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.