Category: Essays

Back in August, 2005, Donald Trump was just a rich asshole with a bad toupee, a few bankruptcies to his name, and a horrible reality TV show. Nobody in a million years would have looked at the man and thought, “Now this guy’s presidential.”

Trump hasn’t changed much in the past decade, but I guess the world has, or at least a corner of it. Suddenly, a bully who doesn’t think before he speaks and isn’t used to ever being challenged or questioned, and lashes out when he is, is someone who some subset of America wants as its president (still, according to the latest poll numbers, despite the fact that he’s dropped out of the news cycle in recent weeks, thank you Pope Francis). So I thought maybe it was a good time to re-run this piece I wrote back then about working with him on a commercial. Like most of what I write, it ends up also being about working in film and my own insecurities, but at least, hey, I’m consistent! I guess The Donald isn’t the only one who hasn’t changed.

The Land of Trump

Worked with Donald Trump for the first time recently. He was pretty much what you’d expect: gentle, soft-spoken, with a fondness for butterflies…Ha ha, ha no, seriously, he’s the same guy you see on television. His tactic, I quickly observed (already familiar to those of you who watch The Apprentice), is to assert his opinion as often and as forcefully as possible.

“That was good, that was a really good take, I liked that one, let’s see that one back…Oh, that was the one, that’s the one you should use. You’re not going to get a better take than that one. The second one was pretty good too, maybe you could use the first half of the second one — Jenny (his personal stylist), you like that one?”

“Yes, Mr. Trump, but the second one was —”

“No, I like this one better. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Note that he was mainly having a conversation with himself. The rest of us? Merely spectators. Because he already knows what he wants and that he’s right, at least in the Land of Trump. There’s a lot to be learned from this for those, like myself, who live in the Land of the Overly-Introspective Neurotic Peons, who are never 100% sure of anything except that we are eventually going to do something that gets us yelled at.

Unfortunately, The Donald arrived on set to do his thing in the last two hours of a workday that had begun, for the sound department, at 1 am (grip and electric had arrived at 10 pm, so they had less than no sympathy for us). By 7:30 in the morning when “the talent” got there, the sound guy and I were both fairly comatose.

We discussed our plan of action.

“I dunno, you want to mic him?”

“Mmm, not really. Do you want me to mic him?”

“No, no, I’ll do it…”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

"Okay, that’d be great.”

We stood outside Trump’s dressing room, listening to the friendly chit-chat coming from inside which still somehow, in that voice, sounded both authoritative and punitive. I noticed the sound guy was looking nervous.

“I’ll mic him if you want…”

“Yeah, um, I’m a little intimidated. Here.”

He pushed the wadded-up microphone into my hand and hurried away.

Contrary to what you might think when you sort through your positive memories of feeling people up, putting a radio mic on a person is no cheap thrill. First of all, any film production does not like to wait on sound. They’ll wait a millennium for camera and lighting to do their jobs if that’s what it takes, but nobody seems to remember that it needs to sound good as well as look good, nooo. Plus, we only get our turn after the talent has finished hair, make-up, and wardrobe, which is often precisely the moment when they’re getting called to set, and then suddenly you and your three minutes of miking time are holding up the whole enchilada – at which point the AD just has to call out over the walkie, “WAITING ON SOUND!” just to make sure everybody knows it.

Second, actors hate to be miked. And why shouldn’t they? It’s one more person they have to allow to poke and prod their way into their personal space, and then it’s even more of an invasion of privacy once they are miked, because every word they say has the potential to be overheard. Nobody would willingly allow themselves to be bugged (the Patriot Act notwithstanding*), especially when they could be talking about private, contractual whatevers with their agents, saying nasty things about the director, or making salacious overtures to a hot PA. Not that I’ve overheard any of those things because the sound people I work for always remember to turn down the volume on an actor’s radio mic when they’re off camera. I’m just saying these things happen, and actors know they do, which just makes it all the more tense when you go in there with a smile and a microphone, knowing that you’re not going to be greeted with a big, happy “Howdy!” Most actors are gracious and professional about having to wear a wire but all sound people have stories about the ones who try to turn “off” a mike that doesn’t have an off switch (thereby turning it to “broken”), or, finding that too complicated, just cut the mike cable up into tiny little pieces. And even when actors are nice, they don’t always think about the fact that they are wearing a $3000 piece of equipment that belongs to the sound person, as when Marlon Wayans wanted to play basketball during a break on a job I did with him and considerately took the microphone off — and left it on the ground, where it promptly disappeared. He tried to help us find it and looked rather shame-faced the next day when he came over to say, “Yo, I’m sorry I lost your shit” — and it did eventually turn up. But this ends up being yet another reason to be extra considerate of actors when you’re miking them: they’re going to be wearing your expensive shit. You want them to take good care of it.

Third, sound mixers hate radio mics to begin with. They are tiny, fairly lame little microphones attached to wireless transmitters known to receive interference from radio stations and taxi dispatchers. They need to be hidden in clothing which can sound bad in so many different ways — squeaky rayon, scratchy wool, too much starch in the shirt — and don’t even get me started on the whole tie thing, oy vey. Ties are generally made out of silk or polyester, two of the most sound unfriendly materials, and every sound person has his or her own idea of how a tie should be miked.** But even if you do everything right, there’s a still chance some item of lacy underwear or fold of flesh will move and so will your mic, or maybe it will stay exactly where you put it and still end up sounding like crap. That’s why sound people only use radio mics when we are forced to, which, given that directors like to shoot wide shots on the noisy streets of New York, is often — which makes us hate using them even more.

So if you’re the third or the boom who’s doing the miking, you’re getting pressure from the sound person to do it right, from the ADs to do it fast, and from the actors to leave them the hell alone. You may be standing closer than anyone has a right to be to your handsome, celebrity demigod of choice, but chances are, you’re thinking, Where the hell am I going to stick this so we don’t hear the chest hair?

Donald Trump, of course, was wearing a tie.

“Hi, um, I’m going to just need to put a mic on you before you go out.”

“How are you going to do it?”

“I was going to put it in your tie and run the cable under your collar and down your back under the jacket, if that’s okay.”

“You sure you don’t want to run it up the front of the shirt?”

Be confident, I thought. It’s like you’re in The Boardroom. Do not show fear.

“No, no, I think it’s more secure going down the back.”

I started working. As I ran the cable under his collar, he looked down at me across that large chin, accentuating the fact that he’s a tall man and that I am rather short.

“Er, sorry, am I choking you?”

“No, no…You sure you don’t want to run it up the front?”

“No…unless you have a preference —“

"No, no. If you think that’s the best way.”

Of course, I began to wonder, Is it the best way? He gets miked all the time, maybe he knows something about his suits that I don’t know. Still, I stuck with my original plan until I realized, just as I was finishing up, that I was missing the one quintessential, make-or-break element of any miking technique: tape. Some sound people have all of their equipment essentially held together with huge swathes of tape. I only needed one, tiny inch of Transpore, but not having it now could prove to be my ruin if the cable I had tucked under Trump’s collar popped out, killing the shot, wasting very important time from his very important day. But now I was out of time. I let him go to set, hearing the inevitable voice in my head: "YOU’RE FIRED!”

It didn’t happen. The mic sounded good, we finished the day fast, I only got yelled at once (when my boom cable was in the shot), and I was in bed by noon. Which just goes to show you the true genius of Donald Trump: sometimes if you act like you know you’re right, you may very likely find out that you are. Even if you forget the tape.***

*Of course, this would now be, “the NSA.” Again, remarkable how only the details have changed.

**Actually, this has changed. Now, thanks to the Hush Lav, ties have gotten much easier to mic, using a technique where you put it just peeking out of the knot. Thank God for technology, advancing, even when we humans can’t seem to.

*** But…I’d rather be right and have the tape. Confidence without substance will eventually lead to disaster. Let’s hope we don’t put that to the test in 2016.

I’m teaching Documentary Film this semester, and this past week, I agreed to fill in for the professor who teaches Screenwriting. This was probably unwise to begin with, as it meant I’d be teaching a 6:30-10:05 pm class the day after returning from two weeks in Spain, so according to the clock in my head, I’d start teaching the class after midnight — right after 3.5 hours spent teaching my own class, as if I wouldn’t be tired enough. But I needed someone to cover a class for me in October, so I didn’t really think the whole thing through.

“You may want to show a short film or two, then talk about some of the production issues the filmmaker might have faced,” the professor I was subbing for suggested in an email, knowing that I work in production. This seemed like a good idea, except for the fact that I have hardly seen a short film since I graduated from film school in 1995, and the ones I have seen were terrible. Like the one I saw at Rooftop where a kid goes to a party with a girl he really likes, and they take drugs together that really mess them up, and he sees her getting raped while she’s unconscious by a random guy, so he undresses and lies next to her so that when she wakes up, she says, “I’m sorry I don’t remember, but I’m glad my first time was with you.” Yeah, not so much. So I decided to show some clips from TV shows and films I’d worked on (getting in two Sopranos episodes, to bolster my cred), but also a clip from my own thesis film, Fear of Dogs.

