Getting Fired

(photo by Michael Ochs)

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

Chinese proverb


Failure... and Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that’s a rough way to get fired.

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

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

It was then that one of "our" director/cameramen decided to stop shooting and bump my gaffer up to DP.  This was good news, but moving up through the Industry ranks can be tricky. In the world of commercials, it's hard to be a gaffer-DP for long without losing a certain credibility -- at some point you've got to make a leap of faith, and when that time comes, you'd better stick the landing. I'd done very little gaffing up 'til then, and had no particular ambition to move up, but when my gaffer made his leap, my choice was to go with him as his gaffer, or else fall back into the pond with the rest of the day-playing free-lance fish. There are some perks with moving up to gaffer – getting a scout day on many jobs (more money), a new level of respect (however undeserved), and less physical work on set (having a best boy and juicers to wrangle the 4/0) -- but in truth, I wasn’t quite ready to be a gaffer. While working as a best boy all those years, my concern had been running the crew, powering the set, making sure the gaffer had the equipment he needed, and doing the paperwork. I was too busy to study the lighting, and by then my Hollywood ambitions had pretty much plateaued.  This was my job now – something that paid the bills and engaged my brain on a practical, mechanical level, but that's all.

The choice I faced left me no good option, so I took a deep breath and made the leap.

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

I was a gaffer in name only.

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

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

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

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

I'd been fired.*

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

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

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

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

Call that what you will, but I call it a success.

Getting fired is a stinging failure in the short term -- a serious bitch-slap -- but it can provide a useful opportunity to re-examine your approach to your job/career. Until you realize something's wrong, you don't know it needs to be fixed. That might mean deciding to crack down and put your heart and soul into the job, or maybe you need to go in an entirely new direction. Either way, the experience -- painful though it is -- can help you grow and succeed over the long run. If nothing else, it just might change your own personal definition of the term "success."


* There's more to this story -- an almost surreal double-whammy of personal complications that made the situation infinitely worse -- but that'll have to wait for the book.  This wasn't my last taste of failure, though, nor the last time I'd be fired. It was all part of the bruising process of learning the ropes in Hollywood.

Failure: Part Two

                                  "It ain't all sunglasses and blow jobs, kid"

(This is my second meditation on the subject of failure - to read the first, click here.)

There are many ways to fail in Hollywood, but for those who work below the line, failure generally comes in the form of being fired -- an ugly experience that can feel very personal. Even when you see the hammer coming, it's hard to wrap your brain around the reality of getting fired when it finally drops. All you can do then is pour a few drinks, curse the forces that brought you down, then take a long look in the mirror to figure out why it happened.*

Clichés don't ease the pain -- and there are many that laud the phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes qualities of failure -- but eventually it might sink in that you really are better off. Getting fired blows away the rust of complacency, extracts you from a situation that may have been problematic to begin with, and liberates you for something new.

Yeah, I know: that sounds like another convenient, worn-out cliché, but such clichés endure because they're stood the test of time.

The calendar pages fly off the wall back to the summer of 1986, when the gaffer I was then working for took a low budget, non-union feature -- and as his Best Boy, I pretty much had to go along for the ride. Not that I was happy about it, mind you. We were making good money doing commercials at the time, working for relatively short, intense periods, and enjoying lots of free time for other pursuits. Blowing off such a sweet deal for the relentless grind and comparitively lousy pay of a low budget feature (a world I'd worked very hard to escape) felt like a huge step backwards, but work relationships in the film industry are a bit like a marriage: to maintain the partnership, you're in it for better or worse.

Besides, if I didn't take the job, somebody else would, which meant that person would be working for my gaffer doing my job with my crew for the next two full months -- a process that forges tight bonds through the mutual suffering endured while overcoming difficult, frustrating challenges on a daily basis. Memories are short in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately town like Hollywood, where (like it or not) we're all replaceable. If I turned down the movie, there was no guarantee I'd still have my Best Boy slot doing commercials once the feature was over. Besides, I'd been getting much of my work from this gaffer for several years at that point, and not taking this feature would mean having to fish for day-player gigs over the next two months. Day-playing work is sporadic at best, so I'd probably make as much or more money doing the movie despite the crappy rate.

There was no way around it: I'd just have to suck it up and strap myself to the low-budget whipping post for the next eight weeks. Once the flogging was over, we could all go back to our fat, happy life making commercials.

Still, this one looked like a royal pain in the ass, with Gary Busey and Yaphet Kotto starring in a drama about a Vietnam vet who served time in prison after the war, and is being released on parole as the movie opens. "Buck Mathews" then returns to his small hometown, which is being terrorized by a violent drug-running motorcycle gang, whereupon -- surprise -- he ends up battling the bikers with his old pal played by Kotto. Bloody mayhem ensues, in the form of decapitation, endless gunfire, and explosions galore. When the Evil Bikers make the mistake of murdering Buck's wife, he morphs into an Everyman Superhero and unleashes his terrible vengeance upon them. 

The song "Eye of the Tiger" blares all through this exercise in cinematic idiocy, of course, since the movie's producers were also responsible for the tune. We can only hope there's a special, very hot little room in Artistic Hell waiting for serial offenders like the Scotti Brothers.

Most of the movies I'd worked on up 'til then were steaming piles of formulaic crap, so the quality of this project didn't really bother me, but the filming would take place in the parched desert regions north of LA during the hottest stretch of the brutal SoCal summer. Working an occasional hot day is one thing -- doing eight straight weeks in that withering heat is something else. With a script that sucked, money that sucked, an hour-long drive each way to start and end every work day, a star fresh from an extended stint in drug rehab, and a co-star with no apparent sense of on-set camaraderie, the next two months promised to be an ordeal for all concerned. To me, this gig felt more like a prison sentence than a form of gainful employment.

Still, you do what you've gotta do. As the old timers used to snarl, always with a bitter grin: "It ain't all sunglasses and blow jobs, kid."

