Crashing Billy Crystal’s Party

I was working at Universal Studios in the late ‘90s filing contracts, and sometimes I saw strange things when I would leave.  Once I had a couple friends visiting for some reason.  I don’t remember for certain why they were there, but I remember one of them was a costumer, so I think I was introducing her to someone.  Anyway, I had a really crusty car at the time.  When it moved it sounded like it was having a perpetual fart.  It was barely holding together, having rust all over, several colors of paint, and a window that was being held up with a stick.  There was even writing on the back, “OBO” which stood for “Or best offer.”  It had said “900 OBO” but I had wiped off the 900.  I couldn’t get the rest off, so it remained, and the car became known as Obo.

As we were leaving, we got stuck behind a line of fancy black cars, many of them limos.  They were stopping in front of the Europe part of the backlot, letting people off, then continuing forward.  When we got to the front, valets opened the doors and rushed, almost pushed, us out, then one took the car and “sppppppp” sped the car away.  We were all dressed better than the car looked, so we sort of fit in with the suit and tuxedo clad men and women in their fancy dresses, so we strolled into the event.

There were tables with large meals on them, so we sat down to eat.  Pretty soon, Billy Crystal stepped up to the mic at the front and began speaking.  Soon we realized we had stumbled into a charity event and eating plates that were costing others thousands of dollars to attend.  We felt guilty, (but not too guilty to have another course or two,) so we eventually wandered off.  We walked up the hill toward the suburbs area.  During the day, it was hard to go up here because the tour trams went through, but in the evening, it was an easier walk.

We got to a point where we could see a huge cliff wall that had been built over the water where actors were climbing around.  They were shooting Jurassic Park 3.  I knew it had been written lately; I had don’t the paperwork for the writer’s contract.  It had been Alexander Payne, an acquaintance whom I had met a few times at the Nebraska Coast Connection.  It was a bit depressing to see how many hundreds of thousands of dollars he was being paid for something he wrote over a weekend, (we did the paperwork on a Friday and the script came in on a Monday,) but I needed to get over that and focus on my own work.

We weren’t there long before someone found us and told us we couldn’t hang around, so we strolled back to the event which we passed through to return to my car.  I gave the ticket to the valet and waited.  It was quite a while before we heard “sppppppppp” in the distance, and after several more limos and fancy black cars passed by picking up their wealthy patrons, my little crusty Obo pulled up and we climbed inside under the judgmental gaze of those around.  Then we scurried out of there, the car sputtering fumes and going “spppppppppppppp!”

Beginning Film School at NYU

Having grown up in Nebraska, switching to New York City for college was an obvious culture shock.  However, it never felt as strange as many people thought it would be for me.  I was ready for a change, and I was ready to learn a bit about filmmaking.  The most education I had had was a class run by someone who believed nothing good had been made since Casablanca.

Ironically, a film had come out the summer before I went off to NYU called The Freshman.  This was not only a wild coincidence because it was about a young man starting college, but also because he was beginning school at NYU studying film.  I wondered how true it was going to be for me, especially in regard to the teacher who was so obsessed with The Godfather that he couldn’t talk about anything else.

I had some teachers like that, but more on that later.

The screening of The Freshman I went to was empty, as though it was a private screening for me; a warning.  I didn’t know how to take that, and I still don’t, but it was something that stood out.

The other movie that ultimately had a lot of meaning for me about that time was Pump up the Volume.  I saw it while on the way to New York.  My dad and I stopped off for the night in Pennsylvania.  He wanted to see something I wasn’t at all interested in, and he wasn’t interested in my Christian Slater movie, so we agreed to meet afterward.

At the time I thought Pump up the Volume was just an okay flick.  But on retrospect, it was very foretelling.  The story is about a young man who runs an underground radio station, broadcasting his views on life that really connect to other teenagers.  The FCC comes down hard on him for illegally broadcasting, and he sends a message to everyone to make their voices heard.

This movie could not be remade now because the concept of getting your voice heard is taken for granted.  With Youtube, podcasting, blogging, and all sorts of other ways to get your voice heard, the idea that you once had to go through a filter is gone.  But that really characterizes the difference between the world I was trying to break into as a storyteller at the time, and the world today.  In the 20^th century you had to ask permission to get your story told; permission from a movie studio or a book publisher or a magazine or a film festival.  That changed throughout the 2000s.  IFilm started to change that on the internet, but failed when they decided to become like the film festivals.  Little did they know that people were tired of that mentality, and they went by the wayside in favor of Youtube and blogs.

