Redundancy

The phone has stopped ringing. I think I’m out of a job.

I’m a freelancer. So there’s no HR where I work. So there’s no one to tell me “Best of luck with your future endeavors” before security escorts me out of the building. There’s no one to tell you you’re done. That you’ve become, as our Brit friends like to say, “redundant”.

Or there’s no one to tell you that your frequent angry outbursts are no longer welcome here.

I’ve been having more angry outbursts lately. It’s mainly directed at under-experienced producers who are in way over their skis. Most of the experienced producers left (just like I left) and the replacements aren’t exactly up to the task. And sometimes they’re just straight up incompetent.

I’m a generally a chill guy, and I’ve learned to accept that not everyone is good at their job.

But two things set me off.

The first is money. Sometimes they’ll try to fuck me out of my wages.

I really don’t like this. REALLY don’t like it. At this point in my career I’m a mercenary. I’m here for the money. So when a girlboss producer tells me on the last shoot day that I’m “too expensive” and she won’t pay my overtime, I lose my chill.

But then I remember I got everything in writing and I have a good lawyer and that non-payment penalties are steep and that I’ll probably make more on the penalties than on the overtime.

Then I feel better.

Much better.

The other thing that sets me off is safety stuff. Because this shit isn’t worth it.

Nobody should get hurt or killed on a film shoot. There’s no reason for it.

So no, we’re not shooting on the railroad tracks. No, we’re not going to work on busy highway at night without reflective vests. No, we’re not going to do a lighting setup (with steel stands and copper power cables) on a mountain ridge above the treeline in a thunderstorm. No, we’re not putting the child actor in the freezing lake that still has ice floating on it.

This is where things actually get tenuous. Because you only get one chance to be safe. And I’m not going to collect a penalty check 6 weeks later.

So I don’t back down when it comes to safety.

Apparently my outbursts have become legendary. I know they’re legendary because they get better with every retelling.

On the last shoot, a camera assistant asked me if I really punched a producer and pulled a gun on him.

I told him, no. I only threw a coffee cup at his head.

It was a big heavy steel Yeti coffee cup. And it was full of hot coffee—because those Yeti cups are great at keeping coffee hot.

But the dumbass producer dodged the cup, and no I didn’t pull my gun. Because I leave my gun in the truck when we’re shooting. Mainly so I don’t pull my gun on dumbass producers.

But I SHOULD have punched him. And putting a gun in his mouth would have been appropriate.

Because this shit isn’t worth someone getting killed.

That’s what I told the camera assistant.

Then I explained why I threw the cup at his head. I mean, I had my reasons after all.

We needed 16 production assistants for “lockups”. That is, making sure “civilians” don’t walk into the shot.

But this was a car commercial. And most of the show is what we call “running footage”, which is shots of the car driving at high speed thru city streets.

Working with The City, we hire cops to hold traffic at the intersections so we can blow lights. But for pedestrians (and people on those fucking electric scooters) we need production assistants to keep them out of the street so they 1) don’t ruin the shot, and 2) don’t get killed.

Because in our ultra-litigious American legal system, if you get hurt—even if you’re a complete fucking idiot and it’s your own damn fault—you can sue the fuck out of the production company. And to a broader point, if some crackhead gets hurt or killed on a shoot then the city isn’t going to let us do more shoots. And I need there to be more shoots so I can feed my kids.

The day before I threw the cup we almost killed some crackhead. The Russian Arm almost took his head off.

A Russian Arm (what some have taken to calling a U-Crane, since it was invented in Kiev) is a camera car system. It’s usually a modified Porsche Cayenne SUV. It has a stabilized crane on the roof that rotates 360 degrees and can move so the camera almost touches the road to near vertical. At the end of the crane is a gyro stabilized “head” that holds the camera.

Basic Bitch Russian Arm

The guts of the Russian Arm is the guidance system from a Soviet ICBM. It was designed to turn Dallas to glass. Now we use if for car commercials.

