The #Hollywood Meat Grinder, or War Without Bullets

We’ve all been there, minus the lovely blond…

(Note: I’d planned to foist another pilot season re-run on you today, but that plan — like so many in life — was hijacked by the subsequent flow of events. If you’re interested in those posts, click here, then scroll down to “The Making of a Pilot.”)

If you haven’t read this post over at Dollygrippery, you really should. In his detailed description of one typically brutal work week on a cable episodic, “D” turns over the rock to let the world see just how mercilessly demanding this kind of work really is. Although he’s describing his job as a dolly grip, he may as well be speaking for the rest of the departments on that show. Grips, juicers, set dressing, props, craft service, hair and makeup, transpo — they’re all getting hammered.

Near the end of his post is a particularly poignant and revealing passage:

“I have unfortunately reached the point where I have a hard time showing interest and I’m starting to let little things go. I don’t like working that way.”

There are very few truly easy gigs in this business — working below-the-line is pretty much hard and harder — but as far as I’m concerned, episodic television is the worst. There’s a reason I refer to episodics as “war without bullets.” Many (if not most) of those one-hour dramas chew their crews up and spit them out over the course of a few seasons. Given the money that can be earned working such horrendous hours, people hang on as long as they can, but a high rate of attrition and turnover among those who do the heavy lifting is not at all unusual.

When you sign on for an episodic, you’re walking into a meat grinder.

Some are worse than others, of course. I’m told the crew of “Medium” often worked very reasonable hours, which can be attributed to at least two factors — it was a broadcast network show paying full union scale (meaning the producers had to pay double-time — which they absolutely hate to do — after 12 hours), and the show had a really good DP who knows how to light with a minimum of equipment and effort. Unlike too many DPs I’ve worked for, this guy doesn’t grind his crew into the dirt trying to re-invent the wheel each and every day.*

But as you’ll read in D’s post, a hard episodic can be unbelievably tough. According to a piece the LA Times ran a couple of years ago, the crew on NCIS was working 17 to 18 hour days before a shakeup above-the-line restored some sanity to the production, bringing work days down to the normal zone of 12 to 14 hours/day.** The cable contract negotiated to give HBO a break back when that network was still young and struggling allows cable shows to work their crews 14 hours before double-time kicks in. With lunch and drive time, that means 16 to 18 hour days are typical. Word through the grapevine has it that the HBO vampire drama “True Blood” pushes their crew extremely hard all season long.

Working such a relentless pace week in and week out is brutal. Yes, the crew can make good money working those long hours (except on cable shows, where the bad news starts with a 20% pay cut, then continues on through those fourteen hour days)) — but at what cost? Is the larger paycheck at the end of the week worth being turned into a work-bot zombie with glazed eyes and a thousand-yard stare?

Although I got my IA card too late in life to fully experience the grinding tedium of episodics as a member of the core crew, I’ve done my share of day-playing on one-hour dramas, and did several extremely demanding two-to-three week stints of pickups for “The L Word,” during which multiple-location 16 hour days were the norm. Before finally getting that union card, I slaved on many low budget location features, enduring two to three months of six-day work weeks on each one — weeks that often exceeded a hundred working hours.

That was rough, but still not as bad as crewing a truly tough episodic. There’s always light at the end of the tunnel on a movie — most are over and done in three or four months — but a broadcast network episodic can run 22 episodes, which works out to nearly nine solid months of more-or-less ceaseless toil.

The worst of it comes when you hit the burnout phase (“Burnout” being the very apt title of D’s recent post), so worn down by the merciless process of cranking out each day’s coverage that you slowly lapse into doing only what’s absolutely necessary to get the job done. When the grinding pace is such that a solid, experienced pro like “D” can no longer fully meet his own high standards — and he starts letting the little things go — then something is very wrong indeed. We’ve all been there to one degree or another, but in the suffocating fog of the moment it’s hard to realize just how vulnerable and dangerous that zone of terminal mind/body fatigue can be.

So my heart goes out to “D” and the rest of his besieged crew running the long grueling gauntlet of episodic television. At this point of my life and career, I couldn’t do that kind of work even if I wanted to — a couple of weeks on that schedule would put me in the hospital.

If I was King of the World, episodics would adopt the multi-camera tactic of shooting three weeks (roughly two episodes) before taking a week off to give the cast and crew a chance to recover, then I’d revoke the 14 hour provision of the cable contract so that producers would think twice before allowing undisciplined, self-indulgent young directors to push their crews past a 12 hour work day. Yes, the season would stretch out a little longer and cost the production companies a bit more — and each crew member would bring home less money each month — but by not flogging those crews to within an inch of their lives, working episodics would become less of a meat grinder and more a sustainable way to make a living.

Not that the corporate overlords who now run our Industry (and increasingly, our country) give a flying fuck about that, mind you — but it’s something to think about.

* Full disclosure: the DP of “Medium” and I worked together for more than fifteen years doing features, music videos and commercials before our working world was turned upside-down by the stampede of runaway production from LA to Canada in the late 90′s. At that point, our paths diverged in the world of television, where he went into episodics and I chose sit-coms.

** I tried to find a link to that article, but it proved elusive…

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

About The #Hollywood Money Machine

Like Randy Newman said, “It’s Money that Matters“

The goal of every commercial (non-PBS) television show — broadcast or cable, scripted or unscripted, drama or comedy — is to become a money machine. Once a show attains that lofty status, it can feed a lot of people for a long time. For an actor or producer atop the food chain, that money machine can buy a monster McMansion in a gated community and fill the six car garage with expensive German automobiles. For the rest of us, the machine will pay the rent or mortgage, make the monthly car payment, and keep the fridge full of food. Call it “trickle-down economics” if you will, but everyone employed by or connected to a successful show will prosper so long as the money machine keeps running.

Every successful show – and by definition, any show that earns a second season has achieved a certain level of success – experiences growing pains from one year to the next. If the first season is something akin to a blind stumble through a minefield, the second season feels very different while facing the same challenge of attracting and maintaining a big enough viewing audience to avoid the sudden death of cancellation — the network’s way of saying “you’re fired.”

Studios will often cut a lot of slack to a brand new show, giving them a break on equipment and stage rentals with the unspoken but implicit understanding that if the show does well enough to reach that second season, the largesse will vanish faster than a five dollar bill dropped in the abyss of downtown LA’s infamous “Shitter’s Alley.”

From the studio’s viewpoint, turnabout is fair play: after helping a brand new show find its legs and stand tall, they expect a return on their investment now that the money-machine has survived to enter a second year on its own two feet.

Production companies don’t always fully understand or appreciate the dimensions of this unwritten deal. Consumed and distracted by the pressures of running the Season One gantlet, they sometimes assume that the same nurturing kid-glove treatment from the studio will continue — but Hollywood doesn’t work that way, a hard lesson the producers of my little cable show are beginning to learn. Faced with considerably higher second season rental expenses, our UPM has been grinding the grip and set lighting departments hard to minimize costs over the first two episodes. I don’t know for sure, but imagine the other variable-expense departments (set dressing, props, and wardrobe) have been tied to the budget-cutting whipping post as well.

It wasn’t so bad for the first episode, which had only one swing set – but episode two called for four swing sets. Depending on the area involved and the action required, we’ll use up to twenty lamps of varying sizes to properly light a modest three wall set, which is why the UPM’s head spun around in a full Linda Blair 360 when he saw the lighting order. He was not a happy man, but there wasn’t much we could do to ease his budgetary pain. Our job is to light every set so that it and the actors look great -– that’s our bottom line — and if the production company can’t afford it, then something else will have to give.