The first day went pretty much as expected -- long, hot, and no fun at all. Gary Busey was as tightly-wound as a new spool of thread. Tense and unsmiling, he stayed on set much of the time whether on camera or not, a foul-smelling cigar clenched in his teeth from morning 'til night. Yapphet Kotto remained a consistently sullen, glowering presence throughout, whether by design (an actor staying "in character" to maintain a certain level of internal continuity) or simply because that's the kind of person he was.** I have no idea why he felt the need to be so grimly unpleasant, but with our two main actors radiating such dark energy, this was the antithesis of a loose, happy set.

The week ground on, one ugly, sweaty day after another. Filming scenes with a large motorcycle gang isn't easy, and our First AD -- a big, burly man aptly nicknamed "Bear" -- worked his ass off, somehow keeping his cool amidst that swirling cauldron of heat, dust, and confusion. By the time Friday rolled around, the entire crew was fried. With a late call, we arrived on set knowing we wouldn't wrap until sometime early the next morning.

Another fucking Fraturday...

We sweated through the afternoon, then broke for lunch as twilight approached. The rest of our "day" would be night work in cooler temperatures, at least, but filming at night requires a massive quantity of lights, cable, and power distribution gear. By the time we'd set up for the master shot, our equipment truck was nearly empty, which meant that come wrap, every last lamp, stand, distro box, gang box, cable, and stinger would have to be lugged back and properly stowed before we could head for home and our day-and-a-half off.

The night dragged on until we set up for a scene where the motorcycle thugs were scripted to force a woman's car off the road, then smash the windows, drag her out into the dirt, and abuse her mercilessly -- and then, of course, "Buck Mathews" would come to the rescue and save her from what writers of the early 19th century referred to as "a fate worse than death."

Here, the narrative muddles. With just two juicers on my crew, I was busy helping to power and adjust the many lights out in that dark field, and thus nowhere near the camera. I could see an animated discussion going on around the car, but had other things to deal with. As I heard it later, our stunt coordinator was unhappy with the type of glass being used in the car, and dug in his heels when it came time for the window-smashing and actress-dragging. I was told he refused to take part, but the director went ahead anyway... and the actress suffered cuts on her thighs and legs as the bikers dragged her across broken glass on the car seat -- cuts bad enough to send her to the nearest hospital emergency room.***

Shortly thereafter, one of my juicers rolled his ankle in a pothole, and he too was taken to the hospital. Working one man short, we soldiered on through the night, and I didn't hear until later that four more crew members from various departments had suffered sprains working on the rough terrain. At one point, all six  -- one actress and five crew -- were being treated in the same emergency room, where the suddenly overworked ER staff wondered what the hell was going on with this movie. A good question, that. 

When that grueling night finally came to an end, and the truck was nearly wrapped, the gaffer informed me that the producers were in the process of firing our DP. It seems they weren't happy with the dailies, and had decided to go with another DP -- which meant a new lighting crew, so we too were getting the axe.****

Oddly enough, I had mixed feelings. Although my rational brain was delighted to be off this shit-show, I didn't like being fired. Maybe it was wounded or misplaced pride (or simple stupidity), but having endured that first miserable week, my emotional loins were girded to finish the job. Worse, the new electric crew couldn't start until the following Tuesday, which meant after our short weekend, we'd have to come back for one more Monday sweating our balls off under the hot Saugus sun working for the new DP.

Awkward.

But we got through it, and when the day was finally over our 1st AD insisted that we meet him at Tips, a legendary watering hole famous for its exotic, pricey, and extremely potent mixed drinks. Once we'd gathered around a table, "Bear" pulled out a hundred dollar bill and bought us all a round as thanks for coming back to suffer through one more miserably stupid day. It was a nice gesture on his part, and a welcome sendoff back to the fat and happy world of making commercials.

Or so I thought... but things don't always work out the way you want. Apparently that one nasty week kindled a latent desire in the heart of my gaffer to do features, which is why a few weeks later we gathered in a small North Carolina town called Tarboro -- where it was just as hot with the added misery of suffocating Southern humidity -- to shoot another low budget movie.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Still, this one had a better, happier cast and crew, in a lush and beautiful part of the country I hadn't seen before -- a job we wouldn't have been able to take if not for being fired off that piece of crap biker movie.****  

So if you get fired one of these days, take some time to lick your wounds, then start looking for the silver lining in an otherwise dark, depressing cloud. Getting the axe always hurts, but it just might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.



* The experience of being fired above-the-line seems to be very different than what most of us encounter below-the-line.

** Maybe Kotto made the mistake of reading the script. Just how bad is Eye of the Tiger?  Hoo boy... an old friend recently sent me the DVD, so I sat down to watch some of the worst writing and acting I've ever seen on screen. Gary Busey brought his usual manic intensity to the role of "Buck," and Seymour Cassell soldiered through a badly written role, but the rest -- including Kotto -- were just awful. 

*** I tried to suss out the details of that night, calling the gaffer and one of my juicers to find out what they remembered.  I even contacted the DGA to get in touch with "Bear," our 1st AD, figuring he could fill me in on exactly what happened, but he didn't respond to my e-mails. 

**** The rumor on set was that the producers used a porno lab to process and print the film, since it was cheaper than a mainstream film industry lab -- which might account for the poor dailies -- but who knows...

Stranger in a Strange Land

Portrait of the juicer as a young man. A milk man...

