You work strange hours when you’re making a TV show (or a movie, for that matter). You’ll come in at 7:00 one day and 10:30 the next. Sometimes you’re there for twelve hours, sometimes sixteen. You just never know.
One artifact of this, I believe, is that “morning” is whenever call time is, be it 6:30am or 2:30pm. It can be a bit strange, rolling into the office at a time most people are just getting done with work, and your boss says, “Good morning!”
The first meal of the day is always “breakfast,” even if they’re serving hamburgers at noon. The second meal is always “lunch,” and the third meal is, as you might assume, “second meal.”
When you work in the office, your eating schedule can get screwed up, since the office has to be open during normal business hours, regardless of the shooting schedule.
Some days, I come in at eight, but breakfast isn’t served until 10:30, by which point I’m about ready to eat my own foot. Then lunch is at 4:30, which confuses the hell out of my stomach, since it’s too late for lunch, but too early for dinner. If I eat now, I won’t be hungry when I get home, but then I won’t get breakfast again until maybe 11:00 the next morning. But if I don’t eat, I’ll be starving by the time I’m let go. What to do!
It’s existential quandaries like these that keep us tortured artists up at night.
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I just started interning on my first show. They have us doing set PA stuff and it was driving me crazy last night when we ate lunch at 8:30. I didn’t get it at all. My advice, keep cliff bars on yourself at all times. It helps when you have to get there at 5am
I worked on one show where we shot on Governors Island for three weeks. The trucks all stayed out there, but everything and everybody else got on and off the island by boat.
I had to be out there most mornings at 3:00am to get the caterer on the island so they could be ready to serve breakfast. Strangely, I don’t mind getting up and going to work at 0-dark-thirty, but I hate night calls.