My guess is money will be pulled from future shows to cover our suddenly-bare asses right now, while the writers are urged to craft scripts that make full use of our existing permanent sets rather than setting scenes in extensive (and expensive) swing sets over the weeks to come. Not that we won’t still need more equipment to tweak the permanent sets as well — that never stops — but a few additional lamps here and there are nothing compared to what’s required to light new swing sets. Still, this semi-rosy futuristic scenario depends on the writers behaving themselves and doing as they’re told – and anybody who knows writers will tell you that’s a lot like herding cats. It can be done, but believe me, it ain’t easy.

What makes this situation rather awkward is that we on the crew can’t seriously bitch about all this pressure to minimize our equipment because – will wonders never cease — we actually got a Season Two raise from the standard five-bucks-an-hour-under-scale-fuckyouverymuch cable rate of last season. We’re still not up to full scale, but four additional dollars per hour sweetens the weekly paycheck rather nicely. Although this was rumored to be in the works as we came down the stretch last spring, I never believed it would really happen – so this juicer will not squawk about our shrinking equipment budget. We’ll get the job done one way or another in the hopes that a third season — inshallah — might finally close that last one dollar-per-hour gap with full union scale.

My little cable show will never be a big network money machine, but even if it isn’t perfect, at least we’ve made significant progress. In such tough times, when so many people in this country would kill for a job like mine, I’m just happy to be here.

And while on the generally distasteful subject of money, I’m happy to report yet another miraculous occurrence on this job.* Attentive readers might recall my dismal trail-of-tears futility and endless defeat at the week-ending post-show ritual of Dollar Day. My spotless record of failure in this tradition is unrivaled among my peers – everybody I know has won Dollar Day at least once. Not me. Despite the countless one, five, ten, and occasional twenty dollar bills I’ve fed into the big plastic jar over the past thirteen years of working in sit-coms, never has mine emerged a winner. When it comes to serial losing, I’ve been right up there with Al Smith and the Chicago Cubs… until last Friday night when the lovely star of our show reached her delicate, perfectly-manicured hand into the jug of five dollar bills and pulled out the one with my name on it.

Was I stunned? Was I shocked?

Is the bear a Catholic? Does a Pope shit in the woods?

For me, this was right up there with an alien spacecraft landing on the White House lawn, nice guys finishing first, or Rush Limbaugh taking to the airwaves to urge that his legions of followers acknowledge evolution and global warming as accepted scientific fact – in other words, a sure sign that the the world has turned inside-out and the Apocalypse Draws Near.

And so a week that started out rough and only got rougher ended up pretty well. As we head into our first short hiatus — me with thirty utterly unexpected five dollar bills in my pocket — I’m beginning to feel pretty good about Season Two.

* I know, it’s bad form and a sign of poor upbringing to openly discuss money, but being abandoned at birth and raised by wild goats in a leaky, drafty barn, I never had the opportunity to learn proper manners at good old Pencey Prep. I have thus labored under this crass and splintery cross ever since…

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

The Hollywood Juicer, Michael Taylor on “Season Two”

People come, people go, but nothing ever changes.

(Bastardized from – and with apologies to — Grand Hotel)

Heading into the heat of late summer, good news came over the telephone: my little cable show was picked up for a second season. The re-up order of fifteen episodes is better than the ten to twelve most cable networks typically offer, and there’s an option for nine additional episodes if we manage to bark, roll over, and dance on our hind legs with sufficient enthusiasm to please our masters. Should all go exceedingly well, this would pan out to a twenty-four episode season, and if that’s not quite the thirty we got last year, hey, who’s counting?

Well, me for one, but beggars can’t be choosers in today’s Hollywood, so I’ll take what I can get and be happy about it — or at least a lot less unhappy than if the show had been cancelled, leaving me standing on the dock watching the entire fleet of new season shows sail over the horizon.

Still, ours is not a perfect world. Several of my favorite crew members from Season One (in different departments) won’t be coming back – some for reasons of their own and others who were victims of highly questionable decisions by the Powers That Be. When someone works hard, pays attention, is always there when needed, and does a terrific job that often extends well beyond the normal call of duty, they’ve fully earned their spot on the crew and in the “family” we form on stage. It never occurred to me that most of the departed wouldn’t be back for another good year, and I remain stunned at the stated reasons for kicking them out the back door. What’s right is right, and this is wrong by any measure.

Trouble is, this business has never even approached being a pure meritocracy, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. The Industry has been disappointing and pissing me off in that regard with some regularity for more than three decades now. I’m grateful to be returning for Season Two, but hate to see good people get screwed out of their jobs for no valid reason — and there’s not a goddamned thing I can do about it.

Hollywood, same as it ever was.

So I’ll do what I always do — what every Hollywood work-bot learns early on: make the best of the situation and keep going. The day I can’t manage that, for whatever reason, will be the day I’m finished in this town. Those left behind were good at their jobs, so I wasn’t surprised when they picked up new (and hopefully better) gigs on other shows. Still, that won’t ease the sting of being bitch-slapped and kicked out the back door – which they certainly didn’t deserve — nor will it restore the warm sense of “family” our show enjoyed last season. For the moment, that’s gone… but as the weeks pass, the new crew members will be assimilated and a new stage family formed. For one reason or another, a few people move on or are tossed overboard every season, and if nobody likes it, the survivors keep on rowing through the choppy seas just the same.

Television is different from the world of features, commercials, or game/reality shows, where the crew lineups typically shift from job to job depending on the production company, director, and DP. When I was working features as a juicer and Best Boy, it was typical to see a completely different cast of set dressers, props, sound, or production departments from one film to the next. But where a feature is usually shot in two to six months, a hit television show can remain in production for a decade or more with much of the core crew working the entire run. When a show like that comes to an end, everybody feels it on a gut level. I was a regular day-player over the final two seasons of “Will and Grace,” working with people who had been together for the better part of a decade. At the final wrap party — and it was a good one — there were a lot of tears in that crowd.

But in Hollywood (and increasingly the world beyond), the only constant is change — willing or not — so back to the stage I’ll go to help rig and light a brand new set and do my best to make Season Two a winner.* As usual, there are no guarantees. We could be done and the show cancelled by Christmas, with the entire crew joining the ever-growing ranks of unemployed in America. The only sure thing is that we’ll be going at it hammer-and-tongs for the first few weeks before the dust begins to settle.

Anything beyond that is just wishing on a dream.

When we report on stage for our first day of work, I’ll salute the missing, wish them well on their new shows, then put my shoulder to the wheel and start pushing the big rock up the steep hill one more time. Win, lose, or draw, the show goes on.

So long Scooter, Bruce, and Justin. Good luck, Red. Take care, Dev, Brian, and Tracy. Know that you will be missed, and that — inshallah — we’ll all meet again down the road.

* The old set was all but destroyed in the first season’s final episode.

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

Back on the Gang – More Notes from the Hollywood Juicer

Photo courtesy of MPTV Images

The phone rings in the evening with an offer I can’t refuse – a day of work on the studio rigging crew. After three and a half months off (thanks to some minor-but-unpleasant surgery and the annual spring/summer television hiatus), this will be my first paid day since April. I hang up with a smile, knowing that the wheel has finally turned and Hollywood is getting back to work.

It’s a welcome change. Not being one who lives to work, I very much appreciate the time off afforded by this inherently unstable business, but enough is enough. With a checking account coughing on fumes — and no experience as a Wall Street crook (pardon the redundancy), crack dealer, or Amway salesman — working is the only way I know to make money.

So I’m up with the alarm at 5:00 the next morning for thirty minutes of stretching, back and stomach exercises, then a shower and quick breakfast before heading up and over Laurel Canyon, a drive I could probably make in my sleep at this point. It’s all rote by now. The first real test comes at the parking structure, where the laser scans my aging, faded studio badge – and by some miracle it still works.* The gate rises and I’m in, circling all the way up to a space on the fifth floor to park amidst my fellow below-the-liners. Down six flights of stairs, my rusty old bicycle is still chained up where I left it in the basement after the show wrapped. The tires could use a little air, but other than that it’s good to go.

