Learning Curves

The last two weeks -- or has it been three? -- I have been taking a class in film budgeting and scheduling in this whole in the wall school in Van Nuys. I am not exactly sure why I took this course to begin with, and I guess that's the topic of this entry.

I am not one of those people that surf from class to class, course to course, lecture to lecture for my Saturday Shits and Giggles. I regard myself as their polar opposite. I hated school growing up, a seeming waste of time that could be better spent eating candy, watching "Transformers", and waging plastic war against plastic armies. Deep in my mischevious soul I still feel that way. I am also not a total Luddite either having learned the advantages of protein over carbs, and selective education when needed.

So, I assume, I went to this course to learn something then. I know the instructors. One of them taught me, and taught me quite well, how to script supervise on motion pictures and television. I think my original plot was to go in and once again raid the tombs of Hollywood for secret knowledge and go out and conquer the box office.

You see knowledge of how the film industry really works is something of a Masonic secret. Not intentionally. It is more a case of "That's they way its always been." You get into Hollywood, start making those mistakes everyone makes and eventually you learn not to make those mistakes anymore. You make different mistakes. Eventually through this trial and error proccess you reach an equillibrium of trial and error experience. But if you had really paid attention to people on the long road to that equillibirum you could've saved yourself some pain.

So far, however ,I haven't learned anything like that in this course. Its been more like a refresher in script breakdown and basic scheduling procedures. Stuff you learn by watching other people screw it up on set. Not like when I was first learning the ways of a script supervisor and it seemed like I was uncovering the secrets of my little world.

I think I am partly confirming that Producing and film financing are much more esoteric black arts than they are hard and fast skills. But I also wonder if its finally happened. Have I become Jaded in the classic Hollywood sense?

When I first got into the Industry I was so incredibly eager to the point of being disgusting about it all. I would do just about anything to keep working, because to me working on film sets was a thrill. There were always the horror stories and war stories that came after every set from trying to shoot a 14 page day to the numbskull who blew up an ArriFlex camera with a battery pack. Even that was fun and fresh.

Now, into my four year working on and off film sets, having watched my first production company tank due tot he idiocy of my German business partner, having heard the bullshit, having gone to the parties, none of that is a big deal anymore. I hear stories from these new graduates going out into the real world to work, coming back amazed at what the real film industry is like and sort of shrug my shoulders, sip my diet coke, and pass the joint.

I can't say its not fun. I also can't say its fun either. On a good day, sure, its all a blast. On a bad day, no way. On a bad day its just about getting out before sixteen hours with a paycheck not made of rubber. The fun's not totally gone, but a lot of the adventure certainly is.

So I wonder if I am just stuck in a rut, or bored, ormaybe its finally happened. Maybe Hollywood has gotten so far into my skin that its sliced the nerve endings, rendering me in the classic "Last Tycoon", "Day of the Locust" sense, Jaded?

I don't know. But somehow I find this new line of introspection distrubing only because I vowed to myself a long, long time ago that whatever I did for work, for a "Career" in the Bourgeious sense of the term, it would be fun. My job would be something I loved.

Now I wonder... Is that an impossible goal? Is it impossible to love what you do? Does it get so far under your own skin that eventually you get so disconnected from the reason you love doing it, thereby neutering it into just another "Job"? I wonder and I worry.

Nervous thoughts this Midnight in the City of Angels.

Keep it Sexy, America.