I’d known for a long time — probably since I’d finished shooting it in 8 days in 1993 — that Fear of Dogs hadn’t quite turned out the way I’d wanted. When I was done editing the film and sent it to festivals, it hadn’t done well. It had made it into one semi-known festival, Chicago (now a much bigger deal than it was then), and had actually won the Student Film Silver Plaque, but this didn’t mean very much to me considering that they hadn’t screened it at the festival, so nobody actually saw it. (This was my first but not last experience with festival awards being given out just for the sake of giving out awards. Flat Daddy won Best Educational Film at the Las Vegas Film Festival. This would have been odd since I think of an “educational film” as something that gets shown on a filmstrip during Driver’s Ed and has the voiceover of a man from 1956 telling you to “give a friendly tap of the horn” when driving through a four-way intersection, except that Las Vegas turned out to be a festival where literally every single film was given an award). By the mid-90s, though, I’d given up believing that festival and award recognition was the only thing that distinguished films, and filmmakers, as good or bad. The lack of Academy Award winners that hadn’t been box office successes, or hadn’t been made by white men, contributed to that, but it was also something I’d had to do to make it through film school. If you read this blog (most recently this post), you know that I’ve worked hard and not especially successfully to develop the kind of ego that it takes to be a creative person in this industry. Still, having spent years writing and casting and shooting and editing and sending out my 23-minute opus, for the next several I still felt just too close to/sick of it to think about it critically, much less any urge to just pop in the VHS tape and stroll down memory lane. When people asked me about the film I said, “Well, I wrote it when I was 23,” and that seemed enough of an explanation for why I wasn’t going to show it to them.

I finally watched the film again when I had it transferred to DV and digitized it into Final Cut Pro maybe ten years ago (it was shot on 16mm and my video copy was on Beta), so that I could use a piece of it for my directing reel. The first thing that struck me wasn’t the unnatural dialogue, although that was still there, but how off the timing felt, of everything. As I tried to choose a clip to use, I found myself getting sucked into doing some re-editing — I know, I know —  to try and make certain scenes move faster, but soon I realized that that wouldn’t solve the problem. Sure, I’d also been stuck with wheelchair dolly shots (if you’re not familiar with what this is, it’s putting the DP, with a camera, in an actual wheelchair and pushing them around to simulate the effect of a dolly) that hadn’t moved quite as fast as I’d wanted, both because I’d avoided doing too many takes in order to stay on schedule and because a fast wheelchair dolly shot feels about as smooth as the experience of driving my old 1996 Camry through Red Hook. But it wasn’t just the editing and the camera moves that were too slow, it was the performances too. Why hadn’t I asked the actors to do it again, but faster? Then I remembered that in 1993, I’d been really into the films of Jim Jarmusch. Clearly, I thought that I, too, was making Mystery Train or Stranger Than Paradise, not realizing that that pacing didn’t necessarily match the script that I’d written, which was more screwball comedy than avant-garde deadpan. So, while it wasn’t exactly fun finally watching Fear of Dogs again, I remembered considering it an eye-opening experience, one which helped me get some perspective on the film and my feelings about how it had turned out. It was what it was, it had its good points and its bad points, and, now, more than 20 years after I’d completed it, I thought was okay with that.

Yeah, not so much. When I screened my clip from Fear of Dogs for the screenwriting students last week, I immediately was hit again by the stilted dialogue, the slow delivery, the fact that the big visual punchline of the scene didn’t read in the wide shot that was supposed to deliver it, and the timing of that fucking dolly shot. But the thing that really hurt was that nobody laughed. I was showing one scene, out of context, on purpose, just so that I could talk about the production challenges I’d faced, the students had basically had no idea what what was going on in the film at all, and yet, I somehow managed to feel pain over that. Yes, I still saw that the actors had some really nice moments, and I noticed how much I liked the look of the shots, and I was still happy with the music, but none of that could outweigh the big, fat feeling of failure.

Sadly, I think that’s just how we learn to judge films, including our own. We don’t generally look at their good points and bad points analytically, we don’t weigh the production troubles that someone faced or the fact that they were a young film student at the beginning of learning their craft, or the fact that they were really, mistakenly, into Jarmusch. Critics and journalists do this sometimes, but rarely; in general, a film that’s not bad but could have been better isn’t a story. Something is either good or it isn’t. Someone is either talented, the next big thing, or they’re nothing. That’s why, when we try to look at our own films for what worked and what didn’t and why, we feel like like we’re just making excuses. So instead of analyzing our failures, we just let them gather dust and we never really learn from them, and we never really get over them — and we still have to sell them as successes. Oh, that film? It won the Student Film Silver Plaque! (I did, in fact, say that when one of the students last week asked me if it had made it into in any festivals).

Does this mean I’m now going to hunker down for the next few days, watch all of my old student films and read all of my old screenplays and see what I can learn about my creative process? Hell no. But I’ve spent more time thinking constructively about Fear of Dogs to write this post than I’ve spent over the entire 20-odd years since I made it, and that’s just kind of ridiculous. We’re never going to get better at the work we do if we can’t bear to think about what we did wrong, and right, and without letting one obscure the other – and laughing about it, just a little.

(Want one? You can buy a Beard Can Coozie here)

It started as just one of those odd hipster trends, the kind that usually pass within a short period of time because they are just so unfathomable. But lately, I’ve been seeing it more and more, and not just in Williamsburg and Bushwick (which autocorrect just turned into “Bushwhack,” proving that autocorrect has not been there in the past few years). It’s the beard. And not just any beard. The giant, bushy, holdover from the 1860s, shell-shocked Civil War veteran or moonshining, gold-mining homesteader beard. It’s the beard of someone who really doesn’t care about personal grooming – say, a man grieving for a wife who died of consumption, or the Unabomber. And somehow, it’s a thing.

Where did the trend come from? Well, Brooklyn’s Mast Brothers, of Mast Brothers Chocolate, otherwise known as The Chocolate You Need A Trust Fund To Afford Because It’s Got Really Nice Wrapping, were sporting the beard back in 2010, as you can see in this promotional video, in which they try to seem unassuming and cute (they’re showing us their bloopers!) while still appearing fairly full of shit. The beards are clearly part of their whole shtick, which is meant to hark back to an earlier era when things were, I guess, more artisanal, and people sailed on boats with masts (get it???) to the places where cacao comes from — places to which we can now travel much faster, in more comfort, and without having to worry about scurvy. Have you detected that I am not a fan? The Mast Brothers and their products have the lethal combination of being pretentious, overpriced, and representative of the gentrification of Brooklyn, which is guaranteed to make me dislike them — and now, add to that the fact that they were trendsetters when it comes to this particular fashion. It’s an explosion of “ugh” in my mouth.

Apparently, the trend has taken off so much that men from Brooklyn are now paying for beard transplants (I love this article in particular for the description of the look as a “a lumberjack-meets-roadie hybrid.”) Now, however, The Beard is officially everywhere. There’s hardly a day that goes by when I don’t see one (and of course I’m not including the ones I see being worn by the Hassidim or the Muslims in my neighborhood – although there are some striking similarities in terms of length and styling).

Now, we’ve seen a lot of trends for men come out of hipsterdom, all of them fairly annoying. Skinny pants. Checked shirts. Geeky glasses. The popularity of Pabst Blue Ribbon. While the beard trend was growing, we had the handlebar mustache, which clearly comes from the same seed of a stupid idea, but even the hipsters conceded it was just too ridiculous to stick around all that long. The Beard, however, seems to irk me more than any of these. Part of it’s the fact that it’s so impractical, especially during the summer we’ve been experiencing here in New York; seeing guys in these huge, facial muffs on a hot, humid day just makes me that much more sweaty and itchy. Part of it’s that The Beard seems so hypocritical, a counter-culture statement against modern urban life by people who are choosing to live in the epicenter of modern urban life – because, seeing as Williamsburg hasn’t been cheap or uncrowded for about ten years, why would you move there now unless you really really wanted that? And, part of it’s the fact that this trend has now been around long enough that it’s worked its way into celebrity culture (although generally in a more styled and sane-looking iteration) and thereby the general population, despite the fact that it really just doesn’t look good on anyone. I mean, men like Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor can look good in anything, but must they prove that by choosing to wear beards that look like nothing so much as the remains of two squirrels that decided to curl up and die on the lower halves of their faces? And I am no enemy of facial hair. The stubble, the light beard, the goatee, even the soul patch, I have at times found all of them attractive on the right face (although I just couldn’t help but point at the chins of my friends who had soul patches and say, “Hey, I think you missed a spot.” Hahahahaha, it’s hilarious every time!) But this giant, steel-wool-resembling, food-scrap-attracting, uneven and unkempt look from another era or another way of life says nothing sexy to me at all, unless you find survivalist hermits sexy. It even makes Jude Law look like something has gone seriously wrong in his life. Jude, what is it? Should we get you some help??

