I often wonder how a studio set functions without occasionally acknowledging the tension of twenty minions politely waiting for their big break... while working for the person whose job they would like. Bad sentence, but I'll come back to it later. Point being, at school we all know we're competing, but at least we can kind of do a friendly jostle here and there and there's an understanding that eventually anyone who works hard and has a reasonable balance of good luck to bad will make a stab at it. Not so at Fox. I met a good fifteen people today: they would all like to be in the writers' room. They are not.
I was walking around the lot with Dana's lovely assistant Kate when she circumspectly referred to this weirdness. I asked her for advice about the summer. The lot has large murals painted on several of the buildings - the one behind Kate showed a vaguely anemic Luke Skywalker doing battle with Vader.
"Don't be pushy," she said. "Don't be too smart. I mean, be smart, but not about the writing. Make friends who write. Be smart with them, get your lines out at your dinner parties. I'm still working on the balance." We looked up at the mural. Poor Luke, about to have his hand cut off by the Force. Stuck up there forever.
"Does Dana ever show her scripts to you, though? In private."
Kate beamed. "Dana's really nice with me, actually. I'm lucky. One of my jokes made it into the pilot; I called my parents, I was so excited." I asked her what the joke was, but she wouldn't tell me. "It'll seem like bragging," she said. "I don't know you well enough for bragging yet. Try again next week."
On the way home from the lot, I took the bus in the wrong direction and ended up at the Santa Monica airport. It's as close as an airfield can get to cozy, with little carts puttering around on the tarmac. I bet the air traffic controllers there are happy with their jobs - they don't want to eventually get into the cockpit.
Lucky air traffic controllers.
Notes from a stucco workplace.
Any flat surfaces in LA which are not regularly cleaned acquire a thin layer of chalky black dust. Mary says it is from the big ships that come into the harbour; it makes me feel like the volcanic apocalypse is approaching.
I may come back to this later, but shredding Mary's old patient notes is killing the writer in me. Every file is a real character - you'd never need to come up with a backstory again!
Cheers
Julia
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