My Glamorous Life as a Producer

Craig and I settled into a weekly routine. On weekdays, I would frantically organize locations, props, extras and minor players for the upcoming weekend. On Friday night, Craig would go get any picture vehicles we were borrowing, whether it was the VW bus, gardener's truck, motorcycles, or Lubitch's monster truck. The first three required that we also rent a trailer to tow behind the RV (a lesson learned after the clutch went out on the VW bus that first weekend). On Saturday morning, we went to the market to stock up on snacks for the "food service" table: fresh fruit, granola bars, cookies, nuts, chips, coffee, cokes, fruit juices, etc.

On the first and second weekends of shooting, I made lunch/dinner runs around 4:00 p.m. Taking orders, going and fetching the food, bringing it back and serving it - this took hours. Plus, the cast/crew was composed of both vegans and carnivores. It was time-consuming to find a reasonably priced take-out restaurant that offered a tasty selection of both kinds of meals. I had no patience for this. I have never enjoyed cooking or serving. I have limited - some people will say extraordinarily picky - tastes in food. Plus, I was supposed to be producing, not catering. When I watched the dailies of what I missed, I saw that errors were being made. Cass was being shot with bare arms exposed - arms that were supposed to be hidden until the full extent of her cuts and bruises were revealed later on. We ended up having to reshoot these scenes at a later date, at additional expense. I absolutely needed to be on set, not gallivanting around.

We also needed someone to pick up the rental equipment on Friday afternoons, and return it Monday mornings. Michael was currently handling that job, and was not happy doing it. Most weekends required equipment from two different rental houses, on opposite ends of L.A.

I made it known that I was looking to hire a production assistant. Principal duties: handle rental equipment and lunch runs. Experience not required.

Jared, our sound guy, recommended a friend of his named Christian, who was between jobs. Christian was perfect. He was happy to do whatever was asked, and even though he did not own his own car, he managed to get the job done. (most of the time borrowing Jared's car - extra shout out to Jared for that favor.) I was thrilled to have an assistant. It was the closest I'd ever come to having a minion.

Even though his job description did not call for this, Christian allowed us to put on green face paint and dress him like an ogre. Come to think of it ... If that's not a minion, I don't know what is.

Shooting ran til after midnight every Saturday and Sunday. Craig and I were always the last to leave, because we had to wait for the download from Justin's camera onto our mac. It was then a two hour drive back to Escondido. We'd get home usually at 2 or 3 a.m.

And then I was up at 5:30 a.m. on Monday, to get ready for school. Two and a half hours later I was in the classroom, bleary-eyed, telling students to get out a pencil and paper for notes. "Does anyone remember the standard form of an equation for a circle? An ellipse? A hyperbola?" I was asking them because I could barely remember myself.