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.   

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.  

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.  

Here are some of the things I regret most from my career in film, followed by, just to lighten up all the negativity, some resolutions to prevent similar regrets from occurring in the future.  I think anyone reading these will learn something from my mistakes.  At least I hope they will.  If they don’t, they’ll probably regret it.

Some years ago, my sister and I traveled to Mexico’s spectacular Mayan pyramid at Chichen Itza known as the Temple of Kukulcan. She had the brilliant idea of placing a “slinky” on the famous staircase that is built into the structure and filming the spring-like toy as it climbed down, step by step, from the apex of the pyramid.  Neither of us had a video camera at the time, so we asked two guys we met on the tour bus to film it for us and gave them a blank video cassette.  We released two slinky’s and the guys filmed the ensuing race to the bottom and gave us the recording, which I still have today.

Several months after our trip, on Saturday Night Live, Dennis Miller did a Weekend Update news story that featured a slinky going down the stairs of the Kukulcan pyramid at Chichen Itza.  A few months after that, I was working at Culver studios and Dennis Miller happened to sit next my table at the studio commissary.  Was it just a coincidence that his fake news story paralleled our real efforts, or were the two guys we met perhaps writers for the show?  I wanted to ask him, to solve the mystery of the recurring slinky and the Mayan pyramid, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I’ve regretted this ever since.

Another regret: Because I was a huge fan of Steve Martin a while before he became famous (that’s not what I regret), I had bought a first edition of his book, Cruel Shoes, one of only 750 in print. Years later, when I knew he was shooting Three Amigos! on the stage next door to where I was working, I kept bringing the book to work, planning on asking him to sign it if I ever saw him, thinking he would be flattered that someone had bought and kept one of the first printings of his first book.

A week into the Three Amigos! shoot, who stands next to me in line at the studio commissary but Mr. Martin.  I had the book in my shoulder bag, and I turned to him and I…  I couldn’t ask him.  I couldn’t even say hello.  I still have the book.  It’s unsigned, of course.

And then there’s the opportunity I had to work with director Ridley Scott.  I loved his work—Blade Runner is still one of my favorite films. This was a three day commercial out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and I was half a day late getting to the location. That’s six hours late. This incident happened during the year which will always be known to me as the “What the hell is wrong with me??” year.  I slept through my alarm back in LA, I spaced out on the driving directions and got lost, I took hours to match a couple of paint colors, and I fell asleep during a conversation with the unit production manager on the crew van drive back to the hotel one afternoon.  If he remembers me from that shoot, I will probably never work with Mr. Scott again even if the opportunity arises.  Hideous regret, that one.

Back to the present, the first blush of the year 2010.  If I want to avoid having more such regrets in the future, there are some resolutions that are very clear to me now, so many years on.  Why didn’t I talk to Dennis Miller and Steve Martin?  I didn’t want to embarrass myself. I was afraid of looking stupid.  But the cost of avoiding embarrassment and giving in to fear has been years and years of recurring “ah hah” moments when I have thought to myself, “You just should have done it!  You could have avoided hundreds of horrible, soul-searing moments of pure, miserable, and apparently unending regret!”

Even if Dennis Miller had thought I was a space cadet and called security (which wouldn’t have been a problem—the guards all knew me because I’d been working on two films there for several months), even if Steve Martin had withered me with a stare of pure distain, or backed away from me without a word, I would have had an adventure, a story to relive.  I would have had closure.  So I’m going to stop fearing embarrassment so much, and stop worrying about looking stupid.  So what if they think I’m an idiot?  I’m reasonably sure they’re wrong.

As far as the year I blew it with Ridley Scott (and lots of other jobs, in various ways), I now know that I had an undiagnosed medical ailment called hypothyroidism beginning sometime before that year.  It slows you down and eventually, if untreated and becomes severe enough, can cause heart failure.  You gradually stop thinking clearly or quickly.  You start to fall asleep all the time.  You screw up in many different ways, because your body is seriously malfunctioning.

