I had a long history of working in the entertainment business, and there are days I really miss working on film and television projects.
And then you get one in.
Man, I had forgotten how crazy-making and soul-crushing that business had become. I hadn't had a Hollywood project in months, and like all traumatic experiences, you tend to block out the bad and only remember the good, if there is any. And there usually isn't much good to remember anymore.
It wasn't always that way. It used to be a really fun, really creative business. And even though you were pretty far down the Hollywood totem pole, there was still enough glitz and glamour to go around. Jetting around the world doing photo shoots, rubbing elbows with the "A-List". And money! Six figure salaries for everyone!
But then the suits took control and sucked every ounce of enjoyment out of it. And the money with it. What was once a highly sought after career has been reduced to assembly line drone work at slave wages, leaving those of us veterans cashing in the 401k's and raiding the kids college funds to try and keep the house.
At any rate, a call came in from an agency I hadn't worked for in over a year. It was a job! As with everything else in Hollywood, it sounded too good to be true - two days of work, for really great money. And even better, there was no thinking involved. They had an idea, they had already shot all the components, they just needed someone with my "skill" and "artistry" to put it all together. Like Tinkertoys.
Since I hadn't worked on a Hollywood project in awhile, I had kind of forgotten the ins and outs and rules of the business. And rule #1 is, whenever people start flattering you, you're fucked. That's actually the standard way you get fired...
"You are SO creative and talented... you'll have no problem finding another job."
So I took the job and lived to regret it.
The job seemed pretty cut and dried. I can't mention the project, lest they actually print this piece of shit and it gets traced back to me. It was a poster, set in a courtroom. We're standing at the back of a courtroom. Our lead actress, an intense, driven lawyer (are there ever any other kinds?) is storming out of the courtroom, down the center aisle, right at camera, flinging all matter of court documents into the air. The stunned onlookers, the supporting cast, are all seated in the courtroom gallery, facing forward, but looking over their shoulders at the spectacle.
They had shot a bunch of body doubles for the onlookers, shot in courtroom chairs, looking over their shoulders. They had shot all of the supporting cast separately. Assignment one... strip in the cast's heads on the double's bodies.
Sounds easy enough.
Only they had shot all actors looking directly at camera. The doubles were shot from behind. It is physically impossible to rotate your head 180 degrees. Unless you're an owl. This was a problem. I called the account executive handling the project, who six months ago was a receptionist, to discuss. She was having none of it.
"JUST MAKE IT WORK!!!"
Evidently buried far down in the creative brief, in the fine print, was "Overcome the inherent limitations of human anatomy".
The problems piled up from there... perspective from another dimension, people lit from all different angles, missing arms and legs. I did my best, but there was no rescuing the hot mess it had become.
The saving grace, if you could call it that, is that changes in the business and the dominance of PhotoShop have displaced all the people of vision and creativity with the worst kind of anal-retentives, people for whom there is no "big picture", just millions of little ones, which they focus on like a laser.
So I turned in my poster, the one with the incredible rubber-necked owl people in the Twilight Zone, fearing the worst, dreading the comments to come.
And when they did, these were her only comments:
"On Actress A, she seems to have some flyaway hairs - please remove. And can we add a wristwatch to Actor B?"
That was it.
The whole poster looked surreal, with grotesquely twisted humans, warped perspective, and she was accessorizing.
So there went two days of my life I'll never get back. I hope they pay.
Never again.