A brisk two minute pedal carries me over the river to the stage, where eight big tubs and pallets are lined up outside the elephant door, each loaded high with heavy black cable. An electric hoist waits inside, all set up and ready to go. Connecting these dots is easy: today we’ll be sending all that cable up high, which means I’ll probably end up driving the mule.

I leave my work bag in the dimmer room and walk around the stage. The carpenters and painters are already at work on half a dozen sets in various stages of completion. Sawdust and paint fumes linger in the air. I hate that – foul air in a work situation is a personal peeve. Thirty-plus years of sucking down my daily ration of LA smog is bad enough without having to inhale an additional load of particulates and airborne toxins at work, but there are some things you just can’t do anything about. Toiling in less-than-ideal conditions comes with the turf of a rigging crew.

Still, I’ve had to work in much worse air, and as I cruise the stage perimeter checking out the sets, it dawns on me that I’m suddenly feeling pretty good – hardly my normal state of mind this early in the morning. Despite the full day of hard physical labor ahead, it feels like I’ve come home after a long absence.

Once the rest of the crew arrives, the rigging gaffer issues our marching orders. Two of us remain on the floor to send the cable high while the other two head up the long flight of stairs to the catwalks above. With my fellow floor man loading the sling, I end up “driving the mule” – running the hoist with a foot switch and the big inch-and-a-half thick hawser. It’s been a year since I’ve run a hoist, and since rust never sleeps, it takes a good twenty minutes to get back in a comfortable working groove. But it’s not exactly rocket science, and although we have to endure the wailing cacophony of power saws and percussive chatter of nail guns, the usual array of bellowing boom boxes is conspicuously absent. This is a very welcome change, allowing us to communicate without screaming, which considerably lowers our collective stress level. Power saws run intermittently, but a boom box never stops — and a typical set construction crew has three of them on stage, each tuned to a different radio station blaring at maximum volume. Working under those circumstances is too much like the Bad Old Days doing music videos, where the deafening sonic assault made doing even the simplest tasks so much harder.

With no boom boxes today, I count my blessings.

We spend a couple of hours sending cable high before stopping for breakfast. The studio commissary is crowded and awash with familiar, friendly faces. Lots of new and returning shows are gearing up, so it’s homecoming week with everybody happy to be working again.

Back from breakfast, we switch places – the floor crew goes high while the high-boys take their turn driving the mule. It’s a different world up here, removed from the dust, fumes, and confusion of the floor. Here the task is simple: as each hundred-and-twenty pound load of cable comes up, we pull it in from the open void, release the hook, then muscle the cable atop a narrow furniture dolly and roll it down the catwalks to lay out in neat rows. The dolly makes this much easier than it used to be – there was a time when we’d simply shoulder each coil of cable as it came up and carry it to the proper spot on the catwalk – but convenience comes at a price, which means we have to be very careful. If we go too fast and hit a bump, the load will shift. With eighteen inches of open space between the catwalk boards and the knee rail, it would take only a moment’s inattention to lose a sixty pound coil over the side, where it would plunge forty feet to the floor. Any carpenter, painter, or juicer unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time down below would be in a world of hurt — and the person up high who allowed it to happen would have to live with that.

I haven’t killed anybody yet in this business, and don’t plan to start today – so I take it nice and slow rolling that heavily-laden dolly down the catwalks.

The idea is to store the hundred and fifty-odd rolls of cable far enough away from the waterfall to avoid hindering the show boys when they start running it out to power their sets, but close enough to keep it relatively handy.** Even with the help of that dolly, we still end up manhandling every coil of cable at some point in the process – and once again I remember the hard truth that the only way to stay in shape for wrangling cable is to wrangle cable. All the hauling, splitting, and stacking of firewood back I did back on the Home Planet last month was hard physical labor, but it didn’t do much to keep me in cable shape. By the end of this eight hour day, we’ve transported five or six tons of cable forty feet up and laid it all out in neat, accessible rows. The job is done, leaving me dog-tired, aching, and sore all over. Everything hurts — my neck, shoulders, back, arms, and legs — but I’m working again, earning a paycheck.

And that feels good.

* Something I never take for granted after a stretch of time off…

** The “waterfall” is a massive flow of cable running from the dimmer room up the interior stage wall to the catwalks. Power is modulated through the dimmers via the waterfall to the sets, allowing the DP and gaffer to have control over each lamp on stage.

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

The Off Season

Over the wire and gone…

Until relatively recently, the television season in Hollywood followed a familiar routine. The new fall season geared up in mid-July with the construction of sets on dozens of stages at all the major studios, followed by rigging and lighting those sets for grip and electric. Meanwhile, all the other departments – props, set dressing, wardrobe, hair/makeup, camera, sound, and the various aspects of production — were preparing for what everyone hoped would be a long season ahead. Filming commenced early in August and continued until a week or two before Christmas, shooting the first twelve episodes. Following the holiday break, the surviving shows (those that hadn’t been cancelled by Thanksgiving) churned out their remaining episodes into March, completing a full season’s work. As those shows wrapped, pilot season was busy ramping up to a full-throttle frenzy through April. By mid-May that too was over and done, with television production shut down for the off-season hiatus — eight-to-ten weeks during which very little was going on.

That was the pattern in the late 90′s when I left the single-camera realm of low-budget features, commercials, and music videos for the world of television. In those not-so-long-ago-old-days, the television hiatus was a good time to pick up day-playing work on features, but with the outgoing tide of runaway production over the past fifteen years, features are no longer a reliable source of employment in Hollywood. If you want to work on movies, go to New Mexico, New Orleans, or Michigan — features just aren’t happening like they used to in this town.

The rise of cable over the last decade has altered the television equation. Following the advice of “Wee Willie” Keeler to “hit ‘em where they ain’t,” the fledgling cable networks took advantage of the annual hiatus – when the broadcast networks burned off re-runs or weak mid-summer replacement shows — by starting their much shorter season (usually ten to thirteen episodes) in early spring to run those shows all summer.* Although I’ve often been critical of cable productions that take full advantage of the cut-rate contract to grind their crews into the dirt, they do provide work at a time when there’s not much else going on.

There’s still not quite enough cable work to turn the television season into a true (and oft-rumored) “year-round schedule,” but that’s fine by me — I didn’t get into this business to strap my nose to the bloody grindstone 52 weeks a year. I value my off time for the opportunity to escape Hollywood and do something different away from the down-and-dirty labor on set. Work is good and work is fine, but I’m not one who wants to work all the fucking time. The spring-into-summer hiatus is perfect for taking care of real-life matters — personal or family vacations, or dealing with any lingering dental or medical issues that would otherwise require missing work. Most grips and juicers (and a few set dressers I’ve known) have to endure shoulder, knee, and/or back surgeries during their careers, and scheduling such procedures for the hiatus allows time to recover before the season kicks back into gear.

Sometimes such issues are forced upon us, though, ready or not. Not so long ago I ran into an old friend who – after suffering through an expensive divorce – hit a dry spell bad enough to lose his health insurance. With only a few months of coverage left, he spent his entire summer in a painful trek from one specialist to the next in a desperate effort to complete all the various surgical/dental procedures he needed before the clock ran out.**

All things being equal, my own preference is to head back to the Home Planet during the off-season. Ten months in LA is more than enough each year, but such lengthy escapes have not been possible the past few years. The show I recently wrapped is a cable production that started in the early spring of 2010 and ran on through the summer, fall, and winter to the following spring. Unlike every other cable show I’ve done in the past, it blew right through the standard ten-to-thirteen episode cable schedule to shoot thirty in a single year. That kept me tied to the whipping post all during the usual off-season hiatus, but if the show gets picked up later this summer for a second season — inshallah — that should put us back on the “normal” schedule of broadcast network shows.