My resolution to prevent this particular regret from ever happening again is to make sure I have some kind of health coverage that lets me get to the doctor immediately when things start going south, like they did that year.  At the time, I was working on non-union jobs and had no money to spare for $300.00-a-pop doctor visits and tests.

It would be another year of slow motion descent into hell before I could find affordable health care and get myself diagnosed and fixed.  I found out then that it was easy to counteract this chronic condition with a daily dose of thyroid hormone, but I lost many opportunities and my health for almost two years just because of the lack of medical care.

So, dear readers, answers and advice for those of you who want to avoid living a life filled with stupid regrets?  Don’t take yourself so seriously; don’t be afraid to look a little stupid in the moment.  You’ll avoid feeling stupid regret over and over again for the rest of your life.

And don’t let yourself go without health care.  In fact, write Washington and let them know that you support Obama’s efforts to get the health care reform bill passed, and that you will hold your representative responsible for doing their part to make it happen.  Everyone needs this kind of insurance.  Anyone can suffer with what I had (or something much more serious and acute) even in their twenties, and as a result they may very well regret many things in their lives that could have been easily prevented or cured.

A last regret:  not appreciating the wonderful weirdness and great talents of the Business.  Resolve to do the research on everybody you work with.  Who has your DP or your director worked with over their careers?  What movies have they done and how do their movies look as far as color, visuals, lighting and tone?  How much coverage and what kind of camera moves is your director fond of?  Study their work, and you’ll appreciate what they have brought to film.  Learn what everyone’s job is, as much as you can.  Be curious.  It will bring you into the process with a greater clarity, and it will make your job more like your calling.

As another year in show business gets rolling, I don’t kid myself—I know I’ll blow it sometime, probably even sometime soon.  And then I’ll have to live with yet another regret.  But I’m resolving that beginning with this year, I will step up more often and break through my fear of embarrassment.  And if I run into Dennis Miller again I’m going to ask him about slinky’s on the Kukulcan pyramid at Chichen Itza.  He probably won’t know what I’m talking about, but I can explain, if he gives me a chance.

My sister and her husband are here on a rare visit from the Midwest, and to celebrate, I asked them to see Avatar with our mother and me. It was to be my second viewing of the film, but I had wanted to see Avatar again so I could study it and have something to say about it in this blog.  I knew my sister and her husband would love it, because they’re both gamers and science fiction fans.

However, we got a late start. We had to wait for Mother to show up, and as usual she was running late.  Very late.  Over an hour and a half late, she finally showed up with several bags of odd, unneeded stuff from the Dollar Store.  Why had she spent so much time shopping when her daughters were waiting on her?

My mother and my sisters and I have a running joke.  Whenever we get distracted by something during a simple shopping errand, and find ourselves spending an hour or three at someplace like the “wall mirrors” section of Big Lots, we explain it all by looking at one another and saying the same two words, usually in unison: “Pretty!  Shiny!”  That’s because these two features in any one object are all it takes to grab our attention and hold it for ridiculous amounts of time.

And true to form, our mother had stopped at the Dollar Store for who knows what stupid little item—I think it might have been potato chips (I know, a bad idea) —and something pretty and shiny had gotten her attention at 3:00 pm and the next thing she knew, it was 4:30 pm.

We rushed through dinner and then got to the theater, picked up our 3D glasses, and watched the film.  As I predicted, both my sister and her husband were amazed, entranced, and they loved Avatar.  My mother and I still loved it, as well.

So what can I say about Avatar for this blog entry?  I had plans to analyze the color palette and talk about the quality of light and its continuity through the rising and setting of the several planets in Pandora’s sky.  I was also going to check the credits for listings of painters and what part they played in the making of the film as far as live action or CGI effects.

But you know what?  For the second time I fell headlong into the world reaching out from the screen and flew with those giant bird-lizards (who strangely enough remind me of my hawk Tennerin), caught my breath again at the luminescence of the forest plants and the seeds from the Tree of Souls, watched the irises of the Na’vi glow with emotion, and the changing hues of their skin, marveled at those lizard’s mottled scale patterns that seemed to shift through the colors of the rainbow as they soared between floating mountains…

And I have nothing of any substance to report.  Once again I was completely distracted by the beauty of Pandora.  It was all so pretty, and so shiny!

