Down the Stretch

Working, and then some...


















On the long walk back to my apartment after another late Friday shoot-night, I came across this ancient Cathode Ray Gun -- apparently still in good working order -- left on the curb for the first willing taker. The image sums up my current situation rather nicely.


We're heading down the stretch on my little cable sit-com now, shooting the final episodes of Season One while keeping our collective fingers crossed that this is just the first of many. Four or five more seasons would work just fine for me, but right now I'd settle for Season Two.

One step at a time.

For reasons I don't understand (not that the "why" really matters at this point), our producers juggled the usual three-weeks-on/one-week-off cycle in favor of shooting the final five episodes straight through, with no hiatus weeks off. Once accustomed to working the normal sit-com schedule, anything else feels like a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which means nobody on the crew is happy about this -- but the reality is we're mere playthings of the Gods above-the-line who control our weekly destiny. When they say "jump," the only acceptable response is to ask "how high?"*

One of our core cast members probably had a conflict of one sort or another, so we took two hiatus weeks sandwiched around one week of work last month, and are now slogging through the Death March towards Episode 30. It hasn't been much fun getting our asses so thoroughly kicked the past few weeks. The scripts are more ambitious lately, with more and bigger swing sets, all of which must be treated to the usual level of lighting, tweaking, re-lighting, and yet more tweaking before being shot-out and torn down. My work days have been starting earlier and ending considerably later than normal, leaving me dragging my ass like a three-legged donkey by the weekend.

And that's my excuse for such a short and relatively content-free post this week. It's all I have the time/energy for, and with the next show's script calling for a similarly bruising load of swing sets, we're in for another long week.

So bear with me, people. No doubt I'll be back to my usual long-winded bleating eventually, but not until we finally crawl across the finish line marking the end of Season One. At that point I'll commence the burning of incense, chanting, and ritual sacrifice of small helpless animals in an effort to entice the Gods of Hollywood to grant us a Season Two.

Whatever works...


* Anybody toiling in the Killing Fields of episodics or features will snort derisively at this, and with good reason. But I've said it before and I'll say it again -- life in Hollywood is graded on the curve of one's own experience and expectations. Having done my time in the long-hour/late-night trenches over the past 34 years, I've got nothing left to prove.