Some people have an image of me that I am a rich, trust fund kid or something like that, and it makes me laugh. I always ask them to tell me where that trust fund is so I can make a withdrawal, because I have yet to see a dime from it.
From a few weeks after my 15th birthday on, I have pretty much had a job constantly, and most of those jobs have been physically intensive. The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I mucked horse stalls. I mean that literally--every day from 6am to 2pm, I shoveled piss and shit soaked hay out of the stalls of thoroughbred horses, and then laid fresh hay. I spent one summer washing dishes, and the next busing tables. I've spent countless hours working all sorts of jobs on farms--putting up fences, painting fences, worming cattle, cutting hay, gelding steers (cutting the balls off of young male bulls--not kidding at all), etc, etc.
Now that I sit down and think about it, I may have worked more blue collar than white collar jobs in my life--probably because I get fired from the white collar jobs pretty quickly (e.g., this little situation).
That's been one of the strangest things for me to deal with on this movie--I am not just one of the people in charge, but I am solidly white collar now. In fact, I couldn't even be blue collar if I tried. The below the line jobs on movies tend to be very physically intense and hard, but they are still very much skilled labor. Any idiot can paint a fence, but you need a lot of training to move a camera dolly or set up hot stinger.
I watch these dudes busting their ass moving equipment or something, and my first instinct is to go help them--after all, what kind of leader sits back and watches while his people toil? Well, I kinda have to; I can't help them because I would only get in the way. For at least 90% of the jobs on a movie set, some sort of specialized skill or local knowledge is necessary, and if I tried to do those jobs without first taking months to learn them, the result would be pretty obvious: I would fuck shit up.
Even though there is nothing I can do, even though by "helping" I'd just fuck something up and make more work for all of us, I still feel like an asshole for watching all these people bust their ass doing all this hard work for my movie, while I sit back and do nothing but eat craft service and have pansy-ass creative conversations about how far the shades should be drawn in a hotel room or what kind of phone Movie Tucker should have.
I guess that's the point though. They bust their ass in each of their respective jobs--whether it's props or sound or camera or lighting or whatever--so that Nils and Bob and I can have the time and energy to have those conversations, because it's those conversations that make the movie what it is. At the end of the day, the point of a movie is to entertain the audience. Nothing else really matters. If the movie sucks, no one will give a fuck how much the producers helped move c-stands (not that I could even do that correctly), so it's our job to make sure we do our job.
I wrote about this because I had this conversation with one of the grips last week about how I felt guilty for not doing any of the manual labor. He told me I was stupid for thinking that, and that I needed to let him focus on his job and not worry about it, that I needed to get my job right so that the movie was what it was supposed to be.
Then he told me if I wanted to do some physical labor, I could come mow his lawn on Saturday. I told him to shut his below-the-line mouth and go move something in the hot sun, I had an iced yerba mate tea to drink.
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