Back to Work

We’ve been off, enjoying a little holiday vacation for the past week, and the time has never gone by so fast.  But tomorrow it’s back to the set, and I’m hoping my stuffed toy dog Snoopy will be able to play a small (nonspeaking) part in the upcoming scenes at our next location.  If so, this will be his tenth film, and a continuation of his incredible acting career.

My dog’s last appearance was in the soon-to-be-released film Extraordinary Measures, starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford.  Snoop played in a scene with Brendan, and hopefully this moping, one-eyed stuffed dog will be seen in the background, sitting with a woman near the left side of the frame as Brendan races through a hospital waiting room.

So now it’s off to get some beauty sleep for my dog Snoopy and for myself some sanity sleep.  My “vacation” was a nonstop parade of driving, frantic Thanksgiving visits, hideous illness, and working on my flip house, interrupted on one day by an amazing, shamanic animal encounter, compliments of my hawk friend Tennerin.  That last brilliant, strange event I am still trying to process, and will probably be thinking about it even as I rush into set to deal with some emergency tomorrow.

It’s good to be going back to work—I’ve missed the crew with all our camaraderie.  And without my radio and headset on all day, I’ve been missing those voices in my head, too. 

The Etiquette of ‘Standing By’

Today, our “Friday”, we will spend most of the day riding in heated comfort in “follow vans” with a fake city bus carrying camera and cast to shoot several scenes.  The one day on this shoot when I could have read a book without feeling lazy or guilty, and I forgot it on the seat of my truck, some four miles away down in crew parking.  However, this does give me an opportunity to write my blog entry.  The subject of today’s blog is: what to do during those hours of “doing-nothing-but-standing-by” time.  There are unwritten (until now, anyway) rules as to what you can and cannot do.

Firstly, even if everyone, including the producers and studio moguls who might visit the set at any moment, knows that you will often, as part of your job, be doing nothing other than standing by near the set waiting to be called in to do your small but critical part, it’s not acceptable to be engaged in any activity but those listed below.

You can be seen reading the “sides” or the call sheet (but after the twentieth read-through, this begins numbing the brain).  You can be seen talking to someone in your department on the radio (about anything, really, as long as you keep it off channel one or any of the designated walkie channels being used by other departments such as grip, electric, et al.).  You can’t talk during rehearsal, or heaven forbid, shooting.  And you have to keep the chatter down, lowering your voice to give the conversation, at least on your end, an urgent quality, should anyone of producer or supervisor ilk be within earshot—as if you are dealing with some important departmental issues.  By the way, I never do this; talk on the radio.  But I’m not a phone person, either.

            You are also allowed, in the event that you are “standing by” 1)inside, and 2) with a free chair or table nearby (both of which have been exceedingly rare on this show) to work on your laptop if you have even a vague reason to do so that is related to your job.  Myself, the only job-related thing that I might be doing on my computer is making my weekly invoice.  But other departments, such as wardrobe and set dresser, might be downloading continuity photos, prepping for the upcoming shoot days, or various other tasks.  Of course they might be playing solitaire or reading their horoscope, but who’s to know if they minimize that window at the right moments?

If you are a stills person, a stand-in, or one of the vanities (hair, make-up, wardrobe), you may, with no questions asked, read the newspaper.  More iffy, for some reason, is reading a book; perhaps because this implies a commitment on your part to reading at work.  It implies that perhaps you value this book as much as you value waiting for your call to set.  This kind of prioritizing would almost certainly be seen as wrong in the right circles.

With a newspaper, however, you can give the impression that perhaps someone else left it near set and you just happened across it accidentally and are briefly scanning it with only a passing interest, eager to toss it aside at the first hint of being called upon to work.

Within all departments, however, with the possible exception of PA’s, there is one completely permissible, non-compromising of one’s work ethic “standing-by-time” activity: fooling around on your phone.  You can text back and forth with family, friends, and enemies all day.  If you have a BlackBerry or an Iphone, you can check emails, write emails, download interesting apps, surf the web, shop online, bid on ebay, sell on ebay, or look up any kind of information, whether it applies to your job or not, like the definition of “azimuth”, which sounds like the name of a demon, but is actually a technical term, the exact meaning of which I had forgotten but felt I needed to review today for my own piece of mind.

If you have the right apps on your phone, you can even read the script and the latest script changes.  I have never been more interested in my phone than when I’ve been on standby for hours at a time—and, as I may have mentioned, I am not a phone person.  But I am a person who hates to be bored.

So if you play your cards right (that’s a metaphor—don’t play cards in reality on set, because that is a definite faux pas), you too, can do your standing-by time in correct style, and semi-functionality, at least when it comes to accomplishing things over your phone.

And in case you’re wondering, the “horizontal direction expressed as the angular distance between the direction of a fixed point (as the observer’s heading) and the direction of the object” (according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) is also known as the “azimuth”.

Joke’s on Us

Once again, I can’t divulge much about my current project except in the context of my own personal experiences minus any identifying information.  So instead I’ll tell the story of a joke that Harrison Ford played on a few of us during the last show.

I was sitting outside the set, which was a real-life “clean room” located inside a currently-unoccupied high tech facility near Portland.  Harrison was in his wardrobe, which included an official-looking long white lab coat.  I was on top of an extra desk left over from set dressing (on top because we had no extra chairs to go with the extra desk), working on my computer, probably writing my blog, come to think of it, when he wandered by me, smiled a bit oddly, and then began walking over to a large rolling cart which contained dozens of set dressing items, mostly office equipment, that had been rejected for use in the set.  They were all brand spanking new, and there were some clever objects in with the usual file folders, desk pads, pen-holders, lamps, and the like.

