Oof. So yeah sometimes I do politicsish. I don’t like it. What the fuck even is this blog? Daily noise. Welcome to my DAILY NOISE. Nonspecific daily noise BUT NOISE.
Right now I’ve got three NDAs active, guys, and I write daily. One of them there’s someone who would be absolutely thrilled if they could find me breaking it. “Send me that photo,” they tried. So they can send it to someone as an example of me being unprofessional. ‘No way in hell.”
The other two NDAs are for proper jobs where I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. It’s this one where I’m crew but the crew has gone weird: I was Production Assistant on a doc where I literally provided the production company with the gaffer and many of their live crew. I honestly could have pitched for a production credit. I massively helped staff it and then rather than being acknowledged I was pilloried. Treated like absolute shit.
It was an event company pitching as a film company. The producer got wind of this and played trumps. She made F feel clueless but also “you’re my friend and I’ll teach you” was their line to and F bought it hard.
And then the producer just … made up what she wanted and made out like it was F’s job to provide it. “How could you not give me the X Y Z I’ve just made up? You are wrong, because you are an events company.” I hit the frame as she learnt I was an actor and then made out like I needed to magically know all sorts of things. It was a hellish shoot and she was a nonsense human. Pretty much all the crew, not just the ones I had thanklessly provided, saw how I was needlessly the whipping boy. P throwing her weight knowing F didn’t know what was needed in film. Messy, and H perhaps in the role I needed to be, but instead just randomly arbitrating, getting sick and losing the projector. Why…?
I hung out briefly with part of the problem just recently. I allowed honesty when I saw them, time has passed: “That was an unbelievably tricky shoot,” I said. Seriously, I’ve been on so many now. It was far and away the most negative shoot I’ve ever been on energetically. It was nuts bad. Neurosis trickles down. Once, many years ago, I thought this person could sense such things. I thought I saw a partnership, before I clocked that they only look at others for usefulness. I kinda like baiting them now.
She agreed it was a tricky set, but only in the sense we were occasionally on a cliff edge or something physically tricky. I don’t think she even registered what I actually meant by a tricky set. There’s an obedience there deep seated that kinda misses the point of anything that isn’t blah.
“Tricky” is about the people at the top. A tricky set has nothing to do with being on a cliff or whatever. “Oh he had to build a piano on a cliff,” that’s not tricky. You can do difficult stuff together fine.
A tricky set is about someone who can’t work her walkie-talkie and immediately assumes it hasn’t been charged, coming and attacking the bottom of the status pile multiple times via technological incompetence and self importance. I would always put the “dead” battery this particular person brought me into my much used walkie talkie. I’d use it for the rest of the day. I told her once I had been using the battery she rejected, and I could see she couldn’t process it cos she needed to buy the narrative where I hadn’t charged the batteries. She didn’t know what to do with me actually being competent and her being shit with tech because of what we call “the infantilising of actors.” She knew I was an actor. Across the pond actors doing that kind of work are often a different breed, a desperate bunch in her eyes. That’s a thing I fear she taught my old event friends. The LA story about … “actors”. It’s very very different over here. In her LA world, actors are everywhere, clueless and desperate. Over here, if you’re lucky enough, you’ll get an actor in your PA role where like me they could easily have been something else but this is their jam. Anyone who has kept it going this long is both excellent at it and resourceful.
I’m still happy that Kes introduced me to them. “You need to get yourself out from under that one,” said Darren quite rightly when they took a third of my wage last summer. But Kester did me a solid sending me on that shoot with John and the chairs. I’m happy he trusted me like that. Got Brian to thank. I’m just gonna try not to throw them so much money when they have not been kind to me.
All will be well.
