The Foreign Embassy

It wasn't too hard getting in to film production: offer to work for free, and you can land a spot as an intern or even a production assistant on an indie film shoot pretty quick. But as easy as it was for me to get into, it was even easier to get out of. I didn't like the long hours, or the precariousness of working from job to job without a guaranteed paycheck or benefits, and I certainly didn't feel like putting in the years and years needed to work my way up through the production hierarchy to the more interesting (and better paying) technical positions. I walked away from production with little hesitation, and didn't look back.

That said, I love being on set. Being on a film set is like being on a beehive held together by cable and electrical tape; everyone is doing something, and they're all doing it at once. The energy of a major production in full swing is overwhelming, right up until they point when the cameras start rolling, and that's the part I like the most: when the call echoes around the set, and beehive falls still in seconds, and the full attention of a dozen or fifty or a hundred people is suddenly sucked through a lens a couple inches in diameter for a brief moment in time. It's a great moment, one I love to be a part of, even as a bystander, and so I never turn down an invitation to a film set.

Thursday was a drive down to Culver City, to Sony Studios, where I got to walk through soundstages holding a house painstakingly constructed to appear as though struck by a meteor shower, then even more painstakingly duplicated, surrounded by a lit starfield backdrop several stories high. Artfully detailed craters were gouged into polished wood, and plaster moonrocks sat half-buried in living room floors. Out of the side door of the house, a stuntman in astronaut gear was strapped into a twenty foot crane to dangle him outside the windows while a pyrotechnician set off a towering burst of flame in the living room and a child actor told knock-knock jokes to a crew of grips and the Steadicam operator rehearsed his steps.

And then the call went up, and the hammering stopped, the jokes and chatter and arcane technical discussions stopped, and then we were rolling, and nobody moved except for the man with seventy pounds of camera strapped to his chest backpedalling down the hallway, just ahead of two racing boys who rounded the corner in the foyer, sprinted into the living room, and dove into the fireplace as a burst of lightning appeared outside the windows.

Then we cut. Hammering resumed, discussions resumed. Another knock-knock joke. The spaceman adjusted the straps around his chest, scratching an itch. The still photographer grabbed an off-the cuff shot of a grip walking down the hallway with one of the kids wrapped around one of his legs. The beehive awakened.

And then the director called, "Again."

I also got to meet Guillermo Navarro, which was nice. And if you haven't seen THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE, you should.