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eye WEEKLY                                                June 29 1995
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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REEL LIFE                                                    REEL LIFE

                    WHEN TO QUIT THE FILM BUSINESS

                                  by
                             LAURA LIND

The day you walk out of film school

"In film school, they just teach you all the glory jobs. They're not interested in training you for the real film business, which is fishing plastic out of milk, that kind of thing," says Allen (no last name please).

Fishing plastic??

"I was a production assistant on an Eagle Brand commercial. I fished chips and strips of plastic -- which were supposed to look like shredded coconut -- out of a vat of condensed milk. I did this for five hours straight. At the end of the day I was covered in condensed milk and thinking, 'For this, I paid $25,000 to go to film school.' "

Allen studied film in Syracuse, N.Y., and now works as a postman.

"If I wanted to be a technician, I'd be a plumber," says Margaret (totally fake name please), a Ryerson film grad who worked as a camera assistant for five years. "It was like working with 20 plumbers who are all pretending to be sculptors. But it's hard to be an artist when you're a grip. "

WHEN YOUR BOSS MAKES IT HIS PERSONAL PROJECT TO RUIN YOUR JOB

Says Margaret, "If you're in the camera department, you can't talk when you're 'in the bag' (loading or unloading film) because if you expose the film, you don't just lose your job, you lose a whole day's work for everybody. I worked as a trainee for this one camera assistant who kept talking to me while I was in the bag, to test me, so I'd have to tell him to fuck off."

WHEN THEY DON'T PAY YOU

"On my last non-union shoot," says Margaret, "the focus puller who was in the union said to me, 'You're a coffee girl and a pack-rat.' It was the worst shoot I've ever been on, 18 hours a day for six days a week. And the cheques bounced."

WHEN YOU REALIZE YOU'RE REALLY JUST A TAXI DRIVER

"I drove 100 miles a day -- within the city," says Allen, who also worked as a driver. "I had to pick up kids from daycare -- not the director's kids, but anybody's kids -- take their dry cleaning in or pick up the stars from the Windsor Arms where they spent the night ... not with their wives."

After the third Divorce

"We call the wives of people on TV series 'film widows'," says Margaret. "On Night Heat the divorce rate was so high, because they worked at night six days a week for years. It was notorious for marriage breakdowns."

WHEN THEY START PRETENDING THAT TWO DAYS OF WORK IS REALLY JUST ONE

Says Margaret of one shoot, "This director was known for his porn work in the U.S. This was his big break into mainstream film, a horror film. He was an awful man. On the day before we wrapped we got our call sheet and there were three meals scheduled, which seemed odd. What they'd done is schedule two days into one because they couldn't afford to pay us for two. We worked for 34 hours straight, from 7 a.m. Saturday until 4 p.m. Sunday and they paid me $50.

"But you do this because you're working in film."

When You Turn Into A Film F*#!@

"When you're shooting on location on these corners and you get used to all these people watching you so you put this 'oh, I'm soooo bored' look on your face. It's just the peacock in people, everybody likes to pose," says Margaret.

"You're disrupting so many people, you've got these lights on, the assistant director is screaming and you're keeping people awake all night but you don't care because you're 'Making a Film,' some movie- of-the-week that how many people are going to see? You end up in this world of hugely over-inflated egos for the products these people put out, which are mainly just crap."

Says Margaret, who is now a potter and who also works as a waitress to pay the bills, "I was in this bar across from a film set and this guy walked in with his headset and his baseball cap and his Reeboks. He sits at the bar for several hours and there's this mirror across from his seat so he keeps looking at himself in the mirror, re-adjusting his headset like it's his little tiara.

"I was just howling with laughter," she says. "We call these people film fucks."

To see films about the film fools, check out Swimming With Sharks and ...And God Spoke.