The climb

4/8/11

Old and regretful. That’s how I feel this fine if chilly Friday morning in LA. I have been working for a major worldwide television production company for the past 3 weeks and only today did I glean the little bit of information about my fellow co-workers that I had feared. One of the casting associates is 26, one of the casting producers, 28. Here I am, nearly 28 myself and I am still just a production assistant. I have done plenty of work as a production coordinator and I have the expertise to be a production manager or an associate producer, but the nature of the beast out here has saddled me with setbacks.

Don’t get me wrong; I am happy to be working and steady paychecks are such a relief on my strained mind. But I overheard them discussing some work opportunity one might be able to hook the other up with “But its only for $[X] a week, so I understand that’s, like, nothing” where X is twice what I make per week. I feel silly quibbling about this, money is only a means to an end for me; I don’t need money, I just want to not have to worry about it so much. Thankfully, my paychecks from this gig are covering all my costs and actually allowing me to accrue some capital so my standard of living is going to go up. Hooray.

I just worry that I am doing something wrong. Probably my most paralyzing fear I have is that I am always missing opportunities; that if I just knew where to look, who to talk to, where to be; then maybe I could feel a bit more satisfied by my current station. I don’t feel like I deserve to be a producer right now or anything like that, but something a bit higher, a bit stabler, a bit more directional.

I’ve had to climb this ladder before, and here I start to do it again. Hopefully this time I don’t get kicked off again. A year ago this time, I was in line to become a coordinator at another company I’d moved out here to work for. After a month of training for the position, everyone stopped calling. I found out after a week of calling around that the contract with the network was being renegotiated. No one bothered to tell me. Month went by with me checking in every week or so; no news. Around September I learn that the show’d been back on for over a month and that another PA, Titus, had been given the coordinator job. He had been their original first pick for it, but he told them he didn’t really want to work in tv and was planning on leaving the company at the end of the year anyway. Regardless, they had reneged their offer to me and gave him the job. Titus did not particularly care for me, and so I never got hired there again to do freelance work. Come January, Titus had left as he said he would and I dropped by the company to let them know I’d been doing some coordinator work for a major television show and would like the opportunity to pick up where we’d left off. The company had let Titus pick his replacement, however, and he chose a friend with no coordinator experience. That’s the Hollywood game.

So I’m grateful to be employed, and for the chance to climb again.