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Daily Blog

December 27, 2011

No apologies, but a bit of explanation for this gap in blogging, my friends. I’ve been very busy doing thankless tasks, which, as thankless tasks often do, took all of my time and accomplished nothing of note. Except for a hideously painful failure that engendered the following (and too familiar) feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, anger, depression and ultimately a big, fat burst of cynicism. But as George Carlin once said, “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.” I suppose I’m one of those, because after several days of negativity, I put the failure behind me and began dreaming and hoping again. Although now that I think about it, Stanley Kubrick once said, “You’re an idealist and I pity you as I would the village idiot.” But I can’t depend on the words of others to define me, and besides, both of those guys are dead.

So in honor of the thankless work that ruined my Thanksgiving and the holidays and consumed all my time off (I’m starting back to work on another season of that television series soon), this week I would like to describe some of the thankless tasks of the standby painter and scenic artist.

1. Possibly the most incessant and boring and physically hard thankless task is that of cleaning up after yourself. Somehow, even if you are painting a tiny prop the size of your hand, your work area soon explodes with paint, containers, tools, rags, and garbage. If you don’t clean it up immediately, someone from production or another department will knock over your most expensive metallic glaze or trip over your water bucket or complain about the smell of your toxic materials. If you do clean it up, nobody will notice, care, or thank you (except your fellow painters, who are the only ones who understand, and they don’t count, because they’re part of the problem, just like you are).
2. Getting ready for something that never happens. This is a standby painter task, and involves the gathering together and organizing of a vast array of bizarre, mysterious and toxic materials, objects and tools, “just in case”. You end up with a huge cart full of what looks like just a pile of old crap, but which, in reality (someday) will be necessary to make a set presentable, finish a prop or repair damage to a set or prop, thus allowing the movie to keep moving, (no) thanks to you and your professional preparedness.
3. Aging. This is a special skill that is really quite necessary to make sets and props look real. A brand-spanking-new freeway sign will look incredibly fake unless it’s aged. As will most vehicles, which are often too shiny and reflective to film unless they’re aged. Age well and nobody can tell that somebody aged the car, sign, prop, or set. Do it badly, or in hurry, or too close to filming, and everybody even remotely connected to the show will notice and whine and complain and sneer. Plus, once your awful work is on film, it lives forever, blaring out your incompetence to everyone who notices that weird-looking, fake rust on those pipes you did late the night before shooting with only a distant, dim overhead light to work by. If you do an awesome job, nobody will ever notice, because it looks completely real.
4. Organizing. Anything. When you do this thankless task, it looks like you’re fooling around, shuffling papers, wasting time until break, confused about why you’re there (to paint, not to move things from one place to another or line things up on shelves or label things carefully!). But if you don’t organize—constantly—you will lose your way and the paint department will fail spectacularly or implode because of some tiny forgotten, incredibly crucial task that wasn’t written down in an organized way. If you’re organizing and organized, you’ll still look like you’re just barely holding things together (except to the other painters, who, as I said before, don’t count).

Of course there are so many other thankless tasks we painters do—but I have to stop writing now so I can vacuum the house, do the dishes, make dinner for my parrot and clean my parrot’s cage. You’re welcome!

August 8, 2011

Whooo! Long time no write, I know. My apologies, and things should be changing here very soon, as I will wrap my television series in a couple of weeks, after which I will take some well-earned time off, and begin writing this blog in a regular fashion once more. It has been a long, long road through difficult country. My job on the series was far from my usual gig as standby painter (although tomorrow I will do that for one day on the biggest set of the finale episode—yay!). This show I am gang boss, meaning I assist the lead scenic with the paint crew. This is the first series I have done since the Wonder Years, and I quickly remembered why I detest television and prefer features.

There’s no time to think, very little time to paint, and letting some of the work go without finishing it because of deadlines is hard. That work will be on the screen in reruns for eternity (or close to it), and the perfectionist in me does not like this. The pace is grueling and non-stop. One script fades into another and it’s hard to keep caring. But I do. Last night I had a nightmare, guilt-induced because I took Sunday off after six twelve hour days, when everyone else came to work. I know. Selfish. Indulgent. Guilty. I dreamed I had made some special prop socks for Diane Lane (who I enjoyed working with in reality a few years ago). The socks were due on set the next morning. But in the dream the next morning I was in my truck, lost in the mountains and late for call. My peeps covered for me in the dream. Just as they do in real life.