I think the thing that bugs me the most, though, is that The Beard is clearly a look that came about in order to be worn ironically. Men, or at least straight men, can do that: they can choose a look that many of us would consider kind of bad, or at least unflattering, on purpose, in order to make some sort of statement about…well, maybe something but also maybe nothing aside from the fact that they don’t care how they look. But women? Most of us really can’t, or at least absolutely won’t, make the choice to even dress ironically, much less make something so permanent and noticeable as a hair change, for the sake of waxing sardonic. Yes, women have for years made choices in terms of hair and dress in order to carve out identities for themselves outside the mainstream culture (think Annie Lenox, Grace Jones, Cindy Lauper, Sinead O’Connor…hmm, maybe this only happened in the 80s and 90s), and this is particularly true when it comes to race and sexual preference (choosing natural hair, or a more “boyish” or “butch” look). But they also do it to look good. And would they ever do it for satire, a clever aside, particularly if it did not look good? No way. Because for us, appearance is way too important to fuck around with. Women just don’t make ourselves look bad on purpose, because looking good is too damn important to us for just about everything. You have to look good to get hired and then you have to look good to keep your job or get promoted. Very often, at least if you are of a certain age, you have to look good to have friends. And, most of all, you have to look good to be attractive. Whether the people you’re trying to attract are men or women, and whatever the look might be that attracts them in your particular community, making yourself able to attract someone you want to be with is of the highest priority for women. That’s why even on Halloween, the night when you are supposed to dress up as something that you aren’t, most women wouldn’t be caught dead in a costume that makes them look less than 100% sexy. That’s why you see so many hot witches and nurses wandering the streets on October 31st, whereas you see men running around with blood and eyeballs oozing down their faces, or even just horrible fake boobs and wigs, and entirely not giving a shit that they look disgusting — in fact, that’s the point. 

Now, I know I spent my last post griping about the tyranny of Resting Bitch Face, so let’s not beat this point to death. But really, though, I am sick of The Beard and its attitude of not caring that is really extreme caring about being on trend, about being hip and ironic, because, seriously, why else would you have that thing? Can we please move on to something that you’re not carrying around on your face to make your friends think you’re cool and your mother upset and as another way to show your girlfriend that you can hold on to your independence/immaturity, like being on a kickball team and riding a fixie? You’ve made your point fellas, now grow the fuck up and admit that irony isn’t something you should wear on your face.

Last week I read an article in the New York Times on “Resting Bitch Face,” otherwise known as RBF. It talks about this “problem” some women have of, basically, how their face naturally defaults to something that isn’t a smile. The article, of course, makes it sound a lot worse than that, like these women are making faces that make them look “absolutely miserable” (January Jones) or “really angry all the time” (Anna Paquin, describing her own RBF), or “simultaneously bored, mad, and skeptical” (the author of the piece talking about herself). As someone who works in a still-male-dominated industry, I’ve been a victim of this idea for a long time. In my career, I have regularly been told to smile by men, or advised “Come on, it can’t be that bad,” or simply given an unfriendly answer to a question or request if it wasn’t asked with a smile (and there’s a voice that has to go with it, one that appeals appealingly, rather than simply asks, much less tells. I’ve even learned to employ the uptalk when necessary. I know). It doesn’t happen nearly as much as it used to, maybe because there are far more women who work on set now, or just because nobody wants to see me smile pretty any more now that I’m in my 40s, or because plastering on the fake happy has just become such a Pavlovic auto-response at this point that I don’t even think about it. So, as with anything else that’s gradually fallen into the category of “not really my problem any more,” I haven’t spent much time recently being personally irked by the concept of RBF. But then I happened to read this article right after working on a job debuting the pack of new Victoria’s Secret “Angels.”

I first worked on a Victoria’s Secret shoot back in the late 90s, and I remember noticing how the brand seemed to be selling not so much underwear as the concept of fantasy babedom. It wasn’t just that these ridiculously tall, skinny, and beautiful (if odd-looking; a lot of supermodels have such exaggerated features that they really do look kind of weird when you see them up close) women were wearing costumes that made them look like angels, or sexy elves (they were also shooting holiday spots), or just plain lingerie and high heels, which god knows real women wear all the time. It was that I was doing behind-the-scenes and the director, who was also a woman, was given these questions to ask for the interviews that were so ridiculous, so designed precisely to make the “angels” sound like sexual blow-up dolls that talk, that even she was laughing at them. They were along the lines of “Describe your perfect Christmas,” or, “What would you do for a man who gave you that diamond-and-jewel-encrusted bra that we’re giving away as our sweepstakes prize?” Most of the models knew exactly what they were supposed to say and said it, although a couple clearly had a hard time taking these questions seriously or seemed genuinely bewildered at being asked such stupid questions.

Well, very little has changed in the past 15-plus years, apparently, when it comes to what sells Victoria’s Secret. You can see an example of what I mean if you read any of the hundreds of interviews with any of the ten new Angels, or just go to the VS All Access page of the Victoria’s Secret website. There, under “Secrets,” you can find a series of answers to questions, ranging in nature from just kind of vapid to outright embarrassing to ask an adult, that each model has had to answer in order to, er, not exactly “humanize” her or even make her seem “real,” but maybe, I don’t know, make her real world adjacent?: “The five things you can’t live without,” “Favorite place in the world,” “Vanilla or chocolate?”, “Pink or red?”, “Boxers or briefs?” Some of the answers are entirely predictable: “The most glamorous part of your job?” is inevitably some variation on traveling the world and wearing beautiful clothes and make-up; “The least glamorous part of your job?” is almost always being away from family and being stuck in airports (only one model says something like what I would say, which is, “Nude underwear”). The answers that seem most clearly canned are for, “If you were a spice, which would you be?” (almost all said either cayenne or cinnamon), and “What did you have for breakfast?” Probably half of the models say some variation on “eggs and bacon,” which simply cannot be what a super-model typically eats for breakfast (the one who says “gluten-free toast and avocado is one of my favorite morning treats,” she’s the one, sadly, who is probably telling the truth). And what are the models like in person? Every response to the press is friendly, cute and coquettish, projecting a perfect example of who a Victoria’s Secret “angel” is supposed to be. And, yes, every smile is perfect — unless, of course, they are posing for ads in which they are not supposed to smile. The kind of hilarious aside to all this is that when models are modeling, they are only very rarely smiling, because that’s when they’re supposed to embody the other side of the madonna/whore male fantasy, the bad girl sexual temptress, and we don’t want her to be happy and friendly, because, for some reason, that’s just not sexy. Instead, they are supposed to, as Tyra Banks so famously put it, “smize,” or smile with their eyes only, inviting us in without seeming to say it out loud. A sexy look is very much a come-hither look, it engages you, it wants you, it’s about you — and really has nothing to do with her, other than saying that she’s yours.

If this is the image of a perfect woman that’s plastered all over (and it was literally that, with huge billboards and electronic ads of the models taking over Times Square that day), is it any wonder the rest of us think that there’s always something wrong with us? And the saddest thing of all? I’ve seen plenty of compilations of old ads, like “These 45 Shockingly Sexist Vintage Ads Will Make You Glad To Live In 2013.” Yes, they are absurdly horrible. But just look at any series of contemporary Superbowl ads , or ads for brands like Go Daddy and Axe Body Spray, or even just for certain products like beer, video games, and cars (because as we know, women don’t drink or play games or drive). The overall message about what women are supposed to be and do in our culture hasn’t changed all that much.

This is the thing about the whole concept of Resting Bitch Face: it’s another way of telling women that there’s something wrong with them if they aren’t some man’s fantasy. And as with with every other “defect” that has ever been pointed out to us, we internalize that and try to fix it — with Botox, with therapy, with how-to books and Cosmo’s “Ten Ways to Whatever,” or just by forcing ourselves to fucking smile even though we don’t feel like it. Would men ever have to worry about their smiles, or facial expressions or any kind, in the same way? Would it even cross their minds for most men stare at themselves in the mirror for more than a few minutes trying to fix anything about the way they look? No. And yet, we can’t just tell women not to bother the way men don’t bother, because the fact is, if we don’t fix RBF, or whatever the problem is — with our hair/clothes/make-up/skin tone/muscle tone/thigh gap/Brazilian wax not being Brazilian enough, with our demeanor or behavior or tone of voice, with someone else’s perception of any of that — we are the ones who are going to suffer. So we do what women always do: we take on the problem and we cope as best we can. It’s eerily similar, if on a totally different level, to the attitude of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, a book that said women have a problem in the workplace and here’s what they can do to fix it: work on themselves.

I’m not saying that there isn’t something that needs to be fixed. I’m not even saying that women can’t or shouldn’t adapt and make life easier for themselves when necessary — clearly, when it comes to RBF, and many other things in my career and life, I have done just that. But things are only going to truly get fixed when we women get clear about something: the problem isn’t us. The problem that women have in our culture doesn’t come from what women are or aren’t doing to fit in the with that culture, it comes from the fact that our culture has a problem with women — or, at least, with real women, who are actual human beings, with individual identities and lives to lead and problems. Yes, it’s a lot easier to try and focus on and fix yourself than to try to change an entire culture (not to mention that that’s a whole other myth about America in particular: that no matter what our economic background, gender, race, country of origin, we can all independently bootstrap our way to success here in the good old USA. Yeah, right). One might even say that changing this culture is damn near impossible. But it does happen. Those ads from the past few years, sure, they suck, but no, not with the same degree of suckitude as the ones from the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. The transition in how this country has viewed gay marriage in just the past five years shows that there can be huge cultural transformation in the way we look at sexual preference and gender roles.

