By the time I hit 7th Grade I knew a few things for certain.
1) I wanted to get the hell out of my hometown.
2) I liked Art and English. . I couldn’t do Math to save my life, and Science was hard for me to grasp, but dammit I could write a good poem. Around the time most kids my age were playing sports I was reading the biggest book I could get my hands on. A real conversation during class went like this;
Me: What are you reading?
Kid: This R.L. Stein book. It’s short and easy and people die. What about you?
Me: I’m reading the whole Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. *I pull out a gigantic grey five hundred page tome the size of a text book*
Kid: …You’re weird.
This interest in writing and reading led directly into…
3) I liked Film. I liked Film a lot. The first film I can remember seeing in theaters was The Rocketeer and it blew my 6 year old mind. I wanted to go see all the movies I could, and I wanted to talk about them. After a while I found ways to read about them, which opened up whole new avenues of thought. What if this book I was reading could turn into a movie? What would it look like? This eventually developed into “this idea I’ve always had would look GREAT on a movie screen!” This in turn led to me attempting to draw and write out screenplays of whatever popped into my head. My drawings looked like stick figures with birth defects so I had to focus on my writing, for better or worse. And this was all before High School.
This all led to my decision to get into the Film Industry. I mean, how hard could it be?
What no one seems to realize is that the film industry is huge and encompasses world wide probably over seven million people. I have come to this number without doing any research at all but judging from what I’ve seen I can’t be far off. This means that for everyone person who moderately makes it in the film world there are roughly 1000 who don’t. A lot of these people quit the industry after awhile and go onto other things because they are tired of living off of Ramen. But then there are the other crazy people who decide that living off of Ramen is just fine as long as they are chasing a dream, or doing something they actually like.
These are the people at the bottom of the Film Industry pile who no one ever really recognizes or remembers. They are the security guards, the receptionists, the script readers, the drivers, the part time location scouts, and of course the many overworked Production Assistants (PAs), to name a few. These are the people who do their work quietly, take their money, and walk away asking themselves what the hell they did with their lives. These are the proverbial “flies on the wall.” These people tend to get front row seats to everything going on in the film industry while at the same time not being in any position to do anything about it. This is where most the seven million people in the industry work.
Most these people are still trying to break into the Film Industry somehow and become successful. What people have to realize is that the Industry itself is incredibly hard to break into. The people who make it tend to have connections, or somehow got the luck equivalent to winning the lottery. Others climbed the ladder for years to get to some moderate success. The rest of them are left out in the cold to do odd jobs and try to make ends meet. It can be a pretty miserable existence.
If you tell this to most people trying to break into the Film Industry they will simply nod at you, tell you they know, and continue on their quest to “make it” somehow. Most of the time this means they are dreaming. They don’t want to hear what you’re telling them because they’ve heard it a million times before, so they will simply agree with you and hope you forget about them so they don’t have to hear your logic again. This is especially found in Film Schools around the country.
The rest of these people are realistic about their chances of breaking into the industry but try and do it anyway. They are realistic either because they have always known the odds or because the industry has already chewed them up and they are too stubborn or driven to quit. Either way, these people have drive. God Dammit, they hate all other jobs in the universe and for some odd reason love film enough to put up with the bullshit it throws at them daily. They are going to stick with trying to “make it” and try and make a living doing so. A lot of the time the only other option for these people is to admit failure and try and get a job they will hate doing for the rest of their lives. This tends to not be an option.
These are the people who will “couch surf” from apartment to apartment, finding friends nice enough to lend them a couch to live on for a week or two before going to another friend’s couch in order to not have to pay rent when money is tight. These are the people in their mid thirties who live on cereal for a week straight because there is another strike keeping them from working. These are the people who sleep in their cars to keep a movie set safe because it’s a few extra dollars in their pocket, and more importantly, a hell of a lot of respect the next day. These people are insane. These people have been broken down and built up so many times the shit thrown at them simply rolls off. These are the hard skinned bastards of the world who still put up with everything because of some inner drive telling them “it will all pay off one day.”
They are driven. They are proud. They know film like no one else. I call them Film Grunts. And right now I can officially say I am one.
These are my stories as a Film Grunt, being on the front lines to see some of the insanity on the lower rungs of the Film World. I am a fairly young Film Grunt, and I don’t think I have seen everything yet. But some of my stories are too weird or insane not to share. I can guarantee you that every story here is true, although names and some places have been changed to protect the innocent and my own ass.
I hope you enjoy these stories. I didn’t enjoy living every one, but I sure do enjoy telling them.
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