”I’m not an actor, but I play one on TV”*

Working below-the-line generally means a solid, if unspectacular career behind the scenes, toiling long hours to make a decent living, then retiring just in time to die in anonymous obscurity. There are notable exceptions to the rule, however -- some surprisingly famous names who got their foot in Hollywood’s door working below-the-line. Legend has it Marion Morrison was working as a prop man and set dresser when John Ford spotted him, then began grooming the young man who would become John Wayne for a career in front of the camera. Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter before becoming a full time actor. Early in Kevin Costner’s Hollywood career, he pushed a broom as a stage manager at Raleigh Studios, just across Melrose Avenue from Paramount. While finishing up a job at Raleigh a very long time ago, I talked with young Mr. Costner one night as he swept up the stage. “I’m not gonna be doing this forever,” he declared -- and whatever your opinion of his subsequent career,** he was true to his word. The impression I have is that Wayne more or less stumbled into his life’s work as an actor, but Ford and Costner had their eyes on the prize right from the start, coming to Hollywood prepared to do whatever was necessary to rise from the shadows into the blazing heat of the spotlight.

They came here to be actors.

That said, swinging a hammer or pushing a broom is hardly the inside track to a screen acting career, and most who start out below-the-line, stay there. Film making can be a remarkably fluid enterprise, however -- particularly in the low budget world of non-union features and music videos, where circumstance will occasionally conspire to drag some hapless crew member from his/her safe haven behind the lens and thrust them in front of the cameras. Perhaps there is a little ham in everyone, but that doesn’t mean every grip, juicer, or prop man harbors a secret desire to perform in the merciless glare of the spotlights. When called on, some do surprisingly well out there, but most want nothing more than to crawl back into the comfort zone beneath their own craft-specific rock. Anybody who thinks what actors do is easy – and the good ones do make it look effortless – just doesn’t have a clue.

My own cinematic debut came early, during my very first Hollywood job, working as an unpaid production assistant on a micro-budget feature with the rather stilted title of “He Wants Her Back.” For reasons that were never clear – then or now -- the script called for a brief reenactment of the 1973 shootout between FBI agents and members of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It was a night shoot, with every lamp pulled off the truck and burning, while the camera prepared to make a thirty foot dolly move along a row of actors playing FBI sharpshooters. Halfway through the setup, the director realized he needed another body on the firing line. Being fresh out of actors, he looked around, then fixed me with his intense glare.

“Hey Farm Boy,” he barked. “You know how to shoot a rifle?”

Word of my rural upbringing had leaked out, branding me with the moniker “Farm Boy.” Such is lot of the lowly, unpaid production assistant – a life of insult heaped upon indignity.

“Sure,” I shrugged. As a kid, I’d spent many a long afternoon wandering the then-empty hills and valleys of the Bay Area with my trusty bolt-action .22.

“Go to wardrobe,” he ordered.

Like it or not, I was an actor now.

Fortunately, this was not a demanding role. All I had to do was squeeze the trigger as the camera dollied past, then chamber another shell and fire again: a simple task I’d performed a thousand times before, albeit without a film crew watching my every move. But the more I thought about it -- the lights, the camera, all those people staring at me -- the more nervous I got. Minutes passed like hours, and by the time they were ready to roll, I was as tight as a brand new spool of thread.

I took my position with the real actors, lying down behind a dirt berm with the rifle nestled into my shoulder, aiming into the darkness. The director issued last minute instructions, then after a couple of dolly/camera rehearsals, there was a long moment of stillness.

“Roll camera!” the A.D. barked.
“Rolling,” the first A.C. replied.
“Speed,” said the boom man, and the second A.C. snapped the slate.
"Action!" the director yelled, and the lens floated towards me.

I waited until the camera was dead in my sights, then squeezed the trigger. Flame belched from the barrel. I snapped the bolt back to eject the spent shell and slam a fresh one home – but the mechanism jammed. I panicked, frantically shoving the bolt back and forth, but it was no use... and then it was too late, the camera past me now and rolling smoothly down the firing line under a barrage of flame from the waiting rifles.

"Cut!" the director yelled.

I felt like an idiot. It didn't matter that I had no interest in becoming an actor -- I'd been handed one of those magical Hollywood opportunities to rise from the pack and show what I could do: to actually help put something on film after two weeks of picking up cigarette butts, bringing coffee to the director (black, no sugar), and driving the set-dressing 5-ton from one location to the next. Instead, I’d blown it. “Farm Boy” couldn’t even shoot a gun right.

My ears burning, I blurted an apology, but the director waved me off with a grin. He wanted to portray a night of confusion and gunfire during which two Indians were killed and an FBI agent wounded in the shootout – and since I’d looked confused and angry on camera, he was happy. At the cast and crew screening, I was relieved to see the lens flash past me in an instant, and that at least I managed to get that first crucial shot off on screen.

But I still felt like an idiot.

My next moment in the spotlight came several years later, while working on a commercial for a then-fledgling cable network called Showtime. Part of the commercial was designed to offer a “back-stage” view of a film crew hard at work -- which is how I found myself up on the green beds (wooden scaffolding suspended from chains) getting ready to pull a Big Eye Ten K (a huge 10,000 watt studio lamp) from the deck of the stage floor. A Big Eye Tenner is as bulky as a washing machine, and almost as heavy. Standard procedure in taking such a massive lamp up to the green beds is to use a "mule" and block-and-falls (an electric hoist with a pulley system), but our director had something more dramatic in mind: a juicer pulling that beast up on a rope, hand over hand. Since those old Big Eye Tenners weighed around 140 pounds -- and at the time I might have weighed 150, soaking wet -- there were two of us up there on the greens preparing for our close-up.

That Big Eye was a monster. Pulling the rope over the green bed rail required a maximum effort from both of us to get the damned thing four feet off the ground, where the D.P. ordered us to halt while he lay on his back and slid underneath. His brilliant idea was to shoot straight up so the enormous lamp would fill the screen to start the shot. With so much weight on the other end, our half-inch hemp rope felt like piano wire through my gloves, particularly with the DP lying right in the Kill Zone directly beneath the lamp. If that rope slipped or broke, he’d have less than a second to roll out of the way and avoid being crushed – and it’s not easy to move that fast while peering through the viewfinder of a camera.