But the first thing that needs to happen is that women have to be very clear about the fact that rape and sexual assault, pay inequality, underrepresentation and discrimination in the workplace, eating disorders and bad body image, being unable to afford family leave with pay or proper health care and for fuck’s sake birth control, just like, yes RBF, is not our fault. It’s not something that we need fix about ourselves, or something that we are doing wrong. And unlike all of those other things, of course, RBF isn’t even a real problem.

In other words, American culture, stop making women the problem. It’s not us, it’s you.

I am bad with names.

This is a problem for someone who tends to change jobs every few days or so, if not more often, as I do. I am constantly meeting new people who I am pretty much guaranteed to see again, since we’re likely to be trapped in a small area together for 12+ hours, and to whom I may very likely have to go with questions or requests, sometimes having to get their attention across a crowded room. In other words, I cannot afford to instantly forget their names. This is also a problem when one goes to networking events, which I also do, where, of course, meeting new people, which usually means getting their names, is why you are there. I may not see them again for a while in those situations, which does make it a little more acceptable to forget their names, but not so much if I talked to them for, oh, 45 minutes the first time we met.

Luckily, networking events often involve exchanging business cards, and production jobs generally have call sheets. The call sheet has every crew and cast member’s name on it, and I usually get that emailed to me the day before and keep it on my phone. This saves my ass, and I know I’m not the only one, because on set, we all call it “the cheat sheet.” I even had a whole discussion on a job just last week about what iPhone pdf reader app I use so that I can have it readily accessible at all times, rather than having to scroll through my email inbox.

The only place where this falls down is with PAs, because unlike the 1^st AD or the 2^nd AC, they all tend to have the same title on the call sheet — so unless I have some recollection of their name from when they introduced themselves to me, it’s not going to help. This is kind of the worst, because PAs are the people who are usually treated like they matter the least by everyone, so it’s especially uncool to forget their names. I don’t want to be that jerk who “Hey you”’s every PA — especially when I’m asking them for help, which I generally am, because they are always on walkie and they’re often the only people I can ask.

Looking like you can’t be bothered to learn people’s names just isn’t a positive personality trait. Agency people and clients almost never introduce themselves to me, but that’s largely because they know they’re never going to meet me again — and I have to say, in that case, I largely agree: we’re not colleagues, we’re not going to be pals, it’s not worth wasting our time. Anyone else, though, it matters. Even most of the celebrities I work with do it, which is a bit strange. They tend to say, “Hi, I’m so-and-so,” just like normal people, despite that you both know that they are entirely familiar to you and so you obviously know their names. Not to mention that, since these people tend to be the stars of the project on which you are working, they are probably kind of the reason why you’re there in the first place. Like, you’re usually telling people you worked on “that show with Debra Messing,” or, “that Scorcese movie,” and everything you’re doing on set pretty much centers around them, so of course, yes, you’re fully aware that he/she is that person. For a long time, I was tempted to say, “I know” when famous people introduced themselves to me, I think I might actually have said this to a few people early in my career, like someone who thought she was cleverly cutting through the bullshit. But I eventually realized that it was actually nice when famous people introduced themselves, because introductions aren’t just about names, they’re about the social convention of taking a moment to formally meet somebody, and even if they are doing it self-consciously, and you can almost see on their faces (particularly if they’re hot) that they think they are making your day, it is nice when stars take the time to do that. The ones who go about their business like nobody around them matters except for the producer and director and maybe the AD and DP, because all the rest of us are just cogs, it’s definitely harder to see those people onscreen and still like them as much as you did.

In light of this, and the fact that I am not famous, I’ve tried a couple of techniques to get better at remembering names. I’ve seen some people say the name back right after they hear it, like “Nice to meet you ___,” and then try to use it again as often as possible. I get that this probably works, but I just feel too stupid doing it. I can’t get past the fact that it makes you sound like a used car salesman who’s getting too chummy too fast, someone who would immediately give you a nickname and call you that all the time (like when people I’ve never met before start calling me “Bets” right off the bat, which to me is a license to instantly dislike them). If I can I look at the call sheet right after I meet the person, because seeing the name written down is a big help, but a lot of the time I don’t have time to do that. I have also tried to just repeat the name to myself, but a lot of the time, I don’t remember to do that.

Because here’s the thing: I’m bad at this not because I think I’m too good to learn your name, but because on some level I think I’m not good enough. When someone introduces him- or herself to me, this is what’s going through my mind:

– Remember to smile, and try to make it a genuine and not a fake smile, even though I suck at smiling on command. Crap, I hope I don’t have food in my teeth.

– Say “Betsy” intelligibly so I won’t have to say it twice and they won’t think it’s “Becky,” which half of them inevitably will anyway.

– Am I visibly sweating anywhere?

– Try to shake their hand firmly enough not to give them a dead fish handshake, but without being one of those people who squeeze really hard in order to send some kind of message about having a firm handshake, because you don’t want to be one of those people.

– Ugh, my hands are always clammy, how can I shake without letting them touch my palms? And how dirty are my hands?

– If I have something in my right hand (which I frequently do, like a boom pole, or food, or wine if its a networking event, because I can’t get through one without alcohol), try to make the left handshake not too bizarre, while also possibly making a joke about that.

– Are they looking at my chest? Is that because of my breasts (is my shirt too tight?) or is there a stain on my shirt (ugh, why am I such a slob) or can they tell that I’m sweating?

With this cacophony going on in between my ears, is it any wonder that I can’t seem to hear the one piece of information that is supposed to be the point of this exchange? Not that this is meant to be an excuse, or even an apology, it’s more me pointing out another case of how, as human frickin’ beings, we are often the opposite of what we present. People who seem loud and cocky frequently act that way to hide the fact that, deep down, they have no confidence. Lots of folks who talk too much do it because they’re afraid of awkward silences, not because they think they have the most to say. Those who seem cold or distant tend to be protecting themselves because they are actually squishy and vulnerable. And people who are bad with names care too much about meeting people, rather than not enough.

So if we meet and I forget your name, try to remember this and not think less of me, and if you forget my name, I’ll actually probably be glad, because then we’ll be even.

I took a poetry class my junior year of college and I loved it. I’d never really studied poetry before, unless you count having to memorize every word and punctuation mark in “No Man Is An Island,” which was apparently what my AP English teacher in high school thought counted as studying poetry. Our professor, Herbert Lindenberger, was the type of awesome prof you sometimes get who’s a distinguished scholar in his field, but also a man who clearly relishes teaching and words, as you could tell from the way he’d read to us in class. I can still hear in my mind his reading of Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” bringing such breathless bravura to the lines, “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course/With rocks, and stones, and trees,” that you could forget that it was a poem about premature death. Even the unsexual poems became sexual…or maybe it just sounded that way to me because I was 19. (He is apparently now Professor Emeritus. I love that he has a Twitter page, which he has barely used, with a bio that says, “When you reach 85, 142 characters just isn’t enough room, so let’s leave it at that!”)

When something excites me, I want to have fun with it, so in my first paper for the class, I attempted to do that. It was an interpretation of John Donne’s “The Flea.” If you remember the poem, it’s written from the point of view of a man trying to get a woman to sleep with him. At my then-level of emotional (im)maturity, I found the whole concept that men had been doing this throughout the centuries pretty amusing, and so I decided to write it that way, with sort of a “tell it like it is” attitude. I still did a pretty decent analysis, I just did it kind of conversationally. I also went to town making the cover, with a giant drawing of a flea with one raised eyebrow that I created in MacPaint, making full use of the texture paint bucket tool (since, if you remember, it was the Bronze Age of computing, when most of us didn’t have color screens or printers). I was pretty darn proud of the whole package when I turned it in.

My TA gave me a B. She basically graded the paper like it was Freshman English, correcting things like how I didn’t declare what a paragraph was about in its opening sentence, and critiqued my tone as not being appropriate for this type of paper. This was quite a shock to me. While my academic career up until that point wasn’t perfect and I’d gotten plenty of Bs, I generally knew when to expect them, because I was aware of when I wasn’t quite grasping something (like the calculus class I took freshman year), or when I wasn’t giving a shit (basically the entire second half of my senior year of high school). I was not used to thinking I’d knocked it out of the park and getting slapped down, especially when I was trying to do something clever or different. On the contrary, my sense of identity as a kooky child prodigy had been firmly cemented from a very young age, thanks to the fact that my parents pretty much crowed over everything I ever made — every model rocketship, drawing of a flying pig, and “Escape from the Holocaust” board game was a sign of how wonderfully original I was. Schoolwork had been pretty much the same, from the time I’d made my “analysis” of the salamanders we were studying in our 3^rd grade terrariums into a comic strip that my teacher loved, to even when I turned my final project in college freshman geology (which you may know by its colloquial name, “Rocks for Jocks”) into a children’s picture book that the professor had held up and praised in front of the whole lecture hall (which I only heard about second-hand, because it was a 9 am class on a Friday and that was the one morning after a frat party that I decided to sleep in), I was used to being praised for getting creative. I tried to explain to my poetry TA that obviously I knew how you were supposed to write an essay, that clearly I’d taken liberties with the form on purpose, but she was having none of it. I tried to go over her head, but that didn’t work either. I was too intimidated to talk to the professor, who, as much as I liked him, seemed to me, like most of the professors at Stanford, to be some sort of unapproachable eminence grise (despite that all of his TAs called him Herbie), and the head TA just thought I was grade grubbing. That irked me even more, that they’d assume all I cared about was a letter, when what was really upsetting to me was the feeling that I’d felt inspired to do something unique that I was really proud of, and they just didn’t get it.

