The Humble Nailbanger

I’ve been walking around with this post sort of slowly coming together in my head, formed from a few different elements I’ve picked up from here and there.  Basically it’s about the ups and downs of stagehand life as a whole, how we’re viewed by the rest of the crew and the world, and how we see ourselves.

First, I noticed that I had been linked (once again) by Backstage at backstagejobs.com.  Thanks very much for that.  So I was poking around that site, and I came across this little piece of annoyance, where English-Test.net explains what a stagehand is:

A stage hand is someone who does small jobs in the theater – helping with the scenery, making tea for the cast and cleaning the place. Hand in this sense represents the person – an employee doing manual work.

OK?  That’s completely understates the scope of the job, except for making tea for the cast (?!) and (in some cases) cleaning the place, which stagehands rarely (really rarely, as in “if ever”) do.

Then, OneNYCStagehand returned after a bit of a hiatus (and I’ll cop to being one of the “folks with too much time on their hands” who was wondering where he went) and clued his readers in one where he has/had been:

I think many of us like to think that we primarily make our living in the arts or at least on the periphery of it. But even in New York City it sometimes difficult to survive on just a diet of culture. As we get further and further from the hot sun of the fine arts, away from the nourishing atmosphere of Broadway we’ll work in the cold outer planets of “television” and “industrial.” Even these can be satisfying when the technological gee-whiz factor is high enough. A lot of product rollouts and events have a lot of bright, new shiny toys.

So where am I? Out in the cold outer reaches of our universe, there is a distant planet called “Cable.” It can support life but it’s a hardscrabble existence. Orbiting that planet is a lifeless, gray moon called the “Business News Channel“.

Yikes.  Well, we’ve all been there in some way or another.  Not there there, necessarily, but in that same “universe.”  He sums it up pretty well at the end:

There’s more, so much more and yet so very little. There will come a time when I’ll get off this little moon. As the saying goes, “when the money runs out, so do we”. The Client can hire my body for a couple of hours or days but the money always runs out and that’s my ticket back to sunshine.

Where have I been? I prefer to think about where I’m going, thank you very much.

What does it all mean?  Well, there’s a great saying that I’ve often heard within the business:

Theater is life.
Film is art.
Television is furniture.

As little as some of us who work in the business want to think about it, for the most part it’s very true.  Television is furniture.  What we are doing is basically building and executing content that is just barely attractive enough to justify all the commercials shown during the broadcast.  And more and more often, the content is the commercial.

But it’s not only what happens in our business but how it happens as well that can be frustrating.  I’ve said here in this space that things are generally feast or famine, stop and go.  And that pertains to work and it’s availability as well as the level of satisfaction that that work might provide.

Many of us bounce around.  What happens in that circumstance is that you might catch a loadin, which is generally exciting and challenging and, if you are in the right mindset, pretty fun as well.  The work is hard and satisfying.  You’re able to watch something take shape, often pretty quickly, from the line of trucks you walk past on your way in and an empty theater through to a fully staged show.  The motors, the lights, the rigging.  There’s so much going on, so many people working, and most of them stagehands.

I always feel an immense source of pride that I get to work among all these men and women who are so capable of doing things that leave crowds of people agog, leaving the theater every night saying “how the hell did they do that?”

The Mrs always reminds me that the hours don’t matter because I love what I do.  And she’s right, in the overarching sense.  Why “overarching?”  Because after the loadin, after all the problem-solving and making quick decisions on the fly, after filling the space with everything in the show and shoehorning it in so it all works together smoothly – and if you’re lucky – there’s the execution of the show.

This can be fun as well.  But in many cases, it’s very routine…pushing and pulling heavy dollies, flying scenery in and out, scene changes both complex and simple.

If you wind up on a show that’s pretty cut and dry (as it often is in television), it can get boring and repetitive fast.  The thrill of the initial weeks fades into the daily grind of everyday tasks.  I’ve done shows that really are mostly just emptying the garbages and sweeping.  We do it without complaint, because it’s great to have steady work and sometimes it’s nice to have some mindless downtime, whether because we’re exhausted, sore, hurt, or studying for a certification and we can put the time to good use.

But while we’re doing it, many of us are conflicted…aching to get back into the action and the culture, looking to do something besides work a pickup and make sure the trashcans don’t overflow, no longer hearing from camera ops and stage managers about how easy we have it when we can look around and know that we built and lit everything that the entire crew is working amongst.

I may have written about this before.  Looking back through the archives, I know I’ve mentioned it.  In times like this, when it’s happening, it’s practically all I think about.  The wife yells at me not to stress, the few people I can gripe to about such things always wave me off and tell me of the last two or three times, so I don’t know.  But I’m pretty sure I’ve not written at length about being on the bounce.

There is no such thing as steady work in the world of the stagehand. Sure, you might fall into something that lasts for years and years. But it can ALWAYS end tomorrow. The star(s) might quit. The producers pull out because they’re no longer raking in millions aplenty enough to support all their real estate and possessions. The network pulls the show and closes the studio. The city closes down the theater. You get hurt. Your boss retires and someone totally new and unfamiliar replaces him. As many factors involved in the staging of a show? Multiply that by a factor of two (or two hundred, it sometimes feels like) and that’s how many ways it can turn on a dime and throw you.