Two PA’s were standing by the door to the set, waiting for the camera to get set up for the next shot—as we all were, including Harrison.  We all pretended not to notice when Harrison began examining the pieces of set dressing on the cart, and then picked up a very interesting accordion-style file holder made of brushed aluminum—it was quite handsome, and it looked like a metal box until you pulled it open, and it became a stepped series of vertical shelves for holding papers and notes.

Harrison made some sounds of admiration as he pulled it open and shut it a few times.  Then he looked around to see if anyone was watching.  Of course we all were, but we didn’t want him to know that, so we studied the floor or the computer screen when he glanced our way.

After checking to make sure nobody was looking at him, he picked up the shelf unit, stuck it under his coat, and began slinking toward the exit.  When we burst out laughing he turned around and hurriedly put the shelf back on the cart.

After thinking about it, I went inside and told our set dresser what Harrison had done, and we removed the shelf unit from the cart while Harrison was back inside the set with the camera rolling.  I put a blue bow made of masking tape on the thing and wrote a note: “For Harrison, from the Art Department”.  I gave it to his driver, who put it into his trailer for him to find when he wrapped the scene.

In that way that you always think of what you should have said, long after the fact, I have ever since regretted that I didn’t add: “PS - Next time, just ask!”

The Shape of Locations to Come

How very odd to have so much happening with my work on such a great show and not to be able to talk about it.  If I do mention anything about the movie I’m working on, it will, as usual, be all about me, so no confidences will be broken.  For one thing, it has been grueling for this standby painter from the get-go.  Hence the missing blog entry for last week.  I was sleeping when not driving or working or sitting for hours stuck in traffic, which has been extremely accident-prone with the beginning of the monsoon/ tornado/ tsunami season up here in Oregon

We have a great many exteriors, and this weather has been Oregon at it’s most Oregonian: rain—sheets of it, jumbling waterfalls of it, hail stone peltings of it, showers, downpours, fogs, mists and icy sleet, and through it all, I’m usually standing outside, in the full brunt of it all, with the prop truck as the only shelter.  But the prop truck is a small space, with every shelf, slot, and piece of floor space real estate taken up by my stuff, the on set dresser’s stuff, and, of course, the prop department’s stuff.  So forget about hanging around inside the working truck.  Anyway, most of the time it has been parked too far away from set for me to use as a base of operations.

Instead, I have to decide which of my ten thousand things on my large cart I should take with me to haul up a giant hillside or down a giant mudslide to the set, where camera is.  If I forget some essential item, and they call for me to do something that requires it, there will be no time to waste on a ten to twenty minute roundtrip to the working trucks.  So far, I have guessed, just barely, correctly about what will be needed.  But I have had generous help from synchronicity.

For example, I decided to mix up an exceptionally large batch of aging using Future floor wax, which can work even in the rain, and also decided to make it very, very dark, almost black, compared to what I normally would mix, a light dusty color.  I thought that I would be using it for one thing and instead that thing never materialized, but suddenly there was a huge emergency amount of aging to be done, and done down to black.  My spray pump gun was put to use for that, with the super-dark aging doing the job, along with a can of dark brown spray paint for edges that wouldn’t be walked on or touched.

It was close, but somehow, we made it happen with those two items.  Then it was time to stand by in the rainy mud and fool around with the aging on a hero prop item, which kept my mind off the utter misery of being in cold, wet clothes under my waterproof coat. I had left the coat behind on a twenty minute jog up the road to get more paint items, thinking the rain had let up for the time being.  However, the rain fooled me, and decided to resume pouring once I got halfway to the prop truck, so by the time I got back to set, I was soaked to the skin.  My bags of paints and other uniquely standby painter items were only partially soaked, thanks to the kindness of our prop master who had noticed my discarded coat next to the bags and covered them with it.

To help cut the cold and the wet, there were a couple of propane heaters around, but they were surrounded by crew people two deep, and we had set up our little prop aging “work table” on a trashcan lid far from the range of any residual heat that made it past the crew.

Because of this last week on locations, I have decided that I am going to order a long waterproof coat from an outdoor place with initials in their name, at an insanely exorbitant price that I would have never paid before this show, just so that I can be safely warm and dry throughout the coming days of increasingly cold and rainy, even snowy weather.

That will help my bodily state, but it will do nothing to ease the work of packing up everything on to our truck at the end of every day, as we leave one location for another one.  But it comforts me to remember that  at least the lift gate on this prop truck works.  On the last show, the lift gate rose up with our carts of gear a millimeter at a time, moving almost imperceptibly upward to the floor of the truck, at about the same speed as the growth rate of kelp.  Eventually it would reach its zenith so we could roll our carts off of it and onto the truck to stow ourselves away.

Also on the previous prop truck, if you forgot to push a certain lever at the right moment, the lift gate had a feature that for some reason would flip you and your cart backwards suddenly, like an ejector seat, but toward the ground, so it seemed very risky to use the lift gate for any but the most important moves.  Instead, we often just did fireman’s pass and carry off the truck with every item we could.

Locations: it’s hard work, but that’s part of the standby world, and I have to admit, those little hour-long weight lifting classes at the gym that I was taking to get in shape before this—they seem laughable in their feebleness when I’m lifting weights all day and then running or slogging through mud while carrying them to and from the set.  I could just save my gym membership money and get in shape exclusively by working on locations, if I had enough shows back to back.

Maybe this coming year, when the new incentives kick in, I’ll finally get to do that—skip the gym and get into real shape—perhaps the best shape of my life—the hard way, and maybe the best way: on the job and on the set.