Roadhouse.
When I was perhaps fourteen, Kelly Lynch was the hottest human being on the planet to me. Bleached blonde hair and apparently she was a doctor, of course, yeah, even if when characters including people adjacent to the human she is suddenly smitten with get beaten up horribly she is only concerned with being the still heart of it all plus oh yes I always look like this hi hi boobs! She looked like Lou but that huge eighties HAIR thing, basically. Phwooar
I just internalised it all back then. The late eighties. I was being encouraged to internalise all sorts of weird messages. I ignored as many as I could but hair and boobs and snoood… Leggings???
‘You need to watch the original Roadhouse,” I told Tom, because the Swayze thing is rare. How many actors do we have who are body first? Fewer by far than we need. Buster obviously. Charlie C. Errol, yeah fine. Then noise. Cary? Marlon?!
Patrick. Keanu… Tom… Tom…
I’m talking about masculine male men selfishly cos I’ve spent more time thinking about the balance with people who look like me than with those who don’t. I’m going to bed now though. And really I’ve got nothing to add but observance. Plus Kelly Lynch. Yep. Just literally being female when I was thirteen.
I’m happy that my mate Bellerby tonight cut through the very obvious storytelling to engage with the original Roadhouse, despite the blatantly obvious mentor character being introduced just to give the hero a death of the mentor arc. We had a fun action movie night.
I’m off to bed having enjoyed watching silly movies.
Apparently someone will pay us all soon for doing important things about the East India Company – perhaps my hardest recent job to be paid for in terms of karma. But… loads of humans have given loads of time. We all obliquely trust we won’t be fucked over. We won’t be, at the end of everything. But the possibility of our need is noticeably down the production people’s list of priorities. I’ve had a few other people on it express concern, having worked a few weeks with nothing back. I’ve never done a job where the payment info hasn’t been properly expressed by now. We should have been paid. By now we should have been fully paid for the work we’ve done so far. There’s definitely money there, and lots of it, and trust is a thing. The show has been funded but the offer going forward to creatives has literally just been ITC minimum. The least legally possible. Having been paid nothing we got a message saying that we might get more shows at literally the least that can legally be scratched out. But HEY ARE YOU FREE??
I’m hoping that integrity will win once the writer makes sense of the word “collaboration” It’s a funded show that also charges for tickets, but… I’m also feeling the shadow of the employment model of the actual East India Company at play here where the workers are the ones deprioritised. PROVE ME WRONG?! I’m sure it is just a short term cashflow issue and they need advice balancing the payments to their creatives. But there are lots of people straight from drama school. Pay them. Don’t make them fight for it. Make it easy. Make them know how their contribution is valuable.
We have had a creative process, but we are not secure regarding our pay. We haven’t been paid anything yet even though we’ve been open to audiences, and I’ve quietly wondered how that can be justified. I trust that we will be paid before this weekend, just as I’m trusting we won’t have to fight for fair pay. There’s a respect that makes calamity of so long life. I’m writing this because I’m beginning to worry.
But actually, in my experience, pretty much universally, someone would have apologized to us by now properly and we would’ve been paid for some of our work. I’m sure it’s just an admin drop. Is it legit to withhold our next performance? Is it dumb for me to write my concern here? I’m doing it. I know that the writer is snowed under but they CAN pay. The writer is the producer. And she HAS TO learn that it doesn’t matter how lovely everything is for her and the networking and the show, she is EMPLOYING people. And they MUST be paid. Particularly young actors. No wonder she can’t get people to commit in advance for her July shows. We need to trust we will be treated with as humans. I didn’t do this job purely out of altruism, and sure as dammit I don’t NEED the work.
So yeah, it’s interesting, but I’m feeling right now like I’m being exploited by people making a show about exploitation. They’ve had some unexpected funding so the optimist in me thinks that maybe they are doubling down and they haven’t paid because they want to give us more than they thought they would to keep us loyal over the three years funding they’ve now got from the Skinners Guild. Another option is that they just don’t think paying actors is important. I reckon it must be that they realise they want to pay us more than this ITC minimum and they haven’t done the maths. I’m waiting to hear how they share the joy about what we should invoice for. Watch this space, I will share it loudly, when they apologise for their slow payment and explain that it is because we get however many times as much as we initially thought we would. That’s why I’m not going to be strident yet about the fact we’ve all done shows and had nowt. Nothing. Over weeks. With new practitioners.
Knowing we will be overpaid in the end makes it just about bearable that we are being made to feel like we are the bottom of the list. I’ll let you know the percentage mark-up we all get! It’s a lovely thing as for many it is their first job, and I’m sure they won’t be surfing into this acting game on a wave of exploitation.
AlBarclay 