The Carnival Eternal

So sorry folks!  I missed my Monday deadline due to a night shoot followed immediately by a root canal followed immediately by twelve hours of long-overdue sleep.  But finally, here’s what I wrote and didn’t get around to uploading until today, Wednesday.

It’s close to midnight on a Sunday inside the beautiful, sprawling, architecturally futuristic, tree-and-lake-sprinkled, many-edifices-big corporate headquarters for a world player corporation that makes accessories for people who either do extreme sports or want to look like they do extreme sports.

Earlier, the surreal, fantastic landscape glimmered under the pure blue sky and sunshine of an Oregon spring day out to show off its finery: brilliant rhododendrons glowing florescent pink and purple, daffodils and narcissus in masses under huge oaks and evergreens, geese floating on lakes flanked by terraces of broad steps.  It could have been a Star Trek city on earth during some future stardate.

But it is here and now.  For once our crew, even swelled by the addition of fifty or so extras, was small against the buildings and backdrop of corporate elegance and success.  There was room for everyone to settle down with their carts and their chairs and their equipment and no need to worry about squeezing into the smallest footprint possible.  That was nice.  The beautiful spring day and the lovely landscape with the movie crew—it was all like a strange dream, or a delirious trip to Disneyland.

Adding to the unreality, the corporation was kind enough to let us use their golf carts to travel the winding roads from courtyard to lake to parking areas and to every wooded or fountained or statuary-draped clearing.  So we would take off on our errands in these little cars and I was jolted back into my childhood, recalling the thrill of doing the “Autopia” ride at Disneyland, where you drove your tiny version of a sports convertible on tiny freeways, pretending you were an adult and reveling in the power of being the Driver living your exciting grownup life.

I have lots of little things to do for the entire day and long night of shooting, with calm, dark starlit periods of time to reflect on this wonderfully bizarre job.  My living, compared to those working here in this gigantic corporate complex—what a world away from each other we are.  No corporation supplies our childcare (they have a nursery and daycare building on the premises), provides a company cafeteria, nor all the little and big perks of life here in the “normal”, “successful” world.   We have our unions, but we don’t have a steady job, only the current project.

Have I really grown up or am I just enjoying (still) my own little Disneyland Autopia ride?  With the economic meltdown of the past few months destroying lives, derailing careers, poisoning hopes for the future (at least the immediate future), I myself have never felt so lucky.  I’m used to the freefall, the uncertainty, the sense that you’re only as successful as your last job, and it’s all up to you to fail or fly high.

I joke that we in the movie business, or at least the shooting and production side of it, are the New Carnies.  We have all our teeth, or at least a good dental plan, but like Carnies, we inspire the same emotions from the “civilians” as we land in their towns or neighborhoods: a curiosity, a sense that this is where the fun is to be had—we have the keys to the Autopias and the Ferris wheels and the screaming rollercoaster rides.  Yet at the same time, we are the subjects of a certain repulsion and a vague distrust.  Why are we out here at the carnival, joining the fun every night and not working a real job and settling down like everybody is supposed to do?

Every night when we pull out of a location, it’s the circus leaving town all over again.  Although without the elephants.  Long ago I proudly put my first bumper sticker on my first car, choosing a quote from my favorite writer, Hunter Thompson, that said: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”  I didn’t really understand the quote, but that was part of its charm.  At the time, I was in college, figuring I’d be working in a permanent job in the sciences someday.  I’d be a success, I’d be okay by the majority’s standards.  Instead, I ended up here, in the midnight Autopia of the endless carnival.  I think I know what Hunter was talking about, now.

Maybe if I had followed the road more travelled, I’d be frozen with fear right now at the collapse of my plans and my job at this point in my life.  A few years after I put the bumper sticker on, an aquaintance of mine told me that she hated permanent employment, and loved working freelance, “Because it keeps you hungry, it keeps you alive and aware, looking for your next meal.”   I was in a “secure”, nine-to-five job at the time, and regarded her with, now that I think about it, the same distrust I once reserved for Carnies.  That’s food for thought—I realize as I drive my borrowed golf cart through the artificial landscape to the next set.