Don't screw me over with my rate and I won't bail on your project. That's the lesson to be learned after I recently left an indie movie I was on called "Untitled" after the first week. Since then, I did a couple more days on Gossip Girl and now I'm on a Dreamworks picture called "Ghosttown" with Ricky Gervais, Greg Kinnear and Tea Leoni.
The people on "Untitled" called me a month before shooting started to offer me a job. At first they enticed me with the promises of a better position like Key PA or 2nd 2nd AD, but then told me I'd be driving the G/E truck that I'd driven before at the rate of $125/day. I took the gig because I figured they might be able to hook me up with a better position at some point. A week before filming started, I found out they had decided to go with a bigger truck that needed someone with a CDL, so I got bumped down to just a regular set PA. I didn't mind that so much until I found out, three days into shooting, that because I wasn't driving the truck they had dropped my rate down to $100/day. Lame. So, I bailed on them. I figure if you don't show me any loyalty, then I don't have to show you any either.
So, now I'm working on "Ghosttown". Today we're at Steiner Studios, but we have been doing a lot of location shooting on the UES. I've really been surprised at how many people don't know who Ricky Gervais is (creator/writer/star of the original English "The Office" and the hilarious show "Extras"), but I guess it takes people a while to get the British shows. They'll probably all end up on PBS in ten years... I love the show Extras, especially because I started watching it right after I had just started running background on films, so I found it paticularly funny and true. When people would ask me what my workday was like, I would just tell them to watch "Extras" because it was so right on.
This movie, "Ghosttown", is a comedy that seems to be like the movie "Ghost", only focusing on the Whoopi Goldberg-type character that's played by Ricky Gervais as a dentist that starts seeing ghosts, the main one who is played by Greg Kinnear who wants to talk to his widow played by Tea Leoni, and then becomes overrun with ghosts looking for help in the living world.
Otherwise, I've worked a little on Gossip Girl, which continues to be a fun gig, and I drove around my in-laws last weekend when they came up for a visit. My father-in-law is in a wheelchair (he was a surgeon, but was paralyzed in a horse riding accident) so I had to drive the whole clan (Helen has 4 sisters + her mom) in a converted wheelchair van. It was hectic but fun. I think I won a couple of points with the fam-in-laws when I used my grip knowledge to put together a couple of ramps so that Helen's dad could get in to our apartment building.
Anyway, that's all I got for now. 'Til next time...
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