This wasn’t quite so much fun anymore. Getting fired off a job is one thing – most of us have been fired at one time or another -- but being fired for dropping a Big Eye on the DP (with potentially fatal results) was the kind of stinking albatross that could follow both of us through our entire careers and on into the grave. It was too late now, though – with the camera rolling, the director yelled “action!” so we pulled as hard as we could. The huge light inched upwards. “Faster!” he shouted. We, put everything we had into a gut-busting effort that left no room for error – one slip, and that beast of a lamp would plummet like an anvil. With the entire crew watching our every move, we finally pulled the massive lamp high enough to drag it safely onto the green bed. Both of us were sweating like pigs, partly from the sheer physical strain, but mostly from the stress.

This acting thing is tougher than it looks.

Many years later, lightening struck again while filming a music video for Randy Newman’s salute to modern culture, It's Money That Matters. With a six-day shooting schedule (a long shoot by music video standards), and everyone on the crew working at half our normal rates, this was one job none of us really wanted.

“Don’t worry,” said the producer. “It’ll be fun.”

Thanks to my lifetime enrollment in the Joe Frazier School of Higher Education, there are many words I’ve learned to associate with the term “music video”– few of them usable in polite company -- and “fun” is definitely not among them. Still, this production company was one of our main commercial clients, and in Hollywood (as in life, marriage, and just about everything else), sometimes we have to take the bad with the good. This was one of those times.

Oddly enough, the job actually did turn out to be fun. With six days to do the work, we were under very little pressure, working ten hour days at a relaxed pace, with none of the usual shouting and screaming from coked-out directors or rock stars with egos larger than the pyramids at Giza. It made a huge difference that Randy Newman was such a pleasant, low-key guy, setting the tone for the whole shoot, which featured a small army of local celebrity cameos -- among them, Marcus Allen driving a Rolls Royce, Robin Leach (of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”) popping his head up from the moon roof of a limousine, and Mark Knopfler of “Dire Straits” playing his guitar while floating high above the street, strapped into the seat of a crane arm on a Shotmaker camera car cruising slowly through Westwood.

Things were going fine until we arrived at a little house in West LA early one morning to shoot a scene featuring a milk man. There was no sign of the actor by the time we were all set up -- and that’s when I noticed the director and his A.D. standing together, nodding, and staring at me.

Not again...
Yes, again.
“Go to wardrobe,” said the director.

Minutes later, I was leaning back in the makeup chair wearing a white milkman suit, being fussed-over by an extremely attractive make-up girl murmuring sweet nothings in my ear while she worked.

“Everybody knows the milkman always delivers,” she purred, in a smoldering, sexy voice.

It was only then that I realized how much more goes into a make-up artist’s job than the skilled application of camera-ready war paint. A good make-up girl knows how to pump an actor up, making him feel as terrific as he supposedly looks, giving him the confidence he needs to perform. In my case, this lovely woman didn’t have much to work with, but still, she sent me out of that make-up trailer feeling like a million bucks, buoyed by a wonderfully confident sense of well-being that carried me all the way to the set -- where it vanished like a prayer over a roulette wheel as I confronted the cold glass eye of the camera lens. That’s when I remembered – again -- just how much I’m not an actor. With the director barking orders, the camera rolled, and I did my best to make it happen, but it was painfully obvious to all that my “best” wasn’t good at all. Bathed in sweat, with a rictus grin etched on my aching face, I suffered through take after take after take, feeling like a complete fraud every interminable second of the ordeal... and then it was over. Flooded with relief, I took off the white hat and suit, and turned back into a pumpkin. Again, in the finished product, my appearance is blessedly brief – maybe a second or two, at most – but even that seemed much too long.

Did I mention how hard this acting thing is? Really hard.

With any luck, that was last time I’ll ever have to step in front of a movie camera. In the twenty years since, I moved from the wild-and-woolly fringes of the Industry into its placid mainstream, where we pretty much do our jobs and that's it. Still, you never know -- while working on a sit-com a few years ago, the producers decided we needed a middle-aged guy to play a janitor, pushing a broom across the set to open one of the scene. Rather than call Kevin Costner (hey, I've seen him push a broom, and he's good) -- a call that would have tipped the budget way into the red – they sent our Director of Photography to wardrobe and makeup, and thus it was he who had to suffer through a trial-by-camera in front of a live audience of 250 people. That night, he discovered what I learned a long time ago: there are good reasons why actors are the ones out there in the hot lights, performing for the lens -- very good reasons -- while the rest of us remain behind the camera.

I know what I am -- a juicer, not an actor -- and just as well for all concerned.


*I stole this line from Larry Reibman, an old friend who worked as the gaffer for “On Wings of Eagles” (1986), a television miniseries starring Burt Lancaster and Richard Crenna. Larry made his big-screen debut when drafted by the director (Andrew V. Mclaglen) to portray an American ambassador opposite Richard Crenna’s Ross Perot. This was no mere walk-on, but a four or five minute dialog scene requiring extensive coverage. Larry did an excellent job in front of the camera that day -- such a great job, as fate would have it, that a couple of years later he became...a Director of Photography. A very good one.

** Personally, I think Costner’s portrayal of the veteran catcher Crash Davis in “Bull Durham” (1988) – one of the best sports movies ever -- was spot-on perfect. Say what you will about Kevin Costner, but he got that one right.

Learning to Work

                                                   It ain't easy...

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Maimonides

A while back I discussed the importance of persistence for those hoping to forge a career in the film and television industry, but there’s one more thing every newbie knocking on the doors of Hollywood needs to know if they’re to have any hope of making their cinematic dreams come true.

No, not the four-digit numerical code to open the security gate guarding Cindy Crawford's secluded beachside home out in Malibu (which I learned -- then soon forgot -- while working on an infomercial we filmed in her house), but something much more basic and infinitely more useful:

How to work.

