Oh It's On!

A strange thing happened today. The apartment was feeling a bit stuffy, so I went to open the window. I instinctively braced myself, anticipating a rush of cold air. It never came. Instead, I felt no discernable difference between the temperature inside and the temperature outside. This has by no means been a cold winter, but there's no denying that spring has sprung. In an act of utter meteorological defiance, I broke out the flip flops.

I love this time of year - baseball's ramping up and college basketball is shifting gears to March Madness. It's quite frankly a feeling I don't recall experiencing last year. I hate to admit it, but I think I had two 2010s and went straight into 2012. I have very few distinct memories from 2011 - everything is in someway contextualized by work. Moammar Gadhafi, Kim Jong-Il, and Osama Bin Laden all died? Oh, that should help market The Dictator. Republicans and Democrats duked it out till the eleventh hour on a debt ceiling deal? If it's anything like Nucky Thompson's office, can't we just call in our stand-by construction guys to pull the ceiling? Oh wait... There were riots in the UK? Uh...I worked for some Brits.

Now I know I'm exaggerating a little bit - and perhaps taking important world events a bit lightly - but looking back on it, that was how last year unfolded for me. 2011 was unrelenting. After a pretty relaxed January, I started up on Boardwalk, got a week between that and The Dictator, and just a couple of days before I had to move to Pittsburgh. Next thing I knew, I was ringing in 2012, and I had no idea where the last year of my life had gone.

I had missed every seasonal transition last year, locked away in some artificially-lit, windowless, black-box stage. Which is exactly why opening the window today was such a surreal experience. I had a front row seat as spring burst onto the scene - the sun was in full bloom. I have about a week and a half before jumping back into the working game, and there's no telling what pace I'll keep for the rest of the year, but today was revelatory. My faith in seasonal-change has been restored, whilst my seasonal affective disorder has been squelched.

Back in Business

"It must be weird," my brother said to me. "You go from 0% to 100% back to 0%."

I scratched my days' old beard growth and thought to myself, I need a job. It is the sad truth of this existence I lead. When I am working, I am non-stop for about 3-4 months. But then when I'm not working, days go by without me even realizing it. It's the weekend? Oh cool.

I've been out of the workforce for almost 2 months now, and while the first couple days - weeks, I'll admit - were sorely needed and gratefully welcomed, the time since has been agonizing. I've beaten every video game I own, I'm through Season 1 of Breaking Bad, I've begun writing again, anything to occupy my time.

And finally my patience paid off. As of Thursday, I know now that I have a job on the horizon. While I obviously can't go into specifics about what the job is, I hear it's going to be a lot of night shoots (yikes), on a lot of rooftops (eesh), and my "weekend" will be Wednesday-Thursday (ugh). But it will be a break from this current monotony, and I welcome it with open arms.

The job does not start for another few weeks, but the prospect of employment has galvanized me to become a more productive person. I've reconnected in the past couple of days with old work friends over lunch, drinks, what have you. I've been boning up on my geopolitical acumen - watching the daily gamut of political punditry unravel unfold on my TV and computer.

And last night, I ventured out to Columbia, to catch the penultimate Ivy League game between Harvard and the Lions. Harvard's looking to snap a 65-year NCAA tournament drought, but Columbia was itching for an upset. In front of a packed-house crowd, which included such luminaries as Spike Lee and Jeremy Lin, Harvard pulled out the win, showcasing dunks and overall gameplay uncharacteristic of the Ivy League games I used to watch.

So I'm back, o blogosphere. With so much to look forward to - spring, baseball, March Madness (con Harvard, fingers crossed), and a job - I'm breaking out of hibernation. Unfortunately, so is the mouse that lives in our apartment. But I'll leave that for another day, I've got too much going for me right now.

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

I'm deeply entrenched in week 4 of unemployment - or "funemployment" as many friends have insisted I'm in - and living like this certainly has its highs and lows. It's funny, really, because when I first got into the DGA training program, my parents and I scoured the internet for anything and everything about the program. At the time, all we could find was someone's blog about how, as a trainee, you are shackled to the program - "can't even go to your brother's wedding," was how the blogger put it I recall. And yet I've had ample opportunity to travel, take time off, enjoy responsibility-free living (sidebar: I conveyed the same sense of amazement to the program administrator the other day and she said that that blogger likely had gone through the LA program...).

