No thanks to the scam artist or the temp agency, I found a job. I actually really liked it and if I had found this job first, versus the boring office, I might have stayed and had another career path. But this is Hollywood, Babe, and I was on to bigger things.
I was hired as a receptionist at a company that provided music and shows for radio stations throughout the world. It was interesting. The people were great. I loved answering the phone not knowing whether I would have to speak Spanish, French, Italian, or English. Plus, I loved being a DJ in college.
The problem was that it interfered with producing the short film. Okay, so we didn’t get into section two of the Making a Short Film class, but the director told me he had the money and wanted to make the film anyhow. Plus, from meeting other people, they seemed to say that the way to make it in film, was to make a film. If he was paying, I was in.
I tried to make phone calls to recruit a crew and get things we needed (like film stock) during work hours but the phone kept ringing and it was my job to answer it. I then made calls at lunch but everyone I called was at lunch too. So, I sadly, had to leave this job. I told them it was because I was going to make a movie. The man who hired me said that he had lived in LA a long time and most of these dreams go up in smoke. I knew I was different!
Instead I applied for a job where my housemate worked – an insurance agency. Great money working on a computer all day and even better, weird hours – 6am-2pm so I could make calls all afternoon. I got the job and settled there the rest of the “school” year.
Another group that did get into section two invited me to join them (and share the now group cost of tuition). I went to one class but backed out due to my lack of money for another class. Yet, the contacts I made helped me get onto my first film sets since I was hungry jump into production, any production.
But the short film I was producing wasn’t going as great as I thought. Here I was changing my job for it, not going on with the UCLA class, and thinking of investing some of my savings into it. But the director was giving off signs that maybe he wasn’t trustworthy. Once we got rejected by UCLA he got another writer and started hinting that she’d get credit too. In the early stages of a film career you don’t work for money, you work for credit. I needed a screen to say I was the writer so that I could then write other movies in the future. That’s one reason I decided to work with him – to write the movie.
We had our talks and our arguments and he promised I’d get co-writing credit since I wrote the first scripts. I had heard of these things happening in Hollywood, I just didn’t think they happened so soon. I had heard the horror stories of people writing scripts and then getting written off the credit scroll.
I decided to stay with the project just to make sure I really got my credit. For mental survival, I to put my heart into my Indigo Girls script and focused on working with women in the future. At this time we also added another producer, a male acquaintance of mine from one of my many day jobs. All of a sudden the director and this guy (who was supposed to work under me) were talking sports and I felt pushed out. I was starting to think men couldn’t be trusted in this town.
The dating scene was even worse. I loved all the meeting of people and networking and sometimes there was flirting. I knew my body type didn’t fit in – I wasn’t a size 6 or 10 even. One guy at a party said “I know what you’re thinking ‘I don’t fit in’. Don’t worry. Guys will like you because you are nice”. Nice? In a town built on not nice?
I had a lot of first dates and false hopes. Even dated briefly an old friend who lived nearby but that crashed and burned from his shy and weird issues. I mostly just networked for my career and wrote my script. I felt like the L in Los Angeles was really for Lonliness.
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