The good thing about being under employed is all the time. On my drive down beautiful 101 from Northern Cally to SoCal I got an idea. It was so good that I stopped at some restaurant and wrote and wrote. This was it. A great idea for a movie. I wrote it as much as I could since I had to talk to the main players right away. I knew it would get made since these famous people are friends of a friend. I was so naïve.
I had worked closely in the past in Minnesota with Winona LaDuke of Greenpeace, Green party, and Indigenous Environmental Network. She ran a concert series called Honor the Earth. They were going to Vegas and I didn’t really have a job and my aunt lived there so I went and met everyone back stage. I finally got to meet the Indigo Girls, kinda said “hi” to Jackson Brown, and re-met Bonnie Raitt who I had met a few years earlier with Winona. I also got to meet my favorite Native American rock star – Keith Secola. Winona, unfortunately, was not at the concert, but I told the Indigo Girls and Bonnie Raitt my great idea – a movie about two women following the Honor the Earth concert. To me it was perfect – a road movie since I love to travel, and a political message like my favorite movies.
I had a script ready but realized it was a sucky first draft and I was smart enough not to give it to them. They gave me the names of who to call in their offices. I knew with these stars, this movie would fly. I had a lot to learn.
But as I worked on the script, I kept working around town and taking my UCLA Extension classes. I got a two week temp job at Warner Brothers. They also had a big studio lot which I should have lunched more at since one day the people in the office saw Kevin Costner but since I was poor, I brown bagged it. The office where I was was off the lot and that would prove dangerous for me. Well not dangerous, but I got robbed.
I was a kinda the receptionist but the phone never rang and by the time it did, I had forgotten my training. I told them to call back and call the boss on her direct line. That was my last day (preplanned conveniently)
The other job was to walk the office first thing in the morning and deliver any faxes that came in. But basically, I had nothing to do so I surfed the web looking up Indigo Girl fans and whatever else I could find for 8 hours a day. It was weird to see that big glamorous studios could have just normal office workers in cubbies, but apparently they also had too many positions like mine where you didn’t have much “work”. To be honest I was just a temp till the real woman was going to be there and maybe she would have more to do that they didn’t bother training me to do.
Yet as I did my morning duties one day someone else helped themselves to my wallet. It wasn’t on the lot so we didn’t have the gates and guards just an office guard who waved everyone in from his side desk. So I checked my messages at home and there was one from my credit card confirming I had just spent $1500 (maxing out the card) at Toys R Us in some town I had never heard of. I went to call them back and that’s when I realized I didn’t even have my wallet so I knew right away what happened. I called and cancelled the other card too and at that time, didn’t have to pay a dime. But I was mad that they took the cash I was so proud to not have spent in the past few days.
Unfortunately my social security card was in there and one dumb job wouldn’t take my passport so it did cost me one job but it was in construction so maybe it wasn’t a big loss. That was about the time I realized I had to get out of day jobs in Hollywood and have some job that’s schedule allowed me to concentrate on making movies.
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