Little did I know that that TA was basically saying, “Welcome to adulthood.” Especially if you want to work in a creative field, your career can come to seem like a long string of rejections and negative commentary about what you put out into the world, which, no matter how many times you tell yourself not to take it personally, crushes you like a bug. I was destined to go on to NYU graduate film school, where I would get very little feedback at all from the barely-present faculty, much less the positive kind. The most helpful notes I remember getting were from the Hungarian screenwriting prof for one of the other sections, who I went to see several times when I was looking for any sort of help with writing my thesis, and who, while she made it clear that she was doing me a favor by even reading my script and that I was never going to be one of her favorites, at least was willing to read a couple of drafts and say, eventually, “Well (sigh), this is somewhat better…” Feedback from my peers was more plentiful, since they were required to give it in class, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. I still have the wonderful sense memory of feeling stomped after I presented a first draft of the script for my second year film in screenwriting workshop, when one fellow student began her critique with, “Well, I don’t know why you’d want to make this film,” then went on to detail all of the reasons why it was doomed to failure, from casting (because it had children in it) to locations (it took place in the suburbs), with nothing that would help me to improve the writing, aka why we were there. The people who came up to me after class to console me said she’d been so personal because I was trying to write something feminist, which she felt was intruding upon her territory. (She may have gone on to be a semi-successful TV writer in Hollywood, but since I see her most recent credit is as one of two screenwriters on the next Dirty Dancing movie, I can at least have the satisfaction of saying, Ha, who’s the feminist NOW, bitch?!). But regardless, any confidence I’d had in college to reply to negative comments with, “They just don’t get it,” would, over the course of five years of film school, evaporate completely, and I’d lose my sense of who I was creatively or what I wanted to do — to the extent that I’d ever had that in the first place. I was, after all, only 24 when I shot my thesis film. My experience of the world at that point was basically 19 years of school topped off with 8 weeks of travel in Europe and three months studying abroad — so more school — plus a couple of summer internships, a few weeks of temp work in a mail room, and waiting tables at Bennigan’s.

I spent probably the next ten years after that learning to tell the difference between what people were saying about my work and what it actually meant, or at least, what it meant to me. This is a key component, I think, of being a creative person of any sort: having a healthy enough artist’s ego that you can see and accept criticism that helps you, that appreciates what you’re trying to do in your work and wants to push you to accomplish that better, and reject the criticism that is either trying to cut you down or trying to make your work into something it’s not and never will be — that just doesn’t get it. All right all right, who am I kidding, I’m still trying to learn that. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s incredibly hard. My response when someone criticizes something I’ve done is still basically to 1) beat myself up about it and tell myself I’m stupid and I suck; 2) tell myself they’re stupid and they suck; 3) try to figure out where the most helpful truth lies between these two positions. Not necessarily in that exact order, because I might tell myself they suck first, but 1) and 2) in some form still always come before 3). I say “helpful truth” because there are always many, many different truths that you can derive from people’s reactions to your work. For instance, knowing the person and what their taste tends to be can really help you derive something useful from their feedback, as long as you don’t just say, “Well, his favorite filmmaker is Scorcese, so unless my film has superficial female characters who get physically abused, he just won’t appreciate it.” That might be true, but it’s not helpful. If, on the other hand, you say, “She likes conventional love stories, so if I want my film to be more commercial, she might have a point,” then you can actually take that person’s notes for what they’re worth. You really need some sort of protective shell to be able to do this (more like a beetle, say, than a flea), and you build that one screenwriting contest/production company/film festival/grant application/feature magazine/short story journal/book publisher rejection at a time. Or you think that you do, but in all honesty, just remembering the rejections that helped me come up with this list is making me sweat.

Because it’s really hard to separate the criticism from yourself, and that’s just as true when you’re the one giving it. That’s not only because we all have egos, it’s also because so much of what we learn when we learn the business of selling creativity is about judgment: accepting or rejecting, sorting through the piles of losers to pick the winners, and, in doing so, proving that you understand what it takes to be one of them. Helpful critique, however, shouldn’t be about the person giving it proving that they can tell good from bad; it shouldn’t be about the person giving it at all, and it shouldn’t be about good or bad. Once I figured this out, I think I got a lot better at giving people notes. I was in a screenwriting group for a long time, and my criticism was more popular than my writing, which is saying something when you are basically giving people notes about what’s not working with their scripts (and I guess not necessarily saying anything positive about my screenwriting abilities, but let’s gloss over that for now). I think I just looked at it in terms of what I’d want someone else to do for me, and that meant figuring out what the writer wanted to do and how to make the script do that better — and by “better” I don’t mean more like how I would do it. There’s some basic stuff we are all supposed to know, like character development and story structure, that it gets hard see in our own work once we get too buried inside the writing process. And how you say it, explaining what needs to change in terms of what you like that’s there already as much as what you don’t like, can be just as important as what you say. Anyone who dumps all over you and then says they’re trying to help you by “just being honest” is just being an asshole.

I dug around recently and found my essay on “The Flea” in my parents’ attic. It’s sort of embarrassing, riddled with cringeworthy clauses/sentences, such as “In the second stanza, the wily fellow changes his tack…,” and, as an ending “All in all, I think that when she killed the flea, we pretty much know that he blew it. Better luck next time, John.” My TA was right, it does read like a kid who’s trying to be too clever for her own good, which makes it really hard to take the analysis seriously (although I still think she wasn’t one hundred percent right, because she said of the opening paragraph, “tone good here for class presentation,” when that paragraph ends with the sentence, “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this man was thinking about sex,” complete with bold and italics, or at least to the degree that was possible with a dot matrix printer). Luckily, even if I bristled at it, I was smart enough to listen to her criticism about not using that tone in future class papers, which basically stuck to formal essay-writing prose (except for the catchy title of my next one, “Throwing Out the Bathwater but Keeping the Swan: An analysis of how William Butler Yeats wrote ‘Leda and the Swan,’” of which my TA predictably wrote, “Wit in a title is dangerous unless it works to a purpose.” Honestly, it was generous of her to call it “wit”). 

And yet, there’s something about the writing style of my “Flea” essay that reminds me a little bit of this blog. So even if it wasn’t appropriate for English 150, a little kernel of what I liked about that voice survived, and eventually went on to find the place where it belonged. Maybe I learned the right lesson after all. 

Day Zero

This week coming up is the first in a long time that I have an entire week of work scheduled — like five whole days, in a row. It has also been well over a week since I’ve posted a blog, and so I’m way overdue for one. But when will I find the time to write it? Well, it looks like this is one of those jobs where I’m going to have to be at work for at least 12 hours every day, but I’ll actually have a lot of free time on my hands because not everything we’re doing involves sound, and when it does, much of it isn’t dialogue. So, for this week’s post, I’m going to try and chronicle this entire week of work while at work. As usual, details and names will be left out or altered to protect the innocent, and me, because I signed an NDA. Here goes.

Day One

Man am I tired. Call was 7 am, but my boss asked me to be here a little early in case he had trouble parking. I purposely did not ask what “a little early” meant, and decided for myself that it meant 15 minutes. So that meant I set my alarm for 5:20, but I actually was awake before 5. I often wake up before my alarm, and also Damon, who was reading on his phone in the wee hours as is also often the case, dropped it on the floor somewhere around 4:30, so that’s when I woke up. When I was the train on the bridge, I got a text from my boss saying there was no need to come early because he’d already gotten a parking spot. Oh well. I’m awake, sort of.

This job is mostly stunts. There are multiple cameras and therefore a small village of camera people, whereas we are only two. This is already a bone of contention for my boss, because normally on a job like this, we would have a third. Still, as the day gets going, it seems like we are going to have very little to worry about. One person says there are no lines today, another says no lines until Wednesday. So I’m just pointing the mic at sound effects, and I vaguely hear someone shouting during the take.

“Was that the actor speaking?” says my boss.

“Huh, was it?” This tells you where my interest level is at already, one hour into the first day, but it’s hard to maintain your normally laser-like focus (hahahahaha) when you know that everything you’re recording is going to be replaced in post.

I go to talk to the 2nd 2nd, who seemed very well-informed/authoritative earlier in the day. “Nope, he’s not speaking.” I pass this back to my boss. Five minutes later, my boss comes over to tell me that the script supervisor has confirmed tht there’s a line. I go and tell this to the first AD, who was one of the other people who said there was no line, who tells the director, who was the third person who had said there was no line.

