A Long, Introverted Post No One Will Read

About a week back I PAd for a short my friend Jay is producing. We were walking back from parking the van, talking about how it had been a hard day, and Jay asked, politely, "Are you having any fun at all on this production?"

This is a question I get at least once on every production. My answer is usually "I don't think 'fun' is the right word," but that tends to end the conversation a little quicker than I intend. Jay's a friend, so I decided to give him a fuller explanation.


"I don't do productions to have fun," I said. "I know some PAs do jobs to have fun, if it's early in their careers or if it's their first job, but I don't do that. I'm a professional.

"Production overall might be fun, but there are so many parts of this job that are inherently un-fun, like moving around trash, so you sort of have to take the good with the bad."

Then I told him about Surreal Moments of the Day and how that day I'd gotten in to a sort of tug-of-war with a clown, and I'd enjoyed that. But the natural next question is, if I don't PA for fun, why do I do it?

Some Excellent Reasons Not to Be a PA
PAing isn't the most thankless job on set, but just because there are so many other contenders. PAing takes skill, but it's an entry-level job, which means I'm often treated as a beginner until I prove I'm not (and often even then) and I often have a nagging feeling that anyone can do what I do.

I've thought a lot lately that I'm too good a PA to keep doing it. It's pride fucking with me, of course. I believe that good PAs find their niche and then move up to better jobs, or they work on commercials for the money, but I don't really like doing commercials.

It also bothers me to see other people doing a job on set when I suspect, right or wrong, that I could do better at the same job.

Last week I watched as the key told a very green grip (too green to know he needed to bring gloves to set) to take a double out of an HMI. The kid struggled for awhile before finally suceeding in unclipping the gel and diffusion from the light (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, just know that this is bad.) I winced.

Of course, I'd be second-guessing people at their jobs even if I weren't at the bottom of the filmmaking hierarchy. It's just that at the higher levels, it's actually someone's job to second-guess other people. At my level, it just pisses people off.

Oh, and because it's an entry-level job, the pay is shit.

Why I Do It
First, in a very real way, I don't see an alternative to being a PA. 9-5 has never appealed to me (I have worked 10-7, but that was something else entirely). I can't move up to something without risking incompetence, and I have a complex about that I'd prefer not to get in to at the moment.

I've consistently been bad at job hunts because I get overwhelmed and I have trouble starting things where I don't know a clear path to the next step.

PAing is also a low-responsibility job. It's not my fault if production was delayed four hours on a job because the camera wasn't ready. It's hard (but not impossible) to screw things up too badly as even a semi-competent PA. Of course, I balance this out by owning problems too much.


Then there's the fact that production is addictive. There's a new environment almost every day, new people every job, new problems to deal with every moment. It's always intellectually stimulating.

Like any addiction, however, production is unhealthy. I don't sleep enough. I put my body through the oddest things. The stress has broken lesser men.

But Here's Why I Really Do It
The best and worst part of production is that it does not leave space for any other part of my life. That's the big reason I do production - it leaves no time or energy to face the other problems in my life. I have no choice but to ignore them. It's a tremendously unhealthy place for me to be.

After each job, once the high of finishing and having my life back wears off, once I feel I've used all the time I could excuse doing nothing, I inevitably have the same problems I had before the job and I crash very, very hard.

So I'm now in a position where I have to give up production to survive - or at least limit the amount I work so I don't allow it to take over my life. I have to work on my problems so I can be happy when I'm not working. I have to figure out how to move my life on to something else.

Which is not to say I'm announcing my retirement from PAing, film or anything else. I don't know what else to do or how to do it. I'm stuck, and I have to figure a way out.