Yesterday, I was more than a little surprised to find my readership had quintupled over night, and Monday’s post had more responses than all my previous posts combined.
It’s thanks to the Polybloggimous blog, and Nathan’s little web 2.0 game. I’d like to continue the meme, but first I’ll have to come up with a blog who is lacking readers as I much as I was. That’ll be tough.
Even though he’s from New York, Nathan seems like a nice guy. When I checked his profile, I saw why. He’s a location manager!
Location managers are always cool. I think it’s because they spend most of their time sweet talking people.
You have to take a complete stranger from, “Who the hell are you and why the hell are you knocking on my door?” to “Sure, you and a hundred and fifty of your friends can set up shop in my house for three weeks!”
That’s not even the end of it. The location manager also has to deal with the property owner’s complaints even after filming has begun. A location manager told me a story of how a college professor once asked for more money half way through the shoot. His response was for too clever for me to remember correctly, but it went something like this:
“You’re a tenured professor at Caltech. You probably make a hundred thousand dollars a year, right? And you don’t even have to drive up to Pasadena every day, if you don’t want. We’re giving you five thousand a week. I’m just a working man, but seven grand a week to watch a movie get made sounds pretty good to me. Still, if you think you need more money, I can go and talk to my boss. I’ll be in some hot water, since I told him one price and now I’m telling him another, but I can do it. If you want.”
The professor said forget it.
Man, I wish I could do that.
7 Responses
Oh. Wait. Nevermind.
Nix that last part.
Don’t listen to Eric! You’ll lose your mind! Lose your sanity! Lose little bits you might like to keep attached!
Another thing Nathan is doing, gamewise/memewise/communitywise is putting together his second collaborative writing project. You should head back over to his blog and take a look at it, maybe consider signing on if you have some free time. (I may or may not be involved with this one, but the first one was a blast.)
Great blog, by the way.
Nathan is a good dude. Even though he lives in New York, he’s a Red Sox fan. That won him a place in my heart.
And he has some great ideas!
You want location war stories? You got ’em.
On one movie, we spent 30 days prep, 30 days shoot and 30 days strike at a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. The whole movie was to take place in 4 days of screen time. We had deals with every house on the block depending on their level of involvement. Obviously, the folks at the far end of the block who only had to consent to having their lawn mowed every other day, got less than the next door neighbor who constantly had extras walking in and out of his front door.
Next door dude decided to bitch to all the other neighbors and to compare notes on how much people were getting. The other neighbors were all happy with their deals and basically told him to clam up. He went to my Asst. Location Manager pushing for more money for himself. She made a deal. He got $5000.00 more. He signed an addendum to his agreement specifying that he’d pay us $3000.00 every time any neighbor told us he’d been bitching again.
I don’t think I ever saw him again during the shoot.