Timely Advice for That Job Search

As promised, I am continuing to keep a record of the typical job search process for me as a standby painter and a scenic artist (or a designer or set dresser, or a whatever-I-can-find at this point given my experience in the aforementioned job categories).  Unfortunately, by the time I heard about the movie that is possibly coming to town, it was too late to interview for any of the key positions.  I’d like to blame somebody besides myself for being out of the loop, but when you’re freelancing you can’t scapegoat, because it’s all up to you, from beginning to end, for better or worse.

This isn’t to say that politics don’t intrude into your freelancing efforts and personal domain of reasonable expectations.  Politics do intrude, in ways good and bad, depending on who you know, and, especially in my case, on who doesn’t know you. I would like to believe that if only those people with the movie who were interviewing local key crew members actually knew of my existence, they would have wanted to hire me.  In fact, I will believe exactly this, just to make my interior life more pleasantly hopeful and exciting.

But they’ve done gone and left, and without knowing about me and my many facets of valuable creativity that would have surely enhanced their little movie beyond their wildest dreams.  Now, assuming they decide to film here in Oregon (another couple of states were in the running with us), I will have to hope for being hired by a key in my department, which leaves me in the position of first hoping that 1) a friend will get hired and then; 2) hoping that they will hire me.

It’s always preferable, for me at least, to get interviewed by the higher powers face to face rather than being hired further down the hierarchy.

This is why I prefer the position of standby painter over being hired simply as a painter or even a second-in-command.  The pay for any of these positions is close to the same rate, but as a standby painter, you’re usually hired by the designer herself or himself.  This means they know your name from the beginning, and this decreases the chances of becoming a generally faceless, unidentifiable minion or drone.  And the next time they come to town with a show, who will they call?  Why, someone whose name they know, of course.

As of yesterday, rumor has it that the movie is probably going to shoot here, so that is good news.  I believe I will be working on it in some capacity, although given the budget, they may not have a standby painter.  But there should be something for me to do.  So the next part of the job search (and find) process is: waiting, and plenty of it.

What makes ‘waiting’ freeing and fun, rather than a mind-frying stress junket into the bowels of self-destructive hell? My answer: give yourself another life, or maybe even two or three.  You should have other projects, interests, hobbies, or obsessions to live for and identify with.  Choose whichever one or several that you feel will give your life meaning beyond the context of Show Business (as wonderful as we all know it is).  This, the Time of Being Unemployed, is when those of you who really want to direct/act/write/sing/farm rutabagas/train horses/computer model earthquakes/rebuild Harleys/learn to invest in real estate, etc. can seize the day (or more likely the week, the month or longer). It’s true nobody’s paying you, but nobody’s stopping you, either!

So, how to best deal with that time between jobs?  Make it time that counts for something.  Which reminds me; I have to go outside now and play with my hawk, Tennerin.  This wonderful wild thing has apparently put off his spring migration to stay here with me for a while, so I am glad to have this time off (really!) to spend with him.

A River Runs Through It

Another week has gone by and it appears that my email to the television series production office passed from my friend’s hands straight into the art department Maelstrom of the Lost.  Things will get crazy over there and everyone will need help and they’ll all have to work overtime, and they’ll hate the relentless grind of the overload of work, but nobody will (probably) think of calling in somebody new.  Or at least new to their little corner of the world.  This work is not, as the cliché goes, “neurosurgery”.  I can lift, hang blinds, sew curtains, put together furniture, buy color coordinated accent pieces…  I’ve done it all, and done it for years.

Whatever.  They didn’t call, and probably my “file” is just hanging in cyberspace, not even seen by anyone because they’re busy, and don’t have time to be looking at resumes they assume come from wannabes.  I’ve worked in this business, doing these things, for a lot of years, but if nobody reads my resume, they will never know that.

Do I sound bitter?  Angry? These feelings buffet me almost daily around this point in the cycle of looking for a project to jump into.  I envision all my friends (and right about now I start thinking, “Are they my friends?  Are they really? How come they’re all having fun and working while I’m not even on the payroll?  How dare they??).

