Media Relationships - Fickle Beasts
I started my career in media as a runner.
It wasn’t glamorous but, it was a start.
I used to grab filmstock and deliver it every couple of hours from a shoot to the development house (3 to 4 times a day) for commercials, in film production it was driving celebrities and grabbing coffees all day.
I did about 1/2 year of this until I “graduated” to being a production assistant (it was more like an assistant to the production assistant).
My first job as such, all I had to do (no joke) was park the director’s & main actor’s cars from different parking locations in downtown Lisbon so we could save a few hundred-thousand euros in parking (twas mandated from prod bosses that since we were doing mainly a super cheap indie prod, that forking out possibly thousands of euros in 2 weeks of parking, would be a surreal expense for the project).
For those 2 weeks, I’d go park the cars in different locations, get back on set and waited for the production manager to tell me when to go “rotate the parking” again.
Those 2 weeks in production, doing such a menial job, taught me something that most content creators nowadays don’t really tend to easily understand — every menial job matters & that job is usually connected to someone’s reasoning on how they impact productions (in this case the production manager wanted to show the assistant director that his control of the set and surroundings was excellent).
I became a deep, quick friend with the production manager on said job and we worked on about a dozen projects through the years (before I ended up leaving Portugal to come galivant back to Asia).
Most of our views of the world of media & production aligned quite easily and for a large majority of our then up-starting careers, we seemed to be going in similar directions on what to do with our lives (I wanted to be a full-time producer in under a decade and he was about 2 or 3 productions away from making that jump from prod manager to full blown, accredited producer).
Things changed though when another friend needed support (mostly help and experience) on their first short-film (but wanted a tight-knit team), and not knowing many people in the industry, appointed me as producer of said project.
Me thinking that I needed to make sure that my friend’s project would get the best possible team for the cost, I went on to hire a solid couple of folks for my side of the line-up & of course had to have a discussion with my production manager friend to see if he’d be available to help out (budget was an issue so I knew that I could cover his usual market rates but needed him to help out manage the costs well).
When I offered him the job though, I was met with not only disdain but a seemingly aggressive stance on how “I didn’t deserve the title of producer when I had only been working in the industry for less than a couple of years”.
I tried to reason with him on how we needed the best for the project and, if necessary, I could drop my title to co-producer with him taking the other co-production title (which my friend the director didn’t have an issue with) but that was met with even a worse response because now “we were both at the same level when he was doing his job for half a decade”.
It was a tough time, like many for many in the media industry.
So what a menial job started as a friendship a title detail broke it off almost as quickly.
This situation did provide me with another valuable lesson though and one that I’ve kept in my pocket for the past 15 years in the industry (not just of course, being careful with your expenses and making sure a budget matches the needs of a project).
Compare yourself to your yesterday self, not anyone else that is in the same direction (or similar) than you. You’ll never measure up unless you get yourself better as a reference to others.
Afterall, relationships in the media industry, because of the passing tides and competition (but mostly clashing egos) are inherently fickle, so if you want to work at them, always be sure to understand the other side and fight comparisons as much as you can.
