I made my living for over 20 years in the entertainment business, and it was fun. And lucrative. Things started changing back in the late 90's but you tend to ignore these things when you're being paid obscenely well. But then the economy collapsed and those of us further up the food chain, the ones who made the most money, were chucked overboard to try and keep the whole enterprise afloat. It wasn't personal, just business, and I certainly wasn't the only one affected. The bottom line was that about mid-2009, whatever entertainment work I had completely dried up and out of desperation I started looking north and here we are... in Bakersfield.
But last year things began to change. I started to get calls for entertainment work. And since everyone still had my cell number, the one with the 323 area code, everyone thought I was still hanging out in the old neighborhood. And since everything today is now handled with email and text and FTP sites and...well, I'm now getting almost all my work from Hollywood and they have no idea where I live. I'm grateful, obviously. But here's the thing...
I had actually forgotten how much I hate entertainment work.
Not entertainment. I still love that. But the business has changed and it's now run by anal retentives.
Seriously, this week has been mind boggling.
Here's how it used to work...
Say, you have a new TV show or film and you need to come up with ideas for how to advertise it. So you sit down for a good spell and think about clever ideas and you doodle them up and run them past the team and you'd settle on a dozen or so ideas and have an amazing sketch artist realize them. You run these past the studio, which, back in the day, was run by people who actually still had imaginations and could look at a sketch and visualize it and approve it and trust you to pull it off. And everyone is happy.
Now, I would give an example of what I'm actually working on, but to do so would void God knows how many non-disclosure agreements and blow my anonymity. So for a hypothetical example, let's say its a TV show with Jennifer Aniston. And let's say we came up with a killer idea of Jennifer Aniston walking on water. It could happen, right?
So, in the good old days, we'd sketch that up, the studio would sign off on it, we'd shoot Miss Aniston on some mylar and strip in some water and voila!!... a poster.
But not now.
Now, before we even can show it to the studio, it has to be a fully realized vision. Because everyone at the studios now are now soulless, visionless cretins. And everyone lives in fear of them.
So now, I have to take a head shot of the lovely Miss Aniston, find a photo of a body double and Frankenstein them together. The body won't be quite right, so you'll have to break some limbs and twist some things and more than likely stitch together body parts from multiple photos. I'll break legs to make it look like she's walking. I'll strip in a photo of some water. Surely this is enough to get across the idea to the beancounters at the studio, right?
Wrong.
"I don't know... would she really wear that color nail polish?"
"Those shoes look kind of cheap, can't you swap them out for some Louboutins?"
"There's a flyaway hair over her forehead, that just kills it for me."
"Her wrists look kinda thick..."
"She would never wear a hem that short... lower it two inches."
Keep in mind, these are just preliminary comps. They are going to get the chance to photograph Miss Aniston in whatever they like next month. Doing whatever they want. Hypothetically.
So here I sit, past 1am, not doing anything grand, design wise, and not on Miss Aniston.
I was working on another actress for an upcoming show. I had come up with an idea I thought was pretty clever and the agency I was working for had loved it. Now, as I actually was building it with photos, suddenly and stupidly, earth shattering issues had arisen... her nails.
"She ALWAYS wears French tips, and they are ALWAYS GLOSSY!"
OK sure. It isn't actually HER. And her nails will appear smaller than a grain of rice in the final product. It's a fucking comp. But I'm a wage slave, so whatever you want....
It's so exhausting. And demoralizing. And just plain idiotic.
I need to look into what manicurists make. I feel like an expert at this point and no matter what it pays, it's gotta be less aggravation and better hours.
