An Up-At-Dawn, Pride-Swallowing Siege That I Will Never Fully Tell You About

There's really no easy way to describe my current state of life. There always comes a time in every job, sometimes it is the entirety of the job, where you just set your speed to ludicrous speed. I mean I think this whole industry operates within the realm of "ridiculous speed," but there's something about these last two weeks that's just made everything go plaid.

And I suppose it's a misnomer to call it ludicrous speed, because what it really boils down to is endurance, not speed. It's a marathon, not a sprint. In the final 15 days of shooting, I will have one day off. It was last Sunday, and it was spent primarily in bed.

It's now been about a week since I wrote the first two paragraphs of this post, and I'd be hard-pressed to remember any specific detail of the last 168 hours. It literally has been "an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege" - with the only thing changing throughout the week was whether I was waking up at dawn or just getting back to the office at the end of the night at dawn. Either way, I saw the sun rise every day this week.

That being said, this week couldn't have been better in every aspect of my life. For six of the eight days, we split off the C camera from the Main Unit to shoot a variety of inserts, and I had the good fortune of being assigned to that "splinter unit." It was a highly educational, highly hands-on, and highly exhausting experience. I don't know how someone can do that on a larger scale for an entire 60+ day schedule!

And so, another day has passed in the process of writing this post, and so it is that we have officially wrapped on this movie. I'm at the production office, tying up loose ends on the paperwork front, and I was struck by a quote that's haphazardly taped up outside the AD dept office.

"You have never been inside a film studio? It is really a palace of the 16th Century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women... incompetent favorites... great men who are suddenly disgraced... insane extravagances... unexpected parsimony... enormous splendor, which is a sham... horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery... vast schemes abandoned because of some caprice... secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisors: These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep."

It's easy to look back on a job and be nostalgic. As brutally painful as every job has been and will be, at the end of it all, your mind paints over all the rough parts. Call it denial, call it a coping mechanism, but it keeps me going. It is that balance of tyranny and courtship, flattery, jokes, and intrigue that wakes me up every day, keeps me going for 16-20 hours, and then allows me to sleep with peace of mind. [Oh and as one training to become an AD, I am training to be the court fool in that scenario].

Pittsburgh will always have a special place in my heart. I was reminded of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip that I enjoyed as a kid, and now have a whole different take on. I'm not dead yet, but somehow I landed in Pittsburgh. And fear not, my anthropomorphic stuffed friend, things are good in Pittsburgh.