Go figure. Just when I understand how the system really works, the deck gets re-shuffled for a whole new deal. Still, the lack of permanence or predictability in the shape-shifting terrain of Hollywood is the true norm for the Industry, and something those of us who choose to work here must accept lest we end up walking into the cold blue Pacific towards China while speaking in tongues.

The annual spring/summer television hiatus offers a sweet taste of freedom during the best part of the year, so if my little cable show comes back — and the producers decide to run the same schedule as the Big Boys — you won’t hear me complain. When next spring rolls around, I’ll be going over the wire again with a big smile on my face.

* Not every cable show plays this game. Shows with a very young cast (ie: Wizards of Waverly Place) often shoot up to thirty episodes per season. Those kids grow up fast, so the network has to crank out as many episodes as possible before the cast outgrows their roles. On the opposite end of the spectrum, shows featuring one or more exceptionally old cast members (ie: Hot in Cleveland) adopt the same strategy for a similar, if darker reason…

** I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing over the next couple of years, given the new 400 hour qualifying requirement for the health plan taking effect in August.

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

On Art vs Commerce

The Eternal Struggle

“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers… choose rotting away at the end of it all… choose your future.”

(From the deliriously wonderful opening scene of Trainspotting)

I recently came across an interesting post that got me thinking about the eternal struggle between art and commerce in Hollywood. To my mind, much of what we do below-the-line falls under the heading of commerce — trading our time, sweat, and hard-earned knowledge for money — but even in such a do-it-quick-and-dirty business as the film industry, a certain level of craft is required to do every job right. Like the countless individual brush strokes that make up a beautiful painting, all that heavy-lifting and shared expertise can help raise the occasional blessed project to a level approaching art. For a Hollywood movie to enter such lofty territory remains the rarest of exceptions, but the level of craftsmanship routinely displayed on set often blurs the line between mere competence and that higher calling.

While rigging a sit-com a few years ago – day-playing up in a man-lift helping the show crew hang, power, and adjust the two hundred and fifty-plus lamps it takes to light an average multi-camera show – I watched as one of the set painters turned an ordinary piece of sanded plywood into what looked like a thick slab of yellow marble. It took him about twenty minutes, and when he was done, the results were absolutely perfect. I doubt Michelangelo could have done it any quicker or better – and the grizzled old painter (an ex-con with a cigarette dangling from his lips the entire time) performed this minor miracle using a couple of paint rollers.

It was amazing.

As luck would have it, that “marble” counter top – a small part of the kitchen set nobody in the viewing audience would ever notice or fully appreciate – was probably the best thing about the entire show. No matter how skilled, one person is never enough. A solid lineup of talent, artistry, and support from the powers-that-be in the executive suites are needed to make a truly good show.

The epiphanies keep coming as the years pile on here in Hollywood, occasional moments of clarity allowing me to see the Industry for what it has always been: a business. It’s not a normal business, though, since producing screened entertainment isn’t the same thing as manufacturing widgets. Unfortunately for the mega-corporations that now control our film studios and broadcast networks, television and movies aren’t toilet paper, weed-killers, erection enhancers, or frozen dinners — which means they can’t be manufactured and sold quite the same way. Any halfway competent corporate drone can use his MBA to oversee the marketing of a new product, but a more sophisticated approach is required to craft and sell a dream. That delicate task requires a measure of art, but the cruel irony is that most of those who come to Hollywood hoping to make a living by creating art are doomed to disappointment.

Every now and then a fresh name will blaze out of nowhere to light up the Hollywood firmament – a young writer or director blessed with the talent, super-charged ambition, an eagerness to work hard, and the ethereal combination of timing and luck it takes to succeed. If he or she can follow up that initial success with a string of box office hits, they can earn the chance to break out of the commercial straitjacket and go for the artistic gold.

But these Chosen Ones truly are the exceptions that prove the rule.

As lapdogs of their corporate overlords, most studio and network executives hate having to depend upon artists to get the job done. A true artist answers to a Higher Power, and typically fails to show proper respect for their employer’s groveling obeisance to the bottom line. Rather than kneeling down before the top-down, my-way-or-the-highway management typical of the modern corporate power structure, an artist follows the dictates of personal vision – and when pissed off, is likely to forget who’s the real boss, and offer some tart and very explicit advice as to exactly where the corporate drones can shove their intrusively lame committee-and-focus-group spawned “ideas.” Although artists and management may come from the same genetic well of carbon-based bipeds, that’s where the similarities end. Like oil and water, they do not mix well in the real world, but when the right combination of talent comes together under proper circumstances, amazing things can happen: films such as “Chinatown” and “Blade Runner.”*

Unfortunately, this kind of magic rarely happens in the current era of comic book blockbusters, movies based on old TV shows, and paint-by-the-numbers Rom-Coms starring the hottest young male and female flavors of the month. This trend towards recycling and regurgitating – or is it “re-imagining?” — pop culture reveals a profound lack of initiative and vision on the part of studio executives. It’s no surprise, given the extreme aversion the corporate hive-mind holds for taking any serious risks — but art rarely emerges from that fear-based, cover-your-ass studio mentality.

A few organizations beyond Hollywood actually do “get it.” Just look at the Ipod and Iphone – there are many mp3 players and cell phones on the market, but Apple’s products consistently capture the public imagination with elegant designs that blend artistry and engineering. In the best products – be they tangible goods or screened entertainment — the line between art and commerce vanishes.

This is increasingly the exception in our own film industry. The only good news here is that the corporate steamroller often sows the seeds of its own demise. People eventually get sick of being spoon-fed the same pre-packaged assembly-line pabulum and turn to something raw, fresh, and different – in the case of Hollywood, the occasional small, quirky film made far from the mainstream: a “Spellbound,” Little Miss Sunshine,” or “Juno” that takes the viewing public (and the corporations) by surprise. Stealing their lunch money is the only thing that really gets the attention of those ponderous corporate Goliaths, at which point they are forced to confront the terrifying notion of bringing some of those honest-to-God artists back into the building.

Television has fared better, thanks to the cable networks (the TV equivalent of indie films) which have been running rings around the hopelessly sclerotic and befuddled networks for the past ten years. I’ve got my own problems with these cable outfits, but can’t deny the quality, dynamism, and breathtaking originality of shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Shield,” “Dexter,” and the current champs “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”** These shows were not conceived and written by committee and filtered through focus-groups, nor given the green light by some bloodless corporate mandarin in his penthouse office. Without people who really cared and were willing to follow their gut instincts all the way, such shows would never have come to life — and to me, such people are artists.

In this eternal struggle, commerce wins most of the time — it’s hard to beat the crushing power of money, and those hell-bent on making as much as possible in the shortest span of time. Still, most decent movies and television shows contain some level of artistry: a gorgeous dolly move or steady-cam shot, an atmospheric set beautifully designed, painted, dressed, propped, and lit, or wardrobe-hair-and-makeup so perfect for the actors and tone of the show that you can’t imagine them being any other way. If you look for it, the proof is right there on screen.

Flowers grow from shit the world over. Despite the increasingly crass nature and dumbassification of our own modern culture, the miracle of art — and its cousin, artistry — lives on.

Even in Hollywood.

* To be fair, both of these classics were made before Hollywood was swallowed whole by the current crop of mega-corporations.

** There’s no denying that cable raised the bar to new heights for quality dramas on television, but I have a few issues with the cable world.

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

#Tax Time in #Hollywood

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain but death and taxes.”

