"Break a Leg, Rosie" Part II

I wanted to post about the walkie talkies. If anyone’s looking for a symbol to represent the work of a TAD on set, it should be a black walkie talkie with a hand mike clipped to the antenna. Known affectionately as “walkies”, these gadgets are blocky things that, by the standards of todays cell phones, weigh a fucking ton. They sum up the experience of a TAD’s working life so perfectly because while wearing one lends you a self-important sense of being at work and connected to the entire production, a walkie also creates a massive amount of stress. Not for anyone else on set, mind you, but for the wee TAD alone.

Each walkie costs upwards of $1500, so they all have to be numbered and documented. Which crew member has which number is something you need to track like a bloodhound, because if one goes missing and nobody knows who lost it, you’re paying for the new unit. You also have to keep a steady supply of recharged batteries at the ready, because they run low every five hours. Throughout the shoot I always had two or three fresh batteries clipped to my belt. Not only did each brick-like battery weigh enough to make it that much harder to scamper up and down stairs and fire escapes when needed, they also had a way of pinching my hips as I moved and digging into me when I had a chance to sit down. It felt like the sort of barbed iron belt a medieval monk might have worn to chastise himself for sinful thoughts, and had a way of enhancing my Gunga Din-esque mood of self sacrifice and incalculable worth when it wasn’t annoying the hell out of me.

But walkies are also power. There were 20 walkies on set and each morning I had to decide who would get one and who wouldn’t. And since nobody but me was sweating over how much the things actually cost, everybody on set wanted a walkie. With a walkie, you'd know if and when there's sound rolling on a take, so you don’t have to tiptoe around like a scared fawn waiting for somebody to give you the twirly hand signal that means “Shut up”, or the grin and “How’s it going?” that really means, “No, they aren’t rolling, and you don’t have a walkie, ha-ha-ha”. Walkies also let you have neat, cop-like conversations that everyone on set can hear. For example:

Claire the TAD?

Go for Claire.

What’s your 20?

I’m in wardrobe.

We need all talent standing by.

Copy that.

Copy copy!

I realize it’s pathetic, but trust me; set jargon has the ability to make you feel like a rookie god. Later in bed, the rythm of these conversations will loop and play in your head like background static.

As soon as the production wraps for the night, it’s time to start worrying about walkies in a whole new way. A TAD’s instinct is now to rush around grabbing them from people and checking each number off the ragged list in your back pocket, but that wouldn’t endear you to the crew, because nobody wants to give up their walkie until the last possible second. People would wear their walkies home if they could, I swear to god, chatting to each other in film-ish doublespeak as they head for their respective homes. This mean you have to worm the walkies off of people. And you’re no longer Gunga Din at this point, bring water to the troops with your belt-full of pain. You’re more like the sadistic guard at San Quentin who punishes the men by taking away their cigarettes and fears the whole time that she’ll be knifed in the back for doing it.

I hope all this posting about the last four days hasn’t come across as too self-indulgent, or rather, I hope nobody minds that it is so self-indulgent. I’d really like to remember all this stuff, and if I don’t write it all down now, I know that the madness of it will start to blur together sooner than I'd like. The last time I worked on a set was four years ago, and when I showed up for “Break a Leg, Rosie”, I couldn’t remember enough about my previous experience at the job to do it with any competence for the first day and a half.

I took tons of photos throughout production to help serve as memory-boosters, and I might post a few of them soon. For now, I’m going to relax and take the dog for a walk. She’s staring out the window longingly at my mother’s garden tour, probably wishing she could run outside and shit all over our temporarily manicured lawn.