"Oh. Do you have a website?"
"No, I'm trying to get a few really good pieces together first -- I keep playing them for my friends and they're like, 'Yeah, that one's good, I'd buy that one.' Here."
He handed me his card. It said "Department of Transportation."
"There's no info on there about my music, actually. I work for the DOT on trying to create greener bus systems and stuff."
"Oh, really?" Here we go, I thought, finally.
"That must've been hard to do under this administration."
"Yeah, we had this science worked out a long time ago, it all got buried. I wrote this really important paper, I mean we had a crackpot team of people on this thing --"
"Um, do you mean 'crack' --"
"And nobody wanted to pay attention to it."
"Huh. I wonder why."
"But anyway, I don't think you should buy my music before you listen to it, though I know it'd be perfect for your film. What'd you say it was about again?"

When I told my friend about this conversation later, she asked, "Was English his first language? He had a ponytail." Lotta ponytails.
"Well, he had no accent." I looked at his card. "And his name is Bob Jones."

I guess all this proves is that government has wanna-bes just like the film business -- who also try to impress you in all the wrong ways.

2) Every other person in D.C. is a lawyer.

3) Every other lawyer in D.C. works for the Department of Homeland Security
I think this has something to do with the fact that so many departments got bundled into DHS, and then renamed something else, so when they say they work for ICE, that's another term for a new division of the INS. So in other words, we've all gotta learn new acronyms just to figure out what has happened to the government in the last 8 years.

4) …And yet, they can't get you into the friggin' inauguration concert.
What is up with that??? I mean, they all have badges, and the friend I went with apparently has the biggest and shiniest of all, because she's ranked high enough that she's actual law enforcement. But no.

Her biggest complaint was that she kept on getting automated cell phone calls telling her that they'd raised the terror alert level to orange -- she was the terror alert coordinator of something for her department.

"God, will they just leave me alone?" she said when her phone rang for the fifth time. "Orange alert, big whoop. What else is new."

5) Everyone who is not a lawyer and doesn't have a government job does nothing, or something kinda, well, boring.
Out of the other people I met, several had money and so had no need to work (the woman who hosted one party was the Bob's Big Boy heiress, another guy came from old Washington money of a more nebulous sort); one was a former bike messenger who now was owner of a medium-sized bike messenger business, and was one of the only people I have ever met at a party that I really and truly could not figure out how to make conversation with; and one made eyeglasses (who the aforementioned people actually made seem interesting, until he explained that he doesn't design them, he just actually puts the lenses and the frames together). The most interesting conversation (where I did not feel like I was being propositioned for polyamorousness) I had was with someone who works in IT. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I guess I just expected more.

Oh -- there was the woman who at some point mentioned that she'd been giving stripping lessons. But I came into that conversation too late to get all the details.

6) Even the people who seemed more wrapped up in their own panachay and didn't want to talk about the inauguration –- unless they were talking about who had tickets to what ball -- were excited.
It was palpable. Not just everyone at the party, but everyone at the concert, even though we couldn't get closer than 5 football fields' distance from the stage, was laughing and chatting like we all knew each other.

Woman with punk eyeliner and dyed black hair: "Is that him?"
Woman in funny hat: "It doesn't sound like him."
My friend with the badge: "That's Denzel! It sounds like Denzel."
Woman obsessed with Bruce Springsteen: "Oh, it's my boyfriend!"
Woman with punk eyeliner: "Who's singing with him? Is that Sheryl Crow?"
Me: "No, too big a voice for Sheryl Crow."
Guy with binoculars: "I can't see who it is but it's definitely not Sheryl Crow."
Woman obsessed with Bruce Springsteen: "Oh, I just LOVE him!!!"

One woman was showing around a snapshot of Obama laughing at the camera. "It was at a fundraiser before he announced he was running. I was trying to get a shot of George Clooney, and he was in the way, so I asked him to move. He said, 'What, I don't even get a picture?' So I took the picture just to make him happy."

He did look really happy, confident in his own destiny. She also got the shot of Clooney.

And everyone was happy, just plain psyched. People getting off the Metro, packed together like sardines, were talking to the people whose armpits they'd just had their faces in. People were giving strangers their e-mails and asking them to come stay with them in Minnesota (okay, maybe that was just one of my friends, she's very hospitable). People who didn’t like Garth Brooks (including me) were singing along to "American Pie." Even the people who had the "ARREST GEORGE BUSH" signs -- one guy had "ARREST CHENEY FIRST" -- and were handing out cards telling people to give him the finger as he flew away from the White House were giddy, even joyous in their hatred, and the thrill of his imminent departure.

I think that's the best way to describe it: joyous.

7) Barack Obama looks even better on a jumbotron.

Welcome to a new era, my friends.

2009-01-15T10:25:00.003-05:00

So It's Come to This

After months of bitching and moaning about how annoying Twitter is...I've decided to try it myself! Typical, ain't it?

Sign up if you want. Since I'm so haphazard on the blogging front, you'll probably hear from me more often this way...

2008-12-28T09:12:00.008-05:00

The Devil You Know or Why We Make Fun of the Product

The other day I was on a fast food commercial. It was actually not a bad day: we had a fun crew and cast, we were inside, which is important in December, and, all in all, people were in a good mood (even the electricians, who had to spend most of their day outside. I had lunch with them and they seemed to be giving each other less shit than usual, or at least good-natured shit.

"We haven't settled on a boy's name yet. I kind of like 'Ziad.'"
"Ziad, that's a really nice name."
"Plus, whenever you're looking for him, you can just say, 'Where'zee-at?'"
Loud, raucous laughter.
"No, but seriously, that's a really nice name.")

But when you eventually make the people you're working with punchy by requesting take after take (yes, I'm talking to you, overindulgent director/agency/client), they start looking for somewhere to direct their ire. And since they can't take it out on you directly, 'cause you're too important and they want to get rehired, they're going to take it out on something that won't fight back: the product.

Even the actors, when they've been forced to eat the product for ten hours. At this point, they're trying really really hard not to swallow ANY of it, chewing the same bites for the entire take, even once they become a pulpy mess in their mouths that they can finally spit after "Cut!" into a little cup lined with paper towels, which will then get dumped into a big bucket of mastication.

"That one was totally cold," said the actor playing a lank-haired young hipster with a low-paying job behind the counter of a music store, who was, in fact, a lank-haired young hipster who'd gone to Julliard and now was going to make a lot of money in residuals.

"Mine was kind of warm that time," said the actress playing the cool black chick with attitude and big earrings, who in reality was paying her way through Columbia, where she was pre-med.

The relative temperature of the sandwich did indeed vary a bit because it was the job of one of the three food stylists to stand a few feet away, waving over them with an electric steamer. They then passed them on to a prop guy who sprayed the meat to a glistening sheen with a little pump bottle, that I looked over at one point and saw to be some kind of hair product.

"It's fine," said the prop. "Look, it's all-natural."
"But should they really be eating beeswax?" I asked.
He shrugged and kept spraying.

"Oh, see, now you're burping it all up," said the actress.
"Ugh, I know," said the actor.
"You're going to burp it up all night."
"Going to lunch in 15," called the AD.
"Oh, lunch. Yum," said the actor. "Could I get a Coke?"

The product was called "The Wrap Sandwich," but when I looked at it closely, I realized that it looked familiar.

"So these are actually just burgers cut into strips and then put into wraps with lettuce."
"Yup," said the actor. "It's a Big Mac in a wrap."
"It's a Whopper taco," chimed in the DP.
"He's going to break out in a rash right there," said the prop guy, who was now watching his colleague apply a dollop of sauce to the actor's lip – with explicit guidance about size and shape being shouted over from the monitor by the agency.
"Or a tumor," I said.

This is why we turn down the feed to the Comtek headsets between takes. Actually, it's really so the director can talk shit about the agency and clients, but it benefits us as well. Because sometimes it's really hard not to make fun of what we're selling or how we're selling it.

At least in the case of the Wrap Sandwich, even if the product was idiotic and kind of gross, the commercial itself was clever.

Not so the Lucille Roberts spots I'd worked on a few weeks before. In those, a woman named Jessica who claimed to be trainer to the stars, urged viewers to come to Lucille Roberts for the "Glam Workout."

"It's easy, it's fun, and it's proven to take off the pounds, guaranteed!" announced Jessica.

I must say I find the idea of a target audience that aspires to be "glam" but needs to "take off the pounds" to do it to be an incredibly depressing concept. All I could think of were overweight housewives and secretaries, tricked by watching too many makeover shows into thinking that they could bring out their inner glam. This was only made more sad/absurd by the fact that we spent most of the rest of the day shooting professional dancers with perfect bodies performing elaborately-choreographed hip-hop dance steps that were supposed to look like workout routines that could somehow be mastered by your average mother of two from New Jersey. But the part that was hard not to make fun of was when they had the dancers line up behind a spandex-clad trainer with a headset microphone, jumping around with large rubber balls, chanting "Glam, glam, glam it up! Glam glam -- GO GLAM!"

And then the people making the commercial were also hard not to make fun of. The agency guys were two men in their late 60s with hair dyed black or blond and wide collars unbuttoned to reveal chest hair, who looked as if they, like the commercials, had stepped out of another era. Perhaps the era of Don Draper, only a Don Draper who was no longer smooth and partially deaf.

"Where the hell are the girls?" bellowed the one who seemed to be the most important, or at least the loudest, at the beginning of the day. "Bring out the girls!"

Someone brought the girls.

"Where's the red lipstick?" demanded the producer, who also seemed to have been sent by central casting, probably for a Coen Brothers movie.
"I think make-up was going for a natural look," said the AD.
"I said RED lipstick!" yelled the agency guy. "They have to have RED LIPSTICK!"
"DON'T TELL ME THE GIRLS ARE READY IF THEY'RE NOT READY!" yelled the producer at the AD.

The girls returned in half an hour, looking nothing like any woman in her right mind would look at the gym, unless she liked the experience of sweating through pores clogged with pancake make-up. Then they started on the "Celebrity Work-out," for which they chanted, "Be a star at Lucille Roberts! Superstar! Superstar! Be a star at Lucille Roberts! Superstar! Superstar!..." Oh, and did I mention they did this one in sunglasses? While the agency guy watched the dance routines by the monitor, snapping and swinging his hips like Sinatra?

The sound guy and I smirked and sent text messages to each other saying "GO GLAM," and I comforted myself with the thought that if we were going to be helping to make commercials that exploited both women's bodies and their body image issues, we were doing it in the stupidest way possible.

But herein lies the conundrum that typically hits me at holiday time, a time known for peace on earth and good will toward your fellow humans, particularly if that good will runs to buying them an iPhone, a Wii, or a new Mercedes. Yes, it's the season of consumerism run rampant, and I contribute to that, I know, in my line of work; in fact, it pretty much is my line of work.

And we do need to buy stuff. Especially now, with the economy in the toilet, people need to work, and for them to be able to, products need to be made and sold, young people need their Mcjobs selling food that's bad for us, and somebody needs to grow the flimsy iceberg lettuce, and a whole laboratory of people, probably, is needed to come up with the red dye number 6 and mayonnaise substitute and corn sweeteners that go into that special sauce. Lucille Roberts trainers and administrators and Jessica, even though I have no idea who she is, need those women who need a proven way to lose weight to come out and join up, so they can pay their rent and feed their cats and clothe their kids.

And I need these companies to hire the people who hire the people who hire me. And so does the actor who's paying off his Julliard loans and the prop guy who needs a new pick-up truck. And we'd all rather not work on bad commercials because, well, we don't like putting our time and sweat and missed hours of sleep or creativity or sex into something that will utterly suck.

But then again, I spent a week this past year working for and shooting in Wal-Mart, and when I saw that those commercials actually turned out to be really good, it made me feel like I'd been doing the devil's work. I tried to make myself feel better by running around, trying to stop everyone on the crew from buying anything there, but even the most scrupulous of them, when confronted with a 10-pack of AA batteries for $4.99, could not resist.

But whenever I have these moral dilemmas, I remember this: back in 1996, when I was first working in the business, I got a call from two friends, two of the gayest men you could hope to meet, asking me to record sound for them on something for more than I had ever made for a day of work. The catch was that we were working on the Reagan tribute for the Republican National Convention. I balked.

"How can we do this?"
"Look," my friend Anthony said, "they're going to pay somebody a lot of money to do it. It might as well be us. And just the fact that they're paying us…Think of the irony."

So I thought about the irony, and the $1000 plus that I was going to make, and the credit card bills I'd run up making my thesis film, and I said "yes."

And I don't know if I can really, truly, justify it that way. Maybe the point is not to justify it, but to knowingly subvert it; to remember who paid us that money, and use it to in some way make the films and write the blogs and go to the protests and cast the votes that take them on -- and by "them" I mean the Wal-Marts and drug companies (I've worked for them A LOT) and the Victoria's Secrets and anyone else who puts out objectifying images, tries to sell shit that will kill you, exploits their workers for minimum wage and no health insurance, manipulates the market and sends us into a recession and then runs off with a $30 million bonus, etc etc.

Because in the long run, making fun of the product doesn't do anything...but buying your batteries somewhere else does.

2008-11-02T22:03:00.009-05:00

Election Day bonus!
Notes from making calls for Obama (now get out there and vote)

"Hi, I'm ___ and I'm a volunteer with moveon.org. Is this Rose?"
"Yes, it is."
"Hi Rose. Well, as you know, the last weekend before the election is coming up, and so I'm trying to get people to come out to volunteer."
"Oh, yes, well, I can't come out and volunteer because I'm teaching a class over the weekend."
"Oh, that's --"
"But I have been working for Obama and talking to people -- I've been talking to the press a lot. You see, I live with a Republican."
"Really?"
"Yes. And I've got two interviews coming out this weekend, I can't remember where the reporters are from. But they're all very interested in us. We're in the I4 corridor, you know. We typically go Republican but not this year!"
"Wow, well, that's --"
"Now where are you from?"
"Um, I'm from Brooklyn."
"Oh, I'm from Brooklyn! Flatbush! It was not a good neighborhood when I was growing up there."
"Yeah, I don't know if it's a good neighborhood now…"
"And two of my daughters got their PhDs at Columbia. The third one's an MBA. Now what do you do?"
"I'm a filmmaker."
"Really, a filmmaker! So I should look for you! I see on the caller ID that your name is _____ _____. Is that what your name is?"
"Er, well, yes."
"Well, I'll have to Google you!"

"Hi, I --"
(suspicious) "Who is this?"
"My name is _____ and I'm a volunteer for Moveon.org. And, um, on my list here I have that I'm either calling for 'B' or 'G.'"
"Well…I guess you'll have to talk to B."
"Okay, so is this B?"
(long pause) "This is B."
"Okay, great. Um, we're looking for people to come out and volunteer for Obama this weekend."
"Well...I cannot. You see, I'd very much like to volunteer. But my job precludes me."
"Oh." (Beat, while I wait for him to tell me what his job is. He doesn't.) "So you can't volunteer."
"No, I'd like to very much. But my job precludes me."
"Okay."
"All I am able to do at this juncture is vote."
"Well…thanks for voting!"

"Hi, I'm a volunteer with Moveon.org, how are you doing?"
"I'm all right I guess."
"Well, great. I'm trying to get people to come out to volunteer for Obama this weekend."
"Oh, I'm sorry. It's not a good time."
"Oh. Okay."
"You see my dad just died."
"Oh, I'm so sorry…"
"And I have all of my family here at my house right now for a memorial service."
"Oh, well, I'm sorry, then I'll --"
"I am voting for Obama. In North Carolina."
"Well…thank you."
"I really wish I could help, I would like to. But it's -- it's not a good time."
"No, no, of course not. Thank you for taking my call. And again, I'm so sorry."
"Well...everybody dies."

"Hi, I got a call from this number?"
"Oh. Hi. Yes, um, I called you because I'm a volunteer with Moveon.org and we're trying to get people to come out and volunteer."
"Oh. But this number says New York, are you calling from New York?"
"Yes, we're in New York."
"So…you want me to come up to New York?"
"Oh, no, no, we have a campaign headquarters in Ocala."
"Oh. Great!"

"My weekend is booked solid."

"I'm going out of town for Halloween."

"Oh, yes, I'm already going to do that."
"Oh, great! So which time would you like to come out, Saturday at 10 am or --"
"Oh, no. I can't do that."
"Oh."
"I'm going to vote for Obama but I can't volunteer. I'm an old lady."

"Oh, yes!" (off the phone) "She's calling from Moveon." (on the phone) "When are you looking for volunteers?"
"Saturday and Sunday."
(off the phone) "She says Saturday and Sunday…." (on the phone) "What would we be doing?"
"Well, you'd be talking to voters, so either making calls or knocking on doors."
(off the phone) "She says making calls or knocking on doors…" (on the phone) "Hold on a second."
(a few moments go by, the she returns to the phone)
"Well, I guess we're not."
"Oh, that's too bad."
"Yeah...But we did vote! We voted today!"
"Oh, that's great. We don't have early voting here in New York so we have to vote on election day."
"Oh, well, you know we're in Florida, so we're special."
"Yes, well...yes. Well, if you decide you do want to volunteer you can always check out the Moveon website. If your husband changes his mind --"
"Well, we'll fight over it and if I win, we'll do it."

2008-10-29T21:37:00.012-04:00

Needy

I was working on a commercial recently with a lot of actors. I mean, a lot of actors. Probably over 200. It was the kind of job where the first AD requests his own PA system to talk to all of them, which we call "the voice of God."

We all know that first ADs love anything that lets them be more like God. They have the illusion of control and world (read: set) domination, because they get to do all the talking and shouting and giving of orders, and yet they are under so many thumbs -- director, producer, agency, client --- that the backs of their heads must be permanently stamped with the prints. And they're also somewhat at the mercy of the people they're supposed to be ordering around. The AD needs the help of the crew to make his day, so he still has to be nice to us, or at least pretend to be nice to us.

And the AD is also at the mercy of the actors, which is what he (or she, but I have yet to meet a female commercial AD) hates more than anything. Because at least most crew members are rational. Sure, there's the gaffer who loves to fuck with sound people and hide their comteks just for fun, sending them scrambling for one right when we're supposed to shoot (not that this has ever happened to me). And there's the prop person who will NOT be rushed when wiping down the color-corrected, hero soda can and spraying it with just the right amount of glycerin water to get it to glisten perfectly in the shot (it's not his fault, some client from Fresca made his life hell for a week once and he's been scarred ever since). But at least crew people deep down really only care about going home, and so will generally suck up their sonofabitchiness or neuroses when the time comes and just do their jobs -- and only their jobs, because this is the union, and if there's one thing I know, it's what is and is not my job. And it's the actor's job to express those neuroses and marshal them to the cause of selling Shakespeare or Fixident, whatever the case may be. And none of us can go home until they do it right.

As with a normal job, how long this takes generally has to do with the work itself (Faust or One Life to Live?), their co-workers (Sir Ian or Scott Bakula?) and their boss (Busby Berkeley or Ingmar Bergman?) -- as well as, like with any normal person, whether they're having a good day or a bad day. But unlike with a normal person, the difference between a good day and a bad day is the difference between joy and despair, and that difference can be made by a call from their agent or a hangnail or how you (yes, you) said "Good morning" to them when you showed up on set half asleep at 5 am.

Basically, actors are the neediest people you will ever meet. This is what comes of being in a profession where your emotions are your bread and butter -- only, when you're an actor, it's like you're the bread, and the butter is melted, and you soak it all up like a sponge and then you're supposed to ooze or squirt it back out on cue (oozing or squirting depending on the genre of course). It's like being a top athlete in terms of the total control you need, only more so, because if you're a tennis player, or a pitcher, or a gymnast, the idea is to keep your head in the game and take your emotions out. Whereas as an actor, your emotions are the game. Without them, it's just a book of instructions bound together with three holes and two 1.5-inch brads (not three, aspiring screenwriters, two), and somebody's got to make it real. And all of those mixed metaphors I've just described -- the buttery, spongy balance beam routine where you have to stick the dismount or get a 6 from the Ukrainian judge -- that's your job. Every day. No pressure.

Some actors, who are masters of their craft (Catherine Keener, Cynthia Nixon, David Strathairn, Michael Imperioli, to name a few I've worked with), make this look easy. At "Action!" they can cry, and mean it, while saying half a page of dialogue and pausing to pick up and put down their fork on the same mark with the same hand on the same line on every take -- no matter how many takes it takes. Then there are the actors (Frank Whaley, Vince D'Onofrio) who often need to actually get themselves emotionally and/or physically worked up to do a scene. A lot of people say, "Oh, they're just 'method.'" But the truth is, any actor working today worth his or her salt is a method actor, and that's been true ever since people like Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner started teaching people how to have a method. And the idea behind having a method is that you can get in and out of character without having to make everyone else crazy by actually becoming that serial killer or neo-Nazi asshole 24-7. Still, these methody pains in the ass generally turn in a good enough performance that people hire them for their work even if they're a little -- sometimes more than a little -- extra trouble. The line between genius and jerk is pretty fine, especially when some producer's smelling Oscar. Then there are those (no names on this one, sorry) who take the fact that they think they are ACTORS, with a capital A, as a license to commit bad behavior, without actually doing any very good acting -- or, often, any acting at all. It's the fact that they can't act, and they know it, or that they used to be able to and now they're not, is what makes them such a nightmare. These are the people I have absolutely no respect for, because they make everyone else's lives difficult, and for what? So that they can coast on the pathetic skateboard that is their ego and hide their lack of talent from the world just a teeny bit longer. I also know a number of bad actors who get by on charm, and I have no problem with them, as long as they stay sober enough to remember their lines. Hell, be bad, just don't give me guff when I try to mic you, or boom you, or look at you (yes, sometimes we mere mortals actually need to look at you, not because we like it, but in order to do our jobs). And never, ever, extend the length of my day.

This is why we all need the director. The director's supposed to provide the outside guidance, discipline and honest perspective to get the actors to knock it out of the park, or at least not double-fault. This does not, in my mind, mean that directors need to find some insidious means of wringing a good performance out of an actor -- although we all know the stories. How Steven Spielberg, when trying to get the little boy to give his expressions of delight and wonder when the spaceship was trying to beam him up in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, had a pile of Christmas presents that he slowly unwrapped, one at a time. How when Barbara Streisand got so frustrated because she couldn't cry in The Way We Were, Sydney Pollack just went over and gave her a hug, and the tears came flooding. Every director, deep down, wants to play puppetmaster in that critical moment that pulls the film together -- although the truth is, if you cast well, generally all you'll have to do is tell them they're swell and ask them to dial it up or down a little as needed.

