"Break a Leg, Rosie" Part I

Okay. Alright. Alrighty.

I've been away at TAD camp, Trainee Assistant Dumbwaiter camp. Dumbwaiter? Yes. I ran up and down rickety wooden stairs from one floor to another more times than I previously believed I had in me. It's been a lot of fun, it's been an incredible amount of stress, of meeting people, of wearing and tearing my body into the bittiest of pieces, and has felt more like four weeks than four days, thank you. How do people who do this for a living just keep doing this? It has to be the dangling carrot on a string that is “movin' on up”, to 3rd Assistant Director, then 2nd, then eventually 1st, each job more harrowing than the last, until maybe, just maybe, you get to be a Director. Just that. And you get to be creative, and be the only person not on camera who can talk during takes, and have people place your chair by the monitor, and bring you tea.

I don't want to be a director, though as a teenager I coveted the title and had long, complicated daydreams of myself directing in the far-off future, making movies like the ones that had blown my teenage mind. There were movies that left me reeling through highschool, wanting so badly to have been a part of their production that it felt like my heart was broken. I had no technical understanding of filmmaking, (I still have very, very little), and lacked, when it came to movies, what I'd always seemed to have when it came to books; I didn't seem to know what was good. I also, more detrimentally, lacked the ability to compromise when it came to creative projects. And the nerve to boss people around. And physical and mental tenacity. Et cetera.

I'm relived to have been able to be the TAD on two productions without wanting a career in film. The stress level of the work is high enough already without the pressure of aspiration thrown in. One does, after all, screw up. I was lucky on this shoot not to screw up in any major way. Screwing up is painful. I imagine that if you did want to be a director, and you screwed up as a TAD in a big enough way to make that dream even more unlikely to ever happen for you, it could actually be lethal.

Being a TAD, (and people do call you "Tad" on set, as in "short for tadpole" and "a tad on the insignificant side"), means you help the 3rd A.D. do their job whenever possible, and help everyone else do theirs when it isn’t. By which I mean, if the 3rd A.D. doesn't need you to help "talent wrangle" by sticking close to the actors and extras, herding them from wardrobe to set like a slavish border collie, you become a gap-filler. You go to Starbucks for twenty coffees or pick up film canisters from a place down the street. You help the Locations Manager do things like open locked doors and stop fridges from buzzing when they aren't supposed to (Sachi, I thought of you). The P.A.s, Production Assistants, peons, have more stationary jobs, like guarding craft services so that people can't come in off the street and pocket all the granola bars.

I was frequently jealous of the P.A.s at our location. They got to sit peacefully at their stations and be rotated and relieved every so often by the Assistant Locations Manager, (our ALM was Michael Brooks, nicknamed Brooksy, who helped me avoid screwing up so many times that I didn’t even mind his insistent and weird preoccupation with clipping clothes pins to my hair). Strangely, one of the P.A.s on “Break a Leg, Rosie” was Jacqueline Khou, otherwise known as Jacqui, who went to school with Marian and me at York House. I’m generally terrified by people from highschool on the rare occasions when I run into them, but it was actually really nice to have Jacqui on set. She recently completed her degree in commerce, of all things, and like me was on the project as a favor to someone else. We ate lunch together each day in one or another of her stations.

I need a cup of tea. To be continued.