But Why Is The Blog Gone?

Haha. I love a good Fail. Especially the kind that usually end up on the FML boards.

Remarkably enough, Danny Gomez contacted me by phone this morning to say he wanted a copy of my resume on email; he had friends on other productions who were looking for someone, and apparently my name had stuck with him. Go figure! Mr. Hustle himself pulled through for me after all!

So I eagerly got on my email and shuttled him my resume, along with a brief message about having just started watching Tracey Ullman's State of The Union and enjoying its comedy.

Twenty minutes later, it dawned on me that I didn't attach my resume. I attached my complaint letter to Ithaca College about having not received a competitive education from them and being ill-equipped to launch a successful career in the entertainment industry.

omr. Danny, don't open that. Please don't forward it to everyone you know who needed a production assistant, either. It's the wrong file. I'm an idiot, I know.

Life's little ironies. It likes to pee on your leg from time to time and run away snickering.

Read This Blog Lightly, The Council Does Not

I was at CBS handing out resumes a day or two ago, and because most of the production offices aren't labeled (and because I don't watch any TV shows anyway), I made a questionably poor decision to blindly walk into buildings and feign competency by saying, "Are you guys accepting resumes for PAs on the show?"

I have no idea what shows I've applied to now, but if I get a phone call from Wayne on "Hickory Maud's Hussie Women Diaries," I'll know how it happened.

After I had handed many out and was stumbling around lost on the lot, some guy (from the office for "Greek," I think) found me on the lot later and got really excited and said, "Andy? Right, Andrew! Do you know Tom Pistol? No? Okay, well, go to that building there, go to room 360, and ask for Tom Pistol. And you tell him that Danny Goldman sent you and he says you're The Hustle!"

I got really excited, cause I had no idea what any of that meant, except he told me Tom Pistol was Executive Producer of something or whatever. So I ran away and immediately forgot everything he had just said, and proceeded to mess up every name AND the message:

"Is Tom Pistol here?"

"Right here."

"Hi, Mr. Pistol! My name is Andrew Pinkerton! Danny Goldman sent me up here-"

"Gomez."

"Yeah, Danny Gomez. Sure. And he sent me up here to your office. I, uh... I think he said I was The Hustle..."

A really long, really awkward pause. Then Tom says:

"I don't know what that means."

"Oh... Really?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know what it means, either. I was, uh, hoping you'd get it."

"I don't."

"...well, I gave him a resume. So maybe I'm just supposed to give one to you."

"We're fully staffed right now."

"Uh huh. I figured. Here you go."

And then I smiled prettily, choked out a nervous laugh, and thanked him for his time before I scampered out of the room with the rest of my resumes.

And then I sulked sheepishly in the elevator the whole way down, and darted past the desk lady in the lobby to the CBS Take 5 Cafe, where I begrudgingly paid $1.89 for a 20 oz. bottle of Coca-Cola to drown my humiliation and sorrows in.

I Want To Read A Little Blog With You...

*DEJECTION!*

;_;

(you know a blog post is going to be good when it starts like that)

I just got back from checking out my first house in LA, after a long day of scheduling appointments and trying to jive industry professionals into giving me a job. One landlord told me she didn't want "a bunch of college boys" living in the house, even though I tried to explain we had graduated from a university in New York and were pursuing professional careers. Sigh.

And is it just me, or is this town really into the practice of, um, kicking people's shins out and then running over them with a car (generally something that costs $50,000 or above)? I'm getting this trippy vibe -- and correct me if you're not feeling it -- that everybody here *gasp* already hates you and hopes you either leave or die. Anyone? Just me? Yeah, maybe I'm bringing it on myself (I got that even in New York, from friends), but I get the distinct impression that Hollywood is built upon the bones of everyone the successful have cannibalized over eighty years of two-faced viciousness and heart-breaking. The good die young here... and the bad go work at Warner Brothers.