From a letter by Ben Franklin

Monday is the big lighting day on my show. With the new swing sets freshly constructed (but not yet fully painted), this is when we lay down the broad brush strokes using seniors and juniors — 5000 and 2000 watt tungsten lamps. Depending on the size of each set, we’ll hang anywhere from a dozen to three dozen lamps on the pipe grid, working from man lifts where we can, and ladders where we must. The endless tweaking required to smooth out the lighting — adding numerous “specials” and accent lights, then fine-tuning everything (tilt-up/tilt-down, pan right/pan-left, add-a-double/pull-a-single…) will be done on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Monday is all about the heavy lifting.

So that’s where I was one recent Monday afternoon, up in my lift hanging 5Ks and 2Ks on the pipes, when loud voices erupted from the stage floor below. Vociferous conversation is not unusual once the director, actors, writers, and production personnel have left the set, but ours isn’t a particularly boisterous crew — and this ruckus was loud.

I finished tightening the pipe clamp bolt, then looked down to see the set lighting best boy locked in spirited debate with the best boy grip. A young grip stood between them, looking confused, his eyes darting from one to the other like a spectator at a tennis match.

Listening in (and given the volume of the discussion, it was impossible not to listen-in), I was surprised to hear it had nothing to do with the usual subjects of blue collar discourse – these two guys weren’t jawing about sports, women, or the latest wild-eyed antics of Hollywood’s Bad Boy de jour, Charlie Sheen.

They were arguing about taxes.

Income taxes are a big deal in our society, for reasons both practical and ideological. Rich or poor, nobody likes to pay more than their fair share at this time of year, and if the rich enjoy a huge advantage here, it’s because they’ve already bought and paid for enough politicians to keep it that way. Meanwhile, the rest of us — the working classes — do the best we can on this decidedly uneven playing field, scrambling for whatever tax-break crumbs the rich left on the table.

Our tax code is so absurdly huge and complicated due to a blizzard of exemptions and loopholes add down through the years. Tax payers who itemize their returns can usually find ways to claim all sorts of deductions, and those of us who grind out the film and television sausage here in Hollywood are no exception. If you work for a bank, repair cars, or unclog people’s toilets for a living, that brand new sixty inch flat screen TV hanging on your wall is probably not a deductible expense – but if you are among those who follow the Hollywood elephant, shovel in hand, it may well be. The same goes for movie tickets and the monthly cable TV bill — the former falling under the heading “professional admissions,” while some portion of the latter can be classified as a legitimate work-related expense, since those who make television do have to stay current with the products of our industry. Dining and entertainment expenses with fellow work-bots (who might be able to offer employment somewhere down the line) are also candidates for deductions under the “business expense” provisions of the tax code, as are some percentage of cell phone and/or land-line telephone bills. In an industry where most of us are itinerant free-lance workers, documented mileage on the car to and from work can also qualify as a tax deduction.

It all gets very complicated in a hurry, and I claim no real expertise in this — which is why I just throw all my receipts in a bag as the year unfolds, then spend a miserable day or three every spring collating those expenses before mailing the distilled data to a tax prep specialist whose job is to make sure my return takes advantage of every legitimate loophole. Once she’s done her work, I send her a check. In the end, I usually wind up getting back a healthy tax return while the Feds and state hang on to a considerably larger sum.

Such is modern life.

Almost everybody I know in the biz does something similar, each following a strategy tuned to their own comfort level. I’m not one to push my luck, but over the years have run into several fellow Industry work-bots who take pride in paying nearly nothing in taxes every year by adopting hyper-aggressive tax avoidance strategies – claiming every possible deduction while exploiting every potential loophole. Among these people was one of those “don’t tread on me” zealots, a self-described “patriot” who claimed that the government had no legal right to impose income taxes on U.S.citizens. I made the mistake of asking him about this once, an innocent question that sparked a twenty minute spittle-flecked harangue complete with long-winded quotes from the Constitution. Talking to him was like trying to have a rational discussion with some tri-polar homeless person long gone off his meds. Like many crazy people, he was very sure of himself, scrupulously following the advice of a famous anti-tax guru — but eventually the Feds got tired of his antics and threw his ass in jail for a couple of years.*

The animated discussion on our stage turned out to be a tug-of-war over the tax-paying soul of that young grip. Still new to the biz, he planned to file a short-form 1040 with H&R Block this year. One best boy — a fervent adherent of the save-every-receipt-and-claim-it-ALL school of tax preparation — was doing his level best to talk that young man into seeing a tax specialist knowledgeable in the the ways of the Industry. The other best boy maintained that until the kid stopped renting and bought a house, itemizing his tax return wouldn’t be worth the trouble and expense.

I had no idea who was right, but since the only thing I hate more than talking about taxes is actually doing the necessary-but-odious paperwork, I tuned them out and went back to work.

I don’t mind paying my fair share at tax time. Modern life in a First World society doesn’t come cheap, and those who enjoy the benefits have an obligation to share in the burden. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously noted, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” He was right about that, but until our tax code is revised to the point where it’s fair and simple, I’ll continue to play the game, however reluctantly. What drives me up and over the wall isn’t paying the taxes, but the unbearably tedious process of collating and itemizing all those receipts — an exercise in mindless concentration that always makes me feel like I’m choking.

So that’s what I’ll be doing on this lovely Spring weekend — drowning in a small ocean of receipts. I’m certainly not alone in this purgatory of paperwork, though, with most of Hollywood (and beyond) doing the same thing.

April 15 looms just a month away, and the tax clock is ticking…

* I wonder if he pays his taxes now…

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

This Island, Hollywood

A college degree, it is said, remains the essential passport to success in the dog-eat-dog competition of our ever-shrinking, increasingly globalized world. No doubt this is true, but some courses of study are more equal than others: there are degrees and degrees. Sadly, the more interesting credentials tend to cluster in fields that although undeniably fascinating, are unlikely to provide sufficient thrust to launch a high-octane career rich in the material rewards our society deems essential to achieve true success. A student who chooses to devote his/her precious college years to the pursuit of a major such as Aesthetic Studies, for instance – as opposed to something like Computer Science, Business Administration, or one of the many well-worn and reliably remunerative career paths — stands a fair chance of ending up doomed to the labors of Sisyphus, facing the daily struggle to push a very large rock up a very steep mountain for a very long time. Unless this misguided soul happens to be supremely gifted, incredibly lucky, or somehow manages to marry into a very wealthy family, the post-graduation price for following one’s heart rather than putting shoulder to wheel in the more prosaic (read: boring) disciplines — which invariably require endless and miserable exertions of the cranial muscles — can be high indeed: a working life that remains the functional equivalent of summoning up a big phony smile while inquiring “Would you like fries with that, sir?”

Take it from One Who Knows: walk that path and you just might end up in Hollywood.

Having followed the muse of youthful sloth all the way through college (and who was neither gifted, lucky, nor able to marry a nice rich girl), I’ve paid the price in the form of thirty years hard labor toiling “below the line” in the salt mines of the film industry. And it’s not over yet. Assuming I can keep answering the daily work bell, several more years of breaking rocks in the hot sun lies between me and the shiny brass ring of retirement. Trouble is, the actuarial statistics make a strong case against looking forward to that bright and sunny day. According to the obituaries in our dreary little union newsletter, an alarming number of freshly-minted retirees shuffle right off this mortal coil into the Great Beyond soon after being turned out to pasture. It seems the reward for squandering one’s life and vitality on a career of hard labor in Hollywood is grim indeed: a swift take-down, followed by the cold and clammy hand of death. Some serious digging is required to find the silver lining in such a gloomy cloud, but if I’ve only got a handful of years left after pushing off into the deep water of my “golden years”, it’ll be steak and lobster every night, bartender, and keep those martini’s coming. Rev up those credit cards, run ‘em deep into the red, and to hell with the mortgage — the only real estate I’ll need for the long haul is six feet under ground.