You’d be surprised how many newbies arrive on the shores of Hollywood burdened with the assumption that by dint of being young and earnest, some mysteriously divine process will bless them with success -- that after a few weeks of paying their dues, good things will just naturally start to happen.   

It doesn't work that way... and the key word there is “work,” because in order to make your Hollywood fantasies come anywhere close to reality, you’re going to have to work very hard indeed.  And if you don’t know how to work -- to really work -- you’ve got a problem.

And by “knowing how to work,” I don’t mean simply putting your head down, then grunting and sweating until someone tells you to stop.  It’s a lot more than that. 

I too was once a clueless young fool who didn’t know how to work.  Despite growing up on the farm where doing chores (of the sort that would horrify your average urban or suburban film school graduate) was just a part of life, I didn’t really learn how to work until I was 25 years old.  

Truth be told, I was a lazy kid who had to be prodded with the pitchfork of fear or the lure of a reward to do any sort of work, and even then I'd do just enough to accomplish the task.  Truly unpleasant assignments (such as spending an entire week shoveling pig shit out of the barn during Spring Break or  -- later in college -- writing a hopelessly lame paper on D.H. Lawrence for some god-awful Lit class I never should have taken in the first place), were performed grudgingly at best.* 

I just didn't like to work.

Nothing in school taught me to embrace  the concept or reality of work, so I remained a lazy slug in the immediate post-collegiate years while finishing up my thesis film and scraping out a living behind the counter of a local pizza parlor.  I hadn’t yet learned to do a good job or take pride in my work no matter the circumstances -- which is to say, I was just skating through. After getting fired from the pizza job (a totally justified termination, I might add), then completing my thesis film, I stood before the world a 24 year old unemployed young man with no useful or salable skills at all.  

By comparison, Orson Welles was preparing to make “Citizen Kane” at age 24, and was all of 25 when his legendary film hit the theaters.  But Orson Welles knew how to work, and I didn’t.**   

Being flat broke, I was neither financially nor emotionally prepared to mount an assault on Hollywood, so I took a job behind the counter of a mom-and-pop deli in the hills north of town. With just one store at the time, Erik's Deli was a small family operation, but Erik had big plans that did not include tolerating a lazy, unmotivated employee accustomed to doing a half-assed job.

Erik and I got off to a rough start.  He was a burly, intense man who made it clear that certain standards would be maintained in his deli come hell or high water -- and as the king of this little castle, he expected me to meet those standards.  Behind this challenge lurked the unspoken threat that it was his way or the highway.  Given my innately lazy nature and dismal history with any kind of work, it seemed unlikely I’d last more than a couple of weeks.  

Much to my surprise, those two weeks passed without getting the boot, but I wasn't having much fun. Having deduced that I was a lazy fuck-up, Erik began busting my chops with metronomic regularity.  I didn’t much like that, and at a certain point my simmering resentment at his eternally critical comments bubbled over into a powerful desire to prove him wrong.  

I didn’t realize it then, but I was responding to his challenge.  I began paying attention at work in a way I never had before, taking a job seriously and trying hard to do it right for the very first time.  It took a few months for me to fully shape up, at which point Erik assigned me to the crew about to open his brand new deli in town, a much bigger facility at a busy outdoor shopping center.  Business would be fast and furious there, and he seemed to think I could handle it.  

The chops-busting continued, of course.  Erik was relentless in his determination that the new deli succeed and prosper.  The service would be friendly and efficient, the sandwiches would be made with care, and the store would be kept clean at all times.  If this all sounds completely obvious, you're right -- it's Retail 101 -- but my previous stint at the pizza parlor had taught me every bad work habit you can imagine, along with a few that you can't.***   That kind of negative training doesn't get turned around overnight.  

There were plenty of ups and downs over the next year.  Erik dropped in for frequent unannounced visits, and during one of those, found a marijuana seed on the kitchen floor.  He made a point of bringing that up at an employee meeting, turning to fix me with that hard, laser-beam glare of his. The irony was that of the entire night crew, I was the only one who didn’t smoke dope at work (or at home, for that matter)  -- and everybody knew it but Erik.

I kept my cool, meeting his gaze with my own unflinching stare.  He could think whatever he wanted.  I’d learned how to work hard by then -- how to be responsible, to work with a crew as a team, and the importance of going above and beyond what was strictly required.  Let the rest of the crew jockey for the soon-to-be-open assistant manager job.  I was on my way to bigger and better things.  

Eventually I felt ready to take my shot at Hollywood.  I gave a full month’s notice at the deli, and kept working hard right up through my final day.  After clocking out for the last time, Erik called me into the main office. I had no idea what to expect, but there I found a very different guy.  He was all smiles now, the hard edge gone. Thanking me for all my hard work -- and for not slacking off coming down the stretch -- he wished me good luck in Hollywood, then handed me a check for  a full month's severance pay, something he was under no obligation to do.  

I was floored, but what I didn't realize then was that the lessons I'd learned in how to work over that year would prove far more valuable to my future than a check for five hundred dollars.

A few weeks later I threw a leg over my motorcycle and headed down U.S. Route 101 to Los Angeles with a pocket full of hope and enough in my wallet to last a few months. 

Here in Hollywood, my new attitude towards work paid off.  I hit the ground ready to go, and after a couple of months landed my first unpaid PA job on a feature, parlayed that into a paid assistant editing gig, then got on another feature as a PA -- paid, this time. Within a year I'd left PA-dom behind and was working my first feature as a grip, after which I moved towards set lighting.  

I was on my way, but looking back now, I'm not sure any of that would have -- or could have -- happened if I hadn’t learned the hard lessons of how to work in the deli.  

