an oblique angle instead of head-on like I did.
At eighteen, I showed up for freshman year at a big, sun-dried university in a place that wasn’t anything like the town between Ann Arbor and Detroit where I grew up. I brought along huge expectations with my extra-long twin-set sheet and new gym socks, and a long-distance relationship that, no surprise, went off the rails a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I liked many of the differences between here and home, but it wasn’t like the best film studios had their doors wide open, their sexy receptionists waiting to take me upstairs to see the executives with all the biggest stars on speed dial.
I thought college would be different from high school, filled with charismatic, friendly weirdos, but after a year or so of living in student squalor at UCLA, I realized that the rest of the world, Hollywood in particular, is no different from the tenth grade. It’s probably much worse, because the people in charge have real power. They decide who makes what films, and how, and these are the films that the rest of the world flocks to see. The studio executives, the directors and producers and marketing millionaires, many of them no more evolved than newly pubescent twelve-year-olds, are responsible for the images America beams out to the billions on the planet who aren’t Americans. That movie about the two idiots who can’t remember where they parked their car because they were too high the night before? This is the cinematic ambassador we deliver to the rest of the world, ninety minutes of Grade-D eye candy that forever corrupts the gray matter of twelve-year-olds in Tokyo or confirms the low opinion that the teashop owner in New Delhi has had of Americans ever since a group of fat, belligerent tourists from Hartford staggered into his shop and complained that his teacups were dirty.
I was in the drama club in high school, and instead of trying out for the plays, I stuck to the stage crew. I learned how to work hard, move quickly, and let the actors and director take the credit for a good production. Even at fifteen, I understood that all clubs have their ritual hazings, especially ones where members of both sexes find themselves in close, competitive relationships, an underpaid teacher barely in charge of the whole hormonal gang. A Hollywood movie set isn’t much different. I get most of my paying work for Sony, and it comes in more or less regularly, but it’s not like I’m flying to Maui every other month to spend time at my second home. There aren’t many union or guild jobs anymore for people who aren’t in front of the camera; like everywhere else, the movie industry is trying to make as much money as possible by spending as little as it can on production.
Before the mostly regular Sony gigs, I worked as an assistant in set decoration at Paramount after spending six years at UCLA, the last two in the graduate screenwriting program. I moved to props within a year and thought that I’d only have to do this kind of work a little while longer before I’d have saved some money and found a backer so that I could start my own production company, Binocular Spectacular. Needless to say, it hasn’t happened yet. The truth is, without a friend in a high place, you often have to start on the lowest rung in the film industry, which is porn. You work as an editorial assistant to some coke-sniffing greaseball director out in the Valley, and you learn how to use the editing software and you pretend you don’t mind and maybe if you’re lucky, you move up to some B-level but more legit studio, and then from there, you keep going. If you’re lucky.
There’s no way around it. This town is superstitious about everything, especially good luck. If you have it, they love you. If you don’t, or don’t outwardly appear to, no one will give you the time of day or night. They don’t want to be tainted by you or your ugly luck.
The job I’ve been doing at Sony, however, isn’t without its rewards. I get to work closely with the actors, making sure the briefcase opens the way it’s supposed to, that the wristwatch the Eisenhower-era lawyer wears is the right one. Before I became propmaster, I sometimes had to run miscellaneous errands that other production people were supposed to do but managed