The bad news is that it’s a little late to do anything about it now – a good twenty-five years too late, apparently. An old college friend, now a successful and respected television writer/producer with five gleaming Emmys resting on her fireplace mantle, once told me of an article she’d read positing that those who work in the film industry longer than five years are thereafter ruined for any other line of employment. The reasoning was simple: once a person has spent half a decade doing a performance-oriented job for which no formal training is required (or even exists, in most cases) — work that is sporadic, intense, and often pays well enough that the ensuing periods of unemployment/recovery/rehab are greeted with open arms — this individual has by then been rendered forever unsuitable for the nine-to-five, forty hour week, fifty week a year grind so many gainfully-employed Americans cheerfully accept as normal life.

In other words, we’re spoiled.

There’s some truth in that. A working life in Hollywood has more in common with running off to join the circus than anything resembling the comfortable routines of a more conventional career. Once you’ve grown accustomed to the chaotic rhythms of free-lance Industry work (and all those oh-so-sweet weekdays off), it becomes increasingly difficult to envision crawling back to a desk under the pale fluorescent glow and tick-tock-watch-the-clock mental constipation of the Cube Farm. By then, an invisible threshold of some sort has been crossed – a “tipping point”, in the jargon de jour — after which you’re trapped in Tinsel Town as surely as all those doomed mammoths and saber-toothed tigers who long ago met their grim fate in the stinking petro-swamps of the La Brea Tar Pits.

At first it’s all one big adventure, rolling into LA brimming with the brash, blissful ignorance of youth, filled with a burning desire to work on real Hollywood movies, no matter how cheesy or lame they might be. Such blind ambition is essential, since the only Industry jobs a clueless kid with no real connections or usable skills can hope to land will be on the worst-of-the-worst low-budget schlock. But that doesn’t matter, because in those early days, simply being allowed to work on a film is a two hundred octane blast of pure adrenaline. In time you learn enough about the process of making movies — and yourself — to focus on something resembling a career path, be it getting your hands dirty in one of the technical crafts, keeping them clean in the white-collar arena of production, or embarking on the hard and rocky quest of the wannabe writer/director. You make your choice and push on, climbing the ladder as luck and opportunity allow. As the years pass, the work becomes more routine in many ways, more complex in others, but you keep moving forward, gaining experience, and ever so slowly, without ever really noticing, your joi de work begins to calcify and crumble. Your footprints slowly turn to dust. Then, on some hot and smoggy morning five or ten or twenty years later, you wake up to the stark realization that Hollywood isn’t The Emerald City after all. Suddenly it looks a lot more like Alcatraz, where getting on the island took some doing, but getting off was infinitely harder.

By now, no intelligent employer back on dry land will have you — one look at that Tinsel Town resume lights up the Damaged Goods warning like a Christmas tree. And if by some miracle you manage to charm your way through Human Resources, and sweet-talk some naive, do-well-by-doing-good employer into giving you a job, what then? Slow-motion disaster, that’s what. All too soon your new boss will find that in hiring a Hollywood refugee, he or she has brought into the fold the sort of bad-apple employee whose only contribution is to drag down the productivity of everyone else. You’ll fully intend to work hard, of course, but it’s so much easier to spend half the day at the water cooler entertaining your fellow wage-slaves with tales of life in glamorous Hollywood. But at that rate, you’ll run through your entire repertoire twice over in no time at all, after which you’ll have to start inventing stories to hold an audience. Soon you’ll be dropping names with shameless abandon, trying to wow the wide-eyed civilians with lies about cruisin’ with Brad, Jennifer, Lindsey, and J-Lo – and that’s when your co-workers will finally understand just how full of crap you really are. Suddenly alone at the water cooler, you’ll have no choice but to slink back to your desk and grudgingly buckle down to whatever mindless drudgery you’d been hired to do.

Too little, too late. At that point, you’ll have all the time in the world to daydream about the good old days back in Hollywood (having conveniently forgotten why you ran screaming from the asylum in the first place), since by now your employer will have rectified his/her mistake and given you the boot. Even Hollywood at its most ridiculously absurd will start looking awfully good when you’re shivering the night away in a cardboard condo beneath a freeway overpass on the edge of town. Still, you’ll have a whole new audience down there — a little rough around the edges, maybe, but ready to be dazzled by all your great Hollywood stories.

It rarely comes to that, though, because the only way most Industry workers ever manage to leave is in a hearse. For all but a few determined, hardy, and resourceful escapees, Hollywood remains a life sentence without parole or time off for good behavior. And the awful truth, I suspect, is that if I should finally manage to limp across the finish line of retirement, I’ll probably end up like all the others, gathering from time to time with fellow gray-haired retirees over coffee — or something stronger — to swap lies about how great it all was. Even in retirement, there’s no getting off this island.

Sometimes I wonder if, over the eons of eternity, Sisyphus didn’t finally come to love that big rock of his after all.

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

On Failure in Hollywood

(photo by Michael Ochs)

“Failure is not falling down, but refusing to get up.”

Chinese proverb

Getting Fired

Hollywood lives on the image of success and all that comes with it – money, power, fancy houses, expensive cars, and the freedom to wallow in every earthly indulgence known to man. The tabloids may quiver with orgasmic joy whenever a celebrity stumbles in public (providing raw, bloody grist for their insatiable mill), but success – particularly the sudden variety — remains a favorite subject in this town: the previously unknown writer, actor, or director who finally gets his/her shot, nails it, and is promptly whisked from the crowded, fetid stench of steerage below decks to join the rest of the Chosen Ones up in the breezy opulence of first class.

More than the Hollywood Dream, this now seems to be America’s Dream, and the foundation for so many un-Reality shows on TV. Once upon a time, the American Dream was to get a decent job and raise a family in a nice little house behind a white picket fence, but now the collective cultural lust is to ride the Cinderella-story, rags-to-riches rocket from Palookaville to a giant McMansion in a gated community, with a “Great Room” (whatever the hell that is), a 60 inch plasma screen hanging on every wall, and all the useless glittering bling a mountain of money can buy.

Are we really so shallow and stupid, or is that just the way things look on TV?

The flip side of this shiny golden coin doesn’t get quite so much press, and for good reason — nobody wants to be Dr. Buzzkill bringing dank and gloomy rain clouds to blot out the sun. Still, image and reality usually reside on opposite ends of the spectrum, and reality in Hollywood means coming to terms with failure at some point. For every happy success story, there are a thousand sad tales of ambition gone wrong: the aspiring actress who finally gets her SAG card but can’t land any paying gigs, the writer who churns out one spec script after another but never makes a sale, or the would-be director who can’t even get an agent, much less a job.

To quote an Oscar-winning song, “It’s hard out there for a pimp…”

Just as there are many varieties of success (which really is all relative), there are myriad ways to fail, perhaps the most common being the slow death of never quite meeting the inflated expectations created by dream factory of Hollywood itself. But without a doubt, the single most defining and emphatic form of failure is to get fired. I’m not talking about being laid off — which is as much a part of free-lance life as breathing – but actually getting fired. That’s a very different beast. And let’s face it, if someone like Michael Ovitz — in his day, one of the most powerful (read: feared) movers and shakers in Hollywood — can get fired, then anybody can.

Human nature being what it is, ego, insecurity, and personality conflicts probably trigger most firings, but sometimes a person just isn’t suited to perform a given job, or else gets promoted (or falls into) a position he or she hasn’t sufficiently prepared for. After catching a break and the opportunity to show their stuff, the result is a failure so dismal that getting fired becomes a form of mercy killing. A trap door opens beneath their feet, and they’re gone.