It is now three weeks into my time off from the last film I worked on, which I believe has the potential to be a cinematic gem, if not a classic.  So much depends on so many things that will take place in the editing room, in the decisions about what to lop off and what to leave in and how to weave one thing into another with beauty and skill that I cannot predict what the outcome will be.

Deep into winter, the Northwest has darkened into near-constant rainy days, and even though the physics of our solar system says the days are getting longer, they still feel too short and dim to get anything accomplished.  But every so often a bright, sunny respite beams out from the clouds, melting them away into mist over the river.  Gifted with a suddenly blue sky, I spend time on the deck watching my hawk Tennerin, who has been harassed now for several days by a single crow, which follows the hawk from tree to tree, and branch to branch for hours at a time.  All the birds, including the blue jays and the doves have been chasing each other and riding the blustery winter winds, living their lives mostly unseen by the rest of us humans.  I have to make the effort to look.  Now my hawk friend is sitting high above me as I write this, waiting on his fir tree for me to stop writing and play with him down on our empty field next to the river.

I’ve become contemplative and odd things catch my attention, surprising me with their own kind of brightness shining through in the winter doldrums.  I recently found myself watching the movie American Beauty and noticed how everything from the furniture to the music to the colors of the costumes worked to make that movie what it is: a classic and one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time.  Another aspect of this film that made it work was not clear to me until I tried to explain it to a friend afterward.  I was forced to put into words what I had previously only felt, a deep kind of emotional understanding.

There is the dialogue (or monologue, really) by Ricky Fitts, who is Lester (Kevin Spacey) Burnham’s young neighbor, when he is talking about his video of “the most beautiful thing he’s ever filmed”, which is a plastic bag dancing in the wind. He begins by explaining that the bag was playing with him, begging him to dance with it, like a little kid.  Then he goes on to say, “And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.” 

There are the voiceover monologues of Lester Burnham, who at the end describes life as “an ocean of time”, and reveals, “There’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…”  

These are monologues that are right “on the nose”, which is a no-no in writing, especially screenwriting. But they worked wonderfully in American Beauty because in counterpoint, the ironic, comedic characters played against it in a weird dynamic that forced you, (ironically?) to take the unabashedly spiritual words seriously.

And why not?  Annette Bening’s Carolyn Burnham, is a shrill termagant, highly colored and stylized.  Her musical loves, though, hint at a deeper longing in her than simply controlling her American Beauty roses and becoming a powerful and fulfilled real estate agent.  She forces her husband Lester and daughter Jane to listen to Bali Hai every night at dinner, and Bali Hai has a power, too, as silly as it is. Even if it is from an unreal musical that is stylistically and politically dated and expired, it still says out loud what deep inside we might truly feel:

Your own special hopes,
your own special dreams,
Bloom on the hillside
and shine in the streams.
If you try, you’ll find me
where the sky meets the sea.
Here am I your special island
Come to me, Come to me.

  You hear Bali Hai and know that there is a connection between this song and a beautiful, divinely-moving plastic bag. After all the two are neighbors, in an American suburb.

Carolyn’s bold colors, red and blue, cool white in her immaculate kitchen, and Lester’s yearning for a nostalgic version of first, true love all over again in a rock and roll past are given soul-searing force by using music to fix their emotions throughout the film.  The actual soundtrack music, composed by Thomas Newman, made the plastic bag scene effortlessly touching.  Before I knew who was behind the musical selections, I marveled at the perfection of the pairings between character, plot and popular songs.  When I found out Chris Douridas was the film’s music supervisor, I remembered his wonderful, wonderful radio show on KCRW, Morning Becomes Eclectic, where he would pair selections as disparate as a Disney instrumental from Pinocchio and readings by Jack Kerouac with a Bollywood female pop star’s danceable ballads, creating incredible musical journeys with every new show.

