It was after 2 am the next day when my car started sputtering after I had worked 22 hours on a promo for a movie that you would probably know of. I was totally broke, had no money in the bank, my truck was about to get repossessed and I wasn’t sure how I would pay for gas if I could get to it.
I was a production assistant and had been driving the production cube earlier that day, and well night. I had dropped the cube off about twenty minutes ago at the rental yard in Hollywood.
That truck was full of gas. My car was not. I had left my apartment a little above ‘E’, hoping karma would get me through the day and back to my apartment. Magical Thinking had worked up until now.
I hadn’t worked much over the last month. I had only been in town for about a year. I wasn’t totally sure how this was going to all work out. Especially when I rolled into the gas station in North Hollywood and my Nissan pick-up truck was out of gas.
I had known this was a possibility when I took the gig. I was on like a quarter of a tank. But I needed the work. Even though it was only one day. I had food in the refrigerator and if I just made it home tonight I could walk to the bank when my check for my last gig arrived, get cash, and then hope I would make it to the gas station then.
That had been a miscalculation.
I was at a bottom. The town was slow, or maybe I was just slow. I still didn’t know a lot of people and was trying to build my network. This gig actually was a result of those efforts. Another PA I had worked with on a feature had started coordinating and he was an assistant coordinator on this little promo and knew Ii had driven cube trucks for commercials. I had worked in construction before the film business, among a bunch of other professions, and had driven some bigger trucks then.
I was happy to be working until I saw the schedule at around 6 am that morning, which had us wrapping in 18 hours after a planned second meal. Yes, a scheduled 18-hour day. And that didn’t include pre-calls and wrap out.
Normally the long hours didn’t bother me, but that seemed a little excessive. Especially after all the Production Assistants had just humped 10’ sections of dolly track up four flights of stairs. (In commercials and promos, PAs pick up the dolly and track and are responsible for getting it to set and back to the rental house at the end of the shoot.)
Knowing that we almost always go over on every shoot, I was a little concerned.
I had been up since about 3 in the morning, since I was already worried about my gas situation and I had to pick up the cube truck, park my car around 4:15 am to make sure I was at the lot by 5 a.m. to start downloading that dolly track so we could have it all up there for the 6 am crew call.
That all went well. I rolled into the rental yard, picked up the truck that had been left for me and drove to the studio.
Other than the whole 18-hour day thing, and the thought of driving home and maybe not making it the whole day, the gig went well overall.
Thinking back, I should have asked somebody for some money or something but I was too midwestern proud to ask for help. This was my problem. And I’m sort of glad i didn’t because then I wouldn’t have this story to tell. All right, I’m off track. About the shoot:
Although it first seemed like we would have a bunch of A-List stars on the shoot from the movie, but we were just photo-doubling them. I’m not really a star fucker, but I do like to check off those little boxes of meeting the peeps.
The crew moved pretty well for coming together in a day and having a boat load of work to accomplish. But the day just seemed never ending. We were shooting vignettes and so we would move, block, light and then roll for awhile on a couple of angles, then move to the next one. Rinse and Repeat.
But I couldn’t help but keep looking at the clock. The day went forever. The PA’s joked about how maybe they would cut something, after all, would we really shoot this long. We did. Shoot that long. Not cut anything.
And then went a little extra because that’s Hollywood.
We wrapped out and carried all the stuff back down stairs that was too big to fit in the elevators we weren’t really supposed to use anyway because we were shooting in someone’s office on the lot, not stages or back lot.
We packed it all back into the cube truck and I drove it to the rental yard. Backed it in a spot. Hid the key in the jockey box so the morning P.A. could take it and do the returns. Check.
I got in my pickup and convinced myself that the needle was pretty way over ‘E’ and I had this. But could magical thinking get me home? It was kind of crapping out on me lately. O
I mean, it had gotten me this far in Hollywood. I hadn’t really known a lot of people when I got there, but through work and meeting people and staying in touch and just trying to do my best, things were seeming to fall into place.
I seemed to get jobs when I needed them and get by every month. But it had gotten tighter and tighter recently. I still had a car payment. The weeks I didn’t work, were catching up.
I was actually pretty close when I ran out of gas.
And this is where it achieves the spiritual dimension of Magical Thinking seeming to work.
I’m going to back track. Well side track actually. Oh, and I still have to explain the $.37 from earlier.
In L.A. people would quote the book “The Secret,” in the midwest or south they might say, “God helps those who help themselves.”
I could have in theory, turned down the job and claimed unemployment. And I’m not righteous about taking unemployment or not, just I also believe you should never turn down work. Who knows where it will take you (even it it’s running out of gas in North Hollywood at o-dark-hundred)?
So I was in theory, losing money already when I took this gig because I would have made more by doing nothing — and still had some gas. But I took it because It was the right thing to do to keep moving forward. Work begets work, you’ll hear said a lot here.
Okay, back to magical thinking, The Secret, and the woo-woo of it all:
When I ran out of gas, ultimately, I was able to roll into a gas station. Right to the pump. Truth.
I had one problem well, lots but the one at the moment was that I had no money and my debit card would have been declined anyway
I’m not the kind of person (or at least I wasn’t) to tuck $20 in my wallet for emergencies such as these. I had long since raided all the change stashes in the vehicle.
And I’m not the person who could easily go up and wake up the sleeping attendant and ask him for free gas.
So, I started digging around under the seats of my car anyway. And that’s when I found the $.37 cents.
I dug and I dug through all my P.A. debris in the cab and the extended cab but that’s all I could locate. The weird thing, I had dug through there a lot lately for changes and was pretty sure I had raked it clean.
I took that .37 cents to the little booth, woke the dude up and tucked the quarter, dime and two pennies into the tray.
And he gave me .37 cents worth of gas and went back to sleeop.
The truck started up after a few turns. I got home.
What made this day for me was though that when I started up my truck after putting in a third of a gallon of gas was that I knew I could make it. I could make it through this week.
And I could keep making it through weeks.
Things were going to work out.
That week, I hung out, went to the gym and waited. A check from a previous gig arrived a couple of days later. I walked to the Wells Fargo, deposited it, took the little bit of cash I could for an advance.
I drove on ‘E’ again back to the gas station. This time I filled it up.