Making the Cut
The shortest job I ever had
I answered the job ad reluctantly, not knowing whether this thing was a scam or if it was legitimate. I mean, they had an official website that looked the part, but again, you can be anyone you want on the web.
But after having returned that September from a summer road romp through the Pacific Northwest to South Dakota and back again to the misty-but-still-beautiful beaches of Southern California, I needed to find work yet again, and fast. Being picky with a job listing wasn’t a card on the table, even if it did come from Craigslist, of all places.
But it had to do with film, and that was enough for me to be all for it.
It was one location in a small chain of video conversion shops: those places where people take all their family home movies and dusty old photos in order to have them digitized and restored before the sands of time inevitably claimed the originals through wither and decay. The place was a short enough drive from where we were staying, and it was paying me, at least in that period, far more than what I was making cutting deli meat and emptying putrid chicken fryers all day at Ralph’s.
They were looking for someone to help clean, digitize, edit and package all the 8mm film reels that came through the shop’s doors, moving them from the projector to DVD.
The choice was like night and day. Why not go for it?
As an ardent student of cinema, the old days of Hollywood held (heck, they still hold) a nostalgic allure that bordered on the fantastical. While I knew every in and out of editing a film on the computer, and could do it pretty well, editing celluloid film was a different animal. In theory I knew how things went down on the cutting room floors of Tinseltown’s most celebrated studios, where the art of film editing was created in virtual reel-time (I couldn’t help myself).
Mistakes could be costly: rarely did they duplicate footage back in the earlier days. On the computer, if you make a wrong cut on the timeline, you can simply Ctrl + Z the problem away. If you messed up cutting the master print reel…you were as good as screwed.
It was a delicate job with a lot of care and responsibility, especially since nobody thought twice about making backups of home movies. One oopsie in handling the original reel, and the family Christmas of 1955 was marred forever. Sorry, Grandma.
Considering all things, I had pretty careful hands. Again, why not?
I was even more surprised when I was actually called in for the interview. Brian, the manager — a discount dead-ringer for Seth Rogen if I ever saw one; he even had the gritty voice to match — asked me what I knew about video, why I wanted the job, and even what my favorite song was. Apparently, my taste in music helped me get hired.
Donny, the solo manager of the video conversion department, walked me through all the steps of the process. With wild, wiry hair, five o’clock shadow, thick glasses and a mad scientist’s lab coat, he looked like a much-younger Rick Sanchez, minus the selfish existentialism and a sidekick grandson with which to drag on his meandering adventures. He was a pretty chill guy, to say the least.
There was a girl named Jessica, and another guy, rounding out the total staff to five, Brian included. This was a unique camaraderie that I’d never experienced before in such a small, cluttered office. We traded jokes across the room to each other, giggled at stupid YouTube videos off the cuff, and gobbled handfuls of bite-sized candies in the break room during lunch. All the while I was getting better at cleaning dust off of old films, gently guiding them through the conversion machine, watching the film whilst blowing any pesky remaining hairs off of the footage with compressed air, then finally editing the digitized film before burning it to a custom DVD. I felt like I was re-living a bit of what the old masters must’ve felt when inventing this whole art form.
It stands out in my mind as one of the best stints of work I’d ever been a part of. But sometimes, good things don’t last too long.
While blissfully walking into work, whistling a merry tune like something out of a Disney cartoon, Brian calls me into his office. He’s slouched in his chair, a somber look on his face. He clutches a check in his bloated hand.
To make a long story short: I was fired.
I still don’t know entirely why. I was told it was because I wasn’t “fast” or “consistent” enough, but I don’t buy that. Not once were there any performance issues that were brought to my attention: believe me, if they were, I’d have been on top of fixing those right and quick. But nope, this news came out of nowhere. And I thought I was doing so well.
But I didn’t make the cut for this one.
Of course, I was shattered; not only because I’d never been fired before, but more so that this was the closest thing to a dream job that I’d had. And it barely lasted two weeks. For a while, it made me think that every time a good thing came along, it was only a matter of time before it went blowing away in the wind, and I’d be back where I started from, at the bottom.
Years later, another career-defining job I grew to love also went away, much in the same manner. But this was due to the current recession scuttling that company, not because I was a slouch at the job. I was far from the only one who got laid off, but it didn’t sting any less. That job lasted just beyond a year, but nowhere near as long as I would’ve hoped. But that’s a story for another time.
As short as working at the video conversion place was, it wasn’t gonna be the end of my time working with or around film, not by a long shot.
There’s still a third act waiting to be screened.