Repeated throughout American Beauty, punctuated by the color of vibrant, vicious red, is the notion of your heart opening, stopping, caving in, the roses bursting in nearly life-stopping beauty from the breast of a dancing cheerleader, while the choreography reflects the lights of Broadway in a song that connects, in all its smarmy ‘80’s gilded showbiz glamour with something almost terrible in its secret force: rose petals that for no reason spin out from us at the most surprising, least-provoked moment.

Like the movie I just wrapped, American Beauty changed dozens, perhaps hundreds of times with every decision by writer, director, actor, and editor.  It could have been as many as a thousand different movies at the end of the process.  Through creative synchronicity, or fate, or simply a connection to something unfathomably beautiful— maybe even that unseen “entire life behind things”, American Beauty went on to win five Oscars, including best picture, director, cinematography, actor, and original screenplay.

This time seeing the movie, I couldn’t, as usual, stop the tears from forming when I heard the plastic bag monologue.  Because I knew at the moment, through the process of watching it in creation on film (how I love film, the beauty of it separate from the story, in a way) that it is true, all of it.  There is an entire life behind things.

Probably all the bloggers on this site and anyone who works in Hollywood or New York in the great business of Show Business knows the name Bernie Brillstein.  Bernie was legendary, managing many of Saturday Night Lives’ stars, including SNL’s creator Lorne Michaels and cast members John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Phil Hartman. Bernie ran Lorimar for years, managed Jim Henson of Muppet fame, produced network and syndicated television and feature films with all the major movers and shakers of Hollywood, and founded the top production-management company of the nineties, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment.

I was stuck in the hospital last week for an hour-long visit that turned into a boring limbo of waiting for my ride to pick me up, some twelve hours late (thanks to a freak snowstorm and trapped traffic frozen to a stop on all highways).  I had no computer, no cell phone, and nothing to do but read Bernie Brillstein’s book, co-written with David Rensin: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead: Where Did I Go Right?

Before reading the book, I sort of knew who Bernie was, but he was in the agent/manager/producer end of the big blue Show Business Pool, the deep end, millions of dollars deep, while I am in the technical/camera/set/crew end of the Pool, where the dollars flowing past rarely reach your ankles.  Because we’re at such distant ends of the Business, my not knowing him personally isn’t surprising.  But what is surprising, though, is how many people he names in his book that I have actually worked with or met in the course of my little nothing job.

So with not much else to do in my hospital room, I went through the names in his book’s index and tagged those that Bernie Brillstein and I both have connections to.  Here are a fraction of those:

Matthew Broderick, Ed Burns, Chevy Chase, Dabney Coleman, Harrison Ford, Jim Frawley, Brian Grazer, John Landis, Rob Lowe, Steve Martin, Dennis Miller, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Ivan Reitman, George Schlatter, Tom Scott, Martin Short, and Bruce Willis, for a start.

Bernie Brillstein’s stories of how the deals were made that led to the eventual production hierarchies that spawned, finally, the movies I’ve worked on were enlightening.  I’ve never had occasion to ponder who first got the money together that brought the ideas or the scripts into the arena of reality, with dollars going out to everything from producers to actors to writers and from them on down to the physical manifestation of the actual making of the film.

But the myriads of decisions based on money were (and are) the foundation of everything I eventually work on, whether it’s an independent film, a big budget feature, or a television series.  This book provided a window into how the films I’ve worked on came to be, and where the millions of dollars came from that it took to produce them.

After reading the book, what’s scary, I suppose, is to know how big decisions are made: so many potentially wonderful ideas are thrown away based on a conversation, a misunderstood premise or promise, or simply one guy’s dislike of another guy.  Also what’s scary is how it’s almost always guys doing the deciding.  Even now.

But as I said, I’m at the far end, the shallow end of the Pool—a long way from big decisions or power and wealth.  Even so, there are great leveling forces that connect us all, whether we haul in $35 million for a film or $3500.

What I didn’t mention at the beginning of this blog entry is that I got Bernie’s book for Christmas from my mother, who had found it where many obscure books go to die—-at the Dollar Store.  And when I got home from the hospital, I looked up Bernie Brillstein on IMDB and found out that he died in August of 2008.

