Serial Oversharer

It was the most money I had been paid to work in movies at that point…

I had a story in my head this morning, something from my days working on movies, except like many of these stories, it’s a weird edge case, a thing that happened once and never again.

I think I was filling in for a union grip on a pre-rig for some sort of movie out in Long Island. No memory of what it was called or who was in it, and I don’t think we saw the D.P. at all that day. And it could not have possibly been a union job, or I wouldn’t have been there.

But there I was, and I think the rate for the day might have been a hundred bucks. It was the most money I had been paid to work in movies at that point, so this was a big deal.

There was a ride in a 15-passenger van, as most of those days started, and a mansion of some sort out in Long Island somewhere nondescript, as I find most places in Long Island to be. For all I know it could have been West Egg.

And the important part of the job for the day was mostly just blacking out a bunch of windows. I suppose they had to shoot night scenes indoors in the daytime the next day.

Totally normal stuff. Duvateen. Black paper tape. Rinse. Repeat. We had way too many guys for this work.

Except for this one skylight. Above a chandelier. It was going to be tricky.

And they didn’t have the right lift. They had what we called a Genie Lift in those days, which might be some sort of brand name thing, and it went straight up and straight down.

It most definitely did not have an articulating arm that could be moved around a chandelier. And it did not fit two guys. And this was going to be a little dangerous.

And there was no way any of us was going up in that lift and letting someone push it around from the bottom.

As I mentioned, it was not the right lift.

I believe I was sent out for lunch, as there were no useful production assistants with us, and I was the closest thing available, probably younger than my coworkers by a solid eight to ten years.

We ate sandwiches.

We milled about outside the mansion. Someone must have been smoking a cigarette. We imagined how we might rig it from the outside. With a crossbow. And the right sort of line.

It seemed plausible.

But we had zero crossbows available between us.

We would figure something out. There were plenty of us.

And then we were all out of the room with the skylight, and suddenly a crash, and the key rigging grip who really was going to bear the brunt of this skylight not getting blacked out by the end of the day was halfway under the lift, which was now on its side, and he was

bleeding.

We removed the lift from him, someone called 911, and I was sent to the end of the (long) Long Island driveway to flag down the ambulance.

He’d be fine.

We all went home. We all got paid.

No idea if they ever were able to black out that skylight.

These are my worst Instagram photos

Much like the poetry I wrote in high school, I’ve classified some of my Lomo, Holga, and now Instagram-powered photography over the past, say, 12 years, as “bad on purpose,” as if there were some sort of meta-narrative about photography in play.

In reality, the pictures I make just sometimes suck. As did the poems.

It’s not that I’m not trying, it’s that I try everything and anything, and over-process at the expense of little things like clarity and meaning. If I could expose and document every button I push and filter I swish my index finger over, I would, just to have a record to share.

I think it’s because I enjoy art — let’s just use that as a broad classification of stuff here — where what I’d call “the process” of creation is on display. I like brush strokes and ink blots and notes in the margin and full frame printing where you can see the sprocket holes. I like blogs and links and trails of sources. I like original source documents and lost diaries and notebooks and journals.

Back in film school, to play that card, there was a class called Sight & Sound Film where we each made five short movies. The first three were silent and colorless (and I wish every picture I ever take could look like it was exposed on the 16mm Tri-X we used), the fourth could have music, and the fifth…

Well, we built up the mythos of the fifth Sight & Sound film as an object where the rules no longer applied. We pushed into snippets of painstakingly synchronized sound (some more than others), and color. In my own fifth film, I managed to involve the just-then-bare marquees of old 42nd Street theaters, a dream sequence, color, film going forward and backwards and slow and fast motion, and in the most self-referential procedural bit, the footage to be used for the dream was projected on the face of the protagonist as he fell asleep. And just my luck, on that cold late autumn day on the tile floor of an oversized bathroom in our dorm room, a battery belt wore down as the footage was played on the face, which means the camera’s frame rate slowed and slowed, speeding up motion and letting in more light, until the exposure blew out completely.

It was perfect. Reflexive, layered, and procedural. A commentary on filmmaking-as-self-reference itself.

I should really put it on YouTube sometime.