Regardless, after a week skiing in Colorado with the fam, I stopped briefly in Pittsburgh to watch the Super Bowl with the folks I spent each Sunday with during the regular season, before heading back up to New York to move back into my apartment.

And what a time to be in New York! When I got back, the murmurs around town were that Jeremy Lin, a classmate of mine in college, had just been called from the Knicks bench and had tacked up a gaudy line against the Nets. Cool, I had thought. Little could I imagine how the whole thing would play out. Game after game, the legend of Lin built. It finally hit me last Thursday - after he had scored 25 against soon-to-be-BK, 28 against the Jazz, and 23 at the Wizards - as I was sitting in my favorite gourmet mac-n-cheese place. The guy sitting at the table next to me was regaling his girlfriend with Lin exploits with an enthusiasm so utterly childlike it could only be matched by the fact that he was slurping mac-n-cheese. I decided immediately that I had to see Jeremy play before the clock struck midnight, leaving a slackjawed MSG collectively holding an empty black Nike sneak.

So I convinced (not really sure if that's the right word since he agreed to it pretty willingly) my buddy to accompany me to the Laker game to try and scalp tickets. Without needing to go into too much detail on how we got the tickets*, we made our way in. And what a show! Every time Jeremy flinched, the decible level in the place peaked. It was a madhouse. But the interesting thing that my buddy - who was my co-editor of the sports page of the college paper and so we had seen Jeremy play a lot - and I both noticed was that the moves he was pulling weren't necessarily anything we hadn't already seen him do against the likes of Boston College (fortunately, as I later found, Tommy Amaker validated our assessment on the Boomer & Carton show). The only difference was he was busting these moves out on the likes of Kobe freakin' Bryant. It's just a joy to see.

*No, I'm still not going to go into detail on how we got the tickets, but I needed to force a segue into why I felt capable of making such an investment. As soon as I had gotten back into the city, I stopped by the DGA office to debrief with the program administrator. She had gotten positive reviews from my Pittsburgh employers that she wanted to share, and I was hoping to gather some intel on my future prospects. She confirmed my worst fears that I probably won't get my next assignment until well into March (pilot season, baby!) but before I left, she asked if I'd like to work on a commercial. "Sure," I said. "When?"

"Tomorrow. I'll let the production manager know. She'll get in touch with you about the details."

"Tomorrow...? Cool..."

I got a call no less than 10 minutes later. "Be there at 5:30am." Yikes!

That being said, the job was actually a really good learning experience. It was just me and the 1st AD, a one-day, 30-second spot for laundry detergent. We got to an empty stage, built a laundry room, got the coverage, broke down the laundry room, and left an empty stage. As de-facto 2nd AD, it was really cool to be able to interact with the director, director of photography, department heads, and the ad agency people so directly. Granted, once everything was in place and things got clicking, it was a long, painfully-boring day (I mean, how exciting can a laundry detergent commercial get, right?), but it kept me, at times, more engaged than I've ever been and certainly bestowed me with greater responsibility than any job yet.

But aside from that, I've just been reacclimating myself to New York lifestyle and pace. A friend from Pittsburgh visited for a couple of days, which motivated me to get off the couch (my preferred New York lifestyle and pace...only kidding) and get out. Saw Ground Zero the 9/11 memorial for the first time, which was an awe-inspiring sight. You see pictures of the fountains that mark the footprints of the Twin Towers, but there's really no way of getting a sense of the size of these fountains without seeing them in person. I noticed on my Google maps app on my phone that the fountains are illustrated as actual square-shaped bodies of water - on par with the ponds of Central Park. Simply breathtaking.

Oh and lest you think my time spent lately has been totally mindless, I picked up a valuable little nugget of education today. If you lose something in an NYC taxi cab and pay with a credit card, you can call Creative Mobile Technologies, the company that manufactures and operates the credit card swiping machines in the back of cabs and they can trace your transaction back to not only the medallion number, but the actual driver. Of course, if you pay with cash, as the nice guy at Style Management Co - one of the many cab dispatchers I had till then been contacting one at a time - told me, "You're shit out of luck."