Near the end of his book, Bernie said: “The other day someone asked me why, after all I’d been through, I even bother to come to work. Easy. I don’t know where else I could have more fun.  …And for nearly forty-five years I’ve laughed more than most people I know.  Isn’t that what it’s all about—or at least supposed to be?  I think so.”

Speaking as a mere shallow-end-of-the-pool, dog-paddling, filmmaking drone, I can’t say whether or not Bernie is right.  I just know that, however many degrees of separation connect us, sooner or later we all have to get out of the pool.

Back from the holidays and they spun past without my noticing, because in spite of Gus’s film having wrapped, I have been caught up in a non-stop work tornado of to-do lists and long-delayed projects.  In fact, I will simply have to check in with this short entry on my way out the door to deliver a countertop to the shop that will alter it so it will fit the island in the kitchen of my latest design job: my flip house.

Meanwhile, though, I am thinking (as always) about where that next job may be.  There is a television series coming back this month for another season, and they may need painters—just a couple of them.  I am ambivalent about trying to be a part of this, as it will make getting on the next feature very hard to do.

But will there be a “next feature”?  With our improved Oregon film incentive, I would have thought so, but the horizon, at least the near horizon, appears alarmingly empty.  This is the nature of my business, though, the uncertainty.  I have grown used to it, and actually it is a good Zen exercise.  Lose any attachment to outcomes as much as possible.  I definitely have many things to do to keep life moving, and now is the time to let go of the worry about the next job and just work on those things close to my heart.

So, I wake up every morning to see my hawk Tennerin sitting outside of my bedroom window waiting for me.  Then I go down to the river, put some food out for him and spend some time hanging out and filming him.  After that, I go back to work on the flip house, which is just down the street.  I’m trying to get Tennerin to follow me over there, but he seems to have hawk business across the river most of the time.  I also have to get back to my nonfiction writing and the research and reading that goes with it.  Through all this, I rejoice in the knowledge that I no longer have to get up at 4:00 am these days.

Next time I will discuss a book written by someone at the other end of show business, on the management/agent/producer side and how much we happen to have in common, but for now, it’s off to the countertop shop.

PS I would like to thank both of the people who commented on my last blog entry.  I’ve checked your websites just briefly, but I will be back, and will be in touch.  Synchronicity rocks!

When you have spent long hours shooting in a tree-shaded graveyard, a very old one with residents who passed away in the mid-1800’s, your thoughts tend to wander along some strange pathways.  We have been working hard, filming among and between all kinds of grave markers, some with inscriptions that quote bits of scripture or poems, others that mention angels. One, on a child’s headstone from 1889, said simply: “Ours to love for a short while.”

There are statues and obelisks, marble upright slabs, small, worn square markers on the ground, little fenced graves, flower-decked graves, bare ground graves, rolling hill after rolling hill of gravesites.

So you get to thinking about life, and about death, and about meaning.  Is there any kind of meaning to our lives?  Is there anything after our lives?  I am a believer in synchronicity as a sort of indirect proof of meaning in our own personal existence.  Synchronicity is a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung when he noticed how outside events sometimes matched one’s internal thoughts, or personal events.

Jung’s famous example of synchronicity at work concerned one of his patients, a woman who was overly rational and so restricted in her thought patterns that in Jung’s opinion, she was not making progress in treatment.  One day during a therapy session, as she was describing her vivid dream from the night before about being given some jewelry shaped like an Egyptian scarab, Jung heard a scratching at his window.  He opened the drapes and saw a scarab beetle, a very unusual visitor to his country, apparently trying to get into his office.  He opened the window, took the beetle in his hand and presented it to her with the words, “Madam, here is your scarab!”

The strangeness of the concidence lay in its connection to the conversation between patient and therapist in their seesion at that moment and to the woman’s dream of the night before.  Although the dream did not cause the scarab to appear at the window, the external world seemed to somehow meet with and connect to the patient and psychologist at a deep, meaningful level. The woman was deeply affected by the event and Jung believed it helped her to evolve in her therapy. So, synchronicity is a coincidence that seems to bear with it a meaning to the person experiencing it.