I’ve dropped through that door into the darkness more than once, each time in a different way and for a different reason — and I know how much it hurts. Still, my wounds were limited to the financial and psychological arena. I once saw a key grip fire his best boy in a much more dramatic manner. When the BB showed up late for work on the third day in a row, the key dragged him out of his pickup truck, beat the holy crap out of him (cracking a couple of the guy’s ribs in the process), then shoved him back behind the wheel and told him to get the fuck out of there.

Now that’s a rough way to get fired.

My own journeys through the trap door were more civilized, but (other than leaving my ribs intact) no less bruising inside. Even if you suspect it’s coming, getting fired delivers a staggering body blow — but when you get blindsided, it’s absolutely crushing.

After ten years working as a juicer, then a best boy, I was getting most of my work from one very good gaffer. As his name got around, his career took off, and I went along for the ride. After a certain point, I didn’t even bother to look for work anymore — the jobs just kept coming, one commercial after another, with an occasional music video for variety. Life was good.

It was then that one of “our” director/cameramen decided to stop shooting and bump my gaffer up to DP. Moving up through the Industry ranks can be a tricky business. In the world of commercials, it’s hard to be a gaffer-DP for long without losing a certain credibility — at some point you’ve got to make a leap of faith, and when that time comes, you’d better stick the landing. I’d done very little gaffing up ’til then, and had no particular ambition to move up, but when my gaffer made his leap, I had a choice: go with him as his gaffer, or else fall back into the pond with the rest of the day-playing free-lance fish. There are some perks with moving up to gaffer – getting a scout day on many jobs (more money), a new level of respect (however undeserved), and less physical work on set (having a best boy and juicers to wrangle the 4/0) — but in truth, I wasn’t quite ready to be a gaffer. While working as a best boy all those years, my concern had been running the crew, powering the set, making sure the gaffer had the equipment he needed, and doing the paperwork. I never had time to study the lighting, nor was I particularly interested. By then, this was just a job to me – something that paid the bills and engaged my brain on a practical, mechanical level, but that’s all.

When forced to choose, though, I took a deep breath and made the leap.

As a brand new gaffer, things were fine so long as I worked for that DP, who knew exactly what lights he needed for each shot and where to put them, allowing me to fake it as I learned how to read a light meter without holding the damned thing upside-down. But as hot as he’d been as a gaffer, he was still a newbie cameraman with only one real client, and when that director wasn’t working, neither were we. Fortunately, the cameraman for our other account — the big one — was willing to take me on as his new gaffer, allowing me to earn a decent living. But the world of commercials is a high-stress arena without much leeway for learning on the job, and I was expected to come up to speed fairly quickly. Unfortunately, I didn’t prove to be a quick study at lighting, which left me feeling very insecure in a position I’d essentially inherited. Things went okay under the circumstances – we got the shots lit to the director’s satisfaction, and the jobs went reasonably well – but truth be told, the cameraman was shouldering most of the load. Before every shot, he’d tell me where to put the lights, then I’d turned to my best boy and repeat his orders.

I was a gaffer in name only.

Eventually a scheduling conflict arose, forcing me to choose between jobs for these two cameramen. The tribal loyalty that forms the glue of below-the-line Hollywood required that I go with my ex-gaffer, but the other cameraman (my real money-maker) told me not to worry – he’d do this one with another gaffer, then I’d be back on the next job.

A couple of weeks later, my phone rang on a smoggy, hungover Saturday morning in early July. It was the DP from my big account. The tone of his voice told me he wasn’t bringing good news.

“I lied,” he said. “The new guy and I got along really well, so I’m going with him. I’m sorry…”

I mumbled something, then hung up, reeling. I’d just lost the best and most lucrative gig I’d ever had — and with it, the economic wind beneath my wings.

I’d been fired.*

Losing the gig was bad enough, but what made it worse was that I really liked and respected this DP. He was a terrific cameraman and a great guy, fun to work with and possessed of a wonderful sense of humor. In some ways, he was a bit like the big brother I’d never had, teaching me things about lighting (and life) as we went from job to job. If getting fired was rough, being fired by him — someone for whom I had so much personal regard — was brutal.

In my more lucid moments, though, I had to admit he wasn’t wrong. The production company we’d worked for had been paying top dollar for a crew, and in my case, they really weren’t getting their money’s worth. I knew it, he knew it, and they knew it, so in a strange way, I was almost relieved — at least I wouldn’t have to fake it on their set anymore. But I still had to pay the bills, and that account had been my bread and butter. The other cameraman – my ex-gaffer – was still struggling to establish himself as a DP, turning down gaffing jobs and working maybe once a month. Given that a DP makes so much more than a gaffer, he could afford that (if barely), but with a mortgage back on the home planet and rent due here in LA, I needed more work.

I got on the phone and put the word out, and bit by bit, jobs trickled in — first as a juicer for whoever would hire me, later as a gaffer for the crappy Fringe-Co outfits I thought I’d left behind. It was hard, but this time I immersed myself in learning the craft of lighting with a focus and intensity born of desperation — and slowly, job by job, I learned the ropes of being a commercial gaffer. In time, my remaining cameraman landed more solid accounts, and I was again able to leave the Fringe-Co purgatory and resume doing commercials with decent budgets.

With the 20:20 clarity of hindsight, I could see that getting fired had actually been a blessing (albeit a rough one), forcing me back in the trenches to learn the hard way – perhaps the only way – new skills that would serve me well over the next ten years. Failure hurts, but it can be a compelling motivator.** Years later, I ended up gaffing several commercials with the cameraman who’d fired me, and by then was able to pull my full weight. He appreciated that almost as much as I did, and it was a great reunion for both of us. Although we don’t work together anymore (he left the business to teach, then my gaffing career went up in Canadian smoke), we’re still good friends. Call that whatever you want, but I call it a success.

Getting fired is certainly a stinging failure in the short term — and a serious bitch-slap — but it can provide the opportunity to re-examine your approach to your job/career. Once you realize something’s wrong, you can figure out how to fix it. That might mean deciding to crack down and put your heart and soul into the job, or maybe you need to go in an entirely new direction. Either way, if you make the most of the experience, it will help you grow and succeed over the long run.

And if nothing else, it just might change your own personal definition of the term “success.”

* There’s more to this story — an almost surreal double-whammy of personal complications that made the situation infinitely worse — but that’ll have to wait for the book.

** For another (instructive and entertaining) take on getting fired, click here.

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.

Welcome to the Dream Factory

There are three kinds of people who come to Hollywood: dreamers, drifters, and the driven. Each has his/her own reasons for coming to Tinsel Town, the Dream Factory, and in the end, every path followed or blazed has a way of ending in a complex stew of disappointment, regret, and resignation. Good times are here to be had, careers and money to be made, but nothing good seems to last very long on this thin strip of sun-baked earth trapped hard between the desert and the sea. Time passes in a blur, melting into the haze of smog under the relentless Southern California sun. Then one day you wake up to find thirty years have slipped through your fingers, and where the hell did they go…

Dreamers, drifters, and the driven. These are not mutually exclusive types or personalities – most of us have elements of all three in varying degrees. Even drifters follow dreams, and dreamers can be as driven as any hard-charging corporate CEO. There are as many reasons why they end up Hollywood as there are people living in the shadow of that big white sign perched high in the parched hills overlooking Los Angeles – which would be 167, 664, assuming the last census and Wikipedia got it right. Some had no choice in the matter: as their place of birth, “Hollywood” is a name they’ll be scrawling on job applications and endless government forms for the rest of their lives. The rest came here on purpose — forty-two percent white, thirty-nine percent Latino, and the remainder a stew pot of Asians, Blacks, and a smattering of Native Americans. Many are recent arrivals, having forded the southern border one way or another to seek work in the homes, gardens, kitchens, and construction sites of Los Angeles. An entire generation arrived in the great westward migration after World War Two, including those whose single-minded drive to make it in “the movies” doomed any hopes for a happy life behind the white picket fences and suffocating small-town routines back home. Others were driven here by sheer desperation, fleeing the horrors of blighted lives and terminally dysfunctional families, rolling the dice on a fresh start at the far edge of the continent, on the very lip of the abyss. Once in Hollywood, their backs to the wall, there was nowhere else to go: one way or another, they had to make it here. Some turned out to be gritty survivors who succeeded despite — or because of — past failures, while others ended up victims of the myth, riding the death spiral of drugs and dissolution all the way down. But no matter how many the streets swallow up, however slim the odds of success, there are always more where they came from. The moths-to-the-flame allure of Hollywood ensures a steady influx of young hopefuls from all over America and around the world.

