Hello!
So apparently although these blogs keep getting longer and longer, I continue to wait to write everything down. Before I start, I would like to say "Thank You" to all of you who have said you are reading my blog. I very much appreciate it.
So, going back, Monday was a pretty mellow day. I got my exercise in and got to recenter myself from the long weekend. I'm sure if this was one of the first weeks since I moved to LA, lots of things would stick out about the cute girl at the grocery store or an interesting store I walked by or the fact that Zombies seem to be everywhere and yet no major studios are actually making any Zombie movies (that I know of; and I know subscribe to Daily Variety). As it is, I really don't remember much about Monday except that I got a job Tuesday working on a mini-series for HBO with a call time of 6:30am.
The thing with a 6:30am call time isn't that it is early. I'm not the slacker I once was, but any call time before 8am is going to be early at this point. So I already know I'm going to lose sleep. The problem is that when it is a 6:30am call time and you live in LA and have to adjust for travel time and traffic, giving yourself enough time to get there 15min-30min early, you have to get up at 5am. Getting up at 5am isn't even really the problem, although I do hate getting up in the dark. The problem is that getting up at 5am means going to bed at 9pm the night before to get 8 hours of sleep, my minimum for being a happy camper. The problem with going to bed at 9pm is that it is anywhere between 2 and 5 hours earlier than whatever schedule I am on. So now, even though I know I'm a light sleeper and haven't slept through an alarm since college, I have to debate about taking an Advil pm or not for fear I will oversleep. I almost always go with no. Then of course you are nervous about the job the next day and your mind gets preoccupied and you can't sleep anyway. A parallel for you non actors and non frequent fliers is if you had to get up early for a flight that you couldn't miss.
The shoot was in Arcadia at the Santa Anita race track, a beautiful horse racing track set against an even more beautiful mountain backdrop. Once again I was reminded of one of my favorite things about acting, getting to go to places I wouldn't normally go.
My background role of the day was Camera Crew, a role I would play for less than an hour in what would turn into a 3 day gig.
The beginning of day one was pretty straight forward, sign in, go to wardrobe, go to holding. We got pulled from holding pretty quickly and went down by the stables. They proped up the spectators, but didn't have anything for the 3 camera crew besides some badges that were already on the cameras, so they just told us to stand aside. The PA came and took a group of spectators, but left us and a few others behind. It quickly got hot in the sun and I had to duck next to an info booth to find some shade. I usually am pretty reserved day one on a set, getting to know my surroundings and trying to be as good as possible and unfortunately feeling stressed when others are not behaving. I kept to myself by the info booth for quite some time. I even tried meditating for a little bit, but having everyone around was pretty distracting. A few hours in, they brought the rest of us over and asked camera crew people to just be spectators since we would be so far away anyway. We did one pass and then they told us to hold off because we weren't being seen.
I won't bore you with the rest of the day since it was pretty typical for background work and I only got anywhere near a camera once. One "highlight" was when an older man that had seen me meditating earlier came up to me and, upon declaring that he was shy preceded to tell me he was religious and prayed a lot and asked if I was praying or meditating. I told him meditating and this launched him into more questions regarding religion, meditation, spirituality, agnosticism, and how he only had just one more question to ask. For the most part I didn't mind the conversation and felt like I was helping, but he did get shushed by a crew member, which set off my own alarm bells for fear of getting in trouble.
Before I had even signed out for the day, I was told I was being recalled for the next day, something that didn't surprise me since I hadn't played a camera crew person at all that day. The call time for day two was to be 8am.
You would think that 8am would be a great call time in comparison to 6:30am, since it is an extra hour and a half to sleep. Wrong. At best it is an extra half hour of sleep because traffic increases exponentially around rush hour. What I didn't realize was that the direction I was heading (East from the Valley) was a reverse commute for most people, so hardly had any traffic. I arrived an hour early and instead of going right in I parked at the mall and did a quick meditation.
Day two was even hotter than day one, a fact that quickly registered with me as I stood in the winners circle behind a camera that wasn't turned on. It was my big moment to be camera crew. I had been paired with a guy named Robert and another named Ron, both of whom I would get to know pretty well by the end of my portion of the shoot. Robert has had some success as a voice over actor, among other things, and was sharing some advice with Ron about how to break into the field. I didn't engage them since I was tired (Day two of getting up is always worse than day one.) and hot and the AD had asked us to be especially quiet while the camera set up. (If I can digress for a moment, sometimes I feel like ADs and PAs are like bad parents that tell you to do something, but then let you get away with it all the time, but then get mad when you don't listen to what they say.) I did however listen intently and made mental notes.
As it turns out, my crankiness would be unfounded since instead of a day in the hot sun, I ended up being outside less than two hours before they sent everyone inside while they worked on another shot. As it turned out, the three of us would be in holding for the rest of the day, but of course at the time, we didn't know that. That is one of the hardest thing about background work, the not knowing. It would be so much easier if someone could just tell you, you will be sitting in the same room for the next 5 hours, do what you want, just don't be disruptive. Instead, you sit there and you spend most of your mental energy wondering what would was going to happen next. Something I'm hoping to alleviate some when I get better at meditation. I did in fact try to meditate at one point during the down time, but I couldn't concentrate, even when they took all the extras except for us 3 camera crew off to set.
So my afternoon was spent getting to know Robert and Ron better, reading, sitting outside and staring at the mountains and watching out for El Oso.
At one point Robert decided to lay down on his suit bag and close his eyes while I returned to my reading and Ron was off on his PSP. Quickly he began to snore, loudly. At one point I walked to the bathroom and came back and could hear him all the way at the edge of this large cafeteria. As I walked back in the security guard goes to me, "Watch out for the Bear. You'll get eaten." Apparently the snoring went on for some time too since I went outside for about 15 minutes and when I came back Robert was just getting up. The security guard, who was latino, razzed Robert about it and from then on we were all on high alert for El Oso.
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