setbacks

Today is all about failure.

Google defines "miserable failure" as "President George W. Bush".

Or at least it used to. They fixed that a while back, to the collective disappointment of nerds like me.

But here's a fun thing I found on Google today: try googling "Elgoog". Mind-bending stuff. Or you can try googling "french military victories", if you weren't around about six years ago when that joke was still fresh.

But today we aren't talking about weird Google results-- we're talking about failure.

(I think that's what I was talking about, right?)

For me, failure has taken a lot of different forms. I failed to get into the film school I wanted to get into. I failed at being an engineer. And this summer I applied to about twenty different jobs as a production assistant, and I failed to get a single one.

A production assistant is a person that works on a film set, who basically does all of the shit that nobody else wants to do. It's a position that's just above "being a prop" on a set. A typical PA task involves guarding the set from passersby for five hours straight, or wading into a muddy stream to carefully keep a small fleet of toy boats from floating off-camera. If you're lucky, you get to drive places and pick things up-- or pick people up-- because union scale for gas reimbursement is amazing.

But yeah, I couldn't even get a single one of those jobs for this summer.

I almost got work on a reality show that was going to be filmed in either Newport Beach (which I could do) or Santa Barbara (which I couldn't)-- but as Orange County is a ridiculously expensive place to film, they said nyet to Newport. That makes sense to me, though. I mean, they didn't even tape The O.C. in Orange County, which says a lot about how much it must cost.

I mean, the show is called "The O.C." for God's sake. If they named a show "Temecula" I would think they would go ahead and film it in Temecula. If it was called "West New Mexico", go film in friggin' Albuquerque. "Chico", "Downtown Riverside", "Agoura Hills"-- you get the point. Hollywood is weird sometimes.

Oh well.

Luckily, craigslist keeps posting a pretty constant stream of these types of openings. So I'm gonna keep trying to break in. If I get anything, you guys will be the first to know.

Some people have told me I shouldn't have to be a PA at all, if I want to be a writer/director. Honestly though, I just want the experience on set. I don't really mind doing crappy work, if I'm going to be working in such an interesting place.

But so far... the word of the day is "failure".