On the other hand, I have so much to do at home right now, and I truly treasure having hours free to read through the eight physics books that I had to special order through interlibrary loan for a limited time only.  These have to be read and notes have to be taken—I need this time! I tell myself that there is a reason to how things happen, that they fall into place when and where they are meant to.

But then I start to question that assumption.  The assumption that this all has some sort of meaning: the fruitless job search, the constant scrambling for money, the endless writing and hoping for a chance to get my dolphin book published, or another film to design, or a sale of the house to get out from under the debt everything has generated.

Then I realize that the questioning is generated from the fear and the anxiety about my financial survival. And also (perhaps most importantly) the questions, the doubts, the three in the morning I can’t sleep, generation of worst-case scenarios, are all caused by my disconnect from whatever it is—the “something” that has kept me centered and “good” with the world.

So I make the effort to remember what that “something” is.  It is very subtle, and the reason it’s hard to remember is that it takes stopping everything to see it again.  I have to stop worrying about the next job and fretting over what all my friends are doing at work on their show that isn’t my show.  I have to look at what I have in my day and why it is there.

I have to sit down on the grass by the shining river in back of the house and spend an hour or two or three just sharing food with my hawk friend Tennerin, waiting for him to fly in to “his” log while I stay very still, a few feet away.  I have to watch his perfect, low to the ground glide in, his wings held out wide and still until the last second, when he rears up and lands with a light “click” of his sharp claws hitting the wood, then looks me in the eye with a bright questioning, “Did you see me?”.

While I’m down there, I have to keep up on my research for the book, and I have to write what I’m supposed to write, because once I start working, I won’t have this precious time for a while.  And Tennerin is leaving soon.  The day he leaves for his migration is the first day of spring, and our time together is important in ways I can’t even fathom yet, but know will affect the rest of my life.

Deep inside I have come to believe that someday I will be part of a film based on my dolphin book.  All the work I have done to make some one else’s cinematic vision real will someday be used to create my own.  I have to see this time off as part of that larger, more distant dream.

And if I’m dreaming, so what?  Nobody can tell me that my dream is wrong or not worth trying for.  I’ve got time, so why not make it count for something that matters?

And I just recently got called about a movie of the week coming in to town (hopefully) soon, and I will work on that when it gets here.  Work on the next film will come.  It always has, and it always will.

Meanwhile, I have work of my own to do, and I have only a few afternoons left this season with a wild and wonderful hawk friend.

So I am not bitter or angry anymore, really, at least not right now as I write this.  I guess that’s because of the movie phone call and because I finished reading two physics books in as many days and because, most of all, because I spent a long afternoon today with a friendly hawk next to a shining river.   

Working on Work

A brief update on the work in progress of the progress in finding work.  I delayed that phone call to the TV series production office until the end of the week, managing to fill Monday through Thursday with various unimportant tasks and long periods of reading books on Jung while watching the DIY Network.  I am attempting to master the great art of procrastination, and in my own small way I am making a success of it.  However, I did email my friend on the paint crew and mentioned that I was looking for work if they needed to call in an extra body.  So I feel that my name will come up if the need arises in the paint department.

As far as calling the art department and seeking work in other, art-related jobs, I was happy to find that another friend from the art department on Gus’s last film answered the phone.  I just emailed her a re-edited version of the letter and resume I had sent her for Gus’s film, with a few tweaks to talk about my experience in things besides painting and sculpting, along with some links to my website and online portfolio.  She’ll forward it on to the art director or the production designer, and hopefully one of the other crewmembers working for either one will vouch for me, as I claimed they would.

But this is all I can do for the moment.  Now comes the waiting and the wondering.  It might seem absolutely stupid to hope that any of this will do me any good.  Why should anyone ever call me back?  That’s what I will be thinking sometimes (many times, probably) during the next couple of weeks or so.

But eventually I will get a call, and I’ll be working again.  Then I will realize that this is what always happens, and that somehow I always get some kind of work just when I really need it.  What is that?  Synchronicity?  Or is the universe just on fairly good terms with me?  Or is this just show business as usual?

Next up in my work search strategy, assuming I don’t hear from the TV show or my (hopefully) future literary agents in New York by the end of this week, I will personally drop by the production office and the shop (or their sound stages—there are two), say hello to old friends, see how everyone’s been doing, and then make my way home, ever hopeful that somebody somewhere on the crew will remember me the next time they have to call a dayplayer in at short notice.