“Oh, okay,” says the director.

“We should probably wire him,” I say, thinking about the multiple cameras.

“Let’s get him wired!” says the first AD. He’s the kind of first who thinks announcing things in a loud enough voice makes them happen (which, I have to admit, sometimes does work).

The actor doesn’t want to be wired.

“I can’t wear it, it’ll fall off,” he says.

“Can we boom it?” says the first AD.

“It depends on where the cameras are…”

“We’ll boom it!”

Luckily, only the steadicam will be on the actor when he’s speaking without the no crane shot, because otherwise it would be a crane shot of the steadicam, so while this first set-up suddenly gets a whole lot more stressful for me, because I actually have to do something, it ends up being fine. Turns out I should have savored it because it is, indeed, the only dialogue we end up doing all day. Despite this, my boss still complains about the fact that we don’t have a third person.

"Do we really need one though?” I ask.

“We really could have used one on that first shot,” he says. “While you were off getting the dialogue, one of those cameras was super close on that motorcycle, we should have had a mic on it. ”

This is the motorcycle that ends up being so loud that I have to point straight up at the ceiling when we’re recording it so that it doesn’t blow out the mic, but my boss talks to production and ends up getting us a third for the rest of the week.

The scene we’re shooting is one in which the actor is being chased by a monster who is alternately represented by a large cardboard cutout and two different stuntmen in spandex suits covered in tracking marks and wearing helmets with little styrofoam balls sticking up out of them to represent the monsters’ actual height, which makes it hard to find them very scary. A lot of things get thrown around and smashed. At one point the mic gets hit with rubber broken glass that they’re throwing at the actor. At another, I have to wear a face shield – despite that I notice no one else seems to be wearing one, even people who are closer to the action than I am. It’s pretty hard to figure out how to wear a face shield and large headphones at the same time. I try putting the shield on first and then putting on my headphones over it, but the headphones keep sliding off the back of my head, so then I decide to put the face shield over my headphones, and tighten it on. I have time to figure this out because everything on set tends to move super slowly when you have stunts. You rehearse with the stunt, without the stunt, then you shoot it a couple of times (unless you’re permanently destroying something of which you only have one, in which case you have to get it right the first time). We then shoot a lot of plates: without the stuntmen but with the actor, without both the stuntmen and the actor, with a color chart and a bunch of VFX stuff in the frame for reference, etc etc. Then half a dozen special effects people run around taking photos of everything.

The fight scene of the day is when the A camera operator yells at the steadicam operator over the fact that steadicam was in his crane shot, but that was basically was a foregone conclusion. 

Day Two

Our new third is a nice guy who is rather green and very chatty. I try to be nice back but I’m terrible at that when I’m this tired, so I give up and try to find places to hide so I won’t have to answer his questions. He eventually finds ways to keep busy, like replacing the labels on everything on the follow cart with the camera department’s P-Touch.

The prop department has brought a ton of stunt dummies today, which they leave lying around the set half-naked and in disturbing positions. At one point I see one pantless dummy lying on the ground, holding a cigar – until a prop guy grabs it out of his hand.

“That’s where I left that,” he says.

Our scripty is a character. She’s always wearing bright red lipstick and kind of frumpy lady clothes but with a low neckline, and heels that click when she walks. In another life, she’s somebody’s sexy librarian grandmother. My new approach today is to ask her if there are lines and then go inform the first AD, who then tells the director. They also did finally give us a script, which helps, though not all that much because all of the action is being broken up into pieces and shot out of order. Still, my new method for staying on top of what we have to do seems to work well, until we get through most of the day and the script supervisor notices that there are a bunch of lines we haven’t covered. She tells the director and he freaks out.

“Oh man, I was supposed to cover these…”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s not your fault,” he replies. He then calls over and proceeds to berate his assistant. I guess it’s his fault.

“As long as he didn’t say it was our fault,” says my boss.

Day Three

Working with multiple cameras can be a bitch. Sometimes we actually have seven cameras, although this generally is only for stunts that are so dangerous that I can’t be anywhere nearby anyway, and I’m just getting whatever crashing sounds can be gotten from an adjacent room. But generally, we have four cameras, and that’s bad enough. At one point, I have to work from a ladder to get the pole high enough to avoid having it in the crane shot, even though two of the other cameras are doing close ups. But we’re almost never doing dialogue, and even when we are, most of it doesn’t count because it’s being said by stuntmen, and even if it is going to be used, everyone is shouting. So again, hard to maintain a really high level of caring.

On this shot, however, the actor, who seems like he’s at that point in his career where he’s just starting to feel entitled, has another line and is refusing to be wired, even though there is one really wide camera on a crane that’s going to make the shot pretty impossible to boom. The director says he’ll go talk to the actor about it, but then he either forgets or he decides, eh, that’s a conversation he doesn’t want to have, because he never does, and then it’s our problem. We decide we’re going to try to get them not to roll the wide camera on one take so we can move in the boom close enough to get the actor’s lines.

When I’m back up on my ladder, the safety supervisor hands me a face shield, which is even harder to put on over your headphones while holding a long boom pole and trying not to fall off of a ladder. Then, just before the shot, my boss rushes over to talk with me about something. I can’t push off one of my ears as I would usually do so I can hear because I’ve got the face shield clamping them down on my head, and the shield itself is also deadening the sound. I keep trying to move things on my head and saying “What?"until I just get fed up.

"I’m not wearing this, fuck it.” I throw the face shield to the third, who, luckily, is always on set, even when he’s not supposed to be.

Sometimes, when I do things like this, I have this premonition of disaster — like you’d have in a movie, where you see the protagonist making a mistake in slow motion that’s going to end up causing something terrible to happen later on…But this is reality, so what happens is we get one version of the shot where they let me have the pole in the frame, and plus the actor is shouting, so it all turns out fine, and I don’t get any plastic fake glass anywhere close to my face.

Day Four

Everyone is testy on this job due to the lack of communication. The actor gets snippy with the first AD. The director gets snippy with the first AD. Actually, everyone is getting snippy with the first AD, except for the DP, who is getting passive-aggressive with the director, like a petulant spouse.

“We’re not lit for this, but you know what? I don’t care.” And he starts walking away.

"Okay, how long will it take to light it?” says the director, chasing after him.

“15 to 20 minutes, but if you don’t have time to do it —“

"Well, we don’t really have time but if we have to —“

"Then let me light it!”

In fairness, they all have a point, particularly the actor. He’s doing a lot of physical stuff, so it’s got to be pretty exhausting, and there’s only so many times you want to run into a wall, even if you’re not doing it all that hard. In one of the gags we are doing, he has to run into a pile of wooden flats, knocking them toward where I’m hiding with the boom behind a car.

“It’s not safe there,” says the stunt supervisor, so I move. It’s no big deal, because the actor doesn’t have a line. Except then all of a sudden, he’s talking again.

“Wait, he has a line?” I say to the first AD. “Then I have to be back there behind the car.”

“I thought you were back there.”

“No, because you guys told me I couldn’t be back there because it wasn’t safe.”

“Just stand here instead,” says the stunt supervisor, indicating about six inches to the right of where I was standing originally. I don’t really see how this is safer, but then again, I didn’t see how my original position was really unsafe. I think I’m finally coming to understand how stunts work: nobody actually knows what’s going to happen, so everyone just overcompensates to cover their asses. Which, I guess, is better than not saying anything and having people get hurt, but still. Anyway, everything goes fine.

At one point I ask the stunt guys — who, when they sit around in a group, kind of look like a pack of camouflage Teletubbies — why there are so many of them. They explain that they try to take turns doing stuff, and they each have special skills. As far as I can tell, these skills include driving things, jumping or flipping over things, and having shit thrown at them.

Our third’s special skill is trying to be helpful by stating the obvious.

"If it’s a really wide shot we’re probably not going to be able to use two booms.”

“Looks like another stunt where they’re smashing up cars.”

“They’re slating the cameras.”

“That face shield doesn’t seem to fit very well.”

He’s a nice guy and I know he’s just trying to be a functioning part of our department, but I’m hoping at some point he will realize that there’s not that much for him to do, and when there is, the rest of us are about ten minutes ahead of him, so it’s easier if we just tell him what it is rather than have him trying to figure it out for himself.

Day Five

Since it’s the last day, the prop department brings donuts.

“I’m just going to look at them,” says the producer. “Oh my God,” he says, after he bites into one. Clearly, they don’t make donuts like this in LA. He eats the whole thing. The stunt guys then challenge him to lift a solid iron bollard, which of course he can’t do. Looking at the producer, who has not removed the sunglasses from the top of his head since he arrived, it’s hard to think he has ever lifted anything heavier than a donut. How do these guys get into positions of power? If he were a woman, he’d still be a PA.

At one point, I hear this cheeping sound, and see one of the stunt guys trying to reach under a giant dumpster that is about to get smashed around in the next stunt set-up. He pulls out a tiny baby duckling.

“There’s a bunch of them under there,” he says.

I find a cardboard box and eventually he finds six ducklings which we stick in it. I put some water and bread in there but they just huddle together in one corner of the box.

“What do we do now?” I ask. “What if their mother can’t find them?”