Well, a lot of commercial directors don't even know how to do that. Why would they need to learn? Most actors are never going to get genuinely orgasmic when opening a bag of steaming microwave popcorn, or not to the extent that the client wants them to -- and oh, I've seen them ask for it: "Can they be even more excited?" No, the actor's going to have to fake it anyway, so why would a director bother? Not to mention that he or she is focused on way more important things than the performance, like the precise angle of the pizza box that shows the logo to fullest advantage, or the degree of drip of the mayo that's been food-styled within an inch of its life. These are the moments of genius -- GENIUS! -- in a commercial. (See, and you wonder why the prop people are neurotic). Not to mention that commercial actors are generally nobodies, which really makes them less important than the Redi-Wip (yes, that is how you spell it). Everyone caters to big actors. If they don't know how to direct them, they will at least pretend to talk their preferred brand of psychobabble and make sure that they have a never-ending supply of their drug of choice, be it coke or Diet Coke, and lunch from Nobu waiting in their trailer. But with actors who aren't important, if the director has, say, scrubbing bubbles to worry about, those thespians had better just crank out the facial expressions right quick and ask for nothing, or be labeled difficult.

This is how I often end up in the weird position of helpmate. Really, it is in fact my job to watch actors -- to make sure that the mic is pointing at them and moves when they move, etc. So in between shots, it's often just me and them, standing there, waiting on The Word (from the AD, who gets it from the director who gets it from the agency who gets it from the client). Often there's nothing to do but make conversation, along the lines of,

Handsome and charming actor who knows that he's handsome and charming: So that thing must be pretty heavy, huh?
Me: Naah, you get used to it.
Handsome and charming (feeling my arms): You must have some muscles, huh?
Me (blushing -- exactly the desired reaction): I guess.
Handsome and charming (now gently stroking my arm and looking deeply into my eyes): Hey. Do you know how I could get a water?

Actress who has to do a jogging scene in a tank top and short shorts on a suburban street in the middle of January (shivering): Hey, it's a little brisk out here, isn't it?
Me: Do you want your coat?
Actress: CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK (that's her teeth chattering) Oh, me? No, no, I'm good, I'm great.
Me (to the 2nd AD): Hey, is wardrobe around? She's starting to turn blue.

And then, sometimes, I have to play cheerleader. Like on the set with the 200 extras. We were doing a scene where the main actor had to act as if he was a coach psyching up a football team for a game. It didn't help that he was wearing a red spandex suit and a football helmet that he couldn't really see out of and that he had to walk at high speed over dolly track. It didn't help that he had a whole bunch of fairly technical lines to do in a short space of time because the spot was 30 seconds. Or that he had to walk past a long line of all the other actors, who were all also wearing brightly-colored spandex, and whose job it was to stare at him. Or that, after four days, the director had completely lost any interest he had ever had in the spot -- and most of his interest to begin with had been focused on the exact placement of the sea of 200 bodies in spandex.

The red actor tripped over the dolly track on the first take, and of course he wasn't wearing any shoes over his spandex booties, so that hurt. On the second take, he flubbed his lines. And the third take. The director and the first AD were focused on getting the dolly move right and didn't even come over to talk to him, and didn't seem to care that he was limping. He caught my eye.

Actor: You know, it's just once you trip over it, it's kind of hard to forget it's there. Then you start spending all your time thinking about not tripping over it. And I know, it's just a few sentences --
Me: I know, look, what you're doing is not easy.
Actor: I'm gonna get it.
Me: You're gonna get it.

He did the scene again -- and blew his lines, and almost crashed into the dolly, which still wasn't in the right place. People were tired, it had been a long day -- it was the third spot and it was the martini, and everyone just wanted to go home.

Actor: Boy, everybody's just waiting on me, huh?
Me: No, no. Well, partly. But the dolly move --
Actor: It's the fourth quarter, gotta pull it out, you know? We're in the end zone, 4th down --
(he was a little methody)
Me: Er, I'm not too good with the football analogies.
Actor: All right, what would you say it's like?
Me: Well, I'd say…it's just like when everyone's staring at me and I trip over the dolly track and ruin the shot.
Actor: Yes! Exactly!

He got it right on the next one, but then the AD called out that we were going again.

Actor: What did I screw up this time?
Me: It's not you, it's them, they always do a million takes.
Actor: Right, right…

He did it again, and this time they were happy. Everyone applauded, he gave me a high five, and we were out of there.

Maybe I shortened my day a little. And he had a cute butt -- which looked especially good in red. And look, I can't say I don't enjoy talking to the actors, doing what the director should be doing -- even if nobody's going to hire me to do it, and nobody can actually know I did anything, because if they did, I'd get in trouble.

But it's more than that. Sure, actors can sometimes drive you nuts. And some of them are vampires of love and adoration who will suck you dry if you let them (which is why you should never date one). But when they do what they do and they do it well, that strange and incredible alchemy inside of them that I don't understand, that's one of the wonders of making movies -- or sometimes even lowly commercials.

Sometimes you have to stop and remember that being part of that is what makes it more than a paycheck, that what we do is a team sport where everyone needs an assist or a forward pass -- or maybe even a little sugar. And maybe that makes us needy, but I think, really, it just makes us a part of something. So sometimes, you've just got to give it up -- even if it isn't, technically, your job.

2008-09-30T22:15:00.006-04:00

Prop List From Something I Worked on Recently

(Copied from the call sheet)

Sc.1: Jim's guitar, roughly drawn friend graph (transparency), letter addressed to "Sally," overhead projector, ruler/fine point sharpie
Sc.2: Dale's briefcase
Sc.12: copy of "Scotland" news, overhead projector, roughly drawn friend graph (transparency), ruler/fine point sharpie, Dale's intercom
Sc.21: animatronic monkey, Andrew's arm in a sling, jewelry box
Sc.A3: treadmill, teeth, dreams letters, Sally's bike, chaise lounge, giant bike wheel, big hammers, belly rig, dolls, bandages

2008-09-20T18:03:00.014-04:00

There's a spot

I went to work the other day on a commercial and noticed that there was a spot on my shirt. Typical day, typical occurrence. What we were shooting was actually a weepy PSA to raise money for colon cancer research, but in spite of that, it managed to feel just as crass as any other commercial; the production was just as ridiculously cavalier (they somehow forgot to tell us it was a night job until two days before -- oops!), the agency and clients were just as self-absorbed (one attempted to return a Comtek while keeping the headphones in her bag -- "Oh, did it come with those?"), my boss was just as psychotically stressed out ("DID YOU FIND THE GAFFERS TAPE?? WELL, GIVE IT TO ME, JESUS!" I've discovered after many years of experience that the best way to deal with this behavior is to stand where he can see me but out of the range of flying fur and expletives, nodding and looking concerned) -- all, in other words, as usual. And me finding a spot on my shirt is something that seems to happen every day of my working life. I'm always eating in a hurry, shoving a guacamoled chip in my face or slurping tea out of my Super-8 travel mug, and whatever I'm trying to get into my mouth inevitably ends up a badge of slovenliness prominently displayed on my chest. Thank God for Ecover stain remover, that shit works.

The spot I discovered on myself this time, however, was different. It was a small red dot that I noticed, actually, when I put on the shirt in the morning, but I was in a hurry and didn't want to change. Plus, sometimes you just want to wear a certain outfit because you know you look good in it, and you know people will notice you look good in it, especially when you've recently been dumped and you feel the need to have people flirt with you to make you feel attractive again…But I digress. When I saw the spot, it wasn't like all of the other spots that I usually see and can't tie back to the particular job or glob of grease that instigated them. I knew exactly where this one had come from.

It was a couple of weeks ago, the last weekend we were shooting in Vegas for the documentary, the last shooting trip of the film, in fact. We were with a family that we've gotten pretty close to over the past year or so, and who have braved some tough times. Not to be or cliché or sound like I'm talking about CATS, but we've laughed with them, we've cried with them, we've listened to wireless mic-captured conversation as varied as,

"You shut up!"
"No, you shut up!"

when shopping at the grocery store and

"Mom, don't be sad."
"What is there to be happy about?"
"That we're alive!"

when visiting the grave of a son who passed away two years ago, at the age of 23. On this particular trip, the whole family -- mom, six remaining kids, two spouses, two grandsons, four friends of the family who spent the weekend in the family's trailer, a very tolerant dog named Blue and a coop full of chickens whose clucking is now an indelible part of the film's soundtrack -- assembled for the birthday of the son who had died, to yell at each other, eat, swim, make tamales, and exorcise some demons, or at least take them out for a spin in the 100-plus degree desert heat. And we came out to film it all happening, not exactly knowing what "it" would be, but knowing we had to be there.

It's odd to stand by and watch other people's lives unspool. While you're shooting, a lot of the time, you have no idea what the hell you're getting. You're strung out and your back and arms are sore from wearing the mixer around your midriff and booming while you're rolling rolling rolling for eight hours a day with only quick breaks to talk with our subjects off-camera for a few minutes while eating or drinking whatever they offer us and trying to figure out, Should we be rolling on all this insanity and if so, which part?? (or at least, um, that's our method, such as it is). But sometimes, you have a moment of clarity, where you see their story -- or stories, because usually there are many to choose from -- and how time is shaping it, and them. You know that it's transitory, because their lives will continue, as I've said before, and take new turns, as real lives, unpredictably, maddeningly, tend to do. But for a moment, you can make sense of them in a way that you can never make sense of your own life. It's the privilege and also the burden that we have as mostly-mute observers.

Sometimes, it's more of a burden than at others. The last night that we were in Vegas, we went to a dinner with a bunch of the people we'd met there over the course of making the film, and it only then became truly apparent, because they were now so comfortable with us and the camera wasn't there, that every single one of them was right-wing -- we're talking Rush Limbaugh territory. But of course we couldn't tell them what we really thought about immigration reform, or the war, or the Bridge to Nowhere. Lauren and I have joked from the beginning of this film that we'd like, someday, to go on the "re-education tour" where we can tell everybody we've met in our travels what we really think, and try to challenge a few misconceptions we've heard along the way -- like that "Sean Hennessey" is an impartial newsman, or that Giuliani was a terrific mayor, or that torture is perfectly okay if it's what we need to do to keep our country safe, or that "those kids are taught to hate us over there so why should we be rebuilding their country?"

But we know we never will, even when the film is done and people have seen it (hopefully, some day) and we've moved on to other projects. Because we have, somehow, come to like these people, and even care about them, in some cases deeply, and want them to continue to like and care about us. So we just smile and laugh and watch, amazed, as the rhetoric that we don't entirely understand, probably because it comes straight from Bill O'Reilly, flies ("I could never vote for somebody who hasn't served his country and is ashamed of half of his heritage" Huh???). I gave the woman who approves of torture a big old kiss on the cheek when she left, and it wasn't just because I'd had four glasses of wine. She'd driven all the way down from her new house in Utah to see "her girls." How can you let that kind of affection go unreturned? More importantly, why would you want to? Not to get all existential on your ass, but what's the point of it all if you do?

That may be the bigger burden of being observers. There are moments when someone you're filming is crying, or doing something really cute, like showing you a missing tooth or just smiling and gurgling on your shoes (mind you, I'm talking about individuals under the age of 4), when you really want to step out from behind the camera. Generally, you can't. You have to keep rolling, not think about how you want to participate, and instead try to enjoy watching the movie you're making play out while you concentrate on trying to make it the movie you want it to be.

But stolen between shots, or before, or after, there are moments. On our last day of shooting we went four-wheeling way up into the mountains, ostensibly to film a couple of the kids at a spot where there was a small cross they had dedicated to their brother. I nearly bit it several times on the way up, and still have the scar to prove it. None of us three New Yorquinas had ever ridden four-wheelers before, much less in challenging terrain, at high-speed, led by a daredevil 14-year-old with no fear of death. But we made it to the top and looked down from beside that cross to see an incredible spread of pink and puce desert stretching all the way to Arizona, and it was terrifying and exhilarating and wonderful and worth it, and it made us remember that we were, indeed, alive.

And the spot on my shirt -- it was from a hug. It was the hug that the mom of the seven kids (one gone) gave me when she welcomed us into her house for that weekend-long visit, the last one we might ever make there. It came from a blouse she was wearing that was studded with giant, bright red sequins, that apparently were not color-fast. It was no ordinary hug either, it was the kind of strong hug you give someone when you hold on and you mean it. That's why its left its spray of small red dots behind of which, yesterday, only one remained, and that one will be gone the next time I do laundry. But even then, it'll still have left its mark on me.

2008-09-03T11:04:00.004-04:00

How You Know It's All Going to Go Horribly Wrong – Reprise

When you're on the second day of a two-week shoot and at lunchtime you miss the crew van, and you end up in the agency van, and you overhear this conversation:

Client: I just don't get why we're doing this. I hate everything we've done today.
Agency Creative 1: Well, we're not all that happy with it either…
Client: I mean, it's supposed to be about moms being creative and all she's doing is dumping out a bowl of Cheez-Its.
Agency Creative 2: We wanted to do something with the popcorn too, but the Reddenbacher people would only let us do it if we showed the whole thing with her taking it out of the microwave and smelling the popcorn --
Client: But how did we end up with this? How did this get decided?
Agency Creative 1: Well, you were on vacation.

Agency Creative 1 does not appear for the rest of the job.

They add an extra day to reshoot day two, and you spend the next five days plus one waiting around, wondering why you're waiting around -- until you realize it's always for agency approval, on everything from how the Powerade bottles are positioned to how the bag of Ruffles is placed/dropped/tossed into the shopping cart. Which is not that different from a normal commercial, actually…except that they somehow manage to spend half an hour on it, as opposed to ten minutes.

But you learn a lot about the new iPhone applications from the camera dept. Shazzam is pretty cool. So's that thing where you get to watch the beer fill up the screen.

You start to think that if the rest of your working life is going to consist of days like this, maybe you really do need an iPhone.

2008-08-03T18:37:00.017-04:00

The View From Up There

There are a lot of odd things about my day job. Hell, what's not odd about my day job? I'm holding a pole that extends to 25 feet and trying to swing it around without whacking people in the head, or knocking pictures off the walls, or letting my hands make too much noise -- which they do when I move them, or sometimes even when I don't, because believe it or not, when you're tense, the stress rumbles out through your knuckles.

Sometimes, my job requires me to walk backwards for long distances; sometimes it requires me to run backwards for longer. Frequently it involves doing these things while not tripping over sandbags, metal dolly track, and one hefty guy who's pulling the dolly and a skinny one who's pulling focus -- and not elbowing the director in the ear (I have given many a director the elbow. Not hard and not intentionally, of course, although there are many I would like to bodyslam, if it wouldn't cost me my livelihood. But with a gentle nudge they tend to be either understanding or too distracted to notice).

Then there's making sure that the long pole and the microphone on the end don't end up in the shot, or cause a shadow or reflection, or at least a noticeable, boom-shaped shadow or reflection. Which means that in addition to the running-and- walking-backwards-without-tripping-or-elbowing skill set, I have others which are also somewhat wide-ranging and not altogether applicable in other areas of life. I have to know a certain amount about lighting, in terms of what light from what direction is causing what shadow and how to work around it, if it can be fixed, or is soft enough that maybe the DP won't see it if it doesn't move; and about lenses and camera angles -- 16 and 35, how wide they are and how they shape the frame as you move further from camera, and what can be seen when the camera looks up or down or in a mirror or window or chrome-finish toaster oven.

Which often requires that I spend a lot of my days -- the ones when I am not running backwards -- on top of a ladder. There are times when the camera is high up, and so no matter how high I hold the mic, the pole itself is still going to cut through the frame. And as many, many people like to point out to me (or suggest, in their extremely subtle ways), I'm not the tallest boom operator who ever lived (though neither am I the shortest), and so I just basically have to get taller. Sometimes, if I don't have to get real tall, I can stand on an applebox. For the uninitiated, that's a very sturdy wooden box, with holes for handles carved into the ends, that runs a standard 12" by 20" by 8". They're made to put pretty much anything on -- dolly track, wooden platforms, lights on pigeons, the director's cappuccino, teeny tiny actors, and, yes, substandard-sized boom ops. When they're flat, that's position one. When they're sideways, that's position two. I tend to go for position two -- not as stable as position one, but it can raise me a much-needed 12 inches off the ground. But sometimes, that's just not enough.

Ladders also come in standard sizes: the four-step, the six-step, and the eight-step. I try to go with the shortest one I can because, A) you never want to be reaching down -- talk about creating future problems for you and your chiropractor, and B) the higher a ladder gets, the wider it gets, and the harder it is to place it without getting in the way on the set. Which, incidentally, is a whole other skill set: staying out the way, not just of that dolly, but of electricians and grips trying to light, of actors' eyelines and extras doing crosses -- I mean, there's a lot going on. Although part of staying out of the way is knowing when to step in and claim some space. When I do it too early, it often ends with the gaffer deciding to put a light where I'm standing. Do they do it because I just happen to have chosen the exact best spot for said light? To annoy me? To prove that they can, because they're lighting and I'm sound? I'd say all of the above. But if I do it too late, then I don't have enough time to figure out where the shadows are or if I'm actually in a spot where I can see and reach all the actors whose lines I need to cover, get a frameline from the DP, and just generally let everyone know that I exist, so they won't be surprised when we roll camera and the boom suddenly appears on the edge of the frame. Which can freak out, say, your inexperienced young music video DPs no end.

But so I like to start by seeing if a four-step will suffice, then work my way up. Most often, I'd say I end up with the trusty six-step. It’s not too wide at the base, and it will get me over pretty much as wide a frame as the director can dream up in an interior (exteriors -- that's a whole other ball of wax, and if you're getting that wide on a New York City street, you might as well just throw in the towel and go straight to wireless). In general, the only time I resort to an eight-step is when I have to reach over a wall of a constructed set -- which, like I said, is a killer on your back, not to mention that it's really hard to figure out who's talking and how close you are to them when all you can see are the tops of people's heads, so I try to avoid that as much as possible.

But when it's the right height, there are a number of things I like about working from the top of a ladder. For one thing, I can let the boom lean against it and perch on it fairly comfortably. I know this sounds minor, but when you're standing for most of 16 hours on asphalt or concrete, large portions of that supporting the long pole, the value of being able to take a load off for a couple of minutes in between shots in your own private spot that nobody else can steal is not to be underestimated (although they do try. No sooner do I walk away from a ladder I've planted on the set than it disappears because some neat-freaky grip clears it away, or the second AC puts the slate on it, or the second AD puts his clipboard on it...you get it, I'm possessive about my shit). Plus, it gets you noticed. It's like, "Hey everyone, look at me! My job's pretty tough, eh?" 'Cause sometimes they do forget. But on the days I'm on a ladder, I get a lot more people coming up to me and asking me,

"Don't your arms get tired?"

"Isn't that thing heavy?"

or simply, "How do you do that?"

Or they'll come over to make jokes:

"Hey, how's the view from up there?"

or, covering their eye, "Aaah! Ow! Ow!"

Yeah, that's funny.

And then there are the classic singing jokes,

"I'm being followed by a boom shadow, Boom shadow, boom shadow."
(sung to Cat Stevens)

"Boom operator…Boom…operator…"
(sung to Sade)

Or, since I'm suddenly some sort of focus point, they just want to make my acquaintance -- and then I'm even more the focus point. It's a little weird how easy it is to become a celebrity if you're suddenly up on display on a six-foot pedestal in a room of 100 extras. Although if each and every one suddenly feels the need to talk to you, this can get a bit tedious. But in general, it's a major sock to my ego.

And then, yes, it does make me tall. Not that I mind being not so tall so much, but…maybe I mind it a little. It's just that when you're a female in a sea of masculinity, you always get underestimated -- and if you're a short female, it's that much worse. It's not that I feel any need to butch up, not that I really could if I tried. But I like being eye-to-eye with people, or better yet, with some of them, looking down. Namely the agency, the clients, the executive producer who shows up for an hour of handshaking in his Porsche and his leather jacket -- those who normally spend their days looking over my head. I don't know if you've noticed this, tall people (although I think you have judging by the way you like to come over and stand right next to me and stare down. You know who you are), but there's something about that vantage point that gives you power. Power that is generally not my purview.

But it also gives you perspective. You get to see the whole scene play out -- and I'm not just talking about the scripted one. You see the first AD go through his little man histrionics; you see the agency producer scuttle back and forth, ant-like, between the client and the set; you see the big egos reduced to bald spots and dark roots. And you can take that step back, or up, and really grasp your part in the big machine that grinds out product at 24 frames per second. It all looks just a tiny bit smaller and sillier from up there, and it helps you remember that it's just a job, just a day that will eventually end, just a lot of money for a little bit of celluloid that will hopefully make somebody buy aftershave.

And one more thing about being up there, if you slip or lean too far, you could fall on your head. And I guess that's the last key aspect of my day job, and also my non-day-job, perhaps the choices I've made in general: the element of risk. There are stakes, and they can range from making a fool out of myself, which happens almost daily, to never having my own house and two-point-five kids, or even a car that doesn't have the engine light perpetually on -- which are not unlikely outcomes at this point in time -- and still ending up with a career in which I don't finish a single film that 100 people outside of my family and friends will ever see. Or, I could get paid to make films I care about for the rest of my life. Which would be pretty great. But even if it doesn't happen, there's something about the risk, about standing on that ladder, and the way your heart beats a little faster when you reach out over the edge.

2008-07-09T22:35:00.003-04:00

Thanks…

To those of you who have dropped me a line or made a snarky comment (okay, those were all people I know) along the lines of Where the hell are you??? Things have been very busy with the doc lately and so all of my time in front of the computer has been spent either writing grant applications or e-mailing with my partners or editing. And I've also had some work, some of which will hopefully make for interesting blog-fodder.

But I have not left the building. So thanks for paying attention, if you still are. Here goes…

Uh, how do I do this again?

2008-07-09T21:03:00.006-04:00

Life Behind the Fourth Wall

It's hard to explain. You arrive at a housewarming party, or a 3-year-old's birthday party, or a dance recital, and everyone is glad to see you. You chat with people, eat red hot dogs maybe (if you're in Maine) or an unidentifiable "hot dish" (if you're in Minnesota), make the usual small-talk, joke around, catch up on what's going on -- but then you catch yourself. You stop and say, "Wait! Hold that thought."

And just like that, you go get out your camera, and all of a sudden, everything's different. And you and everyone else there knows that no matter how much they like you and feel like you've become their friend, you're really in their lives to make a movie.

Yeah, it's a little weird, what we're doing. This is the second documentary that I've directed and I don't know if you ever get used to it. I don't know if it's something you can or should get used to: moving back and forth between being a normal person and being an observer behind the quote unquote fourth wall of every intimate detail you can possibly get to pass through the lens, and the more intimate the better.

With the film I'm currently co-directing, this can be especially weird, because a lot of the conversations we get into have to do with serious subjects. We'll be having a casual house tour with a woman we've known for an hour or two and all of a sudden we're hearing stories about how three of her children died. We're having a friendly interview with a very tall, apple-cheeked lady in front of a cheerful, autumnal diorama complete with wooden scarecrows and pumpkin hummels, and then one question later, our subject is in tears telling us how the hospital she was working in as a nurse in Vietnam was bombed and she was one of only two people who survived. In fact, a lot of our interviews end up with people in tears -- including us. Sometimes I'm trying to keep my mascara from running all over my notes and then I hear Lauren sniffling behind me and I know she's trying not to get snot on the camera.