There are certainly levels of synchronicity.  Some are mere “isn’t that odd—I was just thinking about gold-plated cuckoo clocks and here’s a picture of one in the magazine I picked up in the doctor’s office…”.  Others are very moving, heavily freighted with emotion.  At the graveyard last night I experienced both.

I had been thinking about Tennerin, my hawk, mulling over the realization that he had probably never killed a bird, since I had recently read that most red tail hawks do not pursue and catch avian prey, concentrating on small mammals, instead.  Just then I saw what I thought was a snowflake drifting down from above.  As it caught the light, it revealed itself as a tiny feather. I saw another feather slowly float past.

A few yards away, our camera operator called for me, his voice urgent, so I ran up to camera with my bag, thinking he needed something paint-related. Instead he pointed up at a large branch directly above the camera and some of the crew.  “Is that a hawk?” he asked. “It’s eating a bird!”

Sure enough, a small raptor was perched above us, plucking the feathers from a dead bird as it ate.  I told him it was some kind of falcon, probably.  We speculated.  A kestrel?  A merlin?  The little raptor was backlit and it was impossible to tell.  That was an odd coincidence.  I think about Tennerin often, of course, and everyone on the crew knows I have a hawk, so naturally they would call me to identify the mystery bird.

Still, in a graveyard entirely deserted except for one spot, and that one spot filled with fifty or so people talking and moving equipment about, the little bird of prey had chosen to perch on the one branch that ran directly above the camera.  We talked about it among ourselves for a bit, then forgot about the bird once work took our attention elsewhere.

Darkness fell and we began the long series of set-ups that would take half the night to complete.  The temperature hovered around freezing, and the rain fell off and on while the graveyard dust turned to mud.  I finally went inside one of the warming tents for coffee and overheard a man in uniform talking about the cemetery.  He said that it had recently become a county park. That fact surprised me.

The speaker was in dark green and wore a silver star, meaning he was a ranger.  He was stationed at the cemetery, and when I told him about the mystery bird of prey he knew exactly who it was: “That’s one of our merlins. We have a pair that lives here in the cemetery.”  Intrigued by the conversation and his knowledge of the graveyard, I joined in to learn (remember my last entry about how much we can learn from the people who populate our locations while filming?) that the county had made a deal to include the less popular parks (like the cemetery) along with more valuable parks in an all-inclusive package deal.  The ranger said that one of the more popular parks included as part of the deal was Oxbow Park, which lies some twenty miles southeast of our graveyard.

I told him that I had been impressed by Oxbow Park myself when I had filmed a show there.  The park was an amazing 1200 acres of natural features, including climbing rocks and a wild stretch of the Sandy River gorge flanked by a forest of huge, second-growth trees.  It was a lovely place.  What I didn’t mention was that I had seen something so disturbing there that it had haunted my memories of the park ever since.

The day we shot part of Twilight there, I heard the osprey first before I saw it.  The osprey cry is a high, unique call that actually seems to echo off the sky itself, as if the air has become a parabolic surface, bouncing the bird of prey’s voice from one horizon to the other.  The huge white raptor with its distinctive and stylish dark head crest flew over us repeatedly that day, checking us out, obviously curious about these busy humans.  It would perch on the top branches of cedar trees and watch us as we bustled around our our trucks far below.  In between studying us, the osprey would take off and fly back and forth across the river, looking for fish.

I saw it dive, once, and it split the waters surface, disappearing entirely, only to rise up like a phoenix and give that queer, osprey shivering of each and every one of its feathers to shake off the water so it could return to the sky.

As I watched the bird, I noticed a long, shiny filament hanging from one foot.  It was a fishing line, wrapped around the leg with a hook embedded in the osprey’s claw.  This was an awful discovery.  It meant that the raptor’s claw would become infected, and he would lose the use of it.  He would eventually starve, and it would be a long, slow death.  I told the park ranger there about the bird, and he agreed it was a fatal condition, but we both realized that nothing could be done, since the wild, free-roaming “fish eagle”, as it was sometimes called, couldn’t be caught and treated.