It’s this neon-lit face of the American Dream most people want to hear about – the young hopefuls who come to Hollywood burning with ambition to hit the jackpot of wealth and fame, to be a star. Like the vast majority of these American Idol wannabes, only the barest handful bring the talent and drive it takes to make it big — and even that’s not always enough. The importance of luck, that fickle and mysterious confluence of talent and opportunity, cannot be overstated when it comes to achieving success in Hollywood. While a chosen few make the most of their chance, the rest – many just as talented and driven, if not quite so lucky – will eventually face the hard choice of adapting to reality or heading back home. Those able to take the punches and stay on their feet can usually find a place somewhere in the Dream Machine. It’s never easy, but people do it every day.

There are others who arrive carrying equally ambitious (if quieter) agendas tucked under their arms: to become a hot, can’t-miss director: the next Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, or Tarantino. Theirs is a daunting quest, but at least the gauntlet they face isn’t as brutally insulting or degrading as that suffered by aspiring actors — and the fall-back options (Plans B through Z) more numerous and somewhat less soul-crushing to accept. There’s a very wide spectrum of “success” in Hollywood. If nobody will hire you to direct blockbuster feature films, there’s always the world of Television. If TV won’t have you, there are commercials and music videos to be made. If those doors remain closed, maybe you can put together a sweet little low-budget feature to trot around the Indy circuit. Should that fall apart, maybe it’s time to beg, borrow, or steal enough money for a decent video camera and start earning a living making infomercials for late night TV, or educational and training videos for schools and business. At that point, you won’t even be a blip on the Hollywood radar screen, but maybe it’s better than starving – or getting a real job. And if all else fails, there’s always the final frontier: the down-and-dirty world of porn. It’s a long way from Hollywood, but if you can stomach it, there’s work to be had and money to be made down there.

The gulf between working in feature films and the seamy world of porn is unspeakably vast, and a long, hard fall for any cocky young Icarus who blows into town hell-bent on becoming the next Tarantino. But navigating the currents can be tricky in an industry where a little success is often the most dangerous thing of all. Once aloft, it’s all too easy to catch an updraft and soar a little too high here in Hollywood, where sooner or later, everyone learns that even the most expensive pair of designer wings are held together with nothing more substantial than wax.

Success doesn’t come easy, but most people find a way: it’s all a matter of adjusting one’s outlook and the ability to selectively define “success.” And really, what’s the alternative? After coming this far – all the way to the very edge of the continent – slinking back home just might be the worst failure of all. At a certain point, the very nature and process of the struggle itself seems to change something inside, making it almost impossible to turn back. Besides, hope dies last, and there’s no telling when those magic doors might swing open. Yes, the system is rigged against outsiders right from the start, but miracles occasionally do happen – a long-suffering writer, actor, or would-be director plodding along in the dark corridors of obscurity finally catches that once-in-a-lifetime break and is thrust into the fierce heat of the spotlight. It doesn’t happen often, but just enough to keep the rest from giving up hope.

I didn’t come here with dreams of being any kind of a star, in front of or behind the camera, but simply to give Hollywood a try. After falling in love with so many classic American movies in college (and making a few decidedly non-classic student films of my own), I wanted to see what making real Hollywood movies was all about. At the time, anything else sounded way too much like a Real Job — the slow, steady cadence of the dead man walking. Work as a drone in a cube farm? Strap on a suit and tie every morning to battle the twin bureaucracies of office politics and the white-collar power structure? No thanks. And so after a nervous period of post-collegiate stalling, I inhaled one last lungful of crisp Northern California air and plunged south into the smoggy morass of Hollywood. The transition was rude, the learning curve steep, but in time I caught a break, worked a few low-level jobs, and met those who eventually hired me to work on lighting crews. I worked my way up from juicer to best boy to gaffer – and then, like so many others before and since, I too sailed a bit close to the sun. Before I knew it, my own seemingly sturdy wings had come apart in mid-air, sending me on a free-fall plunge right back where I started.

Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

But if the jail was only metaphoric, there was still no going home. Bent but not broken, I got back on my feet a lot older and maybe – just maybe — a little bit wiser.

I’ve been working and surviving in Hollywood for more than thirty years now, through the ups and downs, all the while returning to the San Francisco Bay Area often enough to claim it as my true home. In all the ways that matter, it is – family and the oldest of friends are still there, and I’ll root for the Giants to my last dying breath — but after three full decades, LA has a way of seeping into your blood. One lesson you learn fast down here is that things are seldom as they first appear, and although Southern California is in many ways a horrendously ugly hell-hole, it’s not All Bad, All the Time. There are pockets of beauty here too, tucked away amid the vast urban desert. And although The Industry, as we call it, is nothing like the glamorous playground so many civilians (those of you at home, remote in hand, basking in the flickering glow of the Cathode Ray Gun) often assume it to be, there are occasional flashes of light and clarity here as well. Floating like smoothly sculpted pieces of driftwood amid the daily tidal surge of greed, ego-stoked absurdities, and jaw-dropping excess, are the occasional gleaming, random, and oh-so-ephemeral moments of grace. The trick lies in keeping your eyes and heart open so you can appreciate those moments before they vanish.

I’ll do my best here to peel back the shiny shrink-wrap and offer a glimpse of the real Hollywood as I’ve experienced it: the heavy-lifting, dirt-under-the-fingernails side of the Industry you don’t read about in tabloids. What you won’t find here is any sort of “insider” celebrity gossip. Most of us who work in the Industry see and hear things that would indeed make juicy tabloid fodder, but only a fool or trust-fund baby has the luxury of fouling his own nest by talking out of school. The Industry has big enough ears that a little loose chat could easily put my so-called career in the corn, and at this late date, I don’t have enough time to grow another pair of wings. Accordingly, names will be changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike. So if it’s Hollywood gossip you’re looking for – who said/did what to whom behind his/her back – then click your way over to the celebrity blog-o-sphere, or else run down to your local 7-11 for the latest tabloid trash.

But if you want to hear the truth as I’ve lived it, about the real Hollywood –the blood, sweat, and tedium in the shadows behind all those bright lights – stay tuned.

Michael Taylor joins ACTORSandCREW as a featured writer with his column Hollywood Juicer. Glean sage insight in to the work-a-day life of Hollywood from a crew member’s perspective. From his bio: “Armed with a degree in Aesthetic Studies, boundless ignorance, and a vision of Hollywood heavily influenced by the movie “Shampoo” (and seriously, what guy didn’t want to be Warren Beatty back then?), I proceeded to march on Hollywood in the spirit of a young man seeking adventure, a living — and if Lady Luck deigned to smile upon me — perhaps a modest fortune. Adventure, I found. A living, I made — but although Lady Luck has thus far kept me safe on the road-raging freeways and bullet-riddled streets of Los Angeles, that elusive fortune remains but a shiny mirage dancing on the distant heat waves. There’s no reason to think this will change as I play out the string on a thirty+ year career in set lighting, trying to hang on until the bitter end.