Of course, we provoke the tears, though not on purpose. But we ask. And then we ask some more. And the funny thing is, most people tell, and seem to want to. We always say up front that nobody has to answer any questions that they'd prefer not to, or they can decide what they want and don't want to talk about on film. We had one subject, even while we were unearthing a story about her marriage and the raising of her daughter, somehow manage, through avoidance of the words "husband," "ex-husband," and very careful verb tense choices, to completely talk around the issue of her divorce. That took some skill, and she was more media savvy than many. Even when people aren't, very often the best moments come when we're not filming because the camera transforms everything. But then there are the people who talk much more, knowing that the world is, potentially, listening. Or simply because somebody asked, and that somebody happened to be us.

A lot of the time, you and they end up in places neither of you ever expected. With Chris, one of the subjects in my first film, we started out talking about personal grooming habits, went on to looking at photos of his friends, and family, and half-naked ladyfriends, moved from there to him modeling his extensive collection of hats and sunglasses, and eventually, after four hours of tape had been rolled, ended up in a discussion of how he was in recovery from addiction to crack. That was surprise information that both bonded and separated us. Because it was out there, and I knew about it, and he knew that I knew about it, and it was now part of the film, it could never be taken back or taken out of our relationship with each other -- a relationship which hadn't really existed four hours previously. But would he have told me without the camera there? Or at least, would we have spent the four hours together of non-stop show-and-tell that created the intimacy that allowed him to tell me about it? And even if he had, without the camera between us, would I have dared to probe into the details? My thinking is no.

There was also the case I've already written about with J, who started out as a friend of a friend, but became in some ways more intimate with me than with many of her friends, because she told me things that she would never have occasion to tell anyone, or reveal, even, maybe, to herself. I knew not just about her tough break-ups and how she came out to her mother, but her dreams; how she thought about who she was and who she wanted to be -- the kind of thoughts that a lot of us don't think to formulate until we're asked about them. And then, like J, we surprise themselves with what we were thinking and and feeling.

Or with how much we're willing to reveal. Vanessa really wanted to tell everything, or so I thought. I hardly needed to ask her a question and she was off and running. She really could have been the star of her own reality show because she was constantly changing her job and where she lived and her appearance in the interest of reincarnating herself. And she wanted to talk about it, because talking to me was, in some ways, making her transformations real. But then came that day when we were talking about what I'd shot when she suddenly said, "Well, you're not going to use that, are you? That's private." I'd kind of thought that the fact that she'd said it on camera meant that it wasn't, and I'd come to believe that she wanted to say pretty much everything on camera. But then I realized that it's pretty easy for people to lose track of where they're heading when they start to open up. Which, on the one hand, is what you want most as a documentarian when you're talking to your subjects, because you want them not to censor themselves. But you don't want to feel bad because you took them too far -- even if you went there with them. After talking with Vanessa, we came to an agreement about what was for public consumption and what wasn't. I kept in the conversations about her family and cut the photos of her with her ex-boyfriend and the story of how a former boss had try to extort her for sex -- which, even though it was fascinating, didn't really belong in the film anyway.

That's one of the hardest parts: navigating that territory which is not only about ethics but who you are as a filmmaker. You need to build these relationships, because if you're not the friend or the confidant, you won't get what you need to make the film. You have a lot of power and, yes, a lot of responsibility. You don't want to hold back because you feel guilty. But on the other hand, you don't want to exploit the trust that people place in you by ending up with an image of them that they would loathe -- or even really, really dislike -- particularly one that is forever committed to celluloid, tape, or zeros and ones. So you just try to make it true. Whatever the hell that means, because if there's one thing you learn in the editing room it's that, man, there are a lot of versions of the truth. So you've got to man up (so to speak) and admit that from the start, remember that that person is a whole person, and accept that your mission, if you choose to accept it (and if you've shot it you've already accepted it, baby) is to do justice to them while also doing justice to the story you're trying to tell. Which goes right to the heart of your personal integrity, and how you do right by others, and your responsibility to the human race, and why you're in this fucking business in the first place, yadda yadda yadda.

But there's another hard part, which is about how you relate to people and, in particular, what connecting with them means to you. Because the time will come when you'll stop filming and you'll have to figure out where to go with all of this connecting. With Chris, even when I was still trying to finish up with him, it was harder and harder to get him to return my calls, and then, once we were done, I never heard from him again. I wanted to know if he was still all right, that he was still holding down his two jobs and trying to finish his masters -- a routine that had him going without sleep two nights a week. And I wanted him to see the film, to see how people responded to him, how much they enjoyed hearing what he had to say and admired what he was doing. But I think opening up in the first place had been hard, and now having someone around who knew too much too soon was, well, too much. And who was I to try to tell him otherwise? What was my role now? Who the hell was I, anyway?

With J it was similar at first, and then things suddenly switched when she was diagnosed with leukemia. Now I was the one who wasn't sure I could handle being so invested. For her, things were a lot clearer. I think that happens when realize your life is finite. But then she helped me realize that once I was in, it didn't matter so much how I'd gotten there, or where the lines were drawn, as long as I wasn't afraid to be there when it mattered. And as hard as it was, I did my best to do that.

With Vanessa, she was the one who didn't want to let go. After five years, I had become not only the person who would always take an interest in her life and listen, rapt, wanting to hear what came next, but I think talking to me had become her way of sorting out things for herself. To this day, she'll continue to call me up, out of the blue, often when something's happened -- she's gotten a new job, or she's in a new relationship, or she's dyed her hair blond. And the funny thing is, as busy as I am, and as unsure as I am about what this is now -- is it a friendship? Am I free therapy? -- I call her back. And we get together for lunch or coffee and she tells me everything, and I admit it: I want to know. Partly it's that we've got a routine. Partly it's that I do care about what happens to her. And partly it's just that I can't stop following her story and I want to know where it's all going to end. Because even when I pack up and go home, their lives go on. But I guess once I'm in, I'm in.

But that's okay. I like being hooked. If someone lets down their guard for me, I tend to return the favor. And I think that's a good thing. It's at times like this -- or when you're utterly slain by a spectacular view, or when your nephew holds your hand, or by that incredible spark that comes off a certain person when the two of you collide -- that you've just gotta think, Damn it's good to be a human being. No matter which side of the camera you're on.

2008-04-17T17:35:00.008-04:00

I Luv Free Stuff

The other day, I was at work, and as usual at the end of a workday, there was leftover food at craft service. When this happens, if it's food that will go bad and can't be reused, they generally leave it out for us to take home like the pathetic little scavengers some of us are. This time it was a bag of green apples and navel oranges. I was getting ready to leave on another shooting trip for the doc, and had pretty much cleaned out my fridge, but I also knew that when you're on the road, you need snacks. So I took three apples and two oranges -- which added about four pounds to a backpack that already contained a laptop, an iPod, a hard drive, four New Yorkers and several power supplies. Trying to lift that thing on to my back nearly pulled my arm out of its socket half a dozen times on our way from New York to Minnesota. But we had snacks. And they were free.

Fact is, if it's free, I want it. I mean I won't take absolutely anything, but pretty darn close. From craft service, aside from the occasional fruit windfall, I've taken home loaves of Italian bread from Eli's, slabs of luncheon meat, pocketsfull of mini chocolate bars and who knows how many packs of Dentyne Ice. And that's when I'm not hungry at the end of the day. When I know certain caterers are going to be on set, I'll bring Tupperware for leftovers.

And it's not just about things that are edible. I one cursory glance around my apartment, I can spot a decent-sized number of my overall possessions that came home with me from film shoots: the set of orange-and-yellow-striped glasses, the fake leopard-fur slippers, the two little plaster cherub heads I use as doorstops, the Best of New York Issue of New York Magazine, and of course a rotating roster of plastic bottles that I refill so they can live in my bag. I also have a somewhat lethal combination of absent-mindedness and a teeny tiny bit of kleptomania, which means that I have a host of other people's mini-screwdrivers, batteries and foot foam, and God knows I don't remember the last time I bought a pen.

But it's not just the film shoot stuff. Probably a good 50% of what I own I've somehow inherited, either from family (my car, my grandmother's tarnished silver, three hammers -- yeah, exactly, why do I even have three hammers? Because they were free!) exes who left them behind (a futon, half a stereo system, the large stripey plates, the Italian bowl, the Turkish pillow-cover) or friends/roommates who were moving to France or California or Macon, Georgia (2 bookcases, the coffeetable, a large tabletop which is now my desk, one current and many plants that now rest in peace, seven assorted wine glasses, six martini glasses I really don't need but they go with the two martini shakers I've gotten as gifts) or just got married and didn't need any of their old dish- or cookware (um, pretty much all the rest of the dish- and cookware). Then there's the 10-15% found on the street: the nightstand, loads of books, some read, some never to be read, the plaster bust of Elvis, and, formerly, a lamp whose base was a horse. And the 5% that were gifts, which includes many ill-fitting polyester sweaters and small yet tacky purses in colors that can be worn with nothing, much odd artwork of distant/unknown origin, and a number of just plain oddities like little rubber she-monsters and a toothbrush holder that contains plastic ladybugs floating in unidentifiable but no-doubt toxic green liquid.

Yes, it's true, and no, none of it matches. My place pretty much looks like a flea market sprang up one Saturday in my living room and nothing ever got sold -- and the fact that the stuff I have actually paid for comes from flea markets doesn't do much to improve the effect.

I suppose this behavior, as a general tendency, started with my childhood. After my family moved to the suburbs when I was seven, my family lived in a nice house with two cats, three television sets, and every Intellivision game ever made. But both of my parents did grow up without money, and didn't have much when they started their family, and so we always had a couple of Holiday Inn towels in our linen closet that I think they've only recently parted with. My dad also likes to buy massive amounts of odd tchatchkes and gadgets -- the kind of stuff that one might think fell off the back of a truck if you didn't know about his penchant for random binge shopping -- and then gives it to me and my brother. Oinking rubber pig keychain with a light-up snout? Check. Mugs displaying a Bill of Rights that disappears when it is filled with hot liquid? You know it.

Then there was film school. For my thesis film, I had a great production designer who could create full-blown sets for twelve dollars and change. When I asked her to make me an entirely white room, she did wonders with gauzy shears, a variety of linen and white satin tablecloths, two cracked white mugs, a huge set of white sunglasses, even a couch from the Salvation Army that she covered in white fabric. And all of it ended up in my apartment. The couch not for a while -- it sat in the living room of the two frat boys from my film school class who'd let anyone shoot there (provided they agreed to crew on their films) until I could arrange for a van to go and pick it up at the end of some shooting day -- so by the time I got it back, it had suffered a certain amount of ignominy and beer spillage and had generally become sort of an off-ecru. But considering the fabric had been attached using a staple gun and hot glue, the whiteness was pre-destined to be temporary anyway. But up until two years ago, I still had that couch. And I only got rid of it because I was moving into an apartment where the residents were leaving me behind a couch that was in marginally better shape. Marginally. Oh, and the rest of the set dressing? Still in residence, stirred in with the other detritus.

One part of the pathology happening here is that I hate throwing anything away. Something has to be irrevocably broken in a way that makes it either unusable for any purpose whatsoever or dangerous for me to get rid of it. If it's simply chipped, or leaky, or in need of minor repair, or unreadable, or just plain ugly, it can still be used to hold a plant, or pencils, or prop up the air-conditioner, or simply sit on the top shelf of the closet where it can be forgotten until I have to move again. I'm too classy to regift but clearly not to hold on to something that has no obvious purpose until the end of time, often placing it on full display between the family photos and the television set. Shit, I admit it: I'm sentimental. And compulsive about recycling to perhaps an unhealthy degree.

But let's face it: a large part of this is that I have hardly progressed, financially, since my first years out of film school. I might be nearly 40, but my bankbook is still living in a more innocent time, when everyone's furniture was milk crates and rug remnants and bookcases made out of planks and bricks, when I didn't eat out except at Dojo's or Cozy Soup and Burger, when I only went out to bars knowing I wasn't going to have to cover my own drinks (as a girl on a film and tv set, that's not too hard to swing). Back when I used to do features, this was somehow glamorous. I was living on a shoestring but I was living the dream, surrounded by the flotsam of independent filmmaking -- Anne Heche's frilly shirt in my wardrobe, or leftover blue gel taped around a bulb to create a lampshade. Now, it's just sad.

There was actually a short period of time when I transcended this state. Back in the 90s (yeah, remember the 90s?), right after I joined the union, I started getting calls from this sound mixer, George. One of the first things George asked me was if I had my own boom pole.

"No," I said, "the mixer always brings the boom pole I use."
"You know, a lot of boom operators have their own boom poles in the union," said George.
"Really?" I was such a newbie.
"Yep. They just feel more comfortable with their own pole. Plus, it helps them get jobs. For instance, if you got a boom pole, I would definitely be able to hire you for these commercial jobs I'm getting."

So I bought a boom pole, the cheapest decent one I could get, for about $600, which, needless to say, was a heck of a lot of money for me at the time.

Turned out that on point one, George was full of shit: most boom ops don't have their own boom poles. The truth, which became apparent after a day of working with him and his magically disintegrating sound package, was that he just didn't want to have to buy a new one to replace his own, which was heavy, dented and scratched, and no longer locked in place. But on point two, he made good: he started hiring me and my new boom pole for lots and lots of union commercials. And I started making lots and lots of money. More money than I knew what to do with. And I realized that I didn't have to be on the miniscule budget I'd been living on for as long as I'd been out of my parents' house, that I had that most wondrous of things, DISPOSABLE INCOME. So naturally, I started buying stuff -- things I'd needed but hadn't been able to get, like new jeans and underwear and real raingear; things I'd long coveted, like new CDs, and lipstick, and dry cleaning; and things that I saw and desired and just bought, like a new suede jacket, and some cool pants with sequins down the sides, and a new -- actually new -- lamp with a stained glass shade. Suddenly, I could afford it all. And just as suddenly, I found myself with a $4000 credit card bill. Which I was able to pay off, and then even open an IRA. But it didn't last, and soon I was back to being downwardly mobile, even if I do still have the IRA -- although I soon after went on to invest a large chunk of it in high-tech mutual funds. Oops.

I guess at this point I'm kind of sick of life in the free lane. It's all well and good to be a starving artist, toiling in obscurity. But it really sucks to be an obscure starving artist in the film business, which most people don't even believe results in art, and in which everyone expects you to hit it big and cash in and get famous at some point, fifteen years or so probably being that point, and then some. Plus, where's the art? What have I got to show for those fifteen years? A couple of videotapes that I keep in my closet because I'm too embarrassed to show them and, besides, the formats are outdated (U-Matic, anyone?), or in the overly-fat file of un-produced screenplays, or in a couple of obscure places on the web that someone occasionally trips across. Oh and yeah, this site, where you fine dozen or so people come to read how I rant, on occasion. Which is, in addition, to being unpaid, anonymous. So much for fortune or fame.

I do like to rant, and do like writing the screenplays even if they'll never grow up to be movies and I think the doc will be really good. But when you're residing in the residue of your past, never seeming to move on or move up, sometimes you have to wonder: should I have gone to law school? If I was eventually going to have to sell my soul, or at least sell out on my dreams, should I have done it at an early enough age and in a dependable enough business that it would have at least been a sure thing? And at this point, am I fighting the good fight, or am I just living the lifestyle?

2008-03-16T15:33:00.012-04:00

How You Know It's All Going To Go Horribly Wrong

When I show up for a job, very often I go in with a minimum of information about it. Particularly if I'm booming and I'm only going to be on whatever it is for a couple of days. The unspoken rule for crew is don't ask too many questions because everyone is far too busy to bother with you, and when I'm booming I do pretty much just have to come as I am. Plus, I generally just don't want to know. My work ethic is simply, "I work for money, you pay me enough, I show up."

But there are a few details that can clue you in, either during the initial meetings about a production, or on the first day, to the fact that you are in for a bumpy ride. Here are some of them.

1) "This is such a great project!"
Hearing this from someone who is trying to hire you for a movie is generally an indication that
a) You will not get paid or
b) You will get paid very little and, in fact,
c) Probably nobody is getting paid, because
d) There is no money in the budget for just about anything.
This generally can lead to conclusion
e) The job is going to most likely have inexperienced crew, bad/tiny locations, not enough equipment, bad catering, long days because they're trying to cram an insane amount into them and don't have to pay overtime…so in other words, it ain't going to be pretty.

2) "This production is going to be run like a military campaign!"
Back when I was still mixing features, an AD/Producer once began a job interview with me with this line. If the script featuring the dominatrix and screen direction like "THREE LARGE-BREASTED WOMEN enter the room" and the fact that the film was being financed by the Guccione Brothers hadn't been enough to drive me away, this would have. Because only ADs with absolutely no clue think that indie film crews getting paid next-to-nothing have army discipline, or like to take orders, so any intention he had of whipping us into shape was going to backfire royally -- and if that was his overriding idea of what was going to make the movie happen, that was even worse.

3) The script is a rainbow of differently-colored pages.
When you get a production script with a cornucopia of colors, and with lots of scenes that say, "OMITTED," this means that the script has been rewritten many, many times. And very likely will continue to be rewritten as time goes on. Perhaps you will even be getting pages the day you are supposed to shoot them. Needless to say, this means everyone is always going to be extremely prepared.

4) The production calls you in the days leading up to the job with really stupid questions.
These people don't know what they're doing.

5) Several different people from the production call you with the same stupid questions.
These people don't know what they're doing, and they don't talk to each other.

6) The day before the shoot they order all sorts of new equipment.
This means that only at this late date did they decide exactly how they're going to do the job -- like either they decided to shoot with two cameras, or decided to use playback -- all of which has huge ramifications that will now confuse everyone.

7) There is not enough parking.
This can indicate all sorts of people not doing their jobs. And even if not, it's just a royal pain in the ass.

8) The location is a 5th-floor walk-up.

9) The location is a functioning nightclub/bar/restaurant or is across the street from a firehouse/construction site/functioning nightclub.
Two words: sound nightmare.

10) The location is Gary's Loft.
Gary is a nice guy, and his loft is very pretty. But it has only one, fairly slow freight elevator that you have to go up a flight of half a dozen stairs to get to, the floors are creaky, there are inevitably people walking around on the floor above you, the windows are thin, and it's in a post-industrial zone where there's all sorts of post-industrial noise to be had coming in through them.

11) You arrive on set to find that everyone is either really old or really young.
Now, I don't like to be ageist. But the truth is, when you show up on a set and only the crustiest of grips and electrics are there, you know that they scraped these guys up off the bottom of the barrel. On the flip side, if everyone looks like they're 12 and they all just got their union cards, then you're really fucked. Not just because you have to work with all of these jokers, but there's something wrong with a production when these are the best people they were able to hire.

Mind you, it means something entirely different when people on the production side are young. I tend to meet a lot of baby-faced agency and directors these days, so that doesn't necessarily predict a bad day, just a lot of immature jokes, and a high level of arrogant hipsterdom.

12) You arrive on set to find you don't recognize anyone on the crew.
Not that I know everybody, but if you've been working in the business as long as I have and you show up on set and only recognize the person who hired you (sometimes not even them!), you have to wonder what kind of circle (of hell?) you've entered. Though, um, if we've never worked together, no offense…

13) You arrive on set and recognize one particular person who spells DOOM.
There are a few directors who you know will make your day difficult -- or at least interesting. They are screamers (Giraldi, Pitka), or incommunicative idiosyncratic celebrity wackos (Tony Kaye). There are also a few DPs/Gaffers/Key Grips who can do the same, either because they're lousy at their jobs, or because they hate you, often simply by virtue of the fact that you are sound. Then there are the actors who are notorious for spelling trouble -- either because of their drug habits, their attitudes, or just the level of stress that travels with them like a cloud of tear gas. Or they can be cute and charming but incredibly high maintenance, which drives the crew mad -- like whenever it was a Kristen Davis day on Sex & the City, the sotto voce groans of grips could be heard echoing throughout set. And rock stars -- you know you're in for a ride. Of course, the difficulty level of talent can vary widely depending on where they are in their career. People on the way up are usually the most gracious, then when they get that first mainline shot of fame, they often become impossible for however long it takes them to either adjust to the situation or slide from the pinnacle -- although sometimes people on the way down are the most evil of all.

Then there are one or two people who, when you see them on set, you know you're in trouble because the jobs they work on are always bad, and any production that hired them must somehow be in trouble. Of course, this goes both ways, because then you have to wonder, "Why am I on the job? What if I'm that person?!"

Of course, sometimes you can also be lulled into a false sense of security by seeing all the right people on a job -- and then it still ends up being a total nightmare. Sometimes bad jobs just happen to good people.

14) The sound guy is soldering something when you arrive.
You can usually tell from the look of the equipment how much abuse it's taken, and how well it's going to work, and how hard or easy that's going to make your day as a boom. But early-morning repair work is generally a bad sign. So is when you arrive to find him or her frantically going through cases, looking for something.

15) The camera crew is standing around.
This can mean one of several things:
a) The camera hasn't arrived.
b) The camera arrived and had to be sent back.
c) The camera arrives but isn't working -- in which case the poor First and Second AC are not standing around, but are trying desperately to fix it.
Bottom line: you, too, will soon be standing around.

16) Everyone is standing around and nobody seems to know why.
This tends to mean the AD is awol, or is trying to make time with the agency producer, or simply has no clue –- which is always a sign that things are going to go to hell real fast.

17) The director is a still photographer.
This means that he (or she -- if she's Annie Leibovitz) thinks that he knows everything, but really knows nothing. Bad combination.

18) The still photographer-director is also the DP.
This triple hyphenate means that this person is taking on two jobs at one time which he (I'm just going to say "he" since they are nearly all "hes") really does not have down -- but they're going to try to cover that with swank threads, loud music, and attitude to spare.

19) When any director is the DP.
This means that either the director has decided he is such a control freak that he must be his own cameraperson, or that the DP has moved up to directing but can't let go of the camera. Neither one is good for you. These are both big jobs and neither one should be half-assed. Plus, on these jobs the flow of information is even more of a disaster; because since the DP and director are communicating intercranially, they just forget to talk to anyone else.

20) Y-Cats is the catering/craft service company.
Eeew. Not very often do you see everything on the table scattered with M & Ms or Gummi Bears, on purpose.

21) The First AD has his own mic and speaker system/There is a bus-load of 200 extras between you and your breakfast burrito.
Choreographing large groups of people always makes for a fun day.

22) "We just wrote this this morning" or "We just added a couple of shots."
This actually gets said all the time on commercials, and it never bodes well.

23) Nobody knows the timecode frame rate.
This actually happens more and more often in the age of HD. There's still enough shooting on film that most people haven't switched their mindsets and technical knowledge fully over to video, least of all people in production, so very often they haven't thought to ask the editor how things are going to be done -- or haven't hired one yet. Not only will this lead to confusion on set (and indicates confusion on other fronts), but inevitably, something gets decided, and then, also inevitably, no matter what the decision was, the transfer people or editor will call and blame the sound person when it's wrong.

24) There are babies.
I love kids, but I especially love not working with them -- especially not when they're under two. They just don't tend to deliver on cue. And generally toddlers and younger come on jobs in twos and threes, so that there can be back-up babies around if one goes into meltdown, and those babies will be doing their own burping and crying off set during the take as well.

25) Second meal is already on the schedule.

