November Sweeps - Day 651

This was kind of a unique day, for me and my nephew anyway.  We woke up when it was still dark, and drove to a town out in the middle of nowhere to work on a movie.  There was thick, wonderful fog that we drove through in the canyon (which might just have been low-hanging clouds that had filled the canyon).  I wish I had thought to have my nephew take some pictures of the fog, but I was too focused on a) being ten minutes late in getting out the door, and b) not crashing into anything as my visibility dropped down to close to zero.

We got a call about five miles from the town we were headed to, and I worried that I was going to get fired from (yet) another job.  But they were just calling to let us know that the school where we were shooting hadn't gotten unlocked yet (they'd moved the call time up an hour the night before, and my guess is, never told whichever school employee was coordinating with them) and for us to just wait in the car with our heaters on until they took care of it.

We were shooting in a middle school (that's a junior high to you, sir) that I thought was very nice, although the heat wasn't on. My nephew had been sick earlier in the week (his doctors call it walking pneumonia or something, and he gets it every year), but he was being pretty tough about it (I had warned him that 70% of the day would be taken up with sitting around waiting to be used, so he had made sure his phone was fully charged), but the thing he was most distressed about was there not being any food, like I said there would be.

There is always Craft Service of some sort on every single film set I've been on (except, ironically, the last one where the poor old lady passed out from the heat), and they always feed you lunch (except, unironically, the many, many productions where they set the extras home right before lunch so they weren't legally obligated to fee us), but this one had nothing.  The movie had just started shooting, and I got the impression they were still figuring things out, but boy, my nephew was really upset about the lack of food.  Finally, I went out to my car and grabbed some beef jerky and (stale) trail mix I'd had in there for a while, and he gobbled some of it up.

We were holding in the cafeteria and there was a radio playing low-volume Easy Listening (that I thought was somebody's cellphone until I tried to identify who was playing it), and it was cold.  But there was room for hundreds of kids in there, so the two dozen or so they had was fine, as well as the six or seven adults who were there to play teachers.

I had finished a book on Thursday and started a new one on Friday, and managed to get over a hundred pages of it read throughout the day.  They did bring food in--the usual Craft Service stuff of chips and nuts and candy and granola bars--and my nephew grabbed as much of it as I used to when I lived in Los Angeles and could never afford to buy junk food.

About half of the kids were boys and half were girls, and they were the ones who got used most, first in a scene out in the parking lot* where the main kid gets into a fight with (presumably) a bully and all the kids gather round to watch before a teacher breaks it up.

And then they were moving into the school, and made an announcement that the teachers were done for the day.  This was one of those rare gigs that paid in cash, and they gave me my money, but I was there as a driver too too, so I was in it for the long haul.**

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In November: 1333

It's a kids Sci-Fi movie with aliens in it that weren't working that day (they put out a call for kids who stood between 4'3" and 4'7" to play aliens, and I tried hard to get my 11 year old nephew to sign up to play one, but he flat-out refused, even when both his parents encouraged him to at least try--when I think of how excited I would've been at his age to even watch a movie about aliens, let alone play one, it reminds me that these are most assuredly not my kids, no matter how much time I spend with them), most of the scenes taking place in a classroom with the two leads of the movie, who discover the alien plot in their town.

Unlike most of the productions I worked on in Los Angeles, every single teen in the classroom (and hall) was played by an actual teen.  They ranged in age from thirteen to (presumably) seventeen, and a couple of them actually attended that school.***

And right before lunchtime, one of the A.D.s came into the cafeteria and asked if any of us adults still wanted to play teachers, even though we were technically off the clock.  I stood up and volunteered, and there were four of us that did crosses in the hallway outside of the classroom.  It was the absolutely opposite of glamorous, and there is literally no way I will be visible in any of the shots (I could've been walking on my hands, with absolutely no pants on, and it would not have made one bit of difference), but you know me, I was happy to do it.

After that, they fed us cold submarine sandwiches, half of which were veggie and half were meat.  They didn't tell us this, though, so my nephew and I got veggie ones, and ate them without complained, not noticing until after that some kids had the other kind.  From this point on, our holding was in an adjoining classroom, with all of the kids jammed in.  Besides me, only one of the four adults hung out in there, the other two heading for the hills.

See, kids are loud.  I hadn't been around that many, and in that enclosed an environment, or for that long, in many years.