There were a bunch of dudes designing and building these things in the old Soviet Union (yes, in Kiev). One day the Soviet Union went away and so did their jobs. So they took the tech and turned into a camera stabilization system. That’s why it’s called a Russian Arm.

They took their system to Hollywood and it revolutionized film making. You can drive 100mph and the image is nice and steady. It’s amazing stuff. It allowed us to get shots that weren’t possible before.

I’m not sure if this is still true, but since the guts of a Russian Arm is an ICBM these things were (and still might be) considered protected defense technology. Just taking one to Mexico involved reams of State Department and Defense Department paperwork.

Inside it’s like a clown car. The OEM Cayenne seats 5. But the Russian Arm has an extra jumpseat in the trunk for the camera assistant to pull focus. So there are 6 dudes in a not-so-big SUV packed with monitors and joysticks.

Everyone in the car has a job to do. The driver is keeping his eye on the picture car (the car on screen), the crane op is working the crane, the head tech is running the head, the DP is running the camera, the camera assistant is pulling focus, and the director is directing.

Other than the driver, everyone is looking at a monitor. The monitor only shows what the camera lens sees. And nobody is watching for pedestrians or crackheads on scooters. That’s the job of the production assistants on the sidewalk.

But the day before I threw the coffee cup, a crackhead almost died.

He was on one of those fucking death-trap electric scooters and pulled out of an alley (where there was no cop or PA) onto a one way street. The street was closed by the cops. And since there was no traffic he pulled into the middle of the street. The Russian Arm was going the wrong way on this one way street. So crackhead didn’t look in the correct direction—he was looking for traffic coming the other way.

Anyway, long story short, he pulls out into the street on his fucking scooter. The car is racing at him doing about 60. They’re doing a crane move—that is a sweeping shot—so the crane is swinging. Everyone in the car is looking at the road or the shot. And the camera came within an inch of hitting crackhead in his cracked-out head. It came so close that the camera knocked off his hat.

Nobody in the car saw it.

But I saw it.

And in my mind I saw crackhead brains on the blacktop.

I almost shit myself.

So the next day (the cup throwing day), we were shooting another street. Doing a three block run—which means we shut down a three block stretch. To lock up the corners, alleys, and mid-block crosswalks we needed 16 production assistants.

I had mentioned this in person, text, and email weeks prior. I even made a diagram so the producer had visual reference.

But on the morning of the shoot I found we only had 4 PAs. I asked the aging hippie producer—who had no business producing live action car shoots LIKE I USED TO PRODUCE—where are the PAs?

He said the client (one of the biggest automotive companies in the world) didn’t want to pay for it.

A commercial PA costs about $350 a day. So that’s $5600. Add in 24% P&W (aka fringes for payroll taxes, etc.) we’re looking at about $7k.

To a big car company, $7k is a rounding error of a rounding error of a rounding error. They wouldn’t even miss it.

But this dumbass hippy clown producer didn’t know or want to explain to his car clients that $7k is a small price to pay to avoid a wrongful death suit, brand damage (because shit like this makes the papers), and protect innocent people from an untimely demise.

I told that him someone was going to get killed.

He told me to relax.

And he said I should “be positive man”.

Now I could have told him that we shouldn’t fuck around with safety. And that a car commercial isn’t worth risking a human life. And I could have told him about my many years of experience on sets (that he didn’t have) where everything thing that could go wrong did go wrong—including the time a small airplane crashed into our aircraft hanger location as the Art Department team was diligently working inside.

But I didn’t do that.

Instead I threw a Yeti coffee cup at his head.

So that story has gone around. And it’s gotten better with each retelling. And now the story involves fists and a gun.

That might be the reason my phone isn’t ringing. But again, I have no supervisor or HR “specialist” to tell me this, so who the fuck knows why my phone isn’t ringing.

From time to time I check in with my fellow freelance film workers, and they check in with me, and it would seem that nobody is working.

At all.

Everyone is unemployed. At least the people I know.

This is almost good news, because it means that my non-ringing phone probably isn’t due to my Yeti yeeting or my other angry outbursts.