Now Pump up the Volume seems almost quaint the way it seems to state the obvious.  But one has to understand that those dark days of entertainment are only a very few years behind us; and the movie should serve as a warning of what it could become again if we ever regulate these free markets again.

The Extras Scam

People are told that one of the gateways into the film industry is through being an extra.  You pay your dues in the background of other movies while you make contacts and get to know your way around.

When I first moved to LA in 1995, there were a number of these agencies you could sign up with that had their own ways of finding you work.  Some of them charged a fee up front for you to sign up with them, and they took a very small finder’s fee whenever they got you work; others took no fee up front but got a larger percentage with each job they found you.

Over the years these other agencies dwindled until only a few remained, and only one truly dominates the industry, Central Casting.  Central was a company that charged an upfront fee and took a small percentage of your paycheck.  There was also a yearly fee to remain in their databank.  They made huge amounts from starry eyed hopefuls like myself who had been told this was the gateway to working in the film industry, and by offering our services to multi-million dollar movies for minimum wage.

In order to get work, we had to call in and wait through a long list on an electronic message saying what types of people they needed the next day.  You had to call in over and over, waiting for several messages hoping they needed your type.  If your type didn’t come up, you had no work for the next day.  Of course, you had to give up taking any other work, and when you did get on a set, you were paid so little it didn’t come close to making up for the days you didn’t get anything.  And we continued to pay our fees to remain with Central Casing year after year.

But this is what we were told we needed to do, so we kept doing it.

Then in 2011, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office started cracking down on extras casting companies that charged up front fees.  This issue had come up when there was a scourge of complaints from people who had paid to be included in services but never received work.  Being at the height of the Great Recession, the issue was much more serious, and agencies were required to provide true employment services like in any other business.

In some ways, these agencies were caught in the middle.  Movie studios and production companies have a long history of shafting employees at the bottom.  While they make movies and shows chastising the wealth gap, they have the largest disparity in payment.  Their “above the line” stars, producers, etc. will make millions while the “below the line” extras and production personnel make minimum wage or less.  They are infamous for having an over-abundance of unpaid interns who are supposedly lucky to be there and are “learning” the craft as they get their bloated employers coffee.

It was these studios and companies which were pressuring the extras agencies to provide them with cheaper and cheaper labor, all along expecting fancy offices in the wealthiest areas of town.  So the extras agencies had fallen in line to remain open, passing on the charges and low pay to their employees.  But after the City Attorney’s crackdown, many had no choice but to shut their doors.

But not Central Casting.  They were big enough to last a bit longer; long enough to come up with a different solution.  Recognizing the annoyance of their employees needing to call in to find out about work, they began to provide a service that could call in for you.  No longer would you need to sit on the phone for ten minutes at a time wading through listing after listing, then having to call in again a few hours later if there wasn’t anything for you.  Now you could get a call-in service to do all that for you, and they would call you to let you know you have work.

Of course, this could all be bypassed if Central Casting simply placed their listings online so people could see at a glance if they fit anything.  Or, god forbid, they could do the casting and simply call the people they felt were appropriate for the parts, rotating in actors who hadn’t worked the day before so everyone gets even amounts of work.  But Central Casting isn’t going to bother with all this, you know why?

Because the call-in service is even more profitable than the original payment to register.  While it used to cost about $25 to register and the same to renew each year, it now costs $70 per month to get the call-in service.  Of course, you can choose to bypass the call-in service and call in each day yourself, but you’ll find that there are only very obscure and extremely specific listings; such as little person with a nose ring and a tattoo on his neck, or people who are missing limbs.  Occasionally they’ll offer jobs to people who have fancy, classic cars, but let’s face it, you aren’t getting any of those on an extras salary.

This is because the call-in service gets the listings first.  They fill it with their list of customers who are paying $70 a month, and the only listings that are making it to Central Casting’s messages are the obscure ones the call-in service couldn’t fill.

This obvious scam only gets by the City Attorney’s Office because they opened the call-in service under a different name, Extras Management.  It’s not particularly subtle, however, as the management office is directly across the street from Central Casting, and they even tell you at Central Casting when you register that you should go over to Extras Management and sign up to ensure you’ll get work.

Of course, work is not assured.  In fact, even when you’re called onto a job, it’s still not certain.  Even though you must have your schedule cleared for the day of a shoot, accepting no other work, if the production company decides to cancel, they can do so, even up to the last minute, and you are not compensated.  This means that, from the moment Extras Management calls you, you cannot accept any other work.  You must be available for the shoot, and you must show up.  But if the production company changes its mind or falls behind schedule, it can cancel your job, even if you drove clear across town and turned down other work.