This isn't to paint my own fence as some wonderful Hollywood success.  I've managed to survive the ebb and flow of the film industry for the better part of four decades, but lifting heavy objects for a living is a long way from the heady creative environment of the writing rooms and director's chairs of Hollywood.  I'm a very small and totally replaceable cog lost amid the vast gears that keep the Industry Machine running.  Still, the principle holds true, because nobody  -- above or below the line -- can achieve any of their goals or Tinsel-Town dreams unless and until they know how to work.

It's something everybody has to learn sooner or later -- and in Hollywood, the sooner, the better.

* It's a good thing I went to one of those totally forgiving pass/no record schools, or else I'd never have bagged any kind of college credential.  Not that a degree in "aesthetic studies" was worth a dime in the real world of post-collegiate life, but that's a tale for another time.

** He was also astonishingly talented, utterly brilliant, and boundlessly ambitious.  Me?  None of the above.

*** Remember these words, people:  don't ever -- and I mean EVER -- piss off the kids behind the counter of any food establishment.  Trust me on this.  

Commercials

Chasing the Dragon

                           
I don’t know if this post will make sense to any of you, but the middle of summer is a good time to loosen the tethers and let 'er rip…

Earlier in my Hollywooden career, I spent the better part of twenty years working on  television commercials in various capacities.  Starting out as a grip, I switched to juicing before moving up to Best Boy. When my main Gaffer bumped up to DP and started shooting, I went along for the ride as his Gaffer for another dozen years.  

You name it, we did it: commercials for cat food, dog food, pizza, fried chicken, hamburgers, candy bars, beer, whiskey, soft drinks, shampoo, sun tan lotion, automobiles, banks, credit cards, cable TV companies, Barbie Dolls, and God knows what else.  There were good times and bad -- flying high and getting fired.  The low-rent spots weren't anything to write home about, but the high-end jobs paid good money and sent us to spectacular locations throughout the country.  In addition to filming all over California we did spots in Portland (Oregon), Seattle, Death Valley, Colorado, El Paso and Austin (Texas), Jackson Hole (Wyoming), Montana, Kansas City, and several locations in Mexico. We filmed against some of the most scenic backdrops you can imagine -- places tourists pay a bundle to see -- and all the while getting paid for it.  

 That was the most lucrative and fun stretch of my career.

Pressure was part of the equation, of course.  Ad agencies and their clients can get tense on set when the rubber of their months-long, big-bucks conceptual campaign finally meets the road for a few crucial make-or-break days of filming.  It's rarely a disaster to miss a shot or two on a feature or television show -- you can usually shoot the missing pick-ups later -- but it can be a lot more complicated when filming commercial on location, where the pressure is on to get every scripted shot in the can.  

That’s why they paid us such good money: to deliver the cinematic magic regardless of the circumstances.  

A major fuck-up on one job could mean not getting called back, and in a big-little town like Hollywood -- where you're only as good as your last couple of gigs -- such a failure can be big trouble.  Doing commercials was a high-wire act for everyone involved: agency, client, production company, director, and crew -- but it was a great job. I used make fifty to sixty grand a year working an average of two days a week back when that was actual money -- well over $100K in today’s inflated dollars.  That left me the rest of those two hundred-plus days off each year to do whatever I wanted.

Anyway you look at it, that’s a pretty sweet part-time job.

But at a certain point it began to bother me that in making commercials, I was putting my shoulder to the wheel of the advertising industry, and thus becoming part of a machine designed to fleece the American viewing public by convincing millions of them to buy things they didn’t need and often couldn’t afford.  Our job was to create the illusion of need -- to manipulate those viewers into feeling somehow inadeqate or empty inside, so they would then seek to fill that void by buying the products we'd made look so sexy on screen.  

Can’t afford it right now?  Who cares -- just put it on a credit card.  

By that time -- fifteen years after the 60‘s had crashed and burned on the rocks of political assassinations, war, massive civil strife, and Altamont* -- the co-opting magic of the ad biz had swallowed whole the live for today battle cry of the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll generation, then regurgitated it back onto America's television screens as the hip, modern way of life: fly now, pay later, and worry about the consequences down the road.

In this Madison Avenue vision of America, consumption equaled happiness, and if such happiness couldn't possibly last, so much the better.  That way the suckers -- er, consumers -- would have to keep buying more and more and more, chasing the dragon like a crack addict desperate to experience the giddy, all-consuming body rush of that first lung-searing hit just one more time...

Not to go all Zen on you here, but it can’t be done.  Mick Jagger was right -- no matter how fast you race down that Moebius Highway, you really can’t get any satisfaction from buying things.  It doesn't work.

Not that this stopped me from doing commercials, mind you.**  It might be morally queasy -- and I often felt that I was stoking the boilers on the train carrying us all to our collective cultural and economic Hell -- but the money was great, and for every day I worked, I got two days off.  

Thus proving that I can be bought as easily as anybody else, I suppose.  

But while shoveling all that coal, I began to eye the advertising agency people as the real villains -- the “Mad Men” and women who thought up these diabolically manipulative commercials designed to get inside the heads and warp the minds of American television viewers.  I regarded them with a thinly-veiled contempt.  

This was an entirely too convenient (read: hypocritical) and self-serving assumption on my part.  After all, it was their efforts that made my job possible -- without those agency people, I’d still have been getting my ass kicked making shit money on God-awful low-budget features.  Truth is, we were all equally culpable parts of the same insatiable beast feeding on the economic entrails of the American consumer... but being young and all-too full of myself at the time,  I thought I knew what was what, even if the rest of the world hadn’t yet caught on.  

Live and learn.

The opportunity finally arrived for me to speak The Truth As I Saw It while shooting a commercial in lovely Barstow, California, a bleak little barnacle of a town clinging to the edge of the Mojave Desert.  After a long hot day filming some idiotic spot, I bellied up to the bar next to one of the agency women -- in her early 30‘s, and not unattractive -- who was sipping a drink.  Later I would realize that she probably just wanted to escape the rest of the pin-head agency crowd with a drink or three, and blow off a little steam.   