And when it ends (and you can pretty safely bet that it will end sometime, in some random way, for all of us…) the only safety net you have is your reputation and your contacts.

Ah, your contacts. It takes a while to build them up at first, but then all of a sudden…perhaps I reached some mysterious level of competence – it seemed that one day someone asked me for my number, and from then on, I was constantly programming myself into various people’s phones.

You’re not always making calls, don’t get me wrong. If people know you’re looking and you’re good, they’ll call you. And when you’ve stepped in it and you’re into some solid work, it can last for years. But between those times, you’re on the phone a lot. Every day, if you’re good (or desperate), you’re calling around, staggering the calls so as not to wear out the heads who you’re calling. You don’t want to look too desperate, either.

I once was talking to a fine fellow who I’ve worked with on and off for ten years. We were reminiscing about a particular studio, and I told him that the head we worked for never hired me anymore.

“Really? Why? What’d you do, sleep with his daughter?”

I laughed. “No, I don’t know. I just….never get calls from him anymore. Does he have a steady crew?”

“Sure, a couple guys, but nah: that place is full of hall rats every week. None of them know what they’re doing. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.” He took out his phone. “You know what? Give me your number. I’ll call him tomorrow. I’ll tell him you’re homeless….that your kids are starving and that all their left shoes are worn through. You’re just this side of the dole and even though you’re a demmycrat, you’ll be damned.  I’ll lay it on so thick he won’t be able to pick up his phone fast enough.”

And herein is a dilemma. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe this is universal, I’ve never brought it up with anyone. But I never want to look too desperate. I’m always afraid that if I call too often, they’ll start to wonder why I’ve been out of work for too long, perhaps start to think that I’m not worth my time, or that I might have a hidden shortcoming that they never saw but don’t want to be exposed to.

Because I think all stagehands have worked with those guys. Sorry….those guys. Men who seem to have that permanently haunted look, and a thousand hard luck stories about how they had this or that booked “solid, I mean I was in,” yet at the last minute everything managed to somehow fall through. And when you ask around, because the guy might seem solid, you always hear the same thing…a look left, a look right, a roll of the eyes, a sigh, and:

“Oh man….that guy. Lemme tell you a story…”

And then you hear the other side of the story. About how they were always three minutes late, every day. Or stank of cheap vodka. Or were constantly breaking shit, hurting people, and in need of being showed the same thing every day, over and over.  Somehow, they don’t pull their weight, and they don’t know anyone who will let them just skate by.
It’s those guys I think of when I’m making calls. I don’t want to be the guy who bangs away every morning, calling every studio like clockwork to the point where the phone rings and the crew – to a man – looks at his/her watch and says “Whoops, 6:30. Must be X. You better get that.”

Being on the bounce now, I’m a little stressed. Being a new homeowner only magnifies it. I always manage to stress and lose sleep and forget that somehow, something always comes along. And that leads to something else. And ten new things to write about. So maybe being on the bounce isn’t all that bad….

I don’t get out much. The fact that the business keeps me busy or recovering mostly around the clock means that when I do get a day off, I don’t feel like doing much of anything. Add to that my natural semi-agoraphobic tendencies (I’m not at all agoraphobic, but if you knew all the details, it wouldn’t surprise you), and it might be months between nights when I go out.

So when I do get out, I’m already at a disadvantage. I’m a bit socially stunted, and all I really do is work or read novels and politics. Who wants to hang out with a guy whose only viable conversational topics are work and politics? Or, now, the latest doings in the world of mass entertainment, along with some obscure novelists??? What I need to do is get religion, and then I’ll officially be impossible to socialize with.

Just before Christmas, I got to get out to a party thrown by friends of the Mrs. I was really quiet and very, if not totally, over-aware of how little I felt like I had to talk about. Then a friend of hers (who I rather like, so I forgive him) asked me: “So, you still working at….?”

How the hell do I answer that?

Some of you know that this isn’t a regular business, either because you visit here or you have some personal experience. For those of you who don’t know, well….being a stagehand isn’t a regular business.

I’ve been working for one company for much of the last few months of my time…actually, one network. But just because I’ve been bouncing around one network for a while doesn’t mean I work for them in the traditional sense…I don’t “work for” them the same way that most people “work for” a company. I may know most of the crew, I may know my way around the studio. In fact, I’m in that situation to the point where I could pretty easily blend in in any number of studios…I know my way around, I know the nooks and crannies.

But I don’t work for them. I just work there, and I am asked back pretty regularly.

I don’t have a job with any network, or any theater. I don’t have a job, per se. I’m not really a freelancer, either. I mainly just bounce around, and go where the money is. The question is, how do I explain this in one sentence, so it fits within the bounds of party conversation?

And I guess another question: what is it that one might call being a stagehand, anyway? It’s a job, but not in the traditional sense: I don’t work for anyone, I don’t have a regular spot at which to show up (generally….we go in spurts, and those of us who don’t have regular positions might get 6 months here, 3 months there, etcetc). I’m not a consultant. Is this a lifestyle? A career? Or are we just mercenaries? Go where the money is, leave when it runs out?

More importantly, I know that I love doing what I’m doing, stressful as it may be at times.  And I love that I can take pride in my work, as can all my fellow stagehands.  It’s pretty cool, all in all.