2008-02-09T19:03:00.000-05:00

Vegas, Baby, Vegas

When you think about going to Las Vegas, you think about roulette, about partying with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr, about going to overpriced shows where men in tight, shiny costumes tame lions or dance behind Celine Dion. What you probably don't think about is running around, tethered to a camera, trying to cram three interviews and a parade into a day's work.

Well, that's how I spent my week in Vegas, working on The Doc That Shall Not Be Named. This time, there were three of us, since our producing partner, Jen, decided to come along. Little did she know what she was in for when she told us, "I'm bringing along two nice outfits, and you two should let me know if you want me to get tickets to any shows!" I didn't have the heart to tell her about how we generally work: land, drive, roll camera, repeat ad infinitum until the plane takes off -- perhaps occasionally stopping to eat and sleep, time permitting. Needless to say, the only casino we saw the inside of was the one that let us interview one of their employees in its restaurant. Our view of the Strip? B-roll, shot from the passenger side of our rented gold SUV some time after midnight on our last night there.

Now I knew when I wrote the words "gold SUV" that it would become as apparent to you as it did to us: Dorothy was not in Kansas -- or Minnesota, North Dakota, Colorado, or anywhere else that she could at this point relate to -- any more. If the slot machines at the Vegas airport don't make you aware that you've landed somewhere quite unlike any place else, then the fact that SUVs are really the only mid-size cars they have on offer, most of them gold, starts to clue you in. But why fight it? Especially because the lady who rented us our car was so nice. Mind you I'm not talking Minnesota Nice here, or any of the other nices we discovered in Ohio, Maine, or even Connecticut. We're talking a completely different species of nice.

"It'll cost you 25 bucks a day for the extra driver," she told us, somehow tapping away at the computer despite her three-inch fingernails.
"Wow." Jen and I looked at each other. This film is on a budget where every $25 counts. A lot. "Maybe we don't all need to drive."
The lady stopped tapping momentarily. "Well, is the renter always going to be in the car?"
"Yeah," said Jen. "Pretty much."
"Well then, say you got pulled over and she was drivin'," the lady continued, pointing at me with one of her talons, no less frightening for being decorated in bright and swirly patterns. "You could just say you got sick and she had to take over. Now, I'm not sayin' you should do that." She looked each of us in the eye before turning her gaze back to the computer screen. "In fact, I didn't say anythin'. I'm just sayin'. That's what some people do."
"We'll add the extra driver," said Jen. Jen's a straight arrow, which is good, because who knows what I would have done given my dubious moral code and general predisposition to both want to be cheap-ass and stick it to The Man. "But thank you," she continued. "We appreciate it."
"Hey, just trying to help out. Used to be you didn't have to pay for the extra driver at all, now they got these new rules. Just don't seem right." She went back to tapping. "Where y'all from?"

This was our first brush with what I would describe as a surprisingly potent Wild West spirit. Aka, "Them rules just don't seem right." Yes, Nevada, or at least the Vegas part of it, is the land where not being about to gamble, or smoke anywhere but a restaurant (another new rule), or drink out of an open container pretty much every place but your car, or do anything else in your own car, or anybody's, is considered a violation of your constitutional right to do whatever the hell you want.

This became more evident when we were on our way to film our first air show. We were already a bit paranoid about going on an Air Force base given the extensive background checks we'd had to go through, all of us wondering what skeletons from our dubious filmmaking or liberal hellraising pasts would leap out to "Boo!" us into trouble. Lauren, for instance, knows that when you Google her, one of the top listings is for a film she worked on called Terrorist!

Then, someone told us, "You know when you're on the base, you can't talk on your phone."
"Oh, wow." As freelancers, we are all extremely cell phone-driven -- not to mention that at that point half of Vegas had my cell phone number (because we were interviewing them, okay? Get your minds out of the gutter).
"Is that considered some kind of security breach?
"No, no, I mean don't talk on the phone while you're driving there. If they catch you they'll give you a ticket."
"Oh. Right."

In other words, things that are normally off-limits to those of us from uptight, law-beridden NYC are strangely up-for-grabs in Vegas.

Once we realized this, and that perhaps it was everywhere other than the base that we ought to be worried about, we had fun at the air show. It's sort of strange, when you think about it, that hundreds of thousands of people gather in one place to watch planes designed to shoot other planes out of the sky perform tricks for their amusement (and reduce their hearing by 5%), but if you're forced to go to one, it's actually pretty entertaining. Although getting a tight shot of a fast-moving Thunderbird swooping by in formation can be kind of a challenge.

"They're coming in!" Jen would shout.
"Where?" Lauren would shout.
"At eleven o'clock!" Jen would shout back.
"Where?" Lauren would shout.
"Huh?" This was my contribution, since I'd turned the gain all the way down on the mixer in an attempt to record half-way usable sound of fighter jet effluvia, as well as equally-deafening loudspeaker announcements, along the lines of, "AND NONE OF THIS WOULD BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE THUNDERBIRD GROUND CREW! LET'S GIVE 'EM A HAND!" (And, yes, applause is another sure way to make the mixer over-modulate.)

But one could say this epitomized our Vegas experience: everything roaring by so fast it was hard to keep up. Particularly with the interesting people we were meeting, who were, again, very un-Northeastern/Midwestern/pretty much anything else-ern but Vegas. To grossly generalize, where Minnesota is the land of the wholesome and the corn-fed, Vegas is a town of, how shall I put it…delinquents. We heard again and again how kids got into trouble with drinking and drugs -- and ended up in the military as a way of getting out of it. That's the odd combination that is Vegas: a town full of people who work in casinos and whose kids join the military. As you'd imagine, it attracts an interesting mix, from teenaged beauty queens to Danish pastry chefs, from former New Yorkers born of cops and firemen to Army brats who'd lived all over the world. We were shocked -- but not that shocked, since at that point we pretty much thought we'd heard it all -- to learn that one sweet old grandmother had been married at 13.

"My second husband was a truck driver," she told us, "so I started driving truck to be with him. Then after we split up, I was driving truck to pay the bills. And when my grandson was a kid, his parents were off working the carnival, so I took him on the road with me."

And what did that grandson grow up to be? A Marine.

Perhaps because we spent much less time eating and sleeping, and also spent most of our time in and around one city, we met many fewer interesting waitresses or bartenders, and we only had one set of desk clerks, at the Downtown Vegas Super-8. Of course, we stayed there out of necessity, but let me just say that Downtown Vegas has a much more fascinatingly decrepit ambiance than the Strip. Along with the abundance of neon and older casinos like the Four Queens and the El Cortez, which attract a more crusty, blue-haired and serious gambler crowd, there is an overall seediness, highlighted by pawn shops and quickie wedding chapels, which has it’s own, particular, down-and-dirty appeal.

"Yeah, this is pretty much the edge of where you'd want to go after dark," one desk clerk told us. "Keep going down that way and things get a bit sketchy."
"Really?" We were often privy to drunken shouting in the middle of the night, but this had always seemed to be coming from the Super-8.
"Oh yeah. Prostitutes, muggings, you know. Best not to walk in that direction."

We actually spent a lot of time in similar chats because the motel office/lobby/dining room was the only place we could actually get the free wi-fi (another reason WE LUV U SUPER-8!). So around ten or eleven every night, the three of us would exhaustedly troop across the parking lot and plunk ourselves down in the pleather sofas in front of a television that always seemed to be showing football. Leading to the typical late-night conversation we always wanted to avoid:

"Oh, a documentary, huh? What's it about?"

But for the most part, we liked the pasty white guys who worked the desk. Until one morning when I hurtled in to grab my "free continental breakfast," which we had about five minutes to choke down before running off to shoot. On my way I passed a group of little kids, heading back to their room, bearing paper plates piled high with sticky pastries. When I arrived in the office, there was one lonely-looking glazed donut left on the sneeze-guarded fake silver tray.

"Have you got any more food?" I asked.
"Oh yeah, I was just waiting until they left." He glared after the kids. "Those Mexican kids, they'll eat everything if you let them."

Somehow I don't think he'd have made the same comment about three raggedy and unshowered white girls, no matter how many cups of horrible coffee and lemon poppy mini-muffins we took. And we often took quite a few. They were small.

(And he wasn't the only person we met to make such derogatory comments. If you want to see where Tom Tancredo gets his support, look no further than the Wild West. I know that many of you have made comments pointing out how I tend to highlight the quaint and the avoid ugliness that is also America in these documentary travel blogs, but that's only because I'm trying to escape my own Blue State mentality. Believe me, that, too, is a big part of what we see when we leave New York -- although make no mistake: you can find good ol' xenophobia right here in NYC too.)

Luckily, though, things didn't end on that negative note. I can't tell you a lot more about our trip, which included much strangeness, laughter, tears, and an opportunity for all three of us to try on body armor. But I can tell you that it ended with a bang and not a whimper. After our whiplash-inducing visit to the Strip, we shot some nighttime b-roll of Downtown and then went home and packed and finished the last of the bottle of really awful Elvis wine that Lauren had bought in some cheesy souvenir shop. Then, before we knew it, it was 2:30 am, and you know what time that is in Vegas? Time to blow something up! Well, maybe not every night, but our last night there was the night they decided to implode the Frontier Casino. The Frontier was the place where, apparently, Elvis did his first show; a casino I'd never been to and would now never see up close, or closer than from a block away, where the crowd had assembled to watch the event. First, of course, there were 20 minutes of fireworks. Then, finally, they hit the button and this massive, once-glittering edifice melted gracefully into dust and smoke.

Thanks for the honeymoon, Vegas. We'll be back.

2008-01-17T09:13:00.000-05:00

Fear & Sex
Or
Rampant Capitalism Eats the World Part 3 (yes I know it's a new year but I've still got things to say on the subject, all right? And I know I promised to story you all on the Vegas shooting trip, and I'm working on that, but in the meantime, I had to get something up here, so…)

Recently, I worked on the job on which I took this photo. It was an ad for Chuck E. Cheese, where a mom wraps her kids in bubble wrap before sending them out to play.

The kids were quite good at showing their exasperation at Mom, and she played it sort of obliviously perky. And yet, the subtext is: Yes, this mom is psycho, and you, Viewer Mom, are not like THAT…but wouldn't you feel safer with your kids frying their minds on bad pepperoni and video kickboxing at Chuck E. Cheese, "Where a kid can be a kid," as opposed to out in the unsafe streets of America, where a kid can be a target for drunk drivers and drive-bys?

Now, before I put it that way, I'm sure you were thinking this ad sounded cute, funny, maybe even marginally clever. You were thinking, "In the annals of advertising, this ain't too bad. It's better than our former Surgeon General talking about how he has a button that he wears around his neck at all times to alert a medical unit if he's fallen and he can't get up, which just makes me incredibly depressed."

And you know, you're right. It is. And in general, a lot of the commercials I've worked on have been more entertaining and better crafted than the features I've worked on. Which says more about the features than anything else. Except perhaps how much money goes into advertising compared to what goes into independent filmmaking. (And, hmm, maybe this is one reason why I seem to have major bug up my butt about advertising at the moment…But I'm not here to psychoanalyze myself today...)

Still, here's one thing these two ads, and much of what you see in between your favorite reality shows and reruns these days on the boob tube (MPAA YOU SUCK!!!!!), if you don't have TiVo, have in common: they're trying to sell you something by scaring the shit out of you.

Not on any level that you're necessarily even aware of it, but on that slightly subliminal level that you don't want to admit is there, because you don't want to feel manipulated, and you don't even want to admit that you have fears, do ya? But you do. And they have to do with everything from your airplane going down in flames when you have 30% less legroom to having those little wet patches under your arms if you don't use the right deodorant. Oh, I know how you think. I'm right there with you. I'm a New Yorker, remember? Neurosis is my middle name.

Of course, fear is not the only tool in their arsenal. Let's not forget commercials for Bud/Victoria's Secret/Levi's/Calvin Klein/any perfume or cologne except for maybe Egoîste (although really that too, because screaming women are hot)/any ad starring Kate Moss (and there are a lot of them since she became a famous coke-head)/need I go on????

And again, as with when they take aim at the fear jugular, it's not intended to be obvious when or how this is all working on you. For example, is it logical that that they use sexy spots of women in various states of undress to sell products to straight women? (though we know that men do a lot of the lingerie shopping out there. What woman is really that excited to buy herself garters?). But aside from targeting our unconscious lesbian impulses -- Ooh, I just felt a few pulses quickening there! That was the main reason I wrote that, cheap shot, right fellas? -- somebody smart/with access to a few focus groups figured out at some point that while men tend to be sold on being sexed-up, women are sold on the feeling of being sexy. That's why while a lot sales du sex are in-your-face -- Axe Body Spray? Pretty in-your-face -- many absolutely aren't.

But, really, when you boil it down, you can stick all advertising into one category or the other:

Amaretto di Sarono ad where that woman licks the ice cube: sex
Cleaning products with germ-fighting potential or scrubbing bubbles: fear
Canon Powershot with Maria Sharapova walking in high heels even though she's playing tennis: sex
Those ProActiv spots where they show Jessica Simpson's acne real close up: fear and sex.
iPhone, iPod, all Mac products aside from the ones with John Hodgman playing the PC: sex
Mac ads with John Hodgman: fear (sorry, John)
Jenny Craig spots with Kirstie Alley: definitely fear
Hanes underwear spots with Marisa Tomei/Jennifer Love Hewett/half-neked boys playing dodgeball: sex
Hanes underwear spots with Cuba Gooding Jr making an idiot out of himself in front of Michael Jordan: fear
Most car commercials aside from Volvos: sex
Volvos ads (they're even scary in Japanese): fear
Completely unsexy Mastercard commercials that try to get you to buy cars for Christmas: hmm…

Well, okay, maybe there is a third category, and that's just plain old greed. But then again, isn't avarice highly powered by fear? Fear that you won't measure up to what your buddies have, or what the world thinks you should be? And it's also supercharged with sex as well, because as we all know, the more shit you have, the more sexy you feel, and the more tail you get. At least, that's the theory if you're male. Yeah, I know how you guys think. I work in an all-male environment with way too much downtime, remember? I've got all damn day to psychoanalyze you all. Not that it gets me dates.

And I know what you're thinking now (cuz like I said, either I feel your neurotic pain or I can psychoanalyze you): what about commercials aimed at kids? Like the kind of ads you see on Saturday mornings, for video games, Transformers, My Little Pony, Count Chocula (do they even have My Little Pony or Count Chocula any more? Boy am I old), Bratz, Hot Pockets, etc. Yes, those one would definitely categorize as greed greed greed. But also -- speaking figuratively of course -- these ads are the most in-your-face toy and food porn out there. They are designed to appeal to kids on a purely sensory level, and boy do they work. I don't know if you remember what it was like to see those ads when you were a kid, but I do. The moment you saw those cookies coming out of the bag or the little girl combing Barbie's hair, you wanted one nownownow I WANT IT NOW! Or at least, um, that was me, as my parents, who I can see nodding their heads in unison as they read this, can attest. But for those of you who weren't bratty, think of it like the iPhone spots, just not as artful and with way more low-budget production values, because they only have to appeal to the mind of a seven-year-old who doesn't care about the lighting. That's right: 100% desire.

And now you're thinking, "Okay, Beotch, what's your point?" Or at least, that's what you're thinking if you're Queen Latifah (who has sold her soul to Wal-Mart, Curvation and Pizza Hut and so I can understand why she's a little defensive).

Well, I don't know if it makes a difference, but for a long time I've thought that if you know you're being manipulated, you can stop letting it happen. If you can break down the process and see through it to what's really going on, you can decide not to cave. Is that true? I don't know. Let's face it, I want an iPhone as much as the next geek.

But I think that the only way that media gets better is if we pay attention to it and watch as active consumers, not passive ones who just let it crawl in our eyeballs and cozy itself up to our brains to do its dirty work. I know, commercials are not like, for instance, most local TV news or Extreme Makeover Any Edition or Cops, which you can (AND SHOULD, especially if you're a Nielsen family) choose not to watch. Not everyone can afford TiVo, or to get up and go to the fridge at every commercial break, unless they really want to add some pounds. I suppose you could just walk away and go to your computer during those breaks, but then again, what are you going to find on your computer? Advertising. It may not be as sophisticated at this point as what you get on your tee-vee but it will be.

So the point is: just think about it. Maybe go through the ads you see and come up with your own list of fear and sex (and feel free to post it here) or however else you think they're trying to get you. And don't let them get you. If you want to buy something, buy it, but don't buy it because some piece of mind-warping bullshit got you going.

Because you're better that that. I know you, remember?

2007-12-11T23:11:00.000-05:00

Cars for Christmas
Or
Rampant Capitalism Eats the World Part Two (Part One was that Gorbechev thing)

I worked on this holiday ad recently. Maybe you've seen it, 'cause not only is it running like lemmings on television (or at least on Bravo and Comedy Central, since those seem to be the only channels I watch now that Cablevision wants me to PAY for IFC and Sundance and I am way too cheap for that), but it's being shown on screens at a theater near you before the previews. And as if that weren't offensive enough, it's a commercial in which a guy gives his wife twin cars as holiday gifts.

Now, granted, the cars in this particular ad are a free sweepstakes prize, so he doesn't actually buy them. But this isn't the first time I've worked on advertising promoting giving automobiles as gifts. In fact, if you haven't noticed, there are a ton of them out there this season, trying to convince folks like you and me to do just that: buy cars for Christmas.

What the HELL???? Aside from the fact that in our world, with its dying-a-little-more-every-day atmosphere, nobody should be encouraged to buy another gas-guzzling, smog-producing vehicle -- What sign foreshadowing the apocalypse will it be this week? Wildfires? Bee die-offs? Trees budding in Central Park in November? -- there's the fact that in our world (yes, this too is our world, your world, my world), where folks are dying from lack of food, shelter, vaccines for diseases that should no longer exist, mosquito netting for Christ's sake, ANYONE should be getting a Hummer, a Volkswagon, a used fucking Subaru, or pretty much ANYTHING as a gift THAT COSTS OVER TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!!

Now look, I know. I work for The Man. And specifically for The Man Who Made This Ad. And even though we only recorded sound effects on this one, which they very well might not have even used (even though they were damn good, 'cause we are the best sound people EVER, we even make the useless shit sound good), I am a cog in the machine without which this ad would not exist, and people would not be inspired to spend this kind of money on crap. In fact, in general, as we all know, that is my day job: helping to make crap that's going to be used to get people to spend money on crap they don't need. Oh, and did I mention all of the crap -- money and uneaten food and landfills of plastic water bottles and entire power plants of megawattage -- that's expended making this crap?

Yeah, it's a living. And without me, there would be another very willing cog, quite thrilled to make my $57.50 an hour plus OT to take my place at the pole. In fact, I know him, and he already is, which is why I'm sitting here at home writing this instead of holding the pole over my head for The Man right now.

But still, I am part of The System, some might argue more than most. And even if I use The Money I make off The Man to create something(s) that attempt in some way to buck The System…is any of that any more than, well, hypocritical bullshit?

Nevertheless. That doesn't mean I can't call bullshit. And it certainly doesn't force me to buy the crap. In fact, it makes me think twice, or three or six or twenty-eight times if I'm feeling obsessive, about what I do and do not need to get by in my own little life when I'm not holding the pole.

So in our world, where Gorbechev lends his face to Louis Vuitton, let me lend my pathetic, anonymous, potentially hypocritical voice to this:

Plywood and nails (Habitat for Humanity): $10.

Measles vaccine for 50 kids (Unicef): $27.

A loan to start a tomato-selling business in Tanzania (Finca International): $50.

A llama (Heifer International): $150.

Giving something that matters: priceless.

Oh heck, I don't want to end the year on that churlish note (even if I am a churl -- I'm not sure what that is exactly, but I am one), since we're off on another shoot and then I'm away for the holidays, and this will very likely be my parting shot for 2007. So here's a little phone video from our last shooting trip, to Las Vegas. Yeah, you haven't heard about that one yet, but you will, in 2008. I know, shoes, Vegas, the evils of rampant capitalism, what could be more apropos, and yet contradictory? But for some reason, watching this makes me happy. Hopefully it will do the same for you. Vegas, baby, Vegas.

Oh and, um, happy holidays. Ha ha.

2007-12-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

Back, in Sweats

Just wanted to mention, for those of you who frequent the blogosphere (which I don't, which is part of why I get no hits), that one of my all-time favorite bloggers, Josh Friedman -- not to dis any of y'all, Danator, oneofhismoms, all of you should go read their blogs too RIGHT NOW -- is back again after a 10-month hiatus, at I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing (see link at right). Basically because he's on strike, so this might be a limited-time offer.

Now, me plugging Friedman is kind of like Modest Mouse saying, "DUDE, you've gotta check out this AWESOME band, they're called The Beatles!" But I'm a fan. He's clever, dark, bitter, cynical, occasionally poetic and dare I say deep, and pretty much everything I wish I were as a blogger and hope I am on a very, very good day.

So go, read, and if you see him in his sweatpants on the picket line at Warner Brothers, tell him he rocks.

2007-11-26T12:08:00.000-05:00

The Kind of Stuff That Happens When You Leave New York (Part Two)
Or
Minnesota Nice

In case there was any question, let me tell you a secret:

Minnesota is definitely in the Midwest.

It's apparent not just from the lay of the land, which is flat, I mean flat, and green, except for the parts of it which are a toasty shade of golden brown, all of which you can see when you fly in. But it's also the nature of the people. For one thing, there's the deadpan sense of humor, where you can't tell if they're joking or if they're just funny and they don't entirely know it. Especially when they talk to each other about what's funny about Minnesotans.

"Well there's the fact that we always have to have a hot dish. That's what we call them, 'hot dishes.' It's that need to feed people."
"Oh, yah, I was wondering if you were going to make something for us."
"Well, we have some chips and salsa and some pizza we can heat up."
"And then there's the thing about Jell-o."
"Oh yah, different kinds of Jell-o for different occasions."
"Yah, green for funerals."

And did I mention the accent?

"Yah, when Fargo came out I kept sayin', 'Oh we do not talk like that!' But then I realized that I do say it, I say it, 'What a hoot!' I say it all the time!"
"Oh, yah. Or 'That was a hoot!'"

Then there's the part of Midwestern nature described to us as "Minnesota Nice."

"So, where you ladies from?"
"New York."
"Wow, all the way out from New York! Isn't that a hoot?"

Yes, despite all we'd heard about being thought of as liberal East Coast devilspawn in the heartland, people always seemed excited to meet us. Granted, we had the glamour of film on our side, apparent from our wrinkled clothes, eyes hollowed from staring at the double-yellow line down the center of the interstate, and the midsize rental car we splurged on once we realized we'd need it to fit our eight pieces of luggage, including a camera, two huge cases of equipment -- cases that were packed and repacked, placing the maffer clamps in with the shampoo and the gaffers tape under pajamas, once we found that one could not be taken on the plane because it exceeded the 75-lb limit -- and a light shaped like a suitcase. This light, in particular, seemed to get elaborately searched and swabbed at the each of the airports (there were four) we visited in our eight states in five days extravaganza.