And who knows, maybe something more...

But being a young fool on a mission, I saw this as my chance to confront a wayward child of Satan with the Truth, and thus strike a blow for the revolution fomenting between my ears.  Leaning close to be heard over the cacophony all around, I shouted my irrefutable argument into her ear.  

Didn’t she understand that by working in advertising, all she was doing was sowing unhappiness in trying to convince a gullible viewing public to buy things they didn’t need and couldn’t afford?

She stared at me as if I was a complete jerk -- which I was.

“No,” she replied stiffly.  “We’re helping steer people to the things they want so they can live a better life.”

I wasn’t buying any of that, of course, so round and round we went, each re-stating our respective positions with utter conviction -- which is to say, we were locked in the classic no-win scenario of an “is-isn’t” argument.  Finally seeing that she wasn’t going to budge, and growing weary of shouting over the din of that crowded bar, I dialed it back and tried to make nice.  Too late.  Having realized exactly how much fun I wasn’t, she downed the remains of her drink and left. 

Only then -- suddenly alone in a loud bar full of sunburned yahoos -- did it dawn on me that I’d been chasing a dragon of my own, nurturing a bitter little nugget of perceived "truth" that had fueled the hot fire of my righteous anger all this time.  I also realized that in trying to grab that dragons tail, I was biting the hand that fed me… and in a way, biting my own hand.

Purity is a hard thing to hold on to in this life.  The land mines of moral compromise are underfoot everywhere, and all but impossible to avoid unless you walk the most straight-and-narrow of paths -- and that particular road does not go through Hollywood.  Maybe we’re all guided by self-serving rationalizations in doing what we must to get by in this increasingly complex world, but few of us are equipped to strap on the hair shirt of absolute moral purity and live the life of a Mother Teresa.

I certainly wasn't.

Descending from the high horse, my attitude began to shift after that.  I started looking at these ad agency people as just that -- people doing a job.  Some were boring, ambitious, me-first assholes, of course, but many were funny, creative, interesting people.  My attitude continued to evolve until a few years later, after a long sweaty day filming a spot at Arthur Bryant's BBQ in Kansas City, I accepted the agency's invitation to stay after wrap and sample the legendary smoked meats.***  I was the only crew member who did, and still remember the long look the DP gave me before he climbed into the van back to the hotel.   

“You’ve come a long way, Mike” he said, shaking his head.

What can I say?  The barbecue was great, and those agency people turned out to be very nice, not the Devil's minions on a mission from Hell. Besides, nobody goes through life without getting their hands a little dirty, and in the long run, we all pay for our sins one way or another.  Meanwhile, you do the best you can for as long as you can, and hope that's enough.

But do keep an eye open for those dragons.  They're out there.


*  Yes, I was among that enormous crowd, young, dumb, and full of… enthusiasm.

**  This is what finally kicked me off the commercial gravy-train.

***  Yes, the very same establishment where President Obama had lunch last week.

The Gears of Karma

C’est la vie say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

(Chuck Berry)


The gears of Karmic Justice generally grind with maddening deliberation in this troubled world, offering little satisfaction for those of us who would rather see wrongs righted with a little more alacrity. Villains usually do get their comeuppance bitch-slaps in the long run, but such justice can take a while to unfold. Meanwhile, bad things keep happening to good people for no coherent reason at all.

Every now and then, though, those cosmic gears manage to produce a very satisfying -- if unexpected -- justice in a more timely manner.

A recent post here discussed the sad side of my show getting picked up for a second season: those crew members who did not rejoin us on stage. Some left by choice, others due to an unfortunate cascade of circumstances, but two of the stand-ins were let go – fired – for stated reasons none of the crew could understand or accept. They were both professional stand-ins who knew their job and did it well, but the Powers That Be way up the production food chain ordered them gone, so they disappeared.*

Hollywood has never been known for loyalty, but this was ridiculous. Those two stand-ins just got hosed, which pissed off everyone on the crew – including, as it turned out, our lead actor, who didn’t learn that his stand-in had been fired until our first day back on set. To this actor’s everlasting credit, he hit the roof, then called the execs responsible on the carpet and demanded that his stand-in be re-hired. The following Monday, that stand-in was back with us on the show.

Stand-ins occupy a unique and awkward position on a production. Neither fish nor fowl, they’re not really part of the technical crew nor are they actual cast members, but they are an essential cog in the machine of a television show. If “their” actors aren’t willing to go to bat for them, they’re shit out of luck – which is why we were all very glad to see justice delivered and this stand-in return to the fold.

But that left the other stand-in – who subbed for our lead actress – out in the cold. Still, those Karmic Gears don’t always grind in a linear fashion. Being very good at her job, she quickly found a new home on a much bigger broadcast network sit-com, where her real talents were soon noticed. Last week she got a major break in the form of a speaking role as an actor on her new show. Finally, this hard working stand-in got a chance to spread her acting wings and fly on screen. For her, this is huge – a major increase in pay for the week and a big boost to a late-blooming acting career that must have seemed like it would never come.

And if she hadn't been fired from our show (however unjustly), none of this would have happened.

Which just goes to demonstrate that in Hollywood, opportunity can come in many disguises. Anything can happen at anytime, and what feels like a soul-crushing disaster can in fact be the sound of a golden door being unlocked and opening wide. If you keep pushing, doing a great job, and showing people what you’re capable of, good things can happen. This is a useful lesson for everyone in this industry -- young or old -- to recall.

Sometimes those Hollywood dreams really can come true.


* If you think that job is easy, you don’t understand what they really do...

Reflections

On a winter afternoon...















