Absolutely Probably!

Through the grapevine, or the film vine, or whatever winding, climbing, spreading informational structure filters through the Business up here in this area of the Great Northwest Territory, I have discovered that the movie I am looking forward to working on has more money than was thought, thus making it a budgetary possibility (probability?) that they will be requiring a standby painter, and furthermore, that I am recommended for the job.

I have been trying to see if this is official, just so I can make plans to get ready.  Basically this means I have to clean up my kit (i.e. force myself to reorganize all my crap, and then to go out and buy more crap that I have run low on since the last show).  I am trying not to find myself up at 12 midnight with a room full of things I have to pack up and organize the night before shooting starts.  Since I can be a master of procrastination, this last is a fearful possibility (probability?).

As of now, close to midnight, I haven’t heard positively from the front office, but I feel, well… pretty positive.  I think I’ll be working on my next film—-soon.

Absolutely probably.

Job Search: Day of Disappointment

 

At 8:30 am today I am called to meet the plumber at my flip house, all the while keeping my Bluetooth headpiece on, because today is the day when the production office for the movie coming into town is officially open for business and for hiring crew.  The job search outcome is approaching!

It is now 11:53 am and the production office for the film I am trying to get on has been officially open for hours.  Last week regarding this job search, I had nothing to report, other than I had nothing to report, so instead, I worked on some of my own projects, although with only half of my heart involved in them.  My hawk friend Tennerin had left on his spring migration with his mate last week and now I am feeling (literally) the “empty nest” sense of loss.  Mind-numbingly hard work on a film would have pushed that depression right out of my thoughts.  But as of now I am wondering about my future, immediate and long term, in the film business—

12:16 pm: A phone call!!

Disgust reigns at 12:21 pm.  It was my dentist, reminding me of my next appointment, another out of an apparently endless series of appointments.  I have been in that chair of pain countless times over my break from work these past weeks, and I have good teeth.  Three cavities in a lifetime of chewing and gnashing—that’s it.  If I could put as many steps into my work as a painter as the typical dentist does, I wouldn’t finish one wall of faux finish in time for wrap day on a three month shoot.  On a film they want everything done faster than the laws of the physical universe allow; no time to fuss around and make twelve steps out of a process when two will do.  But my dental work, a single crown, is taking about ten separate little periods of hell out of my life, so far.

I want to get out of this negative waiting-by-the-phone rut for the job search, but I have to also be on call for somebody who wants to see my flip house today.  However, will they actually want to buy it?  In today’s real estate market, apparently no buyer is interested in a place with less than three bathrooms (mine has one bathroom—“How hideous! How can people live like that?”).

Buyers also seem to expect the seller to pay $10,000 in closing costs and provide the buyers with a new roof, all for twenty thousand under what the seller is asking.  Buyers hear about the sad market and think that every seller is in a dire predicament, and that houses are going for a fraction of what they’re worth.  My dire predicament is that I am going to have to rent this place if nobody offers me what it is worth, and I’m asking a fair price.  Once renters move in, all the fix-ups have to be done all over again before I can put it on the market and ask a decent price.  It’s all new, now.  It won’t ever be new again if I have to rent it.

These thoughts are not job search conducive. Can I get away from this phone long enough to concentrate on doing something productive?  I will try right now, hooked up to my Bluetooth, waiting for a call to action from the world of Show Business…

It’s now 4:28 pm and I am crushed by a heavy fatigue, more mental than real, but just as debilitating. I’ve been over at the house I hope to sell for hours, killing ants with a sweet poison that they will take back to their homes and then feed to all their friends and relatives, until everyone is dead.  I do not want to do this kind of thing.  Normally, ants can stay around at my place if they keep their business activities confined to one baseboard, a corner or two, and don’t beg for food at the dinner table.

But I can’t be kind and good-hearted right now—not with a house for sale—the buyers will look at those ants and their insect-hating instincts will kick in, and they will write my house off as a pest-infested hole (although one with new stainless steel appliances and carpets, but it won’t matter because they’re overcome by an emotional reaction now, and they’re outta there!).  I used to talk ants out of my apartment when I was a renter.  Often they listened, and gradually lost interest in hanging around.  If they still didn’t leave, I just lined the baseboards with peppermint oil, which annoyed them into moving out.

But this is the Big Time, and I am an Adult with a house to sell, no job, and financial worries aplenty.  So, after carefully insuring the deaths of thousands of innocent creatures, I also mopped the floors to impress my potential buyers and then cleaned up the gobs of unidentifiable beast fur and hair that spattered the toilet and bathroom walls as they hurtled up from the plumber’s drain snake (who cheerfully charged me $185.00 for the drainage décor).  What a fun afternoon!

By 6:45 pm I have given up on the supposed buyers who assured me they would call and come over to see my house today.  None of my friends have heard anything from the movie’s production office.  We are not feeling at our best right now, I can say with some assurance.  Why did I ever believe in a “buyer” when it was somebody who emailed me from my ad on craigslist? Every response to my “House for Sale by Owner” ad on craigslist has been from some sort of creature possessed of minimal language ability, apparently trying to convince (emphasis on ‘con’) me to spend money on a bogus “service”. Why do I even bother with craigslist for real estate?  Just how stupid am I?

As the possibly final day of this particular job search builds to a 66 mph wind and ½ inch hail storm ending at 8:58 pm, I’m talking to myself, and speaking with great sincerity.  To borrow from the wonderful writing of Jean Shepard, I’ve just sent up a veritable tapestry of obscenities which is hanging over the Willamette River even as I write about this truly sewage-worthy day. Nobody called back about seeing my house, or working on the movie, and the movie, judging by the rumors, is getting smaller by the moment, with hardly any locations, no sets, and so the number of viable positions on the crew is, at least in my imagination, shrinking to impossibly small dimensions, much like the quantum particles in the physics books which I will apparently have lots and lots of free time to read, now that hope is waning for a crew position on this show.

I can feel an attack of the Sorry Syndrome coming on…  I wrote about this affliction in a blog entry some months earlier, but I’m too depressed to look it up in the archives for a link to paste in here, so you’ll have to find it on your own.  But then, why waste your time?  You probably are busy, with great jobs and happy friends, and not burdened with a pest-infested, horrible one-bathroom, money pit of a house pounding on your financial back like a cash-sucking, debt-collecting, elephant-sized monkey from hell.

Hey!  That sounds like a good idea for a movie.  They could shoot it up here in the Northwest and maybe I could get hired on it…