I kid, sort of. I'm not really mad at anyone in particular for anything in particular; just mostly miserable. This housing thing is fast becoming a fiasco. "I NEED PROOF OF INCOME TO LIVE SOMEWHERE? SERIOUSLY?" I just moved here from New York. Where the $*&%@ am I supposed to be getting income from? Oh, get a job? I see, yes, that's easy, considering California's unemployment rate is 10% or higher right now, and I only pulled into town last Thursday. And lest we forget, employers would prefer to know you're living somewhere solid before hiring you, lest you be a tramp on the street or hiding out in a parked car every night.

I guess I'm also twitched tonight because I sit on another dilemma regarding employment conditions: a source I thought may provide work for me has instead presented the interesting situation of doing some free promotion for his pet project, in exchange for a potentially rewarding meeting with a studio higher-up. Great, right? Well, not bad, except some of the underlying details involve hanging out some old IC faculty to dry.

Now, everybody knows how incredibly heartless I am (cough) and how much I loathe an awful lot of curriculum at Ithaca College, especially in the way of how film is taught. Entering the crossroads now (also) is how mildly abandoned I'm feeling after graduating and basically getting a Goodbye Boot from the school, without any sort of directive on how to USE my 40 zillion dollar degree to get work. Kinda like their work was finished after they handed it to me and finished taking my money. After talking up their alumni and networking, though, I came to expect a little more name-dropping and phone-linking than that.

So here lies my pickle (a grosser statement has never been uttered by me). Much as I hate a lot of what IC tells me, I also gosh darn love the place for all the other reasons, and I naturally prefer to discuss the good and omit the bad, when given the option to. In this instance, mentioning the bad and omitting the good is the point in order, and while Ithaca College hasn't done an awful lot to merit either my money OR my presence, I can't help but have developed a minute loyalty to it. So criticizing it exclusively is not only less than pleasant, but also shades my night with some sensations of guilt. Fry my alma mater like an egg, huh? Yeaaaaaaaah, we'll see...

"Oh Ithaca, my Ithaca..."

I Could Squash You Like A Blog Right Now!

Congratulations. You're now reading blog posts from three hours in the future, as long as you're reading in New York (or Pennsylvania, or Delaware, or Maryland, or Connecticut, or Vermont, or New Hampshire, or Mississippi, but maybe not that one...)

My first day of career hunting went a little sour. Let's be blog. I mean, blunt. Getting hired for money is hard when hordes of students are looking to do the same job for free (or school credit). I don't know what I expected... "Oh, you say you want to work on Spider-Man 4? Why, you can just give us your name and we'll pass that right along to the right Magical People You Don't Know and they'll call you when they're ready to start shooting!"

Instead, it looks like -- as of now -- I'm on my own. I can "start" handing out resumes to production companies, if only I knew which ones were making movies and how to contact them. My internship company recommends "working for free for a few months" to build networks. Building a network is great, but living in a house and eating food sounds even better... I'm still saving my trump card -- a man named Mike Kehoe -- for possible big studio work, and if all else fails, I have my ultimate secret weapon: Cory Edwards and his upcoming Fraggle Rock movie, which I hope to have secured my position on if and when it ever reaches its production phase.

I've got some house hunting to do in the meanwhile, so I'm afraid the job search will have to wait a week or so. :<

We Just Keep Running Into Each Other, Don't We, Blog Rat?

You know what I hate?

People who don't realize that the left lane is only for passing other cars, or who don't care. Really, I thought it was universal knowledge, but I'm beginning to question how many states actually practice changing lanes to pass. I think I've passed as many drivers today on the inside lane as I have on the outside, because PEOPLE _ DON'T _ GET IT.

If you like to chug along in the passing lane at 65 or 70, blind to the world of 80 mph cars and vehicles piling up behind you, please wake up and change lanes to let others pass. Because you're making me really, really hate you.

Also, I really hate Oklahoma! That's an exclamation, not the play.

And Blogging Is Half The Battle!

Sorry, the blog has gotten the cold shoulder since I reached the one-week-away mark for leaving. I'm arriving in Los Angeles in about five days, which is seriously spooking me out. Somehow, it's a lot scarier when you're not going there for one semester, as a student, with the college structuring your experience. Now it's like, "I could die out there..."