What’s worse, they can require that you clear your schedule for several days, then decide they don’t need you after the first one, even if it’s too late for you to find other work.  This was exemplified in a heartbreaking way on a set I was on a while ago.  There were over 50 of us who had been told we had three days of work.  We all showed up and worked through a hectic schedule, standing out in the hot sun and trying to get shade since they didn’t have an air conditioned area for the extras.  (Of course they had plenty of air conditioned units for the “above the line” people in this show that made fun of elitism, but nothing for the extras.)  After 5:00, when it was too late to find other work, we were all told they wouldn’t be bringing us back the next day.  I’ve never seen so many people break down in tears.  I’m certain that if you were to watch that episode of the show and look into the background, you would see a plethora of wet faces.

This was during the Great Recession.  Many of these people were counting on the work to pay for rent.  This was near the end of the month, and several said they would now be evicted because they had no chance of making rent.  Some smuggled craft service food off the set because it would be all they would have to eat.  All this while the producers who made these decisions were going home to large houses and hefty paychecks for making a show deriding greedy rich people.

Oh, and by the way, Central Casting still pays only minimum wage for the days you do work, and they take a percentage out for themselves.  This means that the $70 a month one pays Extras Management isn’t even covered in one day’s worth of work.  It takes a day and a half before you become profitable.

It is a shameful racket, one that Central Casting profits from under the table.  One might have hoped Schwarzenegger might have done something about these practices when he was governor, but he was part of that “above the line” elitism that never sees the suffering of those at the bottom.  He had the air conditioned room that never even saw where we were.

Running Into Spielberg in Vegas

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1995, my mother was moving to the area as well.  She and my father had just gotten divorced, and she was starting where she had left off when she married him in the ‘60s, Loma Linda.  I had met some people who promised to help me get my career started; I just needed to get out to Southern California.

My mom and I were driving in a two van caravan; her in a big mover, me in our family van.  This was the days before cell phones, so when we wanted to chat, we either needed to pull over, or I had to run over to her at a red light.  At one of these interchanges, I accidentally locked myself out, and when the light turned green, I couldn’t get in.  Luckily, my mom had a spare key, and as cars drove by honking, I ran over and got it from her.

I was listening to audiobooks along the way, and as we pulled into Vegas, I was finishing The Diary of Anne Frank.  Great material for Sin City.  As such, my mind was wandering and I was looking down at the sidewalk rather than up at the bright lights.  I remembered something from Schindler’s List and was about to say to my mom “In Schindler’s List…” when I smelled something rank.  I stopped, looked up, and found myself face to face with a drunken stranger I had almost run into.  He was talking to someone beside him as he stared at me, wondering why I had almost plowed into him.  He was wavering a little on his feet, and had clearly drunk a lot.  The smell I had detected was his alcoholic breath.  And it immediately dawned on me.  This was Steven Spielberg.

I froze in place, unsure what to say or do.  My mother hadn’t noticed.  She was further down the sidewalk unaware what I was doing.  Then the light turned green for Spielberg and his friends and they walked across, leaving me behind.  At that moment my mom finally realized I wasn’t with her, and came back to me, asking why I was slack-jawed.  I pointed at the street, at the man in white pants, and said, “Spielberg.”  She looked and recognized him and said, “huh.”

I took it as a good omen, and was walking on cloud nine the rest of the day.  Screw Vegas, I just saw the most successful filmmaker in history on my way to the city of movies.

The First Time I Learned About Star Wars

My first movie experience was almost Star Wars.  I was six years old and my father wanted to take me to this new science fiction film.  But my mother, being a responsible parent, stopped him and said that he should watch it first to see if it would be appropriate for someone at my age.  So my dad took my brother to see it while my mom took me to see Benji.  Yep, my mother’s sense of responsibility made Benji my first movie rather than Star Wars.  Damn you good parenting!

My mom, sister and I got home first and we were in the kitchen when the door opened and my brother rushed in with his eyes wide.  My father was right behind him, his own eyes wide as well.  It was as though he had just seen a ghost doing gymnastics.  He told her that I had to go see this movie.  Not should, had.  Still being the responsible parent, my mother asked if it was age appropriate, and he vigorously nodded his head.

