Musings on Hollywood

So, this past week I was in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to film a major motion picture with genuine Movie Stars (tm). This was a fascinating experience, but one of the more exhausting in my life.

The first day, I met the band at our holding area, which was a curious little building that must have held apartments at some point. Now it was basically condemned, with holes in the floors and dust everywhere. Fun features: a great old piano, and a sign over a bucket that said, "Please Use Butt Can." Sadly, I failed to get a picture of either. We got to know this building quite well as we went back and forth to the set. In addition, in our holding room itself, there was another fun feature: in the women's bathroom (a generic bathroom labeled as such) there was an old man's face in a mosaic on the floor. Creepy? Absolutely.

There isn't much else I can legally say about the picture itself, so instead I shall muse on Hollywood.

Filmmaking is wildly inefficient. While I understand that many scenes take many, many takes to get the way the director desires, the process one goes through while shooting these is, as many told me in the last few days, "hurry up and wait." We, as musicians, were expecting the music industry's version of events: show up, perform, go home, with no wait. Intense, but efficient. Meanwhile, for movies, it was more like show up, wait, rehearse, wait, perform, wait, try again, wait, wait, break for lunch, wait, perform, wait, wait, leave. To us, who had monopoly games waiting for us in the holding room, this was exasperating at the very least.

Filmmaking is also entirely unglamorous. If I didn't understand tabloids now, I understand them even less. Just because movie stars are prettier than the rest of us doesn't justify airing every mundane detail of their lives. But I digress. Where I might have expected a bit more kid-glove treatment of our glorious star, he actually was a bit more connected to the rest of the film than I expected-- he had no problem walking through us, and I hardly every saw his bodyguard. And I must say, there is nothing glamorous about standing in a street for hours on end.

And finally, I have decided that perhaps I might do this again, but for a greater fee than last time. When one breaks down my wages and the hours I worked....I made less than minimum wage an hour. Ah well.

But in any case, I'll be Coming Soon to theaters Near You!