Sunset through the looking glass


Last week was pretty easy, considering how hard a five day work week in this business can be, but Friday didn’t end until well after 10:00 pm – which meant getting home close to 11:00. Unwinding from a shoot night takes some time (and a good double shot of Knob Creek small-batch Kentucky Bourbon), so I didn’t go down for the count until after 1:00 a.m. And that meant waking up Saturday feeling like a zombie in desperate need of a steaming plate of sweet, fresh brains.

Anybody working an episodic show would consider getting home before midnight on Friday a gift from heaven -- which is why I remain in the low-stress/low-pay cloister of multi-camera sit-coms. You won't find too many juicers my age tied to the whipping-post of episodic television, because like it or not (and I don't, but that doesn't seem to help), age takes a toll. Every year, every month, every week seems just a little bit harder than the last... so it was no surprise that after such a sluggish start to the weekend, I got very little done over those two days.

I did, however, take a leisurely stroll through the archives of my new favorite blog, 365 Jobs -- yes, the very same blog I mentioned last Wednesday, before I’d had time to leaf through the past two months worth of posts. There are some real gems waiting for you on those shelves, including this.

Read it. You’ll be glad you did.

****************************************

Much has been written and said about the ongoing implosion of Charlie Sheen’s life and career – too much, really. At this point, the studio has supposedly fired him, abandoning the final would-have-been-worth-millions season in favor of cutting the cord with their increasingly troublesome star.

Having never met or worked with the man, I’ve got no fuel to add to that fire, no sage insights on the situation or finger-wagging, tongue-clucking “advice” for anyone involved. It's just a mess, that's all, with no winners on either side. The studio just watched an enormous pile of money vanish into thin air (and that's before the inevitable tsunami of lawsuits), while Sheen edges ever-closer to the lip of the abyss. The people I feel sorry for are the entire production crew, who just went from the best gig in sit-coms since "Seinfeld," straight to the unemployment lines. Those poor bastards are shit out of luck.

Do not pass "Go." Do not collect two hundred dollars.* Just stare at your TV and scream...

Lost in the subsequent media frenzy was the full content of Chuck Lorre’s infamous vanity card -- the card that sank a thousand jobs. The last line got all the press (Lorre declaring "I'll be pissed if Charlie Sheen outlives me"), but those eight words came at the end of a long paragraph leading up to the punch line heard 'round the media world. Had Lorre written that undeniably well-constructed paragraph for Jon Stewart to deliver on "The Daily Show," it would have gotten a huge laugh. Instead he posted it -- as is his habit -– on screen at the tail end of an episode of “Two and a Half Men.”

Big mistake, Chuck. What a hellacious shitstorm that -- and the law of unintended consequences -- kicked up...

I'm currently following three shows on FX.** As it happens, that cable network runs syndicated episodes of "Two and a Half Men" immediately before each of those programs, so I see the tag and end-credits at least three times a week. I've noticed Lorre's vanity cards in the past, but paid no attention. They're on screen for only an instant, and pack so much micro-font prose into a such a cramped space that it would require a TIVO freeze-frame on a 60 inch HD plasma screen to read the damned things -- and in keeping with my 20th Century Luddite ways, I have neither. Thus I never knew (or cared) what those vanity cards were all about. I suspect the overwhelming majority of the show's viewers are in the same boat, which is probably why Chuck Lorre figured he could get away with indulging in a little free-range snark as an inside joke for the amusement of the in-the-know Hollywood crowd.

I finally heard the full text of that card on a recent “Martini Shot” commentary by veteran TV writer/producer Rob Long, who explained the origin and purpose (assuming there is a valid purpose) of the vanity card. When you hear the entire statement, it doesn't come off quite so cold and cynical -- really, it's just the slightly-skewed lament of another rich-but-mortal guy on the potential/inevitable unfairness of life. To me, it sounded like a tongue-in-cheek joke, not a shot fired across Charlie Sheen's bow. But none of that matters now. The damage is done, and the only remaining question is how long and hot the fires of this very public self-immolation will burn.

At any rate, this "Martini Shot" is a good one, well worth your three-and-a-half minutes.

*******************************************

On a different, but related note, one of the listener remarks to that commentary is worth repeating: an entertaining and informative dissertation on the last brutal mile of emotional broken glass every filmmaker must cross -- naked, on all fours -- to finally expel his/her cinematic baby from the womb out into the cold, cruel world.

Note: the following will make a lot more sense if you listen to the "Martini Shot" commentary first...

“Just a little clarification of what an answer print is. An answer print is more accurately the last step in the post cycle before a movie is released. Or the beginning of the end. The actual end. The light at the end of the grueling filmmaking tunnel. I guess for anyone besides a producer, the answer print means you'll soon get to see your family and loved ones again, catch up on the lives of your children, wonder why your wife is spending so much time with her pilates instructor, try to salvage the family dynamic with a trip to Hawaii. You strike your answer prints once everything is completed and joined on film (final picture with color and mixed sound). The answer prints are used to QC the final product. Not a whole lot to do after the answer print except spend a ton of money if something isn't up to snuff. And checking the answer print? It's a total bitch. You've seen the movie so many times at this point that you're ready to gouge your eyes out and Van Gogh your ears. But still you have to sit and watch the whole damn thing very carefully. Over and over. Until you do actually gouge your eyes out and Van Gogh your ears. This is why so many people in Hollywood are blind and deaf and wear sunglasses all the time. They don't hear notes and their follow-up movies look like shit. All because of the damn answer print. It's a tragedy, really. So many great filmmakers and craftsmen left to the dust bin of Hollywood lore only because no one figured out a better way to QC the final product. Also, all that blindness and deafness really ruins your enjoyment of Hawaii.”

Now that's the kind of been-there-done-that insider wisdom they won't teach you in film school. Someone named "Nathan" wrote this wonderful paragraph, but I have no idea who he might be.

After reading it, though, I'd sure love to see one of his movies.


* For anyone too young to recall, this is a reference to the board game "Monopoly."

** "Justified," "Archer," and "Lights Out."