I’d been working on indie movies, and a friend of mine texted me one day when I was an extra on the show Bella and the Bulldogs, saying a shoot needed a PA and was I interested? I took the job. I won’t tell you who the director was, but I will say this: They’ve had a very lucrative career directing commercials, and while they have had wide-release theatrical films, it’s very very unlikely you’d recognize their name. The job worked on a day rate—that is, a flat rate paid for a day of work. Only work for three hours or so, like I did the first day of this gig? Good news! You get paid the flat rate anyway! But what if you work longer than eight hours? Well, shoulda thought of that before you didn’t have a famous relative in the film industry to kick-start your career, jackass!
The second day—the Hellday—started off pretty normally. I was asked to drive a truck from the equipment rental place to set, and when I say a “truck,” I mean a piece of machinery larger than the average Manhattan apartment. Prior to this, I’d never driven anything larger than a Jeep Commander, so this was pretty scary. You think driving in downtown LA is frustrating in a normal car? Try it in a vehicle with the turning radius of an oil platform that, oh yeah, is also full of several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of film equipment.
Since I was delivering the stuff they needed to actually shoot, I was one of the first people on set. After somehow maneuvering the truck into the building, I helped unload it and then was put on firewatch duty. Now, firewatch isn’t watching for fires. It’s code for “make sure nobody steals our shit.” This is important because film equipment is incredibly expensive. An Arri Alexa SXT W, for example, retails at just under $90,000, and that’s just for the brain—no lens, no mount, nothing. If someone was wearing '90s jeans, they could probably stuff it in their gigantic pocket and walk off with enough for a down payment on a house—even in some places in LA!