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.