Sitting in minivans wishing I was drinking coffee
Why was Josh getting paid poorly to sit in a Toyota Siena for days and days and days?
This week marks the completion of the second full movie cycle at Unkind Rewind, where we watched Night of the Creeps with our guest, Leon Henderson Jr., who we pre-interviewed last week (Apple Podcasts or YouTube). The movie is super fun on its own (and it was one that neither Sean, Adam, nor I had even heard of), but our guest Leon makes the ep inarguably more enjoyable.
If you didn’t listen to the Pre-Interview with Leon, Leon and I met working on [America’s Best Karaoke Singer?], which I worked on off-and-on from Season 13 to Season 18. Working might not be the right word for what we did, but we had to be there at our call times and very occasionally do something which resembled work.
Working in the TV and film industry is not for everyone, as there’s a massive amount of financial uncertainty baked into the pursuit of work in the field. Shows begin. Shows end. You will likely have weeks, if not months, of downtime between gigs, as employment in the industry is nearly entirely determined by who you know who can get you on the show they got hired onto.
Downtime sounds great in the abstract. You might be sitting at your desk, not working, reading this right now, drifting off thinking about what time off from work would be like.
Is not punching the clock better than punching the clock in a vacuum? Yes.
Is not working preferable to paying your bills? The jury is out on that.
As someone who was lucky enough to have (after a few years of busting my ass) a handful of people higher up the food chain for whom I would be one of their first calls to staff up their show when they got hired, I generally had a somewhat steady flow of work just from shows that I’d land on for a season or for reshoots (additional photography) or for a pilot or to fix things*, but when each show had run its course, I’d be faced with the prospect of needing another gig.
*This happened way more than you’d think or want, often after getting passed over for the initial hiring for a reasons you later found out about and couldn’t help but be perturbed by, especially when you were overqualified for the position in question while the person who did get the job was less qualified and generally turned out to be bad enough that I ended up getting asked to come in weeks later and make up for the fact that I’d not been hired in the first place.
At a certain point about a year and a half into working into the industry, I had the good fortune of landing at [America’s Best Karaoke Singer?], a show that then had the benefit of being in production for 36 weeks a year, thanks to my having a connection to the transportation department. There were both union and non-union drivers, the non-union drivers—I was sadly not a well-paid union transpo driver—responsible for taking contestants and occasionally talent to any number of places largely but not entirely on the lot at Universal.
The job was not difficult unless you were somehow not good at driving a minivan, and there were times when it was mind-numbingly boring, but aside from the random day with multiple runs to LAX from Studio City (for non-Angelenos, this means somewhere in the neighborhood of at least two and often three hours in traffic on these roundtrips runs) or something of that sort, your day-to-day work life as one of the non-union drivers on [America’s Best Karaoke Singer?] was an easy if not particularly lucrative one.
By not lucrative, I mean it was easily the worst rate I had on a show, as unlike virtually every other show, they didn’t have guaranteed 12-hour days for pay at the time. This is a weird thing for people with normal jobs to hear, but for film/TV work, when a show is in production, you generally have a guaranteed 12-hour day (some higher paying skilled labor jobs have a guaranteed 10-hour day, and some SAG-AFTRA gigs are guaranteed 6-hour days) on any day you are booked, meaning you are paid for at least 12 (or 10 or 6 as applicable) hours of work regardless of if you work the full 12. If you work more than that, you’re paid for that overtime, provided you’re not on a non-union weekly rate (which I won’t bother explaining), but if minimum wage was $15, you would generally have been guaranteed a $210/12 rate, even if you worked a just 10.5 hours. At the time, [America’s Best Karaoke Singer?] did not guarantee its PAs a 12-hour day, meaning if you just worked 8 hours, you’d just get $120. When the industry standard is guaranteed 12s, working on a show that didn’t guarantee a 12-hour day to those on the lowest rung of the totem pole—you best believe the IATSE positions got their guarantees—could cost the most vulnerable employees hundreds of dollars a week.
Given that, I only worked on [America’s Best Karaoke Singer?] when I wasn’t booked on another show, but it was nice to keep money coming in between gigs that paid me better, be it a PA job with responsibilities past that of a PA but which guaranteed me a 12-hour day or (more often as time went on) non-union production coordinator or production manager work. It was also nice to have that money coming in from a show that did not require much of me, labor-wise.
Generally and especially on tape days, we had a few high-volume times of the day where multiple different runs were happening and at least half a dozen drivers were in motion with contestants. Outside of those times with a slew of moving pieces, we generally got to just hang out in minivans, which mostly consisted of shooting the shit with the other drivers. It was an easy show to make friends on because you had to fill the downtime somehow, and I was very bad at carving out time to try to write on the clock when I could be shooting the shit with, say, this and last week’s Unkind Rewind guest, Leon, or likely eventual other guests. Not unlike that service industry job you had in your teens or twenties, much of what your job consisted of bordered on ridiculous, this just happened to be taking place as the cast and crew of Superstore (did you catch our interview with Johnny Pemberton?) or The Good Place or The Mindy Project were passing by, while I desperately wished I was working on those shows instead.
Was [America’s Best Karaoke Singer?] a show I watched? No. To this day, I’ve seen part of one episode only because I was work friends with one of the contestants and was curious to see what he sang like, especially since he was getting to do a song he really wanted to do, which happened less often than you’d imagine. We also had a lot of common interests musically, bonding over Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, and pre-MeToo Ryan Adams.
Honestly, you’d be shocked at how little I’ve seen of the shows I’ve worked on. Aside from the show I keep going back to LA to work even after moving back to Minnesota, I’ve seen Goliath, Marriage Story, Murder Mystery, and You Get Me. I saw a specific episode of Listing Impossible I worked on to show my sister and brother-in-law a particularly ridiculous episode. That might be it.
While I may not have watched [America’s Best Karaoke Singer?] or have been paid in a manner that could have been considered competitive, I made friends on the show and got paid to mostly sit in a minivan, contemplating how my move to LA had gone so far astray of what I’d wanted it to have been while not writing, certainly not being paid to write which was the whole point of the move, and intermittently getting to wax ecstatic about Patriot or Mandy or The Nice Guys for as long as someone would listen.
So we’re in the middle of unpacking a five-part SVU/Organized Crime crossover event at Munch My Benson. The SVU ep we covered this week was actually really good, and I think the second part that we cover next week (or dropped this week for our full-fledged Munchies at Patreon) was really good as well.
As for this week’s Unkind Rewind with Leon, it’s super fun. I’m the sort of person who likes to have seen the thing being talked about. Night of the Creeps is available on Archive.org (shhhhhh…) and is campy enough that it shouldn’t scare off the horror-averse. You can listen to the episode on any podcast app—here’s the Apple Podcasts link—and you can watch the episode on YouTube as well. I really think the new pod is fun and MUCH MORE accessible to the general public.