Ever since that show, almost two years ago, now, I have touched on the memory of that doomed osprey and felt the sadness all over again that we had caused such a proud and beautiful creature’s death through our human activities and thoughtless consequences of our presence.

The graveyard’s ranger was going on about the wildlife in Oxbow Park.  He had occasionally worked out there for a day or two at a time.  Bears came to the river to fish, sometimes, he said, and a bobcat had apparently established a den above the rock cliffs.  He himself had even helped rescue an osprey with an infected claw caused by a fishing hook—

“When was this?” I asked suddenly.

“About two years ago.”

“I know that osprey!” My voice was so excited that the producers looked up from whatever they were doing on their iphones.

The ranger told me that he had brought the bird to a rehabilitator and they had called to let him know when the bird was well again.  As the raptors’s savior he was on hand when they released the now-healthy osprey back into Oxbow Park.

So, I had met the only man on this planet who could have brought me the news of my often-remembered and mourned osprey’s eventual rescue and ultimate survival.  I no longer have the same feelings about Oxbow Park.  When ever I think of it now, I will be happy, not haunted.  Thanks to a welcome synchronicity in a dark and rainy graveyard and the camaraderie of filmmaking in a vast, but connected community.

First, a thank you to T. Emerson for your kind comment last week.  I fear that this entry will be short and not a telling of any story.  When I could have written this blog as planned, while waiting over an hour and half at the car repair shop and using my laptop there, I was instead held hostage by yet another endless succession of Windows Vista updates.  They took so long to install themselves that my battery ran down and the laptop shut off.

So here it is, late at night when I have to get up at 4:30 am to get to location early enough to carry my two set bags (40 pounds of dead weight in one, and an awkward 20 lbs in the other one) over two and half blocks down to the little corner store where we are shooting the first scene.  I had some good ideas for this blog, but they will have to wait until next week when I have more time and energy to bring them to light.

But before I sign off, I would like to remind those of us who work on location and on set that if we will just pay attention and be good listeners, we will learn incredible stores of knowledge, and broaden our cultural understanding, as well.  The next time you find yourself stuck on a strange street in a strange town during a long afternoon to night shoot, talk to the inevitable people who wander over and want to watch what’s going on.

In one long afternoon, I found out what a short line railroad is and met a couple of railroad engineers who drive the short line railroad engines.  I learned that the helicopters buzzing us all day out in the middle of nowhere were actually not carrying paparazzi, but were picking up bundles of Christmas trees from the farms and fields to carry them to waiting trucks.  I learned that one house on the street sold jars of honey made by their own bees, and that on the floor below where all the extras were getting dressed in their Halloween costumes, there was a church bazaar selling some very interesting crafty creations and art.

The people we come into contact with during a show—the “normal” people have amazing jobs and sometimes fascinating stories.  They have a community that you are lucky enough, through arriving in the gilded coach of filmmaking, to be accepted into their lives in an open, excited way.  Meeting people this way, all of you can be like kids again, happy with curiosity, asking questions and wanting to hear the answers.

I have met and talked seriously and deeply with frat boys and prison guards and sheriffs; with chicken farmers, biotech scientists working on cures for genetic diseases, architects, CEO’s, skateboarding artists and punks, a professor who teaches Russian and Math as well as manages the condominium complex where we are filming.  A woman who helped lend us some décor for a magician’s cottage set had traveled the world collecting native  artwork and jewelry hoping to bring them to buyers here and then return with the money to the natives so they could invest  their profits into making more pieces for the outside world, empowering themselves.

As exciting as making a movie is, the relationships that form and the wide range and colorful characters of the people who pass through are sometimes the real story, and the movie is only a shadow left behind.  And even if the movie is much more than a shadow—if it’s powerful and unforgettable—all of it will be colored by those other stories that you lived during that time with those people.  If you worked on that movie you will always see more in it than anyone else—anyone who didn’t come to know the people of the places you filmed in and lived in for those months of long days and hard work.