“Isn’t their mother going to reject them now that you’ve touched them?” says one of the grips.

“It’s better than having them get squashed under that dumpster,” says the stunt guy.

Today there’s even less for me to do than usual, so I spend most of the rest of it trying to figure out what to do with the ducklings. First, I call 311.

“Here’s what it says for Animal Care and Control: ‘Unless the animal looks rabid or threatening, do not call Animal Care and Control,’” says the operator. “So I guess there’s no city department that deals with this. Anything else I can help you with?”

I start Googling. It turns out that when some ducklings were trapped on Park Avenue, the Parks Department got involved and sent some Park Rangers. I find a phone number.

“We have an event in the park today so I don’t have anyone who can come down there,” says the person who answers. “And there’s no mother, no water foul around? Try putting them somewhere in the shade where they can call for their mother. Maybe she’ll come back.”

“They’re not making much noise right now,” I say. If I jostle the box they start peeping again, but that’s because they’re freaking out, which seems kind of mean.

“Well, the other thing we do with injured animals is take them to the Wild Bird Fund up on the Upper West Side.”

I Google the Wild Bird Fund then call their number, which has an automated message. They don’t pick up animals, but they are open until 8 pm for drop-offs. I have a feeling we won’t be wrapping before then. I go to one of the ADs, who is frantically working away on her laptop.

“We don’t have any PAs available,” she says, looking incredibly stressed to even be talking to me. “We have three units going right now. Try one of the firemen, there’s like 30 of them sitting around at catering.”

“I can’t leave,” says the one fireman I find. “We have to stay in case they need us here, then when our shift here ends at six, we have to head right back to the firehouse to relieve the guys over there. You can try the police officer, he’s not doing anything.”

“I can’t leave, I have to stay here until you all are wrapped,” says the cop. “Plus, I’m not allowed to do something like that when I’m on duty. You don’t want to take them away from their mother anyway. What if the mother comes back and they’re not there?”

“Well, it doesn’t seem like she’s coming back.”

“You know, animals die all the time.”

Cops. 

“I have to wait around here to talk with the director to plan out what we’re going to do tomorrow on the fourth unit,” says another one of the ADs, who I find hanging out at crafty, which has basically no food left thanks to the firemen. “Why don’t you take them home with you?”

“I live in a one-bedroom in Brooklyn,” I say. “And what would I feed them?”

“I don’t know, I picture them drinking milk,” he laughs. “I think you should raise them and write a children’s book about it.”

“Thanks a lot,” I say.

It’s like a lesson in why New York City sucks. Everyone is too busy and has some rationalization for why it’s not their problem. The only person who seems to take an interest is one of the effects people. I tell her about the Wild Bird Fund.

“But they’re only open until 8,” I say.

“Well, that gives us a couple of hours to figure it out,” she says.

Finally, sound gets wrapped while they’re doing the final stunt. I go off to help break down and load everything into my boss’ car. But the time we are done, it’s almost 8, and I know that even if I get a cab, I won’t make it to the Wild Bird Fund in time. I decide to go back and cut a hole in the cardboard box, so that if the mother does show up, the ducklings can get out. But when I get back to set, they’ve wrapped and everyone is gone, except for the script supervisor — and so is the box.

“There were ducklings?” says the script supervisor. “Aw, how cute. I would have taken them, I have a yard.”

“But what would you have fed them?” I ask.

“You can feed them greens, and a little ground corn,” she says.

“Huh,” I say, not feeling like this necessarily makes sense, but what do I know? Have I been right about anything on this job? “Well, they’re gone.“

Maybe the effort paid off, maybe one of the people I talked with actually took the ducklings home with them or somewhere where they could be taken care of. In the end, I have to admit that, like everyone else, I didn’t want the responsibility. For me, this job is over, and that’s the one good thing about what we do: when the job is over, you get to just leave it behind.

The other day, I was on the phone with customer service for one of my credit cards.

“We’ll just need your security word for verification. It’s a childhood nickname.”

“Oh, jeez…Was it Moo? Or Moose?”

“Well, it’s like that, but with something else in front of it…”

Sigh. “Bessy MooMoo.”

Chuckling on the other end. “Yes, that’s it.”

Now you can glean a couple of things from this story. 1) I had enough nicknames as a child that I couldn’t remember which one I’d used. 2) I basically decided to choose the most embarrassing one as my security word.

Why on earth would I do that? Why would I choose a real nickname at all, and not just make up something cool, like “Spike” or “Red”?

Well, a long, long time ago, in a land called suburban New Jersey, there was an awkward and uncoordinated seven-year-old who didn’t know how to ride a bike. In fact, I’m sure there were many of them, but this one was me, and 1976 was the year when we moved from Newark, NJ to the suburbs of South Orange. Everything was different in suburbia: in addition to knowing how to ride a bike, I was expected to know how to do my hair and how to dress. I had always been a tomboy, and never paid much attention to how I looked, but in third grade in the suburbs, that shit mattered. I tried to stick with what I’d been doing — basically just wearing t-shirts and shorts or corduroys for every occasion and never, ever wearing my hair down, ever — but it didn’t really make me Ms. Popular, nor did doing well in school. I still managed to make a few friends by 5^th grade, but then several of them moved to different states or different schools, or they were boys — and you definitely couldn’t be friends with them in 6^th grade. Then junior high happened, and everything basically went to shit.

Except for one thing: I actually found a nice group of friends. They mostly weren’t in my class at school (one was older, one was younger, one went to Catholic school), so 7^th grade was still a nightmare, but outside of school, things were better. We’d get together to bake cookies and do craft projects, have sleepovers at each other’s houses and watch Friday Night Videos. We even started writing a group novel we just called “The Story,” basically a comic soap opera written on spiral notebook pages that eventually grew to encyclopedic heft, about our future fantasy lives, traveling and having adventures and, of course, dating handsome actors and rock stars. Aside from not caring much about how we looked and not having great social skills, I think that was the main thing our little group had in common: we shared a silly sense of humor with which we liked to get creative.

Thus and so, it was one of those friends gave me the nickname Bessy MooMoo. She “reasoned,” in the brilliant manner of a goofy tween (even though we didn’t call them that yet in this brand new decade we called the 80s), that Betsy sounded like Bessy, and Bessy was the name of a cow.  Luckily, it was kind of a mouthful, so she was really the only one who called me that, and the name got shortened by everyone else to just Moo. That name stuck, and believe it or not, I totally accepted it. I know, you’d think that I would mind being associated with a cow at that age, when wearing a purple sweatsuit to gym class gave me a special resemblance to an eggplant (seriously, what could I have been I thinking?) – especially because, like everyone else, I’d been called lots of names I didn’t like during my childhood. Betsy Wetsy was the worst, but Betsy Ross was also popular, and of course I hated them both. You may ask yourself, What’s wrong with Betsy Ross? She was a pretty okay chick in her day, and that’s certainly preferable to Bessy MooMoo. The key, however, was that I knew the difference between a taunt and a nickname. Mean kids called me names to get a rise out of me or hurt my feelings. My friends called me names because they liked me.

Now, Bessy MooMoo was not my first nickname. My father had had tons of nick/pet names for me and my brother when we were kids. Moose was one of those, a name my dad came up with because, he would explain to anyone who did or did not ask, “I can’t think of anyone who looks less like a moose.” I didn’t love it, but it was no worse than “Mop,” which was one the ones he called my brother. I have no idea about the origin of that one, maybe my brother’s mop of curly hair, but it didn’t matter. For as long as we could remember, these nicknames just were, as terms of endearment and inside jokes. They are still part the memories that tie us together as a family, signifying each member’s special identity within it. But while I’d always gotten that kind of love and attention at home, getting it from friends was different. After feeling like kind of an outsider for so many years, I finally was a special part of something – a something that, finally, provided me with a place where I could feel comfortable starting to make the transition from childhood to adolescence, and I really needed that.

I’ve acquired a lot of nicknames since then. In college and film school, for better or worse, I seemed to attract at least one new one every year. Freshman year, it was Snagger or Snag, which is still the most pervasive. Thanks to a sophomore year prank, various people in my dorm that year called me Trix or Wetsy (yeah, don’t ask). Junior year abroad, I lost my voice to the flu and people called me Demi for a little while (even after my voice came back). Then senior year, a lot of my RA friends decided to christen me Bagel, and that one’s stuck around too. One friend in film school called me Betsala and that caught on for a while, and then at some point it became The Finagler. These names really had no basis in reality — I never “snagged the dudes” as my friends jokingly insinuated or finagled much of anything (does that picture look like the female Harvey Weinstein [ew] to you? Maybe if I’d gone to USC…). The point of them is that they connect me and those friends to a specific place and time and the people we were there and then.

I’m not a big fan of nostalgia, it often clouds over what really happened with gauzy memories that bear less and less of a connection to reality as time goes on. But a nickname is something that keeps you tied to your past almost effortlessly, because it just is. I guess that’s why I’m happy to remember even the embarrassing ones, because we wouldn’t be the people we are without the dorky and hilarious young people we used to be.