Ah, New York, it's good to be back.

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

Well I'm now a little over a week removed from the working life. Time to kick up my feet, take a load off, lay back, rest up, stress out...wait, what? Yeah, hard to say it but as hard as working life is, the hangover that ensues when you're dropped from employment cold turkey can at times be worse.

Having done this three times before, I decided to try a slow withdrawal and the jury's still out on whether I made the right move. I stuck around Pittsburgh for a few extra days, because after living there for four months I couldn't stand the idea of leaving the people I had come to know and love so easily. That was certainly well worth it!

But now I'm out of house and home - I let my subletter keep the apartment until the end of the month. I stopped by New York briefly this past weekend to drop some stuff off and catch up with old friends. It was bizarre feeling, like being a stranger in a familiar land, being back at my apartment but sleeping on the couch. Watched the South Carolina primary results come in with my brother, and played a drinking game to Gingrich's speech. "History?" Drink. "Radical?" Drink. "Fundamental?" Drink. "Baloney?" Eat bologna. I was home.

But just as New York was beginning to feel familiar again, I hopped back on an airplane bound for home in Birmingham. Birmingham in late-January is a strange time, that I don't have a lot of recent experience in. The last time I came home in late-January was for a weekend to be an escort at a debutante-like event when I was a senior in high school. It was warm then, and it's surprisingly warm now. It was 73 degrees when I stepped out of the airport and I felt ridiculous wearing layers, especially one with "omni-heat." And it's weird being home at such a non-traditional time to be home. Usually I'm only home during the holidays, when all my friends are also home.

I'll be kicking around for the next two weeks, before returning to New York to move back into my room and start hoping for a new job. As grueling as life is while on the job, the waiting game while off the job can at times be worse. I may not find another project until March, and when you're so used to being on your feet all day every day, it feels strange to pull such a 180.

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.

Rubbin' is Racin'

So I've decided to title all my blog posts from here until I end this job - what two, going on 10, weeks? - after random quotes from Tom Cruise movies. [Bonus points to whoever can name this post's reference]

But aside from that, I also wanted to throw up a quick post here before I go to bed (just got back from the office...it's 1am) because something rather exciting happened at work today. I mean, to everyone else at work, it was nothing and certainly, within the grand scheme of the movie, it was nothing. But to me, it was a reminder of why I got into this line of work and why I could not sit at a desk for 60 hours a week. What happened today was fresh, thrilling, it was a rush!

Basically we've come to the point in filming where you've got to tie up loose ends. Throughout a filming schedule, there are always those little things - inserts, close-ups, push-ins - that can't quite fit within the confines of a day's shooting schedule and are cast out in the milieu of last weeks' work. And so without fail, here we were at the stage trying to get those missing shots. One such shot was a push-in on Tom in a car. Sounds simple right. The car doesn't have to move. Tom just needed to move his head ever so slightly. But to make the scene feel alive and natural within the rest of the scene we shot over three months ago, there needed to be movement of other traffic behind. That's where I came in...

The 2nd 2nd AD has done a terrific job of immersing me into other aspects of the job of an AD. Before the holiday hiatus, he had me place a street full of background actors, give them intentions, what have you. It was exciting to feel like an active contributor to the creative process, since after all this is a creative industry. But today, he had a new job for me: Be part of the traffic moving behind to keep this push-in alive.

And so, I swiped the 2nd AD's keys, hopped in his car, and got to my start mark. The mission was simple enough. Be one of two cars to drive behind Tom's car at a natural speed, a distance of about 100 feet. Easy, right? Oh wait, but we're going to keep rolling for a while and do numerous looks all in one take, so as soon as you clear the frame, whip around and get ready to cross again. Because, may I remind you, there are only two cars. Yes, it would make sense to have more cars, but the road was tight (made even tighter by a condor lift in the middle of the road. So, as the two cars are crossing, you basically graze past each other and then attempt to do-si-do around until you're lined up again. Oh yeah, and there's always the chance a train might roll through. Sounding a little more tricky now right?

