A couple of days ago, I got called to help with a load-in for a show my friend was doing. Unfortunately, I'm not part of the permanent crew, but hey, work is work. Besides, if I'm just on for a day, load-in days are the good ones. You spend the day in a rental house counting and checking out the gear and most of the time, you get to go home in less than eight hours. (And if you're lucky, you'll run into someone you know on a different crew and possibly drum up some future work. No such luck for me this time around though.) The work may be tedious, but I'm definitely not complaining.
Especially since I was lucky to even land work for a day. Word on the streets is that it's still pretty slow out there in terms shooting. Almost every juicer, grip and cameraman I've spoken to since I got back into town early last month has been out of work. Sigh. So much for the rumors.
But something weird was going on at the rental house though. They were missing a lot of gear. We had to cross some things off our order list simply because they didn't have any more inventory on their shelves. There were a few items we had to sit and wait around for because they just got returned. And often times, we ended up with the older style lights and stands (aka: stuff that's rusted, banged up, and/or somewhat questionable) because that's all they had left. By the time we got there, there wasn't even any more milk crates! And this was a pretty well known and sizable rental house too.
So what's going on here? Why is it that most people, union and non-union folk alike, are pretty much starving for work, yet a major rental house is running out of equipment? This makes no sense to me. Where is all this gear going and who is being hired to operate it??
Am I missing something?
7 comments :
Do they have a satellite office in another state? I know here in good old Seattle most of the Pacific Grip and Lighting gear was down in Portland to feed the beast known as Leverage.
We'd get things from them for a project that hadn't seen the light of day since Northern Exposure was filming in Washington. It was kinda crazy.
Interesting, in a depressing sort of way. My guess is the rental houses sent fully-packed 40 footers to stages and locations all over the country in the service of what we in California call "runaway production."
When a state with no existing film industry or infrastructure to support large-scale film and TV production enacts subsidies to bring that business in, all the essential grip, lighting, and camera equipment has to come from somewhere else. If those subsidies stay in effect long enough, a local rental industry will spring up -- or satellite offices (as Niall mentioned) will be opened by the big rental houses on the East and West Coasts. Then maybe "our" equipment will return -- whether to be put to good use on sets all over Hollywood, or simply gather dust on the rental house shelves remains to be seen.
Things are deader than dead on my radar screens right now, but the tom-toms are beating in the night air with good news about March.
Keep your fingers crossed...
Niall and Michael - Hm... Good points. I didn't even consider runaway productions. This particular rental house does have warehouses in other states, but they're mainly on the east coast. If the lack of gear is due to out of state shooting, my guess would be that the missing milk crates are floating around between here and there.
I hope you're right about March, Michael. That's a much better forecast than the one I've been getting about "not until summer."
My fingers are crossed.
They're all in New Orleans. (or detroit, or Atlanta, or wherever the lower taxes send them).
D - I thought about those places too, but this particular rental company has warehouses in two of those three cities. There can't be that much production going on there to wipe out several rental houses... Can there?
NBC's pilots?
After the Leno/CoCo debacle, they are running something like 14 pilots right now...
That might be part of it.
Anonymous - I was under the impression that the major studios had their own gear. Though that does bring up another puzzle. From what I hear, the studios are booked solid, yet there's still too many of us out of work...
Post a Comment