But even before we got to the purpose of our trip, people were friendly. They just were. Plus, you forget that America is a nation of movers and transplants, which was always driven home by the inevitable,

"New York? I've got a cousin in Poughkeepsie/Great Neck/White Plains. So what are you doing out here?"

A ten-second conversation would then become a fifteen-minute one, so we tried to save it for when the bill arrived at the restaurant, or during the shuttle bus ride, or pretty much any time other than when we were checking into a hotel at 2 am. Although at any other hour, the reception we got from Pat who works all-night at the front desk of the Fargo, North Dakota Super 8 -- which is also definitely in the Midwest -- would have been welcome.

"Where you girls coming from?"
"Minnesota."
"Wow, long drive, eh? You must be tired."
"Yeah."
"And what're you doing here in Fargo?"
"Oh, we're just spending the night here on our way to Bismarck."
"What are you doing in Bismarck?"
"Working on a documentary."
"Oh, really, what about?"

We'd been driving since about 9, when we'd finished dinner back at The Jack Shack (no, we don't know where the name comes from) -- or rather I'd finished my fried chicken and Lauren, who you may or may not remember is vegan, left most of her fried mushrooms behind (the mushrooms popped easily out of their no-doubt-fried-indiscriminately-with-all-sorts-of-meat-products batter, but this, she concluded, was because they had been dipped in mayonnaise). Driving, that is, aside from the two times we'd been pulled over for speeding, causing Lauren to proclaim, "The Midwest sucks." We'd actually communicated with Pat en route a couple of times, once to ask if it was okay that we'd be arriving late -- "Oh, I'll be here all night" -- and the second time when we got lost en route.

"We're at the Kwik Shop and there is a Super 8 down the road --"
"Are you at the one on Main Ave?"
"Um, yeah."
"Then you're in Moorhead. You're almost here. But you're still in Minnesota."

Little could we have anticipated from these conversations, delivered in flat Midwestern monotone, the extraordinarily friendly and pear-shaped individual with the boyish black toupee who would enthusiastically drag our luggage down the hallway with the moldy-smelling carpet to our room. Another thing that goes in the "the Midwest sucks" category: not all Super 8s are created equal. And we were just putting all of our batteries up to charge into the two outlets in the room that actually worked out of the six that were there when the phone rang.

"Hello?"
"Hi, this is Pat at reception. Everything working out all right for you there?"
"Yes, everything's fine."
"Okay...I just wanted to call and make sure you girls were fine."
"Thanks. Thanks so much."

Poor Pat.

The highlight of our trip to North Dakota was not, in fact, the scenery -- a great disappointment to those of us who have visited South Dakota. North Dakota doesn't have the glorious vistas of the Badlands, the monumental absurdity of Mount Rushmore and the Corn Palace, or even the tourism for the sake of tourism value of Wall Drug. What it has is no downtown. Believe me, we looked. To quote Wikipedia, "the downtown area is rather unique because the city's major shopping center, Kirkwood Mall, is located there instead of in a suburban setting." And it is home to a state capitol building that is essentially a nondescript, 19-story edifice that, at 241.75 ft, is the town skyscraper. And the residents know this.

"The old state capitol was nice," said one of the folks in our documentary, "but it burnt down in 1930 and then they built this one to be as Unitarian as possible." (We think she meant "utilitarian," but considering how many churches we filmed in Bismarck, possibly not).

But the highlight was Space Aliens, a chain of theme restaurants in North Dakota and Minnesota, advertised via billboards with floating green hollow-eyed heads, each of which (according to the website -- though tempted to hit all five, we only went to one) features a full room of videogames, the "Bar from Mars," and well-known extraterrestrial favorites like ribs and quesadillas, as well as three-eyed creatures staring down at you from a porthole above your table. And the folks who work there, at least at the Bismarck, North Dakota location, are Minnesota Nice.

"How much are those inflatable aliens?"
"Oh, you're supposed to win those with tickets. But here, just take one."
"What about the pencils?"
"Just take a couple of those too."

Mind you, Colorado is not the Midwest. For one thing, there are mountains. For another, there's Boulder. Only in the West will you find a city where you can get fined for creating too much light pollution. We stayed with friends of mine there -- friends who go out every day before work to take their dog for a little five-mile jog somewhere on the 130 miles of hiking trails just beyond their backyard. It was the first place on our trip we were hard-pressed not to want to pick up and move to, particularly once they showed us the garage organized specifically to facilitate all of their outdoor adventure activities, which made us feel like we were missing out even when we had no idea what they were talking about.

"This tub contains all of our camping food. This one has our snowboarding accessories. This one has the kiteboarding gear --"
"The what? Is that a sport?"

Colorado was also interesting because we spent September 11th there. It wasn't my first 9/11 outside of New York since 2001 -- I actually was in Montreal for 9/11/03, which, perhaps because I was too busy trying to barhop in French, didn't make me think a lot about my Americanness. But in Colorado (not Boulder, which is in an entirely different Colorado), it was all about How American Can We Be?, at least for the local radio station, which tried to make a sparsely-attended event out of it, complete with singing by bad local musicians, a lot of talk about "fighting for our freedom," and a display of military vehicles with tires bigger than three of me, which they let kids climb into and pretend to drive (and no, in case you were wondering based upon this and our previous encounter with a tank, our documentary is not on huge and scary military vehicles. But good guess). Unlike being in Canada, being in Colorado made me realize how a lot of the rest of the country thinks about 9/11 as a call to arms, whereas I think most of us who were here in New York that day probably got the closest we ever will to feeling what it's like to actually be under attack and were just happy to wake up the next day and find that we weren't, in fact, at war. But that's another blog. Perhaps the most sinister thing about the whole event was the fact that the local minister who led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance chose to omit the words "with liberty and justice for all." I wonder what that says about Americanness now.
Strangely enough, the other place we were tempted to move to (or at least I was, and Lauren claims this was because of the cute young blond men we interviewed, but that is NOT true), was Toledo, Ohio. We were both surprised by how much we liked it. Partly, it was that the center of town is laid out along the Maumee River, lining it with the refurbished remains of old warehouses and factories and including one somehow beautiful towering smokestack gesturing up at the sky. Not to mention that we found great vegan-friendly food there.

But most of all, Toledo might actually win the prize for the most friendly place we went. Although this could have been purely because it had the highest boredom quotient. Not that people seemed unhappily bored. On the contrary, they seemed very content to stand around shooting the shit with us, and probably anybody else who came across their path. Even one of our subjects whose wife was 8 months pregnant and having contractions just wanted to hang.

"I'm so sorry, it's just I have to take her to the hospital, you know. But darn, I was really looking forward to us going out and having a couple of beers."

Then there was Gladys, our bartendress at the Emerald City Lounge, located in the Days Inn around the corner from our hotel. The lounge had earned its name by virtue of its lime green color, which naturally drew us like moths who are exhausted from flying (and driving, but that sort of kills the analogy) but unable to resist singeing themselves against the light of kitsch.

"We don't get too many people out here from New York," Gladys told us. "Though we had a whole bunch of Filipino nurses here from New Jersey last week for a convention. It's funny, one of 'em, this guy, came in here and we were talking for a while, and he asked me, 'So where should I go out around here?' and I said, 'Well, you could go to this area, or this area, but you probably want to avoid this area here.' Then he looked at me and said, 'But where for, you know, guys like me. You know, gay.' And I said, 'Oh. All those areas that I just told you not to go to? That's where you should go.'…But I wondered, why was he asking me?"

We looked back at her AC/DC t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, her bleached-blond mullet and butch biker jewelry, and shrugged. "Dunno."

Probably because we were her only customers, Gladys was kind enough to answer all of our questions about the alcohol on the shelves, a rather unconventional stock. There were brands of gin, bourbon and scotch we had never seen, about fifteen kinds of Pucker and Schnapps, Goldschlager, Jagermeister (which I will never touch again thanks to some experiences on low-budget films out of town in my youth), and Tequila Rose.

"It looks like Pepto-Bismol, but it tastes real good," said Gladys, pouring us a shot. It was kind of like drinking perfume with a kick to it. We would probably have finished it had not the karaoke in the back gotten into full swing at that point, causing us to decide that it was time for bed.

The last night of our trip that confirmed that Michigan, too, is Minnesota Nice, or at least Ohio Bored n' Friendly. It also gave me my last encounter with the late night lonely crowd; specifically, those folks who work in the area of rental car return at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport.

"I don't suppose the shuttle could take me all the way to my hotel instead of just back to the airport?" I asked as the guy at the desk -- who looked to be just barely legal -- closed out our rental.
"Oh, gee, you know, let me ask my manager." He returned looking genuinely sad. "I'm real sorry. He says we can't spare the driver." He leaned in conspiratorially. "But you could ask Papa Joe when he gets here. Come on, let's go watch some tv and wait for him."

We went and planted ourselves beside the other two pubescent night duty car rental guys, who slumped in the customer waiting chairs in front of a huge flat-screen.

"Ooh, 'The Hills Have Eyes Two,'" said Young Desk Guy, scrolling through the channel listings. "Did you see that?"
"No, I haven't."
"Well, you're lucky, that was nasty. Hmm, looks like we got news, news, news..."
"How about 'Sex & the City'?"
"Oh, we don't get that channel. You like that show? I never seen it. Is it kind of a chick show?"
"Yeah."
"What else we got…What about 'Family Guy'? That's a funny show."

Papa Joe finally arrived. White-haired and slumped defeatedly over the wheel of his shuttle, he completely lived up to the image conjured by his name.

"Nope, can't take you to your hotel." He waved his walkie talkie. "I'd be outa range, they wouldn't be able to call me. Couldn't get the hotel shuttle to come pick you up from here, huh?"
"No, they said I had to go back to the airport."
"Shoulda slipped him a ten. That's the way things work," he said with a meaningful look, which I only realized later meant that for ten bucks I probably could have gotten him to drop me at my hotel.

I waited at the airport. As one might guess, the Super 8 shuttle was not prompt. But then I saw the shuttle for the much nicer hotel across the street from ours pull up. I climbed aboard behind two businessmen.

"Hi," I said to the young woman with big hair who sat behind the wheel. "I'm staying at the Super 8, could I take this shuttle?"
" I guess," she said warily. "But I gotta drop these guys off first."

Her apparent surliness changed the moment her real customers got off at their hotel. I was starting to get off too.

"No, no," she said, "I'll take you across. Honey, you don't want to cross that road at this hour."
"Really?"
"Oh yeah, people come barreling down that road late at night, nobody's watching where they're going, they don't think anyone's going to be crossing -- and it is NOT well lit. People have definitely gotten killed out there. I've been driving this route a long time, I can tell ya…"

Needless to say, she did.

2007-10-31T09:30:00.000-04:00

Overheard Set Conversation: Two Actors Looking at Prop Magazines While Waiting on Lighting

(Apologies in advance to the Brits, you know I couldn't make this shit up)

Her: You know, this is the worst magazine, the British In Style. Total trash.
Him: Yeah? Who the hell are these people? They're ugly. See, the British are ugly.
Her: She's ugly, and her baby's so ugly it's cute.
Him: Emma. Emma Breen. (faking English accent) Hello, my name is Emma Breen…(pointing to another page) Oh, I've worked with her. And I've worked with her.
Her: On what?
Him: "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Two."
Her: Was she nice?
Him: Yup, they're all nice. They're just a little too famous for words…I've worked with her...And I've worked with her.
Her: Whoopi Goldberg?
Him: Uh huh. Very nice…(pointing to next page) My brother is obsessed with her.
Her: I know, I love her. She's so trashy but she just doesn't care that she has no class. She's like, "I show my breasts for money, that's what I do." They had a Disney wedding and it was actually really cute…
Him: Oh, look at Britney.
Her: Poor Britney.
Him: Do you think she has, like, a billion dollars in the bank?
Her: No, I think she has, like, ten thousand.
Him: Really?!
Her: Actually, no, she just had a single come out and a new album --
Him: Oh, so right now she has like a billion dollars --
Her: Yeah, but she'll spend it all. She doesn't know how to manage it. She needs an intervention.
Him: She needs someone to adopt her.
Her: She needs to be adopted by Madonna.
Him: Exactly. Madonna. Madonna's not a great performer but she's an amazing businesswoman.
Her: Wow, this magazine really has way too many pages…

2007-10-16T23:13:00.001-04:00

Does anyone else find this Louis Vuitton ad to be horribly wrong?

Maybe I just don't like what it says about our time.

2007-10-10T22:02:00.000-04:00

The Kind of Stuff that Happens When You Leave New York (Part One)
Or
I Drove All the Way to Maine and Back and All I Got Was This Lousy Radiator

I had an idea.

This happens, from time to time. More often than not, I don't do anything about it -- I've got places to go, things to do, New Yorkers to read, blogs and screenplays not to write, laundry to fold, even jobs, occasionally, like, for money. Plus, like all imaginative but lazy and self-critical people (you know who you are), after a few days of thinking about my new ideas, I tend to decide that they really suck, or at least aren't worth the effort, and I'd much rather be watching all of the DVD extras from whatever Netflick I happen to have out that week -- say, the casting sessions from "Junebug," or all of "Breakfast on Pluto" for the second time, with commentary. DVD extras: great procrastination tools.

But this time, I actually decided that the idea did not suck. But it was a documentary idea, and I needed help. In general, when it comes to production, I prefer collaborating, having somebody else around to bounce ideas off of, make decisions with -- yes, I know this might be hard to believe for those of you who read what I tend to write about other members of the human race, but I actually like working with other people. When they don't get on my nerves. Plus, I knew I could direct and do sound on this project if need be, but I probably couldn't shoot at the same time -- not to mention that I'm not as familiar with those fancy DV/HD camera thingies as I ought to be. Also, I didn't actually have one.

Then I remembered that I knew someone who did. She was a friend of a friend named Lauren who I'd met at a birthday party. We'd ridden the train home together afterwards, which meant that 1) we could stand to talk to each other for a good 45 minutes, and 2) she lived in Brooklyn, which is always a plus in my book, 'cause Brooklyn rules.

So I called her up and I said, "I have this documentary idea and I'm looking for someone to partner on it…"
"Huh, that sounds really interesting," she said.
"But we have to start shooting in Maine in about a week and a half."
And oddly enough, instead of saying, "I don't know you and you're insane," she said, "You know, I think there might be a hole in my schedule."

And that was how it started.

Now, here's the DISCLAIMER:
You may have figured out by now that for various reasons both personal and professional, I can't tell you what exactly the film's about. I hope you'll understand and forgive me for this. If you can't and you find it incredibly annoying to read on without getting those details, like hearing a joke without a punchline -- and I can sympathize with that -- you'll just have to avoid this blog for the next couple of installments. Hopefully some day when this is all over, you'll get the full low-down, but for now, all I can say is that anonymity blows.

Anyway. We had to get to Maine. We thought about flying, but considering it was so close to the date and we didn't think we'd have much luck with our Plan A of trying to convince Jet Blue to be our sponsors (although we haven't entirely given up on this idea yet, so if you happen to be listening, Jet Blue, call us), we decided on Plan B of hopping -- to the extent that one can "hop" with two pieces of luggage and seven cases of equipment -- into my '96 Toyota Camry, hittin' the BQE and making our way from there up to Vacationland. Breaking up the trip with one night in New Haven, where we stayed at my friend Ann's house and drank her beer, we arrived in Portland the next day in time for lunch at Becky's Diner.

Becky's is a real local's place. It's on the industrial outskirts of town, surrounded by construction contractors and fishing boat repair, and the waitresses talk to you like they know you, but don't necessarily like you. Becky's is also the kind of place where there's no real parking, so everybody blocks everybody else in, and then they go around bellowing your car description throughout the restaurant to track you down when somebody you blocked in needs to leave. But I was lucky in that this gave me the opportunity to relieve my paranoia, because we were violating Rule #1 of the New York Filmmaker Handbook: never leave the equipment in the car.

But there is always a point in any trip outside of the of the city -- it could be the view from the plane, where you see verdant greenery instead of a vista of skyscrapers and urban sprawl; it could be when the doors of your plane open on the tarmac and you step out and the smell and heavy humidity of a thicker, completely different kind of air hits you; it could be when you hear your first voice speaking a foreign language -- and realize it's every voice except yours. Whatever it is, it's the beginning of realizing that you are not in New York any more, you are Some Place Else, and all the rules are different.

On this particular trip, it was probably that voice yelling, in a full-on Maine accent, "Who's got the Toyota Camreh out theh?"

Or it might have been when we pulled into our eventual destination in Augusta and found ourselves face-to-artillery gun with a tank. At which point I was really glad that the second thing I had done at Becky's was remove the "Republicans for Voldemort" bumpersticker from my car. For those of you who have never seen one up close and personal, a tank is much, much bigger and more disturbing than you probably imagine. Suffice to say, being in front of one gives you entirely new respect for that guy in Tiananmen Square, who, you will suddenly and deeply understand, really really wanted to pee in his pants and run away. And this was a small tank, the Cooper Mini of tanks. And it still scared the shit out of us. So, of course, we filmed it. And then we ran away.

One of the great things about making a documentary is that you get to go to places you wouldn't normally go to. Like Caribou, Maine. When given directions there by our friends in Augusta, we were told a few things:

"If you don't turn left at Houlton and go through Presque Isle [pronounced "Preskile," which was a minor source of confusion], you'll be in Canada."
And also, several times,
"That is way the hell out there."
And
"Be sure to watch out for moose."

We did, indeed, see many signs for moose crossing, but no moose. Or caribou. Still, you never know quite what you're going to find when you drive 3 hours out of the big city, particularly when the big city is Bangor. But what we mainly found were some incredibly good people. This is the second great thing about making a documentary: meeting the people you wouldn't normally meet. I have never in my life before been tempted to use the term "salt of the earth," but there is really no other way to describe the Mainers -- and they were so Maine -- who were willing to let two total strangers come into their homes and sit down and talk with us for two or three hours on camera, despite having running, screaming children in the house or places to go and things to do, actually important ones that have nothing to do with DVD extras -- and then offer us a ride on their boat afterwards. Which we would have loved, had we not been concerned about getting back to Bangor in time to make it to the one restaurant that we knew would be open past nine: The Ground Round.

Eating is one of the unexpectedly tough things about going outside of your major metropolitan areas. Particularly when one of you is vegan -- although having traveled to many places where to be a strict vegan is to starve, Lauren has adopted something of a don't ask don't tell policy. I myself try, in general, to avoid anything extremely fried, unhealthy or just generally nasty, all of which can be difficult to explain to folks who work in places where the words on the menu, "with real bacon bits," are a source of pride. We'd end up having a lot of conversations with servers like:

"So the grilled chicken salad, does that have cheese on it?" (I know this might sound like a strange question but in most of America, or at least the parts dominated by strip malls and chain restaurants, which is most of America, everything comes with cheese on it).
"Yes."
"Could you make it without the cheese?"
"Sure. What kind of dressing would you like? We have blue cheese, French, Thousand Island --"
"Do you have some kind of vinaigrette?"
"We have a raspberry vinaigrette, and a low-fat Italian."
"Um, okay, I'll take the Italian." (Oh yeah, another issue I have is I don't like mixing fruity with savory -- chicken with raspberry glaze, salmon with mango salsa, I hate that shit).
"And what would you like, Ma'am?"
"I know this is going to sound strange, but could I have the chicken burrito, but without the chicken, or the cheese, or the sour cream."
"So just the beans and the rice."
"Exactly."
But believe it or not, the Ground Round in Bangor, Maine was the kind of place where they would then ask, "Would you like us to substitute broccoli instead of the chicken?"
"Wow, really? Could you do that?"
"I'll ask the chef but he won't mind. He's got nothing better to do."

The food was still bland and overcooked, but if all you've had for eight hours has been a bottle of water and a Luna bar, and you wash it down with two glasses of cheap red wine, you don't mind so much.

But then you still have to go spend the night in your Super 8 Motel. This is one of the not-so-nice things about making a documentary, at least one on our present budget of $just-spend-as-little-as-possible.00. Although, I have to say, the Super 8 Motels in Maine were probably among the best budget hotels I've ever been in. They were all clean, when they said non-smoking they actually meant non-smoking as opposed to just non-smoking today, had free wi-fi (if of the one or two bar variety) and free breakfast (of the donuts and instant oatmeal variety). When the Super 8 was full on Saturday night and we had to move across the parking lot to the Travelodge, we were decidedly underwhelmed. Although the wi-fi was better. In fact, we might have been using their wi-fi all along. Still, that night we did make it back to Bangor in time to find an excellent Thai restaurant -- one thing you start to do when traveling with a vegan: you keep your eyes open for a good Thai restaurant -- so we made it back to the Travelodge full.

And with terrific footage. Aside from the nice people and the bad food, there is one other special thing in small-town America that you can't really find the equal of anywhere else: a small-town parade. We found one in Lincoln, Maine, and it was packed with the kind of extreme Americana that most people only dream about: bandstands of veterans singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," bored teenaged baton twirlers, tiny girls in halter tops and high heels beside tiny boys with mullets, Shriners driving around in go-carts, and American flags as far as the eye could see. Parades are a filmmaker's paradise. Even if it has nothing to do with your film, you find a way to cut that stuff in. (Luckily, it does have something to do with ours. That much I can tell you).

All in all, we were very happy and everything went off without a hitch. Until we hit traffic in Connecticut on the drive home. And I suddenly noticed that the car appeared to be smoking slightly. And that the temperature gage had, at some point while we were swapping life stories as one does on an nine-hour car ride, gone all the way up to the red area with the little "H." As you might guess, I don't know all that much about cars, but I knew that this was my cue to get off at the next exit.

Another thing about small-town America, which, for those of you who haven't been there lately, parts of Connecticut definitely still are: nearly everything is closed on Sundays.

"Mm, there's no mechanic open today," said the older lady working at the nearest gas station. "Have to be tomorrow."
"My husband knows a lot about cars," said the younger one. She looked about 16. "I could call him."
"Wow, could you?" I asked. "Is he around?"
She whipped out her cell phone. "He's supposed to be home watching my kids." She dialed. "Hey, Jason, where's Daddy? Well, could you go get him? Just go get him, will ya? I'm not kidding, will ya just -- Will ya just go get him for me please? Where's your sister?" This went on for a bit, during which I tried to interest myself in the candy selection, then she finally hung up. "He's gonna call me back."

Meanwhile, Lauren was filling the car engine with pretty much every fluid we could think to buy at the mini-mart. Nothing seemed to help. Every time we started the car, the thing pinned right back up at "H." We just stood there, staring under the hood like the two not-particularly-girly-but-definitely-automobile- ignorant chicks we are, until a red pick-up truck pulled in next to us. A guy with longish grey hair, a kind of stringy build and a slightly dubious smile got out.

"Got car trouble?" he said.
We gave him the details.
"Hmm," he said. "Mind if I take a look?" He inspected the engine. "You probably got a leak in your radiator. What you could get is some radiator sealant, pour it in there, that'll help you out."

The three of us went inside to look for this wonder product. "Doesn't look like they have it," said Bill -- by now we were all on a first name basis. "But there's another gas station across the way that might, I could drive one of you over there to look for it."

Lauren and I looked at each other, then back at Bill: good Samaritan or serial killer?