I have a very strong memory of seeing Thomas Vinterberg’s film, The Celebration, when it came out in 1998. Here was a movie made with a couple of tiny Sony VX1000 prosumer DV cameras that actually looked and felt like a real movie. As a young filmmaker, out of film school for just three years, it was revelatory. It was a good film, yes, but what it really meant to me was that the tools of filmmaking were now basically in the hands of anyone who could afford a $5000 camera — and not just documentary filmmaking, feature narrative filmmaking. Vinterberg proved that by writing a script that fit the style of shooting with a small, fast-moving, hand-held camera, you could make a film that not only was impressive because it was made for nothing, but because it was just impressive. I was inspired. Not long after that, I started making a documentary with my dad’s Hi-8 camera, and eventually finished it on my own VX1000 (which came down in price tremendously by the early aughts, when better cameras started to emerge).

Little did I know that by 2015, literally everyone would have a camera in their pocket. I could never have predicted the rise of YouTube and Vine and Vimeo as distribution networks, in addition to iTunes and Amazon and Netflix. And I also could never have predicted the other result of this trend of democratizing the tools of filmmaking — and not just filmmaking, but photography and publishing, painting and music, of making art in general. The downside of everyone being able to make art was that anyone was able to make art — it was no longer really a challenge or a struggle or something you had to feel compelled to do. It let in all the artists who had for so long been kept out by the hierarchies created by the business of selling that art, but it had also let in all of the amateurs. And because the people at the top of those art business hierarchies had always cared more about the bottom line than quality, because to them, “quality” was defined by how much money they made anyway, this also meant that they would take anything that hit, anything that had an audience. Lo and behold, if there were amateurs who they didn’t have to pay to create “art” that people would either or put up with advertising to see, even if it wasn’t very good art, and they could just reap the profits by just putting in a small investment at the very end of the process, making those profits much greater, the answer would be, Hell yes.

And so, in essence, we have the amateurization of everything. Perhaps the most visible sign of this has been how newspapers and magazines and other news outlets are letting their photographers go because they seem to now believe that they can just let any reporter — or anyone period — with an iPhone contribute photos of any given news event. I know this is partly due to the fact that newspapers and magazines are losing revenue at an alarming rate since, thanks to the internet, journalism itself is also becoming an amateur’s game — a place where anyone can put up poorly-researched misinformation or opinions masquerading as news on a blog or a site like Upworthy, Addicting Info, or BuzzFeed (at least how BuzzFeed used to be, since in a bizarre twist, BuzzFeed has in fact broken some actual news stories. Go figure). As for film, the funding for indie films and documentaries has gotten so tight that Frederick Wiseman, one of the most important figures in verité documentary, had to pitch his next film at a festival forum event to get funding — meaning that people without his well-earned credits are left even further out in the cold. But the video equivalent of clickbait thrives, enabling new celebrities like PewDiePie, who seem to only be celebrities because their silly-voice-and-sound-effects-and-screaming humor is so lowest common denominator that anyone can get it in any language, to make a killing off of YouTube advertising. And in the realm of music, we have any and every idiot with a drum machine and autotune, and Rebecca Black. Need I say more?

I love that Instagram exists — it’s an outlet for me, as someone who’s always loved photography but has never been able to get paid to do it, to share some of the millions of pictures I take and get some validation. But I can’t stand the thought that photojournalism will cease to be sustain the people who have mastered the art of telling a story with one amazing still photo. And while I do appreciate the explosion of sources for breaking news out there, and the pressure it’s put on the conventional news media to cover many stories that we wouldn’t know about otherwise, I am truly afraid of a future where journalism is left to people who don’t have a clue about its craft and ethics, or even what the term “journalism” really means. And on the film side? Don’t get me started. Yes, I watch videos of cats, and goats and giggling babies and dancing birds etc etc etc, as much as anyone else who needs to procrastinate, but if I have to watch another muddy instructional video or webcast with a ridiculous amount of nostril hair and always always always bad sound, I think I’m going to start going around destroying webcams with a baseball bat, or at least start tying people down and forcing them to wear lavs.

I’m not entirely sure what scares me more: the idea that those of us who do know what we’re doing in these fields will finally be unable to support ourselves (to the extent that we still can) once the jobs behind the professional making of art, entertainment and journalism get downsized out of existence, or that it will be harder and harder to find and experience fine work in these fields by people who actually know their craft. Or no, here’s what really scares me most: the possibility that we’ll stop thinking there’s any value at all in having people who know what they’re doing in the arts in the way that people in our country seem to think that more and more about politics — that we’d be better off if people “just like us” did them. In other words, a wholesale rejection of anything that we can’t understand how to do better than we can do it simply because we can’t understand it, and therefore refuse to value it. As populists, we Americans have never really liked people who are smart, is it just one small step to deciding we don’t need anyone who’s talented or skillful either?

The other day, I was looking at my face in a bathroom mirror while at a friend’s house. Just an ordinary bathroom mirror, maybe it had better lighting than mine, maybe not. Anyway, as I was washing my hands — not scrutinizing, not even looking really — I noticed a wrinkle on my face that I hadn’t seen before. It was (is) on the left side, next to my mouth, one of the kind that creases and frames it when you smile on either side, like parentheses, but slightly higher. But when I was looking in the mirror I wasn’t smiling. The wrinkle was just there.

This was unusual because I’d never noticed a new wrinkle just suddenly appearing on my face before. Aging has always felt to me like a gradual process. It’s not something you enjoy or anything, but at least nothing happens as a big surprise. You just start to notice that you look more tired, older, or you notice that you feel a little stiffer and therefore a bit more of those things than you did the last time you went biking/walking/drinking/lifting something heavy, or not so heavy. Sometimes new aches and pains do show up suddenly, but since I’ve been having aches and pains in my shins/ankles/knees/wrists/shoulders since I was 18, I can’t point to any of them and say, “Now that makes me old.” Even the feeling you have, as a woman, that you are less desirable, less checked out by strangers, that’s something that dawns on you slowly, there’s no clear and identifiable expiration date. Well, okay, if you’re doing internet dating, there is one and it’s 40 — or technically 39, because that’s when everyone thinks you’re 40 and lying about it. But other than that, people don’t see the number, so it’s not a hard and fast thing that goes off like a timer with a “BING!”

But this new, perma-crease on my face that wasn’t going away when I stopped smiling, where did that come from all of a sudden? And what right did it have to just show up like that, unannounced? I mean, this is my face. I get how other people maybe don’t see it for a while and they’re like, “WOW, she’s aged,” although of course they always say, “You look exactly the same!” because that’s required, it’s just what everyone says. But this is like that part of Anna Karenina where that one poor young girl, Kitty, who was in love with Count Vronsky and was passed over for Anna, “lost her looks” like basically overnight, which Tolstoy manages to point out about a million times. I thought that was a literary trope but now I’m wondering, Does that actually happen? I didn’t notice when I got my first grey hair, probably because I have highlights that keep those hairs from sticking out too much, even now that I have many of them — except for on the top of my head where they literally stick out, like straight up, because that’s what grey hairs do. I don’t remember when I got my single (still, thank goodness) chin hair, a little spiky fellow that comes out of a tiny mole on the underside that I pluck dutifully, when I notice it, but that always grows back. That started happening probably in my early 30s, you know, back when I thought I was starting to get old but in reality had no idea that I would actually get there one day. That was probably the age that I started using moisturizer, for instance, because I started to notice that I had some wrinkles — but again, when my face moved, not when it was just sitting there.

I loved it when I saw this interview with Frances McDormand where she talked about how she refuses to give in to Hollywood’s views on aging, and I said to myself, Yes, that’s how I feel too. But this sudden new wrinkle makes me wonder, is it just because I still haven’t truly experienced it yet? Is there a point where as women it just suddenly hits us, hard, like an avalanche, at which we then lose our minds and start doing those things to ourselves that we said we would never do? Maybe it begins with the dying our hair, then it’s Botox or other “dermal fillers,” and then a nip and a tuck and then finally that thing Joan Rivers and Madonna and Demi Moore and 75% of female Hollywood has done to various degrees, the full-on face lift, in terms of that they literally lift up all the skin off of your face and pull it and put stuff under it to prop it up until you look like the same 50-year-old baby as everyone else in the celebrity mags, and no longer like yourself. 

Because you realize that if you can get one new wrinkle overnight, that means from now on, every day could mean a new wrinkle or a new chin hair or a new saggy spot that wasn’t there before. Will I really just wake up one day and not recognize myself — and not because I had some crappy plastic surgeon do something to me, but because of time and lack of sleep and gravity?

But then of course, this morning, I looked in the mirror and the wrinkle wasn’t there. I mean, it’s there when I smile, I can make it be there, but it’s not there for good, not yet. I guess I got more sleep last night, or the light in my bathroom really does suck (and I am fine with that). And I thought, okay, I can handle this. Sure, that wrinkle will be there eventually, just like I’m going to be old eventually, but whether it’s today or just some time in the future – just like whether I’m losing my looks or gaining new ones – that’s not up to Tolstoy or Us Magazine, or anyone but me. Because it seems like whether a new wrinkle is there or not there is more about how you look at it than anything else.