Life Below the Line

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.