Soon after, we went to see it at the Stuart theater in downtown Lincoln.  It was a former stage theater from the days of grand productions.  It looked more like an opera house, complete with deep cushioned, plush, red seats, and etched mirrors in the lobby; and it played only the biggest movies.  I remember only bits and pieces of watching it.  In particular, I remember that I didn’t know what “terminate” meant, and when my mom explained that it meant to kill, I couldn’t believe they were thinking about killing Princess Leia.  It was the first time I remember feeling fear.  I didn’t understand yet that the good guys general win these movies; my exposure to television thus far had often been football, and in that, either side could win.  So I truly didn’t know that the rebels would win.  (Oh, spoiler alert.)

I also remember going to the bathroom during the scene when Obiwan Kenobi turned off the tractor beam, so I didn’t understand why the characters were able to leave.  For some reason I remember another older black kid in the bathroom with me.  I think I remember this because it was one of the first times I was using a bathroom alone, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to react to a stranger in a bathroom.  I wasn’t nervous with fear, I was nervous about my manners.  Am I supposed to look?  Am I not?  I think men and women react differently to bathrooms; we never get over our fear of looking at one another while in them.

After the movie, I remember going to the apartment buildings my dad owned and jumping in the pool.  We had taken a family friend, Jon, and he and my brother Trevor were reenacting scenes, especially the one in the trash compactor as though the walls were going to smash them in the pool, and the snake creature was underneath.  I remember one point when Trevor said, “we’re all going to be a lot thinner” and Jon responded, “At least I won’t have to iron my clothes anymore!”

In the years to come, it would prove to have an impact on me as strong as my dad predicted; especially with the toys.  My best friend Ryan and I collected as many figures as we could and created stories with them.  This became my first efforts at storytelling.

And then my father purchased making of documentaries on laser disk.  I began watching them over and over and over.  I was obsessed with how people made images that went on the screen; how storytelling could be visually explained, and how those images stirred the emotions.

Tales of a Failed Filmmaker: Stranded in Park City

I was traipsing through the fresh snow of Park City, heading through the darkness and drifting snowflakes toward my car in the parking lot.  It was the middle of the night, and the snow had been falling since 10.

I had seen it when it started.  From outside a club along the main street of town, the tiny white dots dancing toward the ground highlighted in the glow of the old fashioned lamp posts.  The white sheen of the streets got trapped by the walls of the quaint buildings, creating an all-too-perfect glow, like a painting of small town America.  Next to me, someone posted the results of the winners of the festival.  At the top was someone named Morgan Spurlock for a documentary called Supersize Me.  It didn't seem important at the time in January, 2004, but in retrospect I realize I was the first person in the world to learn that this groundbreaking film had been the winner at the festival.

I had been invited to the club by two women with whom I had shared a shuttle bus.  I shouldn't have been surprised that they didn't show up, though I later found that I had probably gone to the wrong club.  It was just as well.  I needed to head back to LA, and I had only enough money to pay for the gas to get me there.  I had a check waiting for me at home, but my ex-girlfriend, who had not yet left my apartment even after more than two months after breaking up with me, refused to help out by depositing it.

I had risked everything to go to Sundance.  I didn't have a film in the festival, but I did have a movie being developed.  We had met with a bunch of well-known actors, and Martin Sheen had offered to be a part of it.  I just needed investors, and Sundance was a way to get to these investors and production companies without being blocked by what I called the red velvet rope.

I had made some important connections, and now I just needed to get back to Burbank with them.  The snow was starting to come down hard now, and I needed to get off the mountain before I got blocked in.

That's why I was so horrified to see a tow truck with a small white lump on its back, my car, driving out of the parking lot.  I screamed in panic as I chased after, cutting across a nearby lawn to try to cut it off.  Much to my surprise, there was a hidden dip into which I suddenly sank up to my chest.  Stuck, I tried to push forward anyway.  But I could do nothing but helplessly watch my car be carried away into the darkness.

I was helpless, alone, more than half buried in the snow in the darkness of the middle of the night.  I was lower than the lowest point.  This is where a lifetime of trying to make it in the entertainment industry had led me.  Hundreds of miles from home without a car, no way to get to it, and not enough money to get it out and drive it home even if I did.

As I floated there in the snow in shock and hopelessness, my mind began to wonder how I had gotten there.  What choices had I made that brought me to this point that was lower than I expected life could ever get?

I will be exploring these choices, and my experiences, in this blog.  Whenever the title begins with "Tales of a Failed Filmmaker" I will be telling these stories from a journey of 25  years of trying to make it in the film industry, and failing.

I'm beginning this story now because this month, (in fact, this day,) marks the 20th anniversary of my arrival in Los Angeles.  I will not be telling this story in order; it would take too long to get to more recent tales, and I know I'll be remembering things out of order along the way.  So each story will be from a different point in time, and I'll do my best to explain the dates where I remember them.