"She can vouch for me," he said, pointing his chin at the older gas station lady and grinning. "Right, Irma?"
"Well, I dunno," said Irma. But she was kidding. We thought.

Lauren volunteered to go with Bill. I snapped into producer mode and started making phone calls -- local hotels, AAA. I found out that as an Automobile Club Premier Member, they would tow me 100 miles for free. I pulled out our trusty atlas and using the always accurate measure of my finger against the mileage scale -- the first knuckle was ten miles, the next one 20 -- determined that we were definitely farther from home than that.

Lauren, meanwhile, was getting Bill's entire life story. How he'd been in the service during the Gulf War; how his wife had a drinking problem and he "was ready to stick the 'For Sale' sign on the lawn," but was worried about what it would do to his 15-year-old son; how he kept his truck in perfect condition, as he would later show the two of us while we waited for the radiator sealant to work its magic. We were impressed. We believed in Bill.

After we started the engine again and the bubbles stopped coming out of the constellation of tiny holes he'd pointed out to us in the radiator, the temperature gage held in its normal spot. We thanked Bill profusely.

"You'll have to get a new radiator," he said, "but that oughta at least get you home."

It got us about another 30 miles. Then we noticed that the temperature needle had started to creep up again. We pulled into a rest area and opened the hood, and were immediately engulfed in a cloud of steam.

"Oh my God," said Lauren.
"Shit," I said. "Guess I better call Triple A."
"Oh my God," said Lauren. She just couldn't stop staring at the radiator, which was spraying water like the Trevi Fountain. "I've just never seen anything like that before."

We had plenty of time to capture the moment in cell phone photos (like the one above) before our tow truck arrived around midnight, driven by a young man named Mike. He was in his early 20s, with a mustache that was supposed to make him look older and failing miserably. We watched him hook the poor Camry and hoist it up on its hind wheels.

"Where we going?"
"Brooklyn."
"Guess you two'll be riding in the cab with me."

Something that we were soon to find out in greater depth in our travels is that there are a lot of lonely people who work the night shift. Mike was one of them. It started (as it usually does) with, "Where you girls from?" We asked him the same, and then, being documentarians, started in on the follow-up questions, which soon took us into uncharted territory.

"We met in a chat room. It was totally weird, she was like, 'Your name's Mike and you're from Vernon? I used to be your babysitter!' She's in a bad marriage, says he's really mean to her. She's coming up to stay with me next week. I'm a little nervous because I live with my brother and his girlfriend and her kid, and they're total pigs. I'm the only one who ever cleans up around there…"

At some point, possibly when Lauren was nodding off (sadly I can only sleep when horizontal), I found out about his father's recent death, and how he wanted to join the police academy.

"Aren't you worried about the dangerous part of being a cop?"
"Everything's dangerous. This job's dangerous. I knew a tow truck guy who got killed last week, hitching up a car. Car came by and swiped him and he was just gone."

The man definitely had a dark side. Although then we spent the next half an hour talking about his favorite hobby: country line dancing.

Around 2 a.m., we arrived in front of my apartment. Mike released my car, I signed something, and he started to walk away.

"Hey, wait," I said, "That's it? Don't I owe you anything?"
"Nope," he said. "It was 98 miles."

Somehow, 17 hours after our day began, Lauren and I managed to laugh, jump up and down and cheer, simultaneously. Mike looked happy for the first time all night. We tipped him, he told us to have a good one and rolled off back toward the BQE, hoping to get to bed before dawn.

And that was the end of the beginning.

2007-09-14T21:35:00.000-04:00

Can You Hear Me Now?

When you work in commercials, you often find yourself employed again and again by the same behemoths. Microsoft, McDonalds, IBM, UPS, Coca Cola, a whole bunch of dot-coms, these are some of the folks who've forked over to me over the years what I would consider large amounts of cash -- no doubt to them, all told, a blip on the corporate spread sheet that amounts to less than their daily budget for nondairy creamer.

But out of all of them, the company I've probably had the most repeat business from has been Verizon. They really keep this town in commercials. Over the years when James Earl Jones was their spokesperson, we worked together enough to get into extensive discussions of his favorite television shows ("Deadwood" and "The Sopranos" -- for an older guy, he seems pretty okay with profanity).

And, as you might guess, I've also worked multiple times with the Test Man. You know, that guy in the glasses who's in all the Verizon commercials, who used to walk around with his cell phone saying, "Can you hear me now?…Good!" until they stopped using those lines altogether, so that now he generally just gets to stand there and nod and look sympathetic.

Not that he really minds. Test Man is, in reality, a very nice guy named Paul who is pretty happy in his job, probably because he's living the dream -- if not that one of superstardom then the dream of never, ever having to give a thought to paying for retirement. So he's more than willing to put up with whatever goes along with being the Verizon spokesguy. Like the jacket.

"What is this made out of?" I asked him when I worked with him most recently, feeling the material as I wired him up. "Some kind of microfiber?"
"No," he said with an appreciative wag of the eyebrows. "Gabardine."
"Ooh, wool. That must be hot."
"Yeah, it's wonderful on a day like today, so comfortable."
"But in the winter it's probably good."
"No, it's not warm enough in the winter. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer," he said cheerfully. "It's grrreat." Making royalty bank does wonders for your sense of humor.

On this particular job, we were not only working with Test Man but with The Network. If you've seen the commercials, you know that The Network is a seemingly endless mass of people who are supposed to look like they're the ones making America's favorite phone and internet network go, 24/7. My advice: when you work with The Network, make sure you get to set early because if you don't, even though many of them are digitally matted in in post, they still form one hell of a big line at the catering truck between you and your breakfast burrito. I found this out the hard way.

Mind you, actually being part of The Network doesn't look a like a picnic either. They're extras with no lines who are shipped to set on a couple of decidedly un-deluxe commercial buses, and are really only distinguishable from one another by their props. The Network comes with its own 12 plastic tubs of props. The four-page list of them that I swiped during lunch reads something like:

Box #1:
6 black and tan leather tool belts
3 red hole punches
6 flat-head yellow screwdrivers
6 orange Phillips-head screwdrivers
7 car chargers, in package
17 spools blue cable
7 Motorola flip phones
3 Nokia bar phones
1 Blackberry
16 pairs work boots
4 lanyards, 3 w/nametags

Box #2:
1 UHF/VHF switchbox
2 yellow Ethernet cords
8 black flashlights, 1 broken
25 white hardhats with Verizon logo
47 black umbrellas
53 red umbrellas
10 maroon EAR noise reduction headphones

Box#3:
24 white hardhats with Verizon logo

etc.

One poor guy had a hard drive strapped to his back all day.

"Is it heavy?" one of the other extras asked him.
"It's not light," he answered.

And a lot of them are also regulars who have done the Network shtick a few times. As evidenced when the guy from the agency who appears to be the keeper of the Network concept (who comes to work on a motorcycle and wears a Harley-Davidson t-shirt) got all of the extras together in the morning for a meeting.

"How many of you have done this before?" asked Rebel Agency Guy.

Maybe half of the hands went up.

"Well, this is going to be a little different than usual. Generally, the thing about The Network is you're always, always working. But this time, you're supposed to be feeling a little celebratory. We're not sure exactly how that's going to work. So I just wanted to let you know, those of you who've done this before, that we're doing something a little different, and we'll just have to see how it goes."

It turned out that this little pep talk had to do with the fact that in this spot, The Network has to applaud for the main characters who, apparently, are making world class use of their Verizon service by doing things like watching music videos constantly to get cues for their personal style or giving lost Japanese tourists directions from their GPS. Basically, they're being applauded for spending as much money on a cell phone as humanly possible, though I suspect that this is not what the campaign intends to highlight. At any rate, with Rebel Agency Guy lurking over his shoulder, Ben, the director -- one of those interesting people who is not, himself, funny, and yet somehow can create a very funny commercial -- gave his own specific direction about how The Network should behave.

"So you're working working working then when she comes out, you have to applaud, and then you have to go right back to working. Everybody got that?"

Paul, meanwhile, who arrives in his own private car and needs no direction because he has his shtick down, mostly stood around, quietly killing time sending text messages on his Sidekick. I'd imagine one of the perks of being Test Man is free text messaging for life. Another, since he's now a celebrity with his face plastered above the Lincoln Tunnel, is getting a lot of requests from members of The Network to sign autographs and pose for cell phone photos, which he handles quite gracefully.

"People stop me on the street all the time," he told me. "Sometimes they ask me questions about their bill, I don't really have an answer for that. But now that I have an assistant, she'll get right up in people's faces, which is great. We tell people there are a few things Test Man doesn't like. He doesn't like to be touched. He doesn't like to be picked up."

Of course, there are also certain things that Test Man probably is not supposed to do. At one point, he turned to me and whispered, "Are we potted down?" before leaning in confidentially to the actors who play a family in the spot -- two parents and a teenaged girl who absolutely loves to text message. "They're like the big tobacco companies. They're not going to tell until they have to. But it's definitely going to be a problem 20 years down the line. I mean, they're microwaves."

By now, I guess Paul's level of caring is pretty low. At one point, I was watching him stand calmly at the center of a large scene of chaos, where they were trying to place the 50-odd Network people behind him, rearrange them, rearrange them again, swap out props that they didn't like for new ones -- magenta headphones for green headphones, wire cutters for a phone charger -- the typical nonsense that attempts to satisfy all the folks in video village who need to be satisfied and takes much longer than it could possibly need to. As we both stood there, doing the waiting which forms the better part of our day, Paul caught my eye and mouthed, "I need a new job." But even if you have to do the same thing, day after day, year after year now, especially when you might rather be doing, say, Shakespeare, or whatever it is that you thought you'd be doing when you got into this business in the first place, which definitely is not this, who's got the strength to walk away from that paycheck? Sounds familiar. Only he makes way more money than I do, even more easily. Maybe I can relate to him better than I can relate to me.

And of course, am jealous of the big advantage of Paul's being a noncelebrity celebrity who has no dialogue: that he needs next-to-no coverage. While we'll have to spend a full day shooting the rest of the spot, he's able to be entirely shot out in a couple of hours and get out of that jacket, into a private car back to the city, and back to whatever it is Test Man does when he's not testing.

Which he did, and God bless him. But first he went around, air-kissing the clients and saying his goodbyes. He gave me a quick wave.

"See you I'm sure. We've done this like a hundred times together now, right?"
"Something like that," I said.
Just then, one of the other actors came over and shook his hand. "Well, it was very exciting meeting you."
"I know," Paul said, "It's like meeting Sharon Stone, isn't it? I get that a lot."

2007-08-07T22:15:00.000-04:00

Some old and utterly ridiculous set jokes

How tall's a sound person?
I don't know, I've never seen one stand up.

What's the difference between God and a DP?
God doesn't think He's a DP.

How many ADs does it take to change a lightbulb?
Lightbulb?! Nobody said anything about a lightbulb in this shot!

How many producers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Does it actually have to be a lightbulb?

How many agency producers does it take to change a lightbulb?
That's not funny.

How many directors does it take to change a lightbulb?
Just one more! Just one more!

How many wardrobe people does it take to change a lightbulb?
DON'T TOUCH IT IT'S BEEN APPROVED!

How many ACs does it take to change a lightbulb?
Three. One to change it and two to talk about how they did it on the last job.

How many sound guys does it take to change a lightbulb?
Four. One to change it, and three to stand around saying "I was offered that job."

How many prop people does it take to change a lightbulb?
Five. One to hold the lightbulb and four to turn the ladder.

How many electricians does it take to change a lightbulb?
Six. One to change it and five to complain about the catering.

How many grips does it take to change a lightbulb?
I'm not an electrician.

What did the production manager give his kids for Christmas?
Nothing. But he promised he'd make it up to them on the next one.

How can you tell when a teamster's dead?
When the doughnut falls out of his mouth.

How can you tell the teamster kids on the playground?
They're the ones standing around watching the other kids play.

What's the difference between a sound recordist and a generator?
The genny stops whining when the shoot's over.

2007-07-27T11:41:00.000-04:00

That's Hot

Mmm, there's nothing like the smell of New York City in the summer. Unless it's the humidity. Or a subway with no air-conditioning, packed with people trying desperately not to perspire all over their iPods and the latest Harry Potter or make any contact with each other's clammy skin.

Or working in the heat. Though it doesn't have to be summer to be hot on a film set, mind you. It can just be green screen. For some reason not entirely understood by me -- 'cause it's technical, and you know how to me anything technical is about eighth nature (I'm not sure what the first seven natures are but I'm pretty sure they include fidgeting and bacon) -- in order to make green screen work in post, it needs to be lit to the nth power with extremely high-powered lights, and from all sides, so that there are no shadows. So booming on a green screen set is probably as close as a person can get to what it's like to boom on the sun, except that on the sun your eyes would just fry, as opposed to being slowly bled of all desire to live by that horrible Green Eggs and Ham shade that they use for some other reason I don't understand.

Of course, basking in the glow of a thousand HMIs with me is the talent, and it could very well be worse for him/her if he/she has to do his/her job in, say, a long red beard and leprechaun costume (see accompanying bonus monitor prints). One of the lucky charms for me about work is that I can pretty much wear what I want, as long as it doesn't have too many holes or stains and isn't too terribly revealing. Although many women -- no department names, hair, make-up and wardrobe -- do wear skimpy outfits to work, doing that makes me uncomfortable. As frequently the only female on set, I get enough eyeball time as it is, and let's face it, once, as a woman, you become an object of attraction, it's harder to get guys to respect you for your work. Sad but true. So I try to walk that fine line when I dress for hot weather of trying to choose clothes that are comfortable yet appropriate. Whatever, inevitably somebody will still point out that they can see my stomach.

"Can you wear one of your short little shirts for me tomorrow?" Pete the AD always asks me.
"My shirts aren't really short, it's just that when you have your arms over your head –"
"That little bellybutton is just so cute!"
"Sure, Pete. Anything for you."

Sigh. He means well.

Of course, when the weather's hot, then everyone suffers all the time. That's why you're praying for soundstage work all summer, because even if there is air conditioning on location, it's too punk-ass to stand up to all the lights crammed into the room or blazing through the windows, and we'll have to turn it off when we roll anyway because even central air is too noisy. I know, you don't believe me when I say that, because it's inevitably the kind of white background noise, like humming refrigerators, buzzing fluorescents, and people from the agency talking on their cell phones, that everybody else ignores. But it's the combination of us both paying attention and actually hearing the way the stuff is going from microphone on to tape/hard drive that makes us act like what others seem to consider sound fascists, and gives everyone an excuse to play another round of Let's Blame the Sound Department.

"Are you sure we can't run it?"
"Sound says we have to have it off."
"Oh come on, they can hear that?"

Oh, they'll hear it too -- in post. Still, sometimes we'll make exceptions, if it's super super hot and the unit is super super quiet, or if our level of caring has sunk to an all-time low. For the record, when we turn the A/C off, we suffer just as much as everyone else. If you prick us, do we not bleed???

Sometimes I bleed, or at least sweat, more than anyone. I always seem to be booming next to a hot light, or from the top of a ladder, or the top of a bar or a desk, although I used to do that type of thing more when I was working on independent films where there were no ladders, or there was no room for ladders in the cramped locations we shot in, and I was young and reckless and enjoyed standing on the furniture. But in all of these situations, I'm up in the part of the room where all of the heat rises to, and it's amazing just how dramatically the temperature changes for every few inches higher up you go -- when I come down, it's like entering another climate zone. Also amazing is the amount of perspiration one person can generate, as if your body were liquefying, just like that senator in the first X-Men movie.

Probably the most I've ever sweat was the summer day I spent on an indie film called "Frogs for Snakes" when we were shooting in the old Jones Diner, one of those classic, atmospheric diners actually built out of an old diner car. It was like being in a toaster over.

"Hot up there?" asked Ian Hart, one of the stars, looking up at me from his seat at the counter to where I was, standing on it. Which placed the beads of sweat rolling from my kneecaps exactly at his eye level.
"Yeah,"I replied. "How'd you guess?"

He shrugged. Then he started pulling napkins out of the napkin dispenser and sticking them to my shins. I suppose he thought that was cute.

This -- not specifically Irishmen combining my suffering and indiscriminate use of paper products to amuse themselves, but the experience of how easily a location can become sauna-like -- is why I'd rather be shooting outside than in on a hot day. Not that shooting in direct sun in 98-degree weather (that's 36.66666666666667 to those of you living in Celsius) is a picnic either, although people I don't work with sometimes think, based on my savage tan, that that's where I've been, perhaps one in the Caribbean. But usually the answer is no, I've just been standing around in the Giants Stadium parking lot, trying to sneak under the courtesy flag they set for camera, which tends to be a challenge when you've got the DP, the first AC, possibly the 2nd AC, and the dolly grip, all fighting for that one little rectangular patch of shadow. Or I can loiter under the client tent until somebody notices that I'm not one of them, which, believe it or not, generally doesn't take too long. Or I can try to get some portion of my body under the shade of the sound mixer's umbrella, which is generally only wide enough to cover his head and the equipment. Because that's right, our equipment enjoys the heat even less than we do. Too much sun sends DAT machines into error mode and sweat kills our wireless, electrical generators and ballasts overheat, tapes and film stocks can get iffy, and you don't even want to know what happens to those Gummi bears at craft service.

Of course, shooting in the cold sucks too. Crew people have all the top-notch gear -- expedition-grade Goretex, Capilene and Polypropeline for camera, grip and electric, so they can keep moving, while script supervisors who, aside from their constantly scribbling hands, may not move all day long, do their best to completely cocoon themselves in full-length down coats and moon boots. And then there are the sound people, who may own one or two items of serious cold-weather-wear but are really hoping that we can sneak inside or into the client tent, next to a space-heater. Yep, we're cowards, but why should we suffer? And again, it can be roughest on the actors, forced to wear skimpy sundresses or t-shirts if the setting happens to be summer, sucking on ice cubes so you don't see their breath. But at least they can dash into their coats between takes or go to holding between shots, as long as the ADs are looking out for them -- which they aren't always, mind you. And while actors can be prima donnas, on the flip side, actors who aren't Big Name Talent often won't ask for anything for themselves because they don't want to be difficult. They're kind of like your grandmother in that old joke,

How many Jewish grandmothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Never mind, I'll just sit here in the dark.
(Which reminds me, have I told you all my set lightbulb jokes?)

So often, because I'm the one listening to his or her teeth chatter, I might be the only one to notice if an actor's not doing so well.

"Are you all right?"
"No, I'm fine, I'm fine. Although I can't really feel my ears..."
"Pete, do you think maybe he should go inside?"
"TAKE THAT CONVERSATION TO CHANNEL TWO!…Huh?"
"The actor. He's turning blue."
"Oh, yeah. Would you like to step inside?"

Why do we shoot outside in freezing weather? Well, people generally come to New York to shoot what typifies New York, and most of that's exteriors -- Wall Street, Times Square, Yankee Stadium, the Brooklyn Promenade, anything on the Upper West Side if you're Nora Ephron. Combine that with the economic factor of winter being dead dead dead in New York for film work and you've got a lot of people willing to suck it up. Though most of us do draw the line somewhere. My commercial prop friend Jerry told someone he works for that he'd take movie days in the winter, unless they were nights on the Brooklyn Bridge. And sure enough, when he got the call, it was for a week of nights shooting on the Brooklyn Bridge. And that is some cold shit. Even those clothes REI makes for climbing Mount Everest are not designed for standing around for 12, 15 hours at the summit, waiting for a director to decide if Will Smith was Legend enough on the last take. And yet, I'm sure they got an entire crew of people to do that job.

Your feet and hands are always the worst. I once sprained my ankle days before I started a job mixing a low low low budget feature. We were shooting on the wind-whipped Jersey City promenade, and while my circulation is normally bad, squashing all those little capillaries made it ten times worse. I realized at some point, after we'd been out there for a couple of hours, that my foot had started to feel like was having an out-of-body experience, and finally finding time to take a break, went into the bathroom, took off my boots and layers of socks and stuck it in the sink. It was so white and bloodless, it looked like a piece of frozen chicken. I started to run hot water over it, which I couldn't feel at all. By that time, a crowd of crew members had formed, staring down at my foot.

"Wow. That could be the first sign of frostbite."
"What are the signs of frostbite?"
"It probably looks like that."
"No it doesn't."
"Does that mean they'll have to take the toes off?"
"I heard that --"
"I can feel something! OW!"

I didn't get frostbite, but later that same day, my Nagra did lose power during a take. Batteries don't do too well in cold weather either. In fact, equipment in general likes the cold even less than the heat -- and lenses fog, gaffer tape won't stick, cable refuses to coil and recoil properly, just like your muscles won't. At the end of a long day out in the cold, I find myself aching all over from the exertion, not just of booming but of tensing everything to keep warm.

But if you're looking for the ultimate in equipment-and-soul- killing weather, there's nothing like the rain. Most of us have at least some rain gear -- boots, jackets, hats, pants -- as one key grip once said to me, "You're not serious without the pants"-- but unless you're wearing a rubber suit, none of it's going to keep you dry for too long in a steady downpour. Which will not, necessarily, keep us from shooting, mind you, because one of the great ironies of production is that, unless the rain is really really hard or backlit, there's a good chance you won't see it on film. And very often, they didn't plan for a rain day and they don't have a cover set to go to, and let's face it, if the calculus becomes shoot in the rain or start hemorrhaging money faster than you can say "Chapter 11," which one would you do? So production will cover the camera, keep the actors covered with a flat and attack any stray drops on their wardrobe with a hairdryer between takes, put up a courtesy tent for sound and video, and cross their fingers. Everyone lives in fear of what happened to one sound guy I used to work with who had a pop-up tent collapse on him, dumping water all over his perhaps $30-$50,000-worth of sound cart. Thank God for insurance, but at that point your day is basically over, and the rest of your week you will spend non-stop on the phone, scrambling together another sound package from the rental houses as you simultaneously try to reorder every piece that you lost. It's not pretty.

All you can do is try to be prepared -- which if you've got a cart really means having your own tent, or at the very least a couple of waterproof tarps. But I don't have a cart. In the Life Below The Line Booming Kit, Summer Edition, you will find headphones, a belt with some carabineers and a pouch containing a stereo-to-mono adaptor, scissors, some old moleskin and an apparently broken flashlight, a sweatshirt, a rain jacket, maybe rain pants, sometimes a change of shoes, sunscreen, lip balm, Advil, Pepto-Bismol, gum, and a couple of old New Yorkers. In case you were wondering. Winter Edition: add long johns, wool sweater, wool socks, fleece, heavy boots, hat, scarf, gloves, maybe a couple of toe warmers, and then, well, you're not exactly ready for anything, since we know that in our business anything really means ANYTHING, but you're ready.

Because right now, it's hazy and the sun is out, but they're predicting a 30% chance of Isolated T-Storms at weather.com -- not to be confused with the Scattered T-Storms they're predicting for tomorrow, even though they each show the same little stormy cloud icon with the sun peeking out from behind it, so will somebody please tell me what the hell is the difference?! As if they know anything anyway, since we are, after all, talking about the weather.

2007-07-26T11:51:00.001-04:00

New Mouse Pad

Goodbye old mouse pad, you will be missed.