Our construction and art department crew are all old friends, with some new ones coming in at the end of the show. We have a good time in the midst of all the hustle and hurry and looming deadlines. But you know what? I will not miss seeing them every day twelve hours a day from 7:00 a.m. onward.

The time is coming when Tennerin, my wild red-tail hawk friend, is due back from his migration. I plan to be at home waiting for him when he arrives. I will be working hard on a book for my agent, trying to make things change for this standby painter so she can change up careers. They might make a movie based on my book. When that happens, I will be a part of it, and then I won’t mind coming to work for those twelve hour days.

Wish me luck, and see you back here soon.

April 19, 2011

To write or to work, or perchance to sleep—those have been my limited choices during the past weeks of my absence from this blog. To catch you all up, I have embarked on a very long-term, very full-time project, working as the second-in-command for the paint department on a television “dramedy” about one-time thieves and con artists who have left the dark side and rejoined the human race as do-gooders who are both witty and attractive, even as their checkered past lends them a certain rakish, damaged, risky charm. Luckily, there are quite a few shows on television right now that all feature these very same kinds of people, because I signed a confidentiality waiver that promises my first-born or my lifetime wage-earning potential to the producers if I betray any salient secrets about the show, the actors, the scripts, or even the most banal of scurrilous gossip. With so many similar shows, I am safe within comfortable entertaininment anonymity. Because of my fear of litigious wrath from those on high (I mean relatively high compared to lowly me, but only in the limited and artificial hierarchy of the show and its production company), I cannot reveal the title of the series or anything of real import about it.

But we can still talk about paint and adventures within the paint department, perhaps even adventures among the carpenters and set dressers. However, I will name no names and if there are set descriptions, I won’t reveal any more about them than is necessary for the purposes of painterly discussion. Mostly, we will still talk about my life (because it’s all about me, as many of you will remember) in this world of wonder, of glamour, of fabulous complexity and medium-to-megawatt star-power—this world of Show Business!

Let’s begin with today, which is the first day I have actually had time to sit down and open my computer up for anything other than looking at art department reference photos and set renderings. In fact, on this job I rarely have the opportunity to actually sit down. The kind of work I do these days is all about climbing, standing, or kneeling, and sometimes running. But now I find myself alone on the second floor of a one-time primate lab, a real monkey house, if you will, most of which is now empty except for our shooting crew. They are downstairs shooting a scene that, according to the call sheet schedule, should have been finished three hours ago. I have to wait for one particular scene still to come (several hours to come, apparently) before I can do my job for the afternoon (or maybe evening, it’s looking like, here). I have the entire second floor to myself right now, and I have chosen a set-dressed office that overlooks the monkey yard, where I have set up my computer. I look around, contentedly admiring my counterfeit office, imagining myself as a counterfeit office drone. Far off, across a field and behind a chain link fence, are two tan playground structures that I can call, correctly for the first time in my life, “monkey bars”. There’s a monkey now! I catch a quick glimpse of a dark head and long arm swinging down from the monkey bars and dropping out of sight.

My real job here is to remove a wide, colored vinyl strip that runs along both walls of a maze of hallways. We painters put it on the walls several days ago, but it will have to go away once we change pretend locations with the upcoming scene. Removing vinyl, especially vinyl that has been up for a while, can be very tricky. You must pull it off with the aid of a hairdryer, coaxing it gently up from the wall surface at a 45 degree angle, lest you pull up part of the wall paint with it. I told a story several months ago about this kind of problem and its potentially tragic complications, except that instance involved wallpaper which had to be removed, and it resisted all our efforts, eventually defeating us and ruining my life (temporarily, but still, my life was ruined for nearly two weeks—two weeks that I’ll never get back again). I hope that sort of thing does not await me or the on-set dresser who will be helping me today.

I arrived here this afternoon from the stage, leaving behind the department head and our other painters, who are filling in seams of set walls that have been thrown up for the next Big Thing. I feel lucky, real lucky to have been assigned this mission. I have been aching all over, sore from head to foot, and feeling dragged down by extreme fatigue for the past few days. I think it’s due to the problems I’ve been having with my other, more real, life, the one where I am a talented yet unknown writer about to burst on the literary scene with a bestselling and utterly unique book, only I am beset by stressful hurdles on my road to success at places where I least expect them. When I get this tired, and must face my other, less real, life of working as a painter for a living, I have to silently and constantly talk myself into moving and working. I’m doing it as I step up onto each rung of my ladder, giving myself a tiny pep talk to meet each massively difficult effort: “You can do it, just lift that foot—don’t think too far ahead, don’t think about all the thousands of steps you have yet to take, today—that way lies madness! Just take it one step at a time. You can do it, girlfriend!”

