Tempus fugit, the ancients warn us, and I'm here to tell you those wise old graybeards got that one right. Your mileage may vary, but I find it hard to believe that it's been a full year since I blew one final air-kiss to Hollywood, then watched LA disappear in my rear-view mirror. Truth be told, it's been more than a year now (54 weeks, not that anybody's counting), and I really don't know where the time went. All I can say is that it went by fast -- very fast. Apparently all the clichés are true, especially the one about time flashing by at an increasingly rapid clip as the years pile on.
No shit, kiddos -- that one's for real.
So what's changed, you might ask, what have I accomplished, and what have I learned?
Not that anybody did ask, mind you... but given that this blog served as a chronicle of my last decade working in the film/television industry, it seems fitting to walk the same path now that I've exited the business. This may be of no interest to anyone other than me at the moment, but since most of you work in the industry (or want to), someday you too will age out, then hang it up and head out to pasture. Whether my experiences are relevant to what you'll encounter on that far disant shore is an open question, one that only you can answer when the time comes.
As to those three questions I posed -- everything has changed. Now that I don't live by the alarm clock or report to set every day at a given call time, I no longer must cope with the tedium of a long day on set by hitting craft service every half hour, there to wallow like a hog in the warm figurative mud of the See-Food Diet -- and voila, fifteen pounds mysteriously melted from my frame. I wasn't trying to lose weight, but apparently it makes a difference to have total control over one's diet, and to eat out of hunger rather than simply to ward off successive waves of boredom. The craft service table was a refuge, and in many ways I miss it -- but I certainly don't miss lugging around those fifteen extra pounds.
As to what I've accomplished... that's less easy to quantify. Unpacking and finding places to put all the crap I brought from LA provided a challenge I have yet to fully meet. I was pretty much exhausted after the big push to pack up and leave, and couldn't get much of anything done for a while. About the time I did start making some headway, the rains stopped, and I had to turn my attention outside, where a mountain of weed-whacking, brush clearing, chain sawing, and all manner of deferred maintenance awaited. I won't bore you with the bloody details, but it was a chore akin to the fifth task of Hercules (cleaning out the Augean Stables), except I lacked the convenience of a nearby river to run through it. As summer turned to fall, the wood-splitting and stacking chores commenced, a truly back-breaking job. Being fully occupied outdoors, I had neither the time nor energy to chip away at the chaos indoors, which is why deep into the Fall of 2017, the front bedroom of my small shack in the woods still resembeled the warehouse scene at the end of Citizen Kane.
Still, progress has been made, and if I'm way behind where I thought I'd be by now, at least the end is in sight -- there's now a faint glimmer of light at the end of this long, dark tunnel.
So what have I learned? Looking backwards through time (and now that the pain is forgotten, with the aid of increasingly rose-tinted glasses), I can see the entire arc of my Hollywood career much more clearly: an enthusiastic young man who knew nothing gradually becoming a worn-out old man who knows a lot, yet remains accutely aware of just how much he has yet to learn. But as I replay in my head the many varied jobs I've had, all the amazing people I met, and the adventures we shared on location and stage sets over the decades, I have a much greater appreciation for how much fun it really was. Yes, there was pain, yes, there was suffering -- and yes, I'll carry the scars from all that into my grave -- but there were always laughs along the way.
I recall a particularly dismal night-exterior shoot in Griffith Park during a very heavy El Niño winter back in the 90's. We got the first setup lit by dusk -- a 12K and operator high up in an 80 foot condor, HMI's everywhere lighting the background, with tungsten units hitting the foreground and actors, every lamp covered with a rain hat... and then came the deluge. Oh Lord, did it rain, a hard, driving downpour that simply would not let up. We kept filming, of course, relighting as needed from setup to setup, but before long we were all drenched. The rain gear I had at the time was no match for El Niño. As the Gaffer, I didn't have to run cable or man the HMIs, but I still got totally soaked -- and I mean totally, right down to water squishing up between the toes inside my boots.
Right about then the D.P. looked up from the camera eyepiece with an expression of utter and complete disgust.
"This is fucked!" he declared.
Something about the complete absurdity of that moment and the look on his face (this from a famously stoic D.P. who rarely complained about anything) just cracked me up, and I doubled over with laughter. Granted, that wasn't much consolation ten hours later as I helped my crew wrap hundreds of feet of muddy cable at 3:00 in the morning, but you take your moments of levity when and where you can.
Perhaps the only true blessing of getting old is being able to appreciate these memories, reliving the joy while no longer feeling the pain. The past year has taught me what a gift this is, and that for all the frustrations, indignities, and humiliations that accompany aging, I'm fortunate to have made it this far. Too many of my industry friends didn't -- good people cut down in mid-life, who never had the chance to look back and enjoy the long view. Another of them died just last week of a heart attack, three months from filing his retirement papers.
I miss those people, each and every one.
Such the cruelty of life. If you live long enough, everyone and everything you know and cherish will be taken from you. We lose it all in the end, every last shred, and are left standing naked and shivering on the crumbling lip of the abyss awaiting our turn. But if there's no escaping this grim fate, there's no point dwelling on it either. The hard truth is, all any of us has is the moment -- this moment, right now -- and as I sit here one year later, warding off the winter chill in the flickering light of a blazing fire, things are all right.
That's just about all I can reasonably ask for.
Most of you are light years from any of this. You're still working hard to build, maintain, and advance your career, and have neither the time nor inclination for such cud-chewing rumination. Being in the middle of it now, with the end nowhere on the horizon, you're living in the moment -- as you should be. Still, it's worth pausing every now to look around at where you are, what you're doing, and at people you're working with who help take the sting out those long hours on set. Without them -- and all the laughs -- working below the line wouldn't be much fun at all.
But if for whatever reason you're not having fun, not working with people you enjoy, and not laughing at some point every day... then it's definitely time to make a change.
It's your life, kiddos, and you only get one shot -- so make it count, and appreciate what you've got while you can. Time, precious time, will slip away faster than you think.