But it’s also bad news.

Because if nobody is working it means that the industry is dying.

From what I gather, the few things in production are happening are outside of the country. Mexico City and London seem to be the new hotspots.

It’s cheaper to shoot in either of these cities than in the USA. WAY cheaper. And yes, depending on the exchange rate even London is a relative bargain.

Filmmaking is a labor intensive thing. It hasn’t changed that much since Thomas Edison invented it in the 1890s. In many ways it’s the last vestige of 19th Century artisanal labor.

I mostly gave up movies. Now I just do commercials. But we work in the same way—and have the same manpower needs. If you want that cinematic look then you need a lot of people to do it.

(And yes, this is true—you do need a lot of people. I’m sure your buddy made a really cool video by himself with an iphone—but screen it side by side with something made by “filmmakers” and you’ll see the difference.)

So you need people to make films. And people are expensive. So the powers that be want cheap people. And those cheap people live in Mexico and the YooKay and anywhere but the USA.

So runaway production is one reason for the slowdown, but the big elephant in the room is AI.

It’s getting really fucking good. Maybe not good enough for a movie (yet) but it’s good enough for a commercial.

It’s already eating the industry from the bottom. Many of the low budget commercials I see on youtube have been replaced by AI. Soon it will be the medium budget stuff, and then it will eat what I do—the big budget stuff. The stuff that takes hundreds of people and thousands of smaller moving pieces to shoot.

They bring me in to figure that shit out—because it’s a lot of shit and someone needs to do it. But if they can do it with, say, half the people then they won’t need me anymore.

I’ve been telling myself this will happen in 6 to 9 months, but I really have no clue when it’s going to happen.

Those more informed than me say 1 year. They also say that TV and movie production has 4.5 years.

But they really don’t know either. Nobody does.

Nobody knows when that killer Gen AI is going to hit and make us all obsolete.

Earlier this week I did a little New Mexico trip. I stopped at a highway pullout outside of Abiquiu. The pullout had a nice view of the Rio Chama. The river is lined in cottonwood trees, and they were in full fall colors.

I wanted a picture.

So I stopped.

Another car pulled up while I was shooting, and a man with a camera got out.

I could tell he was an amateur. I could tell by his gear. Compact crop sensor body with a kit lens. Something they sell at Best Buy.

When two photographers meet in the wild, the first thing we do is check out each other’s gear. I don’t think gear is that important—not as important as the person behind the camera. But I’m a man, and I like gear.

He saw my rig. Or maybe he saw me kneel down in the dirt and contort my body to get the perfect frame—something that amateurs don’t do.

He asked me, “Are you a pro?”

I told him no—not exactly.

I explained that I’m enough of a pro that I can write off my camera gear. And I told him that photography is a big part of my job. But I also explained that people buy my labor and not my photos. There’s a big difference between selling labor and selling IP, and I told him that too.

I told him about what I did and where I live and how I got into the business. He was impressed. Said I had a great job. And that I was a lucky man.

I said that was all true. That it’s been great. But it’s almost over.

This guy was retired. Up from Texas—Waco I think. He said I looked too young to retire.

So I explained what was happening with AI. I explained that pretty soon nobody is going to pay a human to make a movie or write a book or take a picture or do anything creative. I explained that we’re all going to be redundant.

He asked me what I was going to do next.

I told him I had no idea. And this is true. Because I have no clue what I’m going to do. Post office? Walmart greeter?

“But you won’t stop taking pictures will you?”

I told him no, I’m not going to stop.

It was a pretty river. Cutting thru a red canyon. Storm was rolling in. I knew I could take down the exposure and the highlights. That would add details to the clouds and give the shot a dramatic look. Then I’d put in some contrast, saturate the yellows, add a little vignette, and finally I’d dodge and burn the shit out of it.

It was a pretty spot.

I don’t think my photos did it justice.

Shameless self promotion: My book Hollywood Samizdat is available on paperback from Passage Press, or on ebook at Amazon. Audiobook coming soon.