In the not to distant past, I found myself working as a temp at a local technical college. Needless to say, I was not making enough money so I started looking around for a second job. Somehow I ended up a restaurant in a local art museum, trying to convince the manager that I had what it takes to be a waitress in a high-end bistro. He asked what I had done recently that could be taken as restaurant experience and on the spot I concocted some BS about how working on a set is similar, remembering what the gaffer or DP wanted and getting it set up, rushing around on your feet for 12 hours straight, blah blah blah. I knew I was sunk when he drew a place setting on a napkin and asked me where the wine glass goes, the salad fork, etc...
Growing up, I used to wish that we ate with chopsticks so I would never have to worry about using the desert spoon when I should be using the soup spoon and so on. Then I met a Korean guy who told me that the higher up your fingers go on the chopsticks, the more well-bred people think you are. So no matter where you're from, table manners will trip you up in the end.
Basically the dilemma is this; What do you do when you have worked in an industry for more than five years and all of a sudden it disappears almost overnight?
In my late twenties, I got a job in a lighting equipment rental house. It was the only way I knew of to work in the industry and get paid while I learned the ropes. One thing led to another and before I knew it, I was working on a feature film being shot in Boston that had been written by a gay playwright about all the trials and tribulations of being handsome and successful and gay and falling in love with a nerdy guy who's really sweet. It paid $100 a week and most of my days on set were spent rigging lights around bored young male extras in their underwear. In retrospect, I probably got hired because most of the grips in town didn't want to work on "some fag movie". I learned a lot about filmmaking. I learned how to stay up for two days straight, I learned how to build out a grip truck. I learned that the South End is mainly inhabited by fiercely territorial well dressed men who love to decorate their condos by putting up mirrors EVERYWHERE. In case you have never worked in the film lighting business, just let me say that the mirror is your natural enemy.
Eventually I moved on to bigger and better things, such as BU student movies and the occasional Hollywood production that dared test the chilly New England waters. Over the course of a couple of years, I began to work with a consistent group of crew people who were all amazing at their jobs, fun to hang out with, and really good at banding together to fight production for things like overtime pay, and 10 hour turn around time.
The local Teamsters began to play nice again with Hollywood and the Mass Film Office was starting to pick up a lot more productions. Things were starting to pick up and several crew people I knew started to buy homes and have children. California and New York crews started to say that they liked working in New England, since we bent over backwards to be accommodating.
On September 11, 2001, at 8:30, I was on my way to pick up my friend Ian at his apartment. We were going to start working on a local short movie with some of our friends and we were headed to a cable tv studio in Roxbury. I called Ian when I was approaching his street and he sounded panicked. He told me to turn on my radio to a news station. A plane had just flown into one of the World Trade towers. I double parked and raced up to his apartment just in time to see the breaking story on CNN. Ian was freaking out because his girlfriend's brother worked in one of the buildings. Not knowing what else to do, we headed towards set. All around us, cars were driving erratically, at half pace, the drivers distracted by what they were hearing on the radio. When we got to the parking lot, people from the crew were frantically calling everyone they knew in New York to check on them, but couldn't get through. Then I remembered that our friend Dave, who had shot a music video in Waltham over the weekend with us, had mentioned that he was trying to get an earlier flight out of Boston to LA for that day. I called the director of the video, who Dave was staying with and she said he was OK, but severely shaken up. We managed to get through the day's shoot. It was very surreal. I remember rigging a 300w fresnel to the studio's grid and turning my head in time to catch the second tower's collapse. The TV studio was in a little strip mall that was populated by Jehovah's Witnesses, and kids skipping school. Every time I went to the grip truck for equipment I had to walk a gauntlet of old women asking me if I was ready for the rapture, and teenagers saying that it was about time someone told the government where to stick it. I felt somewhat in the middle; I felt like my life would never be the same again and I also felt angry that we had been so easily attacked. I had been through Logan many times and put my luggage on those same conveyor belts and watched as the screeners glanced up, maybe, and then went back to gossiping with their friends at the next station. I also knew, and the rest of the crew seemed to be thinking the same thing, it was one more nail in the coffin for the local film industry. If people didn't feel safe flying, then they would stay in Hollywood to make movies and not come anymore.
One of the area's best known producers was on one of the planes that hit the Trade Center. His death seemed to crush everyone's spirit for a while. No one knew what was going on, if any of the films that had scouted here would actually come. The Mass Film Office was dissolved over petty political grievances and still hasn't officially been reinstated. In the aftermath of the attacks a lot of industries that fed into the local film production scene were thrown into chaos and as a result, the jobs began to dry up.
I found myself walking through Boston with a cooked-up resume, trying to find work that I never pictured myself doing. At one point, I got a weekend temp job converting files for Harvard's Student Mental Health Center from "alpha" to "numeric". Everyone else on the job was in the same boat; their company had either collapsed or downsized and here they were on a Saturday afternoon, working for a high-strung sweaty man who barked orders like General Patton and gave long lectures on things like "self-initative" and "what things were like when I was your age"
Most temp jobs were like this; a few people I could talk to while we both toiled away at something no "permanent" employee in their right mind would agree to doing, a lot of dot.com refugees who complained about how now that they were laid-off they could only afford
one ski weekend at Stowe last month, and people who obviously could not find permant positions anywhere because they were, to put it nicely, complete fuck-ups. After a while I started to freak out wondering which type of temp I was.
To top it all off, I was getting older and less interested in doing things like staying up until 4am on a weekend. My husband continued to work on films and several times we sat through a movie with him squinting and scratching his head and saying things like: "Damn! They cut that shot that we spent a week rigging!" or "I think that little white dot in the background is that condor I spent the night in last winter" Finally I had to admit to myself that I didn't want to run around set with muddy cables in my hands for the rest of my days. There would always be someone around to do that, but the thrill was gone for me. I realized that I liked my movie stars bigger than life, on the screen, not scowling at me for taking the last danish as craft services.
The Resume Dance Part 1