But for me it was awesome! It beat the mundane monotony that is paperwork. I was pushing pedal to the metal, doing some epic K-turns (is that an oxymoron?), and reacting to my surroundings. I felt like a stunt guy (God only knows what kind of driving actual stunt guys are expected to handle).

At the same time, it was a humbling experience. I was so jazzed up about an element of the movie that is so miniscule within the greater scheme of things. Surely the shot is so tight on Tom's face that my peeling out in a silver Nissan Sentra rental only provides a hint of reflected light on his cheek. Yet it actually felt like something. Something real. And that's ultimately the role I want to have within this industry, preferably on a larger more noticeable scale. To further quote the mystery movie that lent today's blog its title, "I'm more afraid of being nothing than I am of being hurt." What department I need to be in to best achieve that goal is anyone's guess, but right now I appreciate being where I am and being able to do the diverse things I get to do each day.

The Things We Think and Do Not Say

"That's how you become great, man. Hang your balls out there."

You know that feeling where you go into a situation totally set. You’ve got your lines down, your game face on, you can make this shot. Then the actual situation passes in a blur, and you walk away thinking, “Wait a second…” I've come away from a lot of situations lately with that nagging feeling, and I always come back to the same phrase: “The things we think and do not say.” Initially, I just assumed it must be a Shakespeare quote, maybe the title of a Faulkner short story, it just sounds so damn poetic. But finally giving into my curiosity and the almighty Google, I did a quick search... Jerry. Maguire. Of course! I thought. How could I not remember one of the great quotes from one of my all-time favorite movies! My excitement was quickly replaced by embarrassment, however, as here I was at my computer, watching a clip of Tom Cruise have "a breakthrough. Breakdown? Breakthrough." And just a few yards away, Tom Cruise was having a similar breakthrough in the scene we're shooting that day.

But I find it interesting that there are things I think and do not say all the time, both at work and outside of work. What's more, those at work have a tendency to work for me, while those in life have a tendency to undermine me. I don't know if that speaks more to the nature of my work or to the work of my nature. Yes, I work with an assortment of "sharks in suits," and sure, there are days where "I hate my place in the world." But I think more than anything these diametrically opposing phenomena are characteristic of a work/life balance that I just haven't seemed to figure out yet.

I'll admit such a realization might be a little touchy-feely. One could argue that a healthy work/life balance is about as attainable as the Holy Grail. But I think the film industry is especially susceptible to that dilemma. When working on average 80-90 hours a week in a self-contained, autonomous community, it's easy to see why there are times I feel closer to my on-set "brothers" than my actual brothers (ok, maybe that's a bit exaggerated...). But the bonds I've made with the people I've worked with are intense, seemingly irrevocable, until we are ripped apart by those four little words.

"That's a picture wrap!"

And I confess that part of me really loves that kind of lifestyle. I was talking with an old high school friend earlier tonight, who's curious about entering the film industry, and I told her that, in many ways, the film industry is like high school or college. Projects only last somewhere between two and four months, so a bad job is like a bad class. Sucks you got a bad grade on the first exam and the teacher picks on you. But hunker down, get through it, because eventually all bad classes/jobs come to an end.

"That's a picture wrap!"

And like that, I'm back to my first day of a new semester, trying to make friends with the new kids...

But the thing that makes work so great, I think, is that you're almost expected not to say the things you think. Barriers are inevitably set up at work, a certain professional detachment is commonplace. And apparently I live for that. But, to quote a guilty-pleasure show I've occasionally indulged in, "At some point, you have to make a decision. Boundaries don't keep other people out. They fence you in. So you can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them." And that's where things have gotten murky in my life. On the off chance that I actually dare to cross the line, the things I'm thinking are racing so fast, I trip over trying to say them and invariably recoil back within my boundaries.

So what am I getting at? I suppose it is the realization that, at least for now, my work is my life. And in the words of Jerry's mentor, the late great Dickey Fox, "The key to this business is personal relationships." So I will continue to foster personal relationships at work and, as best I can, in life. Hopefully that line will eventually fade and those boundaries will break down, and I will "become the me I was meant to be."