One of the girls got the idea to play Hangman on the dry erase board, and after a while, I played too, even guessing the answer a couple of times and going up myself.  I didn't want to alienate these kids, so I tried to come up with a TV show that was current, something they'd be sure to recognize (there was virtually no one in that room--except for the other guy playing a teacher--who would know what "Welcome Back Kotter" or "Leave It To Beaver" or even "Desperate Housewives" was, so I picked a 2021 show title for my hangman round.

No one of them--not a single one--had heard of "Only Murders In The Building."  It made me feel about as old as the dude in the cartoon listening to Bad Guy by Billie Eilish.

A lot of the kids couldn't spell very well, which is kind of important when you're playing Hangman, and one of the boys, when called out on this, said, "Nobody needs to know how to spell things, not when there's Grammarly."  It was such an odd comment that I instantly became my father, at least for a few seconds.  Of course, when I was his age, and Spell Check was invented, you could be forgiven for saying the same thing.  I try to know how things are spelled because I'm a writer, and more importantly, I love the English language, but the kid is probably right--just like I have no use for higher math in my day to day life, he probably DOESN'T need to know the difference between "Your" and "You're."

There was a big white plastic box above the board, and one of the boys started playing with it.  I asked, "What is that thing?" and the kids looked at me like I was an Amish guy asking about a tongue stud.  Turned out, it was a projector (complete with internet connection, so the kids could link their phones to it), a device that's in every school in America, but I had never seen before.****

Still, it was an odd experience, hanging out with a bunch of kids for several hours, and reminded me of the fantasies I used to have (not THOSE kind of fantasies, Professor) about getting to go back to high school again, but with the knowledge that I had a decade or so later.  I'm sure I still wouldn't fit in, but it sure is interesting to contemplate.

Push-ups Today: 100
Push-ups In November: 1393

They kept calling in kids who were in the classroom to go back in, depending on where they were sitting, to do the scene over and over, and whenever the camera pointed at the door, I walked past it a time or two.  By this point, I just brought my book with me, reading it in between takes.  Standing around doing nothing and repeating the scene over and over is part and parcel of filmmaking, and there's really nothing to be done about it.*****

My nephew impressed me (once he could get away from "Grey's Effing Anatomy," which he watched six episodes of throughout the day) by palling around with the kids, playing Hangman and making paper airplanes and throwing pink Starbursts around (for some reason, nobody wanted the pink ones, picking out the other colors first).  I'm not great at making (or keeping) friends, so I thought that was cool (of course, had I been the one to hit it off with a bunch of teenagers, then everybody but me would've found something wrong with that).

And then, it was time to go.  We had been there twelve hours.  We got paid, and I took the boy out for hamburgers (I was disgusted to find, as I have been all year, that every restaurant in that little out-of-the-way town except McDonalds either closed their lobby at eight or nine, or were not even open for dine-in, just drive-thru.

I hope it was a positive experience for my nephew.  It was the second time we'd ever done that together (the first time was years ago, for a series Steven Soderbergh made for HBO, and my nephew was about nine then), and we'll see if he wants me to sign him up to do it again.

Words Today: 236
Words In November: 9720

*They did use my car, though, which in L.A. would've paid extra.

**It never occurred to me that I could have just taken off and driven around, gotten some food or something, or simply gone to sleep in the car (which is way more comfortable than trying to sleep on an unwiped school cafeteria table); I just hung around to make sure the boy was fine, which was the more responsible choice anyway.

***Sadly, at the end of the day, those who went to school there were told that they had simply been all-day volunteers, and would not be paid, whereas only those who had signed up through a casting agent were doing it for money, like us.  I really felt for them, most of which had shown up just for fun, then heard we were being paid, and were greatly disappointed to find out it didn't include them.

****In the story I wrote for my uncle the other week ("Here With My Childhood Friend"), I had reference to a sound being like nails on a chalkboard to Alicia, the little girl in the story.  But it occurred to me that there's no way a kid (even if she's, technically, sixteen or so in the story) would know what a chalkboard is outside of movies.  It's as archaic a device as a telegraph was in my youth.  So I added "in a cartoon" to the description.  This was like that, only the opposite.

*****In my many years' experience, the project with the most repeated takes was doing the movie ZODIAC with David Fincher, and the one with the fewest was that day in 2006 at the L.A. airport working on a South Korean movie (those guys really knew efficiency).