Bad Jobs: Production Assistant on an Independent Film
In 1983, my film producer father hired me to work as a production assistant on an indie horror film called Mutant. I was nervous and excited, eager to embrace the prestige of professional filmmaking. I quickly learned that indie film production had little to do with glamour.
I arrived in Atlanta on a blistering July day a few days before the start of shooting. The temperature and humidity topped 90% and everyone had nasty sweat stains. My first morning of work, I was driven in a van with a local P.A. named Roscoe to a creek near the Chattahoochee River. The driver dropped us off beside a small bridge and gave us shovels. He pointed to a steep slope covered in weeds leading to a boggy creek. Our job was to clear the hill of vegetation for a scene involving a car crash. The driver gave us a case of bottled water and said he’d return in a few hours. I watched as he drove away, the sun creating a double-image mirage of the van on the heated asphalt.
Having grown up in a middle-class Los Angeles suburb, I wasn’t used to grunt work. Roscoe was right in his element. He grabbed his shovel and commenced with the digging. I resolved not to let a good old boy outwork me. I stepped onto the hill and plunged my shovel blade into a patch of weeds. I immediately lost my balance and nearly tumbled into the stream.