As for right now, sitting at home with the next job a mystery and only the barest hint of a possibility, I think about my future and I realize that the one most wonderful thing I got from watching the Oscars last night was the renewed knowledge that anyone, anyone of us in this business can get there from here.  Providing we don’t give up hope.  

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Off to Work I Hope

I didn’t intend to miss a week of my blog here and there, but tax time combined with my usual end-of-the-show, now-I-can-get-really-sick illness.  Somehow my body always knows when I can afford to get the latest flu and safely collapse into a total viral meltdown, which is just after a show wraps, when I am no longer required to get up early and toil like a rented mule for twelve to sixteen hours a day.  So now I’m dealing with going on two weeks of fitful bronchitis, which has left me with the energetic qualities of a wet paper bag.

Hard to think, impossible to write, and really, really hard to do math and add up receipts and figure out what is deductible and what isn’t.  But after looking into my finances and estimating my frighteningly meager tax return, what I have to do, no matter how bad off I still am, sneezing and wheezing and coughing, is begin job-hunting again in the Business.

Yep, my potential double digit tax refund isn’t going to be very helpful in paying off the truck and the cell phone and the little what-have-you’s like food and shelter, and the big HBO project I was counting on for work over the next few months has been pushed a year.  That leaves nothing on the horizon in the way of work, except for the TV adventure-caper series that has come to town for a second season.

By now, they’ve crewed up in the paint department, and probably for most of the art department, but they tend to need day players when things get crazy, and they get crazy all the time in television.  I want to record on this blog the next steps I’m going to take in my efforts to get a job in the art department, stepping out of or to the side of, my usual work.

I think what I am about to do in my next job search, here, from Plan A to Plan B and onward, should be helpful (or interesting or maybe just amusing, depending on why you’re reading this).  Besides, a friend of a relative of a friend of a friend (yes, that is the relationship lineage) just called me tonight and asked how he could get into the Business, so I told him about the TV series, gave him some pointers and said he should check out this site and all the blogs on it for some insider viewpoints on how the Business works for some of us.

Now he can read about my own methods for getting work on the same television show he is going to try to get on as a PA.  And maybe he can comment on this blog if he gets work on the show.  We could learn from each other’s experiences here.

So, for the record, the first thing I’m going to do tomorrow is call the television series production office and try to connect with someone there I know from other films.  I will then try to find a suitable person to address my resume to—the art director, probably, and I will email that in with a cover letter which will be clever and memorable.  But that will probably disappear into cyberspace, so I will make plans to actually put in an appearance at the production offices.  More on that later, as it becomes necessary, but if I do this, it will look like an afterthought, a casual decision, made because I just happened to be passing by (45 miles out of my way).

But I hope it won’t become necessary.  I mean, what I hope is that they get my resume, they read it, and they see that they need me to help out in the art department. I do set dressing, on set dressing, even sewing, pattern-making and design, as well as graphics and props, and somebody there will know that.  So, I hope the resume by itself will do the trick and I’ll get in as a day player almost immediately first, and then, of course, as is my way, become indispensable.

Okay, that’s a lie: Nobody on a film or television crew is indispensible, even lead actors (although they are a mite harder to replace in a hurry, but it has been done on more than one show I’ve crewed for).

I may be dreaming, but it would be nice to just have the resume do the work and get me on the show.  I will put a link in the cover letter to my portfolio and website, though, to help with my credibility, and make it easy—just a mouse click away!—to get to my work in beautiful color, presented with custom designed (by me!) website graphics.

So there you have it, my initial plan of attack on the next job search.  I would rather be at home working on my dolphin book and taking care of my wild hawk friend Tennerin (who is leaving on his spring migration in less than a month, so I value the time we have together this season), but I am, alas, not independently wealthy at this time, so the hideous necessity of working for a living has once again intruded into my life of blissful, important spiritual and creative action.

Oh well.  Thank heavens for the glamour of Show Business, or I could be feeling very disappointed right now.  I will keep you posted as to my progress.