I sneak looks at my watch in between talking myself into moving forward or upward, and whenever I read the time, I feel a deep and hideous despair: time has slowed to a crawl, no—it has slammed to a stop, a dead stop. It has been 10:46 for at least two hours! Why have the laws of physics, of time and space, turned against me? Why can’t my weekends slow down to this glacial pace? Why can’t I master this time thing? Okay, take another two steps up that ladder, paint this header and this corner of the wall. Good job, girlfriend!

Let’s check the time again—it’s still 10:46! What is this, the most boring Twilight Zone ever fallen into by a human being?

But right now I am free of the Twilight Zone of time standing still. Thankfully, I am, for the moment, free of the awful effort that working on stage has been for me this week. I am in standby painter mode, and it feels great to be with the shooting crew, taking some time to catch up on my real life, not being pushed by deadlines and looming sets that must be finished in hideously short amounts of time. Which is somewhat paradoxical, seeing how time slows to a stop for me personally, while it speeds up beyond belief for the job in general, deadlines rushing up to smack us in the face every other day. Of course, those sets will still be there waiting for me on stage tomorrow, unfinished, needing all hands on deck, and the paradoxical and hideous nature of time will once again haunt every endless minute of my personal existence.

But that’s on stage. This is now, this is on the set. This is nice.

Now, I will sign off, and when I return next week, I will reveal what happened with my vinyl-removing job. Will I have cause to regret my trip to the monkey house? Will time for once be on my side? Stay tuned.

January 31, 2011

What a month off it has been. Not really a month of not working, but a month of not working on film. However, that is all about to change. Very soon I will go to work on the next season of a television series, one that has been in production for several seasons already, so I’m coming in after many of my friends have already been on the job. I had a taste of the production company I’ll be working for, since they also did the pilot I worked on in December. So it’s not all terra incognita, but it is still exciting, intimidating with unknowns, although I do know that I won’t be able to sleep the night before the first day of the job, which means I will be operating at 30% capacity (if I’m lucky). I know this, I accept it, but I still detest that this is the way the first day will always go for me when I begin a new project.

Meanwhile, I am trying to get my taxes done before I go back to work, trying to ramp down from a marathon writing stretch for a proposed book I’ve been working on over this past month, and congratulating myself that I finally turned in my promised writing to the right people who will be reading it and coming up with (I’m sure) lots of editing for me to do before it is ready to go out to the publishing world. I am going to be editing as fast as I can while working full-time, and this is a difficult thing to do. My wild hawk friend Tennerin’s season with me this winter is also entering the home stretch—he leaves on his northern migration just as spring begins. I cannot short him on time, and all we may have are weekends once the series gets rolling.

I think this is the time when I have to trust the universe. I have to trust that I can handle the work load and also handle the editing that must be done perfectly and done quickly. I have to trust that my writing is meaningful and valuable, or that it can be. And I have to trust that my hawk friend will leave me only to return to me next fall, as he has done for the past fourteen years. This is the time, for Tennerin’s sake, that I have to trust the universe.

January 3, 2011

The last entry was about my day of alone-ness working on finishing the sets for the television pilot I’ve dubbed Head Aneurysm (not real title). Presented here is a brief sketch of the one day I spent as (unofficial) standby painter during the shooting of those sets. Poles apart in energy, personnel, and activities, my standby day was the antithesis of my alone day.

My department head had come in at 4:00 a.m. (maybe 3:30 a.m.—I am afraid to verify the awful hour of her arrival) that morning so she could beat the shooting crew and get various tasks done before their call time, which was 6:30 a.m. I arrived a little before 7:00 a.m., so the action was just beginning to heat up. The first noticeable difference in my day was the hundreds (or so it seemed) of cars now lining the streets a block out from the two stages. I parked a long, long ways away, but luckily Harry, one of my favorite guys from the team of van drivers for the show, was waiting to give me and any other parking crew members a ride to the center of the whirlwind. He put down his newspaper, completely unfazed by the mad activity that had construction and all other departments sending people throughout the huge compound of buildings, everyone scrambling like ants defending an ant hill that’s been set on fire.

“Heading to set or construction?” he asked.

“I’d better see what’s going on in construction,” I said.