2007-07-26T11:47:00.000-04:00

Old Mouse Pad

2007-06-22T16:27:00.000-04:00

Dog Days

They say that the three things you should never work with as a filmmaker are children, animals, and water. Suffice to say, I've managed to find ways to work frequently with all three.

At the beginning, this was entirely my fault. My first film in film school was the de rigeur NYU student film about the homeless, but for the second I somehow wrote something requiring a five-year-old. Luckily, this was a non-sync film and so all she had to do was look cute and play video games, both things that come naturally to most children. Having survived that experience relatively unscathed, I next took on water, choosing to convey the deep meaning of the line "'Til human voices wake us, and we drown" in my cinematic interpretation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (described in more embarrassing detail in a previous blog) by having a tweed homburg worn earlier by the character of "Prufrock" wash up on the beach at the Jersey Shore. Maybe it wasn't exactly what Eliot intended but ooh, the symbolism! Getting the Atlantic Ocean to behave exactly the way I wanted only took about 17 takes, and the arty flashframey shots of my legs scurrying after the hat, trying to keep it from going out to sea, were a great addition to the credit sequence outtakes -- which were, unfortunately, the best part of the film.

Not having had my fill of people and things unable take direction, I decided to make a dog a main character in my thesis film -- one who, naturally, appears in nearly every scene. This being a low-budget production (one that still plunged me into credit card debt for several years), I could not afford an animal trainer, and so scouted dog schools looking for a likely candidate, eventually ending up with Emma, a cute but unprofessional little critter who made everybody's life hell. One of my most vivid memories of that production was trying to get Emma to look at the camera by having Ted, my lead actor, who she'd decided was her favorite person on that particular day (the position was always up for grabs), stand right next to it while Emma's owner fed Ted Emma's favorite food, Wheat Thins, and the both of them called, "Emma! Emma! Look, Emma!" in perky voices, over and over and over again. I think I may even have photos of this somewhere (which I can't seem to find, but while looking, I did dig up some old set photos, one of which is offered above as a complete non sequitur).

But since I began working on other people's projects and lost control over my own destiny, I've worked with plenty more animals, and I'm not just talking about the ones who walk on two legs and spend all their time on the phone screaming at their agents and hitting on PAs. The long list includes cats of various sizes from house to jungle, parrots, butterflies, cows –- which are much, much bigger than you think they are -- and one very independent-minded skunk who, instead of walking straight toward the actress like he was supposed to, would get about half-way there and then bolt off course, on the exact same trajectory every time, forcing one to wonder, are skunks really stupid, or are they really really smart and are they just fucking with us?

Oh, and one fake ferret puppet operated via a couple of long sticks by a little British puppeteer, who originally built it as a mink for the film "Bright Lights, Big City" something like 15 years before it showed up on our commercial –- so really, one had to admire both its longevity and its versatility. And its ability to jump from the coffee table to the poor actor's face through enough takes that the guy had to get a bag of ice for his nose. This was before he had to gyrate wildly about the room while biting on a bite guard attached to a rubber tongue to which the ferret was, in turn, attached, apparently not very well because it kept flying off and hitting the wall during the take –- which might well be the outcome if you were actually trying to remove a ferret from your tongue, but it was not supposed to happen in the spot. So we did it again, and again, and again, until finally, the only solution was that the actor had to try to inconspicuously hold the ferret to his face while running, screaming, and, finally, dialing a text message into his cell phone, finally bringing us to the tag line: "When you can't talk, Verizon text messaging!"

Speaking of puppet animals, I've also worked with Alf, who is actually two puppeteers, one a really obnoxious guy who operates his mouth while doing the voice of Alf. It may come as no big surprise to anyone that Alf's off-screen persona is a pain in the ass given his on-screen persona, but one would hardly expect him to be, also, both surly and egotistical –- especially considering that the man was famous for playing what is described on IMDb as "a furry alien wiseguy" whose show has been off the air for close to 15 years and that, since his guest spot on Hollywood Squares in 2004, Alf's work has been reduced to doing commercials with Hulk Hogan. Or then again, maybe that's exactly why. (Hulk Hogan, for the record, is quite nice).

But before I went off on what I like to delude myself was a vaguely relevant puppet tangent, I was getting to the point that most of the animals I've worked with are dogs. Still uniquely popular in the vernacular of All-American pets, most dogs are also uniquely smart, patient, willing and obedient, which in this case works to their disadvantage because it gets them into situations any dog with a modicum of intelligence –- which is about what most of them have -- would normally choose to stay, far, far away from. This is why, inevitably, a day of working with dogs involves a good deal of waiting, shouting, cajoling, and at least a couple of people making total idiots out of themselves in the interest of getting said dogs to do something that is, if not completely unreasonable, at least unnatural and probably embarrassing for them, if they feel embarrassment, which I'm pretty sure some of them do.

On a good day, they just have to sell their little doggie souls for snacks. Like on the commercial I worked on for Frontline –- a brand name I was unfamiliar with but quickly deduced, from all the scratching going on in front of the camera, is a type of flea and tick repellent. There were three dogs doing the scratching, two pugs named Chi Chi and Mu Shu and a Boston terrier named Buster. They were all pretty good, although Buster seemed to have more of an attention-span problem than the other two because whenever Buster was on set, Al, our first AD, had to call for all talking to stop so Buster could concentrate.

"They're great dogs though. I had two Boston Terriers when I was a kid," said Al, looking a bit misty in a way you don't expect in a man who has the size, shape and swagger of a former football player gone to seed. This is what dogs do to people.
"He seems talented," I replied. "And these trainers seem very good. I've never seen them before."
"These girls are the real deal," said Al. "They worked on 'Men in Black 2.' Mu Shu is the dog from 'Men in Black 2,' Mu Shu is Frank." Then he turned in that sudden way unique to ADs and schizophrenics and called into his headset, "Quiet please! Buster on set! BUSTER IS ON SET!"

I made this remark because, generally, dog trainers make up their own, feral species who seem as if they had, themselves, been plucked straight from the wild, snarling and squirming. They arrive on set disheveled and smelling like the smoky doggie meat treats they always have smushed in their hands and pockets. They have no people skills, tending to be much more comfortable talking to their animals, who they seem to believe can understand them perfectly but insist on ignoring them. Like when one said to a dog I was working with a couple of weeks ago, "Oh, you're pulling your 'Sex and the City' crap again, eh?" I realized then that the dog was, indeed, Pete, Aidan's dog, but the only crap he seemed to be pulling was being too eager to get up off the couch and get his treat, probably because he hadn't eaten all day.

The Frontline job dog trainers, however, were two pretty, well-coiffed ladies in ironed black jeans who actually talked to the dogs like they were, well, dogs, and wore snazzy aprons with their company logo and their various tools and treats at the ready.

"Good job! Good doggie!" they chirped. Over, and over, and over again.
"Hit the dog in the butt with the ball, hit him in the butt!" responded the director, an avant-garde-styled guy named Travis with dyed-black hair, two earrings and a chunky Ankh pendant over an abundance of chest hair displayed through the wide-open collar of a Guyabera. Although he would probably have preferred to be directing a Jane's Addiction video than bossing around a dog who was more famous than he was, he was still clearly having all the fun he could.

"That's funny as crap!" he exclaimed after a shot where they had two of the dogs pulled across the stage in a tiny wooden car and trailer. "To have Mu Shu in the back there is just extra stupid." We also got to see the dogs get chased around the stage by a remote-control monster truck.

Of course, by then we'd all completely lost interest. Having to wait on anyone or anything is very trying for a film crew, much less having to wait while not talking or making any sudden movements -- the only things that keep us awake. Forcing one to contemplate (or maybe not "one," because maybe I'm the only "one" who sits around thinking about these things in her downtime -- I mean, it's either that or go back to craft service): is it worse for the pugs or for those of us who are fully cognizant that we are waiting on pugs?

Sometimes, there's no doubt. In another spot, featuring a family of commercial actors having dinner, all of their food was made to hover around above the table, the joke being that young Timmy, or whatever his name was, was upstairs reading about astronauts on the web, and Verizon internet is just that good. Ha ha. What really was funny was watching five skilled but not particularly graceful prop guys dance around the table, dangling the food on long metals skewers that were going to be Photoshopped out later, trying to make it all look gravity-defying. But then came the real challenge: making the dog float.

The dog's name was Camille but the director, a nice although self-centered (as is the nature of his species) director named Dan, decided, for some reason, to call her "Mr. Pickles." I'm not sure how Camille felt about this but it infuriated her trainer, a woman with a steel-grey puff of hair and a drooping scowl that looked it like it was just dying to have a cigarette hanging from it, who had the improbable name of Melanie.

"She's getting upset! This is very confusing to her!"

It was a losing battle, because naturally the new name caught like wildfire, as such things will with film crews, until everyone was calling Camille "Mr. Pickles." Apparently the woman who was monitoring the shoot from the Society for the Ethical Treatment of Animals did not consider renaming to be a form of dog abuse worth noting on her little clipboard because she allowed it to continue, unabated.

"Can we have Mr. Pickles on set?" called Dan.
"There's nobody here by that name!" squawked Melanie from the other room.

But come Mr. Pickles did for her big moment: to be put into a harness, one not-too-cleverly concealed with fake fur of not entirely the correct shade of off-white dog, that was then hauled across a wire on a pulley operated by all five prop guys, causing the dog to bob through the air, narrowly missing the heads of the actors. The man in charge of the process was a young prop guy named Mike, typical of the species Hot Artdepartmenticus –- rebellious yet handy and identifiable by it's large number of tatoos -- who clearly hadn't come into this day knowing that he'd be spending the latter portion of it trying to comfort a poor dog that he was in large part responsible for making airborne. This was particularly necessary once we got to the commercial's punch-line, which required that when Timmy or Bobby or whatever comes down to dinner, everything floating falls, including Mr. Pickles herself, in several variations thought up by the agency which were super confusing to a dog not happy to be in flight in the first place. She no sooner got used to being caught by the dad -- one-handed, which took some work so that her little furry body wouldn't tip forward or backward in the harness forcing her to scramble about for a place to put her paws –- than she, instead, was allowed to plummet, nearly hitting the floor. Dan the director asked Melanie how Mr. Pickles was doing after she nearly went splat.

"She just doesn't want to do too many more," the weary trainer replied.

While I can't speak to her psychic wounds –- we may yet see poor Camille on "The Dog Whisperer," biting and growling at anyone who utters the word "pickles" –- the dog finished the day unhurt, and she was a trouper. She got a well-deserved round of applause from everyone, and even if its enthusiasm was due partly to guilt at having been witnesses to her on-set humiliation and partly schadenfreude at not having been the victims of it, at least not that day, with some snuggling and a few extra goodies, she seemed happy enough.

Leaving only those of us with the power of reflection to face the question: This is what we do for a living?

2007-05-16T21:51:00.000-04:00

I Need New Knees

Somewhere around this time last year, a friend of mine had a birthday, and she decided to get a group of her friends to go out dancing at a Manhattan club's Goth Night. This in and of itself was an experience. Who knew there were still Goths, much less enough of them that they could have their own night? And yet there they were, some of them young kids who probably thought that Goth was a really cool and original thing that they themselves had come up with (I hate young people), others old fogies like us who clearly wanted to relive their golden years of angst, but all of them in black, with jewelry that looked like it could poke your eye out, dancing wildly to Depeche Mode.

Not being the owner of enough high-end black club-wear, I was clad inappropriately in brown. Still, I like to dance and I was having a damn good time. Until I had to stop, because my knees hurt.

I know I have mentioned before that I have bad knees, the kind of knees that a person should not have in her late 30s -- or in her late 20s, which was when they suddenly appeared, attached to my legs, the legs that I thought I had known my entire life. Not that these legs had not betrayed me in the past. It started with the running, and the fact that I am built poorly for it, which is why I've also had shin splints and ankle problems, because I have the unfortunate combination of hips and flat feet, which pronate, and thus, according to my first orthopedist, who seemed to think he had a sense of humor, I "run like a girl." Ha ha.

But a large problem with my knees is, of course, the film business. When you bend all day and lift heavy shit you have to use either your knees or your back, and after learning the hard way, in film school, that using my back often meant not being able to move for several days, I went on to wear away all of the cartilage surrounding my kneecaps. I suppose it's sort of neat to see someone who has done this to themselves, at least my physical therapists seemed to think so, because I remember them standing over my kneecaps for several minutes, moving them around.

"Wow, look at that," said one of them.
"Yeah," said the other, "they're so mobile."

"You should get carbon-fiber knees," suggested the French guy I was dating at the time. "Like the skiers."

Not being Jean-Claude Killy or somehow otherwise in possession of the gold medals to melt down to pay for such new knees, I chose instead to lift leg weights at the gym, wear an unflattering and itchy knee brace from time to time, and leave it at that. But it was not to be the last time I would be made to feel like a medical oddity.

At some point, when I had finally gotten comfortable with the low-grade status of my knees, I started having problems with my stomach. In my family we are not strangers to indigestion, probably because we are accustomed to eating everything in sight without any real regard for the concept of hunger, or even peckishness. But I found that I was having it all the time.

I went to Dr. B, my GP, and she sent me to a GE. Dr. M was a chipper young man who had the ability to seem really, really engaged with you for the three minutes of his time that he allowed you to sit in his office. He prescribed a battery of tests that began with something only mildly humiliating -- having to collect my own stool sample -- and progressed to a combined endoscopy and colonoscopy, which required not eating for 18 hours in advance except for clear liquids and jello and then ingesting some horrible substance in powder form that completely voided my system, all night long. Dr. M's pleasant bedside manner didn't keep him from making fun of my incoherence the next day when I came in to have the procedure.

"So when did you eat last?"
"I don't remember exactly…"
"You don't know?"
"It was whatever time they said to stop eating."
He turned to share a chuckle with the anesthesiologist. "Ha ha, you're a little hypoglycemic, aren't you?" Then they put me under.

The next time I saw him was when I came in to get the results. He pulled out a detailed, color illustration of the human digestive system on a slender piece of paper similar to the placemats you see at family restaurants -- though why anyone would want to eat off of a picture of their intestines I have no idea -- and placed it on the desk between us.

"Well, you have a stomach in the shape of a J," he began, modifying the bottom of the cute little stomach by extending it into a slight curve. "Which is interesting, but doesn't have anything to do with your problem. You also," he continued, "have a hiatal hernia."
"Oh," I said, sitting up a little straighter at the sound of the word "hernia." Now we were getting somewhere.
"Which is not uncommon, it just means that this little flap here--" he circled a small, rose-colored area at the top of the stomach "-- stays open and allows acid to bubble up into the esophagus. This might be related, but it's not what's causing your problem. The good news is --" he moved his pen along a long, puce stretch above the circled flap, "-- there's no esophageal damage. So it seems you just have IBS. Irritable Bowel Syndrome."

Irritable Bowel Syndrome. It sounds pretty nasty, not to mention like something else that people should only have when they're old, and crotchety. But apparently this is not the case, as many young people, particularly women, get IBS. So what does it mean?

"It means there's basically nothing wrong with you," said Dr. M, handing me the picture, apparently thinking that I might enjoy further contemplation my J-shaped stomach at home. "But I'd like to do one more test."

He drew blood, and got back to me with the results a week later.

"You're lactose intolerant," he announced triumphantly. "You just need to stop eating dairy."

I did. I also gave up coffee, Indian food, peanut butter, and for a while, wheat, eggs, alcohol, and pretty much everything that makes life worthwhile, until there was nothing I could eat, or at least not eat without fear. I lost weight. I went on Aciphex, then Prilosec, then Nexium. Things would get better, then worse again. At one point, the pain made its way all the way up to my ears, and I wasn't sure if this was related. Dr. B sent me to an ear doctor.

"Let's give you a hearing test," said Dr. D when, after an hour, I was finally given admittance to his inner sanctum. Nobody else there seemed to mind waiting, they seemed to think they had all the time in the world, which they were clearly wrong about because the median age in the waiting room was 75.
"But there's nothing wrong with my hearing," I said.
"How do you know?" he said. "Have you ever had a hearing test?"

The hearing test consisted of wearing headphones where tones were played in each ear at random intervals and varying volumes and frequencies. Having had this done to me fairly often by sound mixers over the years, I found it strangely comforting.

"You seem to have had some hearing loss in your right ear," said Dr. D. "That's fairly common, though. It could be caused by loud subway trains, or sirens…" Perhaps children and method actors screaming at high volume without warning? Probably not something included in most medical journals. "Anyway, I didn't see anything abnormal. But just in case, I'd like you to get an MRI."
"Wow. Really?"
"We just want to rule everything out."

Everything being a brain tumor? This was immediately where my mind went, and I know what you're thinking, because I was starting to think the same thing myself: when did I become such a fucking hypochondriac? I'd had a healthy childhood. In my mother's world, we were not sick unless we had a fever of over 100 so I hawked and sneezed my way through school every winter, and took it like a…well, like a sniveling child, but that's what I was. I'd had my quotient of the usual childhood diseases -- chicken pox, stomach flu, strep throat -- but that was the worst of it. My brother even got all the allergies. So before the knee business started, I'd really only gone to the doctor for my annual check-up, if even then. But maybe it's because of this that I was also unused to dealing with the medical profession. I trusted doctors, and assumed that, like my mother, who had formerly been the one to determine whether or not I was sick, they had an interest in keeping me well. It never occurred to me that a doctor would ask for a hearing test if I didn't need a hearing test for the sake of, let's say, getting more money out of my insurance company. I just thought, This guy's wearing a lab coat, and who am I to say I don't have a brain tumor?

So I went for the MRI. I had it done at a place called "Stand-Up MRI," not as in "he's a stand-up kinda guy," as one might hope, but as in you physically stand up when you get one -- which is, in fact, preferable to lying in that claustrophobic little tube the way I'd had to do for my knees. Actually, since I was having my head examined, I was able to sit, and even watch a movie, though not one of my choice.

"You have to sit very very very still, you cannot move at all," squawked the technician's voice through the loudspeaker that was pumped into my little white room. He repeated this adamantly every time he was about to take an image, which made me think that either I was somehow moving without my knowing it, or that the last person who'd been in there had had some sort of uncontrollable twitch. Still, after about 20 minutes, he released me.

"You did very well," he said, looking pleased. "You only moved a little bit on the last one, like this." He demonstrated, tilting his head ever so slightly to the side, like a confused dog, or as if perhaps Jim Carrey's performance in "The Majestic" had somehow moved me. Heck, anything was possible at this point.

"You're perfectly fine," Dr. D told me, looking at the translucent, black and white images of my skull taken from four different angles. "It's probably just the acid reflux." Ka-ching for him.

The acid reflux wasn't going anywhere, apparently. I went back to see Dr. B.

"Are you under a lot of stress?" she asked.
"No," I replied. "I mean, not more than usual."
"Well, there's nothing physically wrong with you," said Dr. B. "Maybe you need to go on medication."
"I'm already on Nexium," I said.
"No," she replied, "I mean you need to go on medication."
"Oh."

I was already in therapy. I mean, it's New York, who isn't? Plus, I've got a few issues, in case you haven't noticed. But this was the first time anyone had ever suggested I was crazy enough to be making myself sick.

Dr. B recommended psychiatrist Dr. L, who did not wear a white lab coat, in fact, she was turned-out in a stylishly sexy short skirt, furry sweater, and chunky jewelry. But she still seemed authoritative because she was European. She welcomed me with an icy smile and then walked me into another room to watch a videotape. It began with Dr. L reading off the teleprompter with a deer-in-the-headlights expression, accentuated by the fact that she appeared in the video without her hip glasses, the kind that architects wear.

"I'm going to ask you a series of questions," she began, in her Teutonic accent. "Answer the questions simply 'yes' or 'no'…Has there ever been a time, when you were not your usual self, when you were so irritable that you started fights or screamed at other people? Answer question one now."

I looked at the accompanying clipboard where I was supposed to mark my answers. It read, "Irritable? Screaming fights?" Did tightly-wound sound mixers or assistant directors screaming at me count? I suddenly thought of a couple of people who perhaps could have benefited from watching this tape. Then I marked "no."

"Has there ever been a time, when you were not your usual self, when you felt as if you could not stop talking? Answer question two now..."

This went on for about a dozen questions. Had I ever not been my usual self and had too much energy? Had I ever not been my usual self and spent money uncontrollably?

"Now watch this video. In it, you will see a series of people telling stories about themselves. If you hear something you identify with, write it down."

What followed was a series of badly-produced and poorly-acted off-speed re-enactments to moody music, showing people behaving like, well, mental patients. All of this in front of a background of animated images of a sky going from blue to cloudy. It was all sooo subliminal, what could it possibly mean???

"So, you think you have some tendency for manic depression?" asked Dr. L. I wasn't sure how she was getting this from the series of "no"s and empty spaces on my clipboard. Then again, she hadn't really looked at it.
"Well, no. Depression, maybe, but I'm in therapy to deal with a few problems --"
"Yes, but these things are chemical. Do you worry about these problems?"
"Yeah, sometimes. I can obsess over things."
"Has this always been true?"

I thought back, to the report I'd written on salamanders in third grade, which extended to five blue test booklets full of pencil-drawn lizards and run-on sentences punctuated with SAT words. I thought of how, at age 11, I'd developed insomnia over the possibility of nuclear war. I recalled a paper on Ancient Greece in 7th grade, that ended up being over 50 hand-written pages, on which I'd attempted my first all-nighter, only making it to 3 am, my cheek indented with the grain of the table when I woke up the next morning (to a snow day! Boy was that cool...).

"I guess you could say that," I grudgingly replied.

Dr. L put me on Lexapro. It didn't seem to do anything, so she switched me to Depakote, which did seem to keep me obsessing a bit less over, say, whether or not I should leave my boyfriend, although who's to say this was not something worth obsessing over? But the dosage irritated my stomach. That's right: the reason I'd started taking the drugs in the first place, and it was making it worse.

"We can cut back on the Depakote," said Dr. L, on this day dressed in a fiery orange tweed suit and gold pumps. "But then you'll have to take the Ambien to help you with the sleeping. Have you been taking the Ambien?"
"Well, sometimes, but I don't want to take it every night…"
"Depression causes brain damage. It causes dementia in later life. Which is worse, taking a pill every night or dementia?"

I had no snappy comeback for this.

"If you don't want to take the Ambien, you could go the natural way," she continued. "This means setting your schedule so you get up every morning at 4 or 5 am. This is the best thing for your mood. The most productive and successful people get up this early, you always read this. Of course, then you must be in bed by 8:30."
" Do these people live in New York? I don't really have a regular schedule so it could be tough -- "
"I don't see why. This is not Southern Europe where you must eat at nine or ten o'clock at night, here it should be fairly easy."

