The Search

This always happens to me. Yet again, I find myself searching for the thick electric cable known as seaway, I listen for the hum of voices or the squacky chatter of walkie-talkies. I strain to hear someone saying "copy that" or the more mysterious "I'm 10-100". I wander on, hoping that nothing is yet "up" - a rehearsal or blocking or, worst of all, "picture" - any of which would mean I am late. In the case of "picture's up" very late.

Through one or more of its indexical signs, I am trying to locate the film set, caught between good timing and bad. But even before I get a toe on set, I experience something like this:

A long corridor, a hallway of closed doors seem to swim past me as quizzical eyes peer at me. I am obviously not supposed to be there. The Job Interview is in a recently rented temporary office space. There are no signs leading me there, and naturally nobody who works behind the mysterious hallway doors has ever heard of them. "Angry Dishpan Productions? What?" Glaring at you as if it's your fault they don't know how to get rid of you.

The interview itself is as strange an anomaly as I've ever come across in this business. I've been offered a year-long well-paying television series over the phone and then had to present myself to two separate producers of a low-budget feature film. Another time the director and producer started having a technical conversation in the middle of my interview. I have been asked to wait while the producer I needed to impress reamed someone over the phone. Once I endure a two-hour inquisition by a Hack Director for three weeks work on a low-paying B-movie. Which I didn't get. When the producer called to let me know this, I told her I was relieved; I thought there was something wrong with the Hack Director. She said Thank You. Later I remembered the hastily-assembled office she worked in had no walls, only 5 foot high dividers; I am sure her own superiors were listening in.

Like many of my brethren, I move from show to show. There are no Big Studios and few film technicians, the people who physically make the movies and TV shows, have any job security beyond their last paycheque. The very temporariness of the film industry is part of its attractiveness. It is a world of non-commitants and quiet rebels and not for the faint of heart.

Thought

Film of all the arts, most has the capacity to male us feel as if we have actually lived a different life; it presents an experience which masquerades as our own. So dependent are we on vision to form our emotional contexts that even black and white and silent films have this power to impact.

I therefore believe, even with the advent of ever more realistic gaming platforms, so-called 'reality' programming and 3-D everything, that feature films and television dramas have not any chance of dying. Everyone loves a good story.

Introduction

I begin this writing as an exercise. But a fun exercise; what I hope will be an amusing and honest anecdote of fifteen years spent working as an on-set technician, a script supervisor (also called "continuity") in the film industry. I have always worked in Toronto, Canada, a city sometimes referred to as "Hollywood North" but just as often called "Hogtown". Throughout my years working in the film and television business, I have found both to be equally applicable.

This will not be any kind of "tell-all" work. I bear no grudge against any of the directors who have given me filthy looks every time an actor got their lines wrong, blamed me for a boom shadow or asked me to "stop taking so many notes and just do continuity". I have no axe to grind when it comes to the myriad producers who barge onto set with little, if any knowledge of filmmaking process. I am not going to complain about having to reset props, run lines with washed-up stars, re-time scenes that have already been shot, listen to editors scream at me to "get control of my actors", explain to producers that the academy frame lines on the monitor are NOT going to be in the movie or try to figure out exactly when the sound recordist changed tapes. Especially now that I have it all off my chest...