What was going on in construction was the morning meeting to plot strategy for the day ahead. I was told to bring whatever I thought I might need to help with wilding and repairing of set walls during shooting. “Wilding” a wall is when you (and your helpful carpenters, grips and electric guys) move a wall out of a set, leaving that area now available for a camera crew so they can have room to do POV’s or masters from that particular angle, or perhaps lay a dolly track for a moving shot.

Now I was scrambling like one of the insect hordes. I had not known that standby was even happening on this show.

A few minutes later I was back in the stage where I had spent those solitary hours just two days ago. Huge yellow canvas tubes almost two feet in diameter snaked in from one of the four or five bay doors, blowing in heat to make things warm and toasty. Such luxuries were, of course, out of the question for us carpenters, painters and set dressers who had been working in here ahead of the shooting crew, in bitterly cold indoor temperatures.

Also alien to our part of the work world: chairs. Nobody—I mean nobody—brings their chair to work when you do carpentry, painting, set dressing or standby paint. But during shooting, everybody with some kind, any kind, of obscure connection to the director had a chair just for them, with their name emblazoned across the back (translation: NO TRESPASSING ASSES IN THIS CHAIR).

This clump of chairs was directly in front of the monitors and directly in the way of ingress and egress for the stage and both of the sets. In other words, the chair clump was in the way of everything. But this is normal. I recalled the chair clumping of my television days working on the Wonder Years. Some things never change. Television gives out the title of “producer” for a number of services or purported services, which turns many people with only a passing importance in the show into permanent residents on set, each with their own chair.

Many of these people, I noted during the day, had IPads. Judging by the glowing screens, one guy was reading a Dave Barry column, someone else appeared to be involved in Sudoku and others were reading emails. Of the IPads, a minority actually seemed interested in the monitor and the action of filming the pilot.

The rest of the working crew were scurrying from place to place, or nervously checking their little projects (props had a gurney with a dead body and EMT trappings) or equipment (electric was doing last minute cable rerouting) or supplies (I was checking to make sure I had all touch-up colors next to set). Actors and extras not working in the first scene sat and gabbed nervously.

The camera crew was inside, hustling to get the camera and dolly set up, which required moving a massive wall encrusted with several layers of dry wall mud and paint.

The moving crew cracked the wall, something I might have to deal with when the wall went back in, and then we were off to the races. The burning pace of television is non-stop and quite different from film in feeling and atmosphere. Filmmakers love what they do, but for many, making television is an acquired taste.

The 1rst AD seemed to be an unhappy fellow and informed all of us with radios about the reasons, most of which concerned questions about why people were so slow; and what was the problem; and how long were we going to have to wait this time? Nobody answered him, I noticed, except on rare occasions, so perhaps these were rhetorical questions. I had nothing to do with any of the questions he posed, so I remained silent, listening in like a little standby fly on the (set) wall until I was on duty and working on pulling out wild walls.

When duty called, I would thread my way through the thick crowds of people all trying to do their jobs, not touching any of them or causing anyone to have to stop with whatever they were doing. If I absolutely had to touch someone I would put a light hand on their shoulder for a split second and say, “Behind you.” They would move out of my way like automatons without stopping their work, showing that they were true professionals. I would be carrying a ladder or a carpenter would have brought one in already. When I got to the junction of two walls, I would run a blade down the corner seam, which was finished not with caulk, but with one-inch masking tape painted over. Meanwhile more guys were on ladders outside of the set, unscrewing the walls I had just cut, and they would pull out the wall or walls and set them off out of the way, making room for the camera people.

Most of us have worked together before on many shows, so this was very easy, and my only anxiety came from the timing. Once those walls came back in, I needed to get my paint dry in a hurry, before the set dressing came back in along with the actors. All went well, and between frenzied wall wilding and wall repairing, I said hello to friends I had not seen in months, picked up some news and a little gossip, laughed a lot and was sorry when the production designer (not wanting to have me on overtime past ten hours) said I could wrap out and go home.

The rest of the shooting crew was there working until midnight or possibly 2:00 a.m. The details are fading, but the general rule of the show led to long, long shooting days, fifteen hours and more. Which might explain the unhappiness I picked up over the radio. On Sixty Minutes years ago, they had a segment devoted to the issue of sleep deprivation and its effects. Studies showed sleep-deprived people get angry faster, lose their tempers more often, and stay irritable longer. The reporter summed up the research by saying, “If everybody, especially all those overworked world leaders, got enough sleep, maybe we would have no more wars.”

But who cares about sleep when you’re living the dream, staying up all night under the bright lights and glamour of Show Business…