I went home wondering if I should move to Southern Europe just so I could be cut some slack, but then realized I couldn't, because Dr. M had told me that if you have acid reflux, you're supposed to eat at least three to four hours before you go to bed. This also ruled out parts of Latin America, and probably Iceland. But as I continued to contemplate, or perhaps obsess over, depending on your choice of terms, the list of places I could not now visit, I realized something: not that I could get up at 4 or 5 am every day, hell no, if we were talking bad moods, there's nothing that puts me in a crappier one more than getting up before 7 -- just ask the people I work with. But the fact that it kept coming up: my lifestyle. Here I'd been going to all these doctors -- I now had a section just for them in my address book and it was the length of my arm. I had diagnoses for several different parts of my body. But I wasn't really trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It occurred to me one day when I was late, racing to get the subway, which I just missed, and having to wait another 20 minutes, knowing that my being late to work would stress out my boss and that he would take it out on me all day, that I would return, at the end of that day, having accomplished nothing I could be proud of, to a home where things weren't good either. I felt stuck with a job and a relationship that were taking me nowhere, and frustrated at not getting what I needed from pretty much anything in my life. And I'd come to think of that as normal.

I stopped going to the doctors. With all the free time that gave me, I put together an after-school program and started writing this blog. Then I broke up with my boyfriend, put all my stuff in storage and went away for seven weeks by myself; climbed some volcanoes, jumped off some waterfalls, hitchhiked, talked to strangers -- I had no choice, everyone was a stranger -- and in general, stopped worrying about what I ate or how much I slept. Sure, sometimes I suffered, but in general, I felt healthier than I ever had. Eventually I came home, got a new place, finished a new screenplay, started teaching college. This year I even stopped going to therapy -- partly because my therapist seemed to have filled my slot in her schedule, but I figured she must have thought I was healthy enough to drop. Either that or she got sick of dealing with my insurance. And I got off the meds. Not that I don't think they're a good idea for lots of people, but they really weren't doing much for me. Besides, if I didn't obsess a little, I'd be unrecognizable.

Not that my life is perfect. I wouldn't try to get that past you people, who've spent enough time here listening to me bitch about the thorns in this bed of roses to know better. But a couple of months ago, I managed to trek for four days straight in these knees, up and down some pretty serious mountains, as well as go clubbing until 5 am in Buenos Aires. I still avoid dairy and spicy food, but sometimes I cheat. And while I've let go of a lot of things, I've still got those MRI images of my skull. I think some day they would make a nice lampshade.

2007-04-22T21:41:00.000-04:00

Why We Write

Soon after arriving back here in lovely and talented New York City, I was hired to work on a commercial in Times Square. Specifically, it was an internet commercial for hair products, where some to-me-unrecognizable media personality types -- all three of them gay men, I guess because they were hawking hair products and all men who do anything hair-related are required to be gay? -- picked women off the street to talk into a microphone shaped like a big brush.

Spending the day in Times Square talking to random strangers was kind of like instant immersion back into the culture. Except from the tourist point of view, since nobody who lives here would be caught dead in Times Square, unless we were getting paid to be there, because we can't stand all the tourists. It's bad enough that we have to be packed in, cheek by jowl, with the people who actually live here, but these camera-slinging, shorts-wearing gapers, clogging the sidewalks when the rest of us are already ten minutes late (and aren't we all perpetually ten minutes late?) must be avoided at all cost. Have you noticed that New Yorkers don’t wear shorts? Ever? It's not because we're scared to show our pasty, white legs, although that is also a factor, especially this time of year. It's because we don't want to look like we're from the Midwest. Or Germany.

Having just been a tourist for several weeks, you'd think I would have a little more sympathy. But no, I carried my hatred of tourists with me, so I had to work desperately not to be one: no backpack except while hiking, no taking out the map and staring at it on street corners (although, realistically, in Buenos Aires, it's impossible not to do this because the place is so damn huge), and I never went shorter than the occasional skirt, or, okay, capris. And I had reason to believe that I was fairly successful.

"No, you don't look like a tourist," one Argentinian acquaintance said. "Your friend, though, the Canadian, she really looks like one, so if you're with her, forget it."

"With your coloring, you look like you could be Argentinian, from the North," another friend told me. "As long as you don't say anything."

Oh well.

Another job I had soon after my return was on a commercial for British tv, featuring a scene in which the main character walks up 8th Avenue, encountering all of these "typical New Yorkers." My job on this spot was to run around, miking all the actors, and one thing I do in such situations, to test our mic placement and levels, is to ask, "Can you just say what you're going to say, the way you're going to say it?" To which I got the following responses:

Guy with crooked eye who runs after cab: "Hey! That's my cab, son of man!"
Cart of boxes pusher: "Coming through, move it move it move it!"
Flyerer: "Yo, check it out, check it out, show right here…(to cell phone) No, baby, we were just dancing. I'm telling you, it was just –- Baby, listen…"
Japanese tour-guide: "(stream of hyperkinetic Japanese)."
Woman on cell phone talking to her lawyer: "No, you need to let her know that she's the one, she's the one who's liable here!"
Religious maniac: "The rapture is coming! The rapture is coming!" which they then changed because it was too religiousy to
Just plain maniac: "I am the greatest director, not you! You hear me? The Academy Awards know nothing!"
(Maybe he was more of an egomaniac).
Pushy older lady getting into cab with dog: "Grammercy Park, 26th and 3rd…Are you getting out or what?"

I suppose this is how we natives are perceived. One of the people I met while traveling described me, in one of his group e-mails to the folks back home as "a very likable young woman from New York." I think the implication being that we are mostly unlikable. But at least I was worth mentioning, notable for being of that loud, brash, Brooklyn teamster accent-sporting (you don't know how many times I got asked why I didn't have an accent), culturally-adept if insane and irascible alien species, and therefore fascinating without my having to work at it. And this is yet another reason why coming home can be so hard. You're forced to be the old you again, not the shiny, new, I can be anybody I want because I'll probably never see these people again you, but the real, exhaust-breathing, tourist-hating, how can this martini cost half my hourly wage, waiting 40 minutes for the F train at midnight, I'll never, ever get a table at Babbo you. On the other hand, it's nice to be around those with whom you have the same language and cultural norms, who can tell when you're joking, not to mention those who will listen to you complain and on whom you can't make a negative impression even if you try because for them, you are already irredeemable -- or perhaps endlessly redeemable, since they've already put up with so much of your shit that they can't stop now. They are, in other words, your friends.

But I have tried, for as long as possible, to keep my travelers' eyes, through which everything looks new and interesting, every day another adventure to be explored. It doesn't last, believe me. Still, when we were shooting in Times Square, a young man came up and asked me and the cameraman I was working with if he could film us talking about what we were doing. Not used to facing the business end of a camera, we said some fairly useless stuff about how we'd been standing around the center of the greatest city in the world since really early in the morning, and would pretty much be stuck there all day. But our young friend was overjoyed. I always forget that to some people, my life looks pretty interesting.

Maybe sometimes it is. One day on the British tv commercial, when I was lugging my cases to the next location, I heard a voice yell out, "Hey, you want a lift?" It was James Gandolfini, who was playing the lead in the spot, and he and his teamster, Joe (who I think really is from Brooklyn), pulled over his SUV to give me a ride. As we drove to Sardi's, the famous New York theater hangout where we were getting ready to film our next scene, we talked a little about the way the theater district was changing, about how they were still shooting "Sopranos" when they were supposed to be wrapped in January. When we arrived, he unloaded my cases for me and carried them over (I protested at first but let's face it, they're heavy and the guy's a lot bigger than I am) before saying goodbye and going off to lunch. By my standards, it wasn't like anything really happened, it wasn't even good blog-fodder (although now it has become that), but as one of my friends later pointed out to me, "How many people do you know who get to ride with Tony Soprano?" Still, especially when I'm sitting in front of my computer on a Saturday night (shocking, I know, but true), sometimes I have to remind myself of that. I think that's the real reason why I write this stuff down.

But you have to be careful not to let it get to be the other way around. Back in Times Square, before he left, our new tourist friend gave me a somewhat sad-looking homemade business card listing himself as "Singer/Songwriter/Musician" and the address for his myspace blog –- which I have since checked out, noting that he considered his trip a way to "promote my music/film footage for my music video & experience my first trip to the U.S.A , (sic) & discover one of the most famous cities in the world." And I wondered, In that order? Of course I also noticed that his blog gets way more hits than mine -- maybe I should have spent more of my travel time handing out business cards (although that wouldn't have gotten me anywhere since I can't put my blog on my cards. Damn you, anonymity!) But I guess, at the time, I was thinking more about seeing the glacier than how I was going to tell everyone about it later. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy to have the photographs. But you can't live solely with the intention of turning your experiences into material for later use. Unless, of course, you call life later use.

2007-04-03T07:55:00.000-04:00

Martha, Martha, Martha or Who you callin' "bitch"?!

The first time I worked with Martha Stewart was about nine years ago. Back then she was really MARTHA, the house and home mogul, the design and cooking legend, the Martha for whom litigation was not even a gleam in the SEC's eye. I was hired to boom on her Christmas special, which was being shot at her cozy little estate out in Nutley, New Jersey.

The shoot took place in a small guesthouse adjacent to the main house. As one might expect, it was appropriately festooned in fir and holiday finery -- lots of green and gold throw-pillows. Truth to tell, though, I didn't get much of a chance to scope out the place. Soon after I arrived, I started looking for my spot -- a key part of my job: finding the ideal booming spot, from which I have an decent view of both the action and the camera, and from which I can most easily reach the actors with the mic without causing shadows or unnecessary destruction. I'm very serious about my spot and I don't like to share it with anyone except the first AC, and I only do that when I don't have a choice, so fair warning to the still photographer or daydreaming prop guy who finds themselves in it: they could well end up with an elbow in the eye. Not on purpose necessarily, sometimes that's just how it is if I'm trying to do my job and you're in my way and you don't move when I ask nicely and then not so nicely. It's the asking not so nicely that often gets me into trouble. Anyway, it was at some point during this process of searching for the spot that I caught Martha fixing her laser-like gaze on me. Two minutes later, the mixer told me I was going to be spending the day outside.

"Why?" I asked. "I didn't touch anything, I swear --"

"She doesn't like having so many people around," said the sound mixer. "I'll just have to put a radio mic on her and do the day that way."

So I watched the shoot from the video remote van. It was a particularly long day because at some point, after we'd shot for an hour or two, Martha came out to look at the footage and said, "That's how I look in this sweater? I look terrible in this sweater! Why didn't anyone tell me how terrible I look?" And everything had to be re-shot.

Such being the nature of my first Martha experience, it was easy to believe what everyone said: that she was a high-maintenance bitch. But I also had some other facts to work with. I knew that she was a former model who, dumped by her husband, went on to form her own media empire based on home-making -- as if just to say to him, "Fuck you, I can make my home with or without your ass!" I thought that was somewhat impressive. Plus, people in the media, particularly women, do have to pay a ridiculous amount of attention to their appearances -- because everyone else does. Martha isn't a paparazzi-magnet of the caliber of, say, a Lindsey Lohan, and her fashion dos and don't are not guaranteed to make the pages of People. But they certainly do matter to a lot of people who will notice if she's looking too old/ugly/heavy/sloppy or anything else a homemaking queen should not look.

Plus, I'd heard a story about how, during the shooting of the previous Christmas special, she'd run into a grip coming out of her bathroom who said to her, "I really don't think you want to go in there..." I picture this being said in a heavy Brooklyn accent by a meaty guy with plumbers' butt (apologies to my grip friends but you know who I'm talking about), even as what he's referring to wafts into Martha's sensitive nostrils, overwhelming her holiday pine-and-cinnamon-scented potpourri, and I got some idea of why she might want to minimize the number of people on her turf. Potential situations like this one are among the reasons you couldn't pay/beg/coerce/extort me into allowing a film crew to shoot in my house. That and the certain damage to be inflicted on any and all surfaces, the extreme likelihood that these strangers will be displacing you from every room you will need to use until all hours of the night, and the knowledge that, in the tremendous boredom of their downtime, they will inevitably be snooping through, and making fun of, your photos, treasured heirlooms, and taste in artwork and furnishings (not that I've ever done this myself). Being uptight about this stuff does seem contrary to the idea of bringing a crew to shoot at your house, annually. Still, it made sense to me why we'd been consigned to the guest house only.

Nevertheless, the second time I worked with Martha, I was prepared for trouble. It was on a K-Mart commercial for a Martha's own line of garden-ware, a spot which featured lithe, young dancers twirling around pieces of patio furniture to a sassy beat, with Martha in the middle doing the occasional line or beauty pose. It was being directed by a commercial director who was something of a fussbudget himself -- the kind of director who brings his laptop to set so he can play his iTunes and check his e-mail, and insists on having the grips set up a stand for it, and the electrics run power to it, and the sound team run speakers for it, and a PA to help move it when necessary -- the kind of director who basically requires a separate crew altogether to fulfill his personal manpower needs. So between him and Martha, I was kind of curious to see who would be the first to throw down.

But I was also prepared for the worst when she arrived on set and her eyes settled upon me, where I was standing, in my spot, trying to blend into the fake shrubbery.

"I have a funny story to tell you," she said.

"Uh huh," I said warily. Did this funny story involve the firing of crew members?

"My daughter was out one day trimming her hedge," she began. I immediately had an image of each of the Stewart children being assigned his or her own hedge. "She was wearing her headphones, listening to her Walkman. And she took the shears and went 'snap!' Right through the cable!" She chuckled to herself.

"How about that," I said.

"Anyway, I thought you would appreciate that."

I appreciated this: Martha had made a funny. It wasn't exactly hilarious but it was unexpected. And she ended up being perfectly pleasant to everyone for the rest of the day. And the director, of course, went home securely swathed in his mantle of genius -- evil genius perhaps, but highly-paid, sought-after, male-and-thus-not-in-danger-of-becoming-no-longer-one-of-the-
only-four-working-directors-of-his-gender genius nonetheless.

The third job I did with Martha was another Kmart spot, this time for her line of sheets and towels. Her main concern seemed to be how she could get her dog, one of the small, decorative, terrier variety, into the spot, the idea being to get him to hide under a towel, to be revealed at some cutely apropos moment. Once this was somewhat accomplished -- never perfectly because no one had informed the dog that this would be his big moment and so he came somewhat unprepared, desiring only not to be placed under a towel for any length of time -- she focused on making sure the production had made arrangements for a car to bring the dog (accompanied by her maid, but it was clearly the dog who was in charge) back to Nutley, because Martha had plans for the evening to which the dog was not invited.

On this day, again, she was practically giddy. Maybe it was the comparative pleasure of not having to watch 100 strangers stomp through her zinnias, or the fact that she was being paid to hawk a product that would bear her revenue solely through her name instead of having to sell her own overall vision. Maybe she was taking a lot of Xanax. Regardless, it didn't take much to make her happy. I've seen a lot worse: people who arrive 4 hours late and when they do arrive, in SUVs and stretch Hummers, bring their entire entourage to give opinions on everything from the camera angle to maintaining the correct crease in their collar, who often stop everything so that they can go off and talk on their cell phones for half an hour or listen to some of their own music. And I'm not going to name names, P. Diddy, but some people really need to take it down a notch. So if it only took Martha a set of wheels for her dog to be satisfied, it seemed a little silly to complain.

But when occasion number four rolled around, I didn't know which Martha was going to show up. She had been through the scandal, she'd been to prison, and who knew what two years of easy time and house arrest could do to a woman of her refined character? I wasn't encouraged when, after the first hour of being on set, the people from Discovery Channel and TLC (we were doing a series of pro-mos for cable syndication of Martha's old shows) called us all together for a meeting.

"Okay, everyone gather around camera, everyone around camera."

Most of the working crew ignored this for as long as possible, the way we do safety meetings, but eventually we did stop working to listen.

"We want to have a meeting," continued the Discovery Channel person, "because Martha's going to be here in about an hour and a half and we have to be completely ready. She's very busy, she's not going to wait for anything, so we have to know exactly what we're going to do. And if you need time for something, don't say it's going to be less than it is, don't say eight minutes if it's going to be 15 minutes. Don't talk to her, don't stare at her. Just work hard and we'll all get through this."

And I was thinking, Do these people actually work in the film business, where no one ever gives a correct estimate of how long something's going to take? Where most of us are so bored of looking at celebrities that we'd be happy if we never laid eyes on another one in our entire lives (aside from the really hot ones)? Where we have already had this notion of being treated like a lower caste so drilled into us that we would never dream of speaking until spoken to? No, clearly these people were just scared out of their wits, they were peeing in their pants. Now I knew we were dealing with Martha Number One.

Things definitely didn't look good when she arrived and immediately started critiquing the art direction.

"Who designs these sets for Discovery?" she asked, looking over the red background and shiny, black-lacquered tables. "There's something very Chinesey about them." She turned to one of her own people and said under her breath, "It's very dark."
Then she approached the set.

It was at this moment that the little voice in my ear decided to pipe up: "Oh no, here she comes here she comes HERE SHE COMES!!!"

Just then Martha turned back to the director: "Are we doing lines here?"

"No, you're just walking, doing beauty shots," he answered.

Martha glanced at me, standing with the boom pole, trying to look extremely ready while staring into space as if I was in no way paying attention to the conversation taking place, as advised. "So why are we doing sound?"

The voice in my headphones then started saying, "Okay, get out of there! Get off set now!"

"We're just rolling ambience," stammered the director.

Martha turned back and looked at me. "Poor girl. Your arms must be really strong."

And switching from a tone of panic to insinuation, the voice chimed in again with, "Ooh, Martha likes you."

This is probably something Martha doesn't have to put up with: harassment from her boss, who has a direct line into her brain. It's not that I don't like most of the people I work with, I do. But there are times when you don't want to have someone telling you what to do, or taunting you, much less doing it in stereo, a few centimeters from your eardrum. And you have to take it -- with a smile if you're a girl. Because if you don't? That's right, you don't get hired -- for being bitchy.

Of course, it is the behavior that creates the bitchiness, in more than one way. Because just to get away from that treatment, I think it'd be worth it to actually be the biggest be-otch ever, do whatever it takes to get to the next level, whoever you have to step on. Not that I've ever been able to do that, or even think it's a requirement of achievement. But I can't say I don't somewhat appreciate it in women who can. Maybe I even admire them for it.

In other words, I don't make excuses for every multi-millionaire homemaker television personality that I meet. I just think a lot of us females with nerve get the b-word leveled at us for very little. And so what? I'd rather be a bitch than a doormat any day, and I'd rather be a success than a failure. I think it's twice as hard for us to make it, or even do our jobs well, with twice the consequences for making mistakes along the way.

Or maybe it's just that she was nice to me. But no matter the exact reason, I'm just going to come right out and say it: I think we should all cut Martha a little slack.

2007-03-22T11:10:00.000-04:00

Now I know this doesn't make up for six weeks of delinquency, but consider it an appetizer while I try and get my life back in order...

Some Random Travel Observations From Six Weeks Abroad

1) Argentinians are the worst people on earth when it comes to waiting on line. First, they're even crazier about it than New Yorkers, which is saying something. They'll line up for no reason 2 hours before a flight -- and nobody's even got any carry-on luggage! Then they will immediately cut in front of you given the slightest opportunity. And we're not talking just Porteños (aka, people from Buenos Aires, who even Argentinians consider a distinct breed), because I've seen this everywhere. Although the Porteños do take the cake for rudeness, when they're not being incredibly nice, which they usually are (see #10). But when they have attitude, they're worse than even your most serious Meat Packing District velvet rope-floggers.

2) Conversational topics to avoid:
a) That little Islas Malvinas aka Falkland Islands incident? Argentinians are still pissed about that. And certain English people seem to have trouble letting it go too (no names). And Chile had it's own issues, so it's best to avoid the topic altogether -- although difficult, considering that every time you turn around there seems to be another huge memorial or a flag or a billboard.
b) Who's go the best wine -- particularly with Chileans, since all Chileans are wine snobs. It's like a national trait. Not necessarily a bad one. Still, don't try convincing them to drink their own wine from a box.
c) 9/11. Actually, I don't really mind talking about it, it just depends on who's asking. Sensitive friends, fine. Eager young boys from Studtgardt with ghoulish curiosity and no tact, not okay.
d) American politics -- especially with people from Texas. I ran into these two guys while treking who had heavy Southwestern accents, so of course I asked them where they were from. They deliberately avoided looking me in the face as they mumbled, "Dallas," then immediately countered with, "but we live in Santiago!" Oh, and with Bush-supporting Argentinians who want to get into a major political discourse about the Iraq War in Spanish. This only happened to me once, and luckily I was saved from it by a nice older lady and an apple tart.
e) Football. If you know something about it, it's the great international language, but if you don't, you could suddenly find yourself in a very heated discussion, possibly with another half a dozen people joining in, and wish you'd never mentioned the two names (Beckham and Ronaldinho) that you know.

3) The creepy missing person and wanted signs at the Chilean border crossings: "Niño Perdido," with hopelessly innocent faces, or sinister photos of pock-marked criminals suggesting foul play. Impossible to know the whole story, but they haunted my dreams.

4) Foreign travel can be like time travel, particularly when you spend 6 hours on a bus with perky American college girls who talk about their classes and football player boyfriends...Okay, aside from that (football player boyfriends -- yeah, right), they were like we were, or like friends we would have made, if only they had lived in my freshman dorm in 1986. Aka, the year they were born.

5) Where do the smelliest people come from? This was the unlikely subject of debate during our 4-day trek through Torres del Paine. I said Germans and Andres said the French, with each of us trying to build a case based on the people passing us on the trail ("Where do you think he was from?" "France." "No way, did you see that ponytail?"). Though truth to tell, they were all probably having the same conversation about us after three days of our hiking in the same pants.

6) Always pay cash at Hungarian travel agencies. (All right, this is actually a two-year-old travel observation, but I thought I'd throw it in for good measure).

7) You can convince yourself to eat and drink nearly continuously, as long as you keep saying that this could possibly be the last alfajor (addictive Argentine sandwich cookie filled, usually, with dulce de leche and covered in thick chocolate)/$5 steak/$2 bottle of wine (and not bad wine either) that you may ever have. But of course, then it isn't.

8) Playing bingo for wine is the best way to teach people to count in a foreign language.

9) All semi-cama buses are not created equal. You can be watching movies on your own flatscreen, eating pretty good arroz con pollo and, yes, playing bingo for wine, or you can watch the same frame of a frozen DVD of a Martin Lawrence movie while you amuse yourself cleaning up the trash of the previous passengers and breaking your plastic cutlery on cold chicken Milanese that resembles nothing if not cardboard...At least I think it was chicken.

10) New vocabulary:
"A lie in" (English) = an opportunity to sleep in
To "pull" (also English) = to hook up with
"Re_____" (Argentinian), eg "Rebuena" = Really good/way good/chevere
"Wow" = bilingual, only with slightly different accents
"Rompecabeza" = my favorite word in Spanish, meaning puzzle, but I love the literal translation: head-breaker.
"Ay, porque?" = You're welcome, in Argentina -- which, when said with a smile, perfectly sums up what I will miss most about the people who live there.

11) Believe it or not, not everyone spends all their time talking about their film or their script and how it's doing at festivals or in contests or what production company or producer or agent or director is looking at it or reading it or is attached to star or is interested in funding it and...let's just say that there is actually a whole world out there where nobody gives a shit about the film business, and it's a very nice place to visit. Maybe someday I'll go live there for good.