My mom just came upstairs with four packets of homeless shelter information for me to store away, in case I "ever need it." That's super freakin comforting.

Otherwise, I'm wrapping up the last transcription assignments I've got for Cornell business professor Tony Simons, who's last book I worked on ("The Integrity Dividend") is still garnering attention out on the market. His next book (and these interviews) will focus more on behavioral integrity in the context of this economic downturn and how the recession may affect the morality of business leaders trying to get ahead. No word on when he plans to complete it or get it out on shelves.

I also woke up distraught three mornings in a row now, and I don't think it's because I'm moving to LA (although maybe that's affecting my dreams...) Three mornings ago, I snapped awake convinced that not only was I working for a volunteer global warming activist group, but that an old beastly woman working there had tried to molest me. Yesterday morning, I woke up believing I had caused a traffic pile-up and was trapped in a seedy apartment building (probably the kind I'll be living in when I get to California). And this morning, I was awoken by my alarm in the middle of a twisted dream where I was competing with a faceless figure for who could take more abuse to the groin. Yeah, seriously, that's what my dreams have come to: getting hit in the crotch over and over.

I gotta get out of here.

Never Start With The Blog! The Victim Gets All Fuzzy!

Whoo doggy. So I just discovered that -- really -- I'm about down to my last week. One week before time runs out and I gotta leave New York to find my fortune abroad (meaning, LA). I thought I'd be more excited, but really, I'm mostly just scared now. Scared that I have too much left to do here, that I can't do out there, and scared that I have too much to do out there, that I don't even know how to do here! Things like getting an apartment -- I have no experience doing that! What do all these hard words mean? Can't I just walk into a place with a sign on it, say "How much you want?", and hand some guy some money at a desk and start moving my things in? IS NOTHING THAT SIMPLE???

*Sigh*. One week. Just enough time to wrap out Batman and Spider-Man Save Christmas, maybe. I dunno what to do about the voices. Nobody's available enough to dub them all in. Nobody but me (and the one-voice-fits-all only applies to cartoons, by the way, and Eddie Murphy movies). Another bridge to cross when I arrive at it, I guess. I'm gonna set myself a goal and try to insert all the music -- all of it -- into the movie by tonight. Force some action, see where it heads.

I got a call today about new transcription jobs that have come in from the agency. Hallelujia. That means a little more money, and possibly even a trickle of income, for moving to Los Angeles. But that also means spending my time listening to recordings about proper business etiquette and not about Batman and Spider-Man escaping a toxic phone booth. You win some, you lose some, I suppose.

I've also been going over my new "industry" resume, because I was informed that companies would rather see volume of work, rather than descriptions. "Good for me," I thought, "I've got a ton of films to list." Except the more thought I've given this new resume, the more paranoid I am to include titles like "Batman and Spider-Man Save Christmas" on it. Seriously, will anyone at Warner Brothers take me seriously once I have a movie with a name like that listed on my resume? And what really ticks me off -- this is the best part -- is that if they only knew what the film looks like, they WOULD take me seriously! MUCH more seriously! Because as dumb and phony as it sounds, that film took WORK and AMBITION -- a lot more than you see in the average "Cigars and Suicide" or "Ryan's Last Rights" or "The Sneakers That Grandma Wore." Cause a film like Batman and Spider-Man isn't just a couple goofy kids giggling and running around in red and black t-shirts; this is tights and capes and cars and explosions and choreography and rotoscoping- Dismissing something like this is dismissing a piece of work that took a LOT more genius and creativity than the run-of-the-mill depressing student film so many resumes are full of. So it pains me to be omitting pieces like that, just because of the name.

Maybe I'll "tentatively rename" it to something simple, like 'Saving Christmas,' and include it anyway.

Now to think up names for "Revenge of the Banana" and "Saw Zer0."

Bill, It's Your Blog-

Whoosh. One week by, without an entry. In my defense, I at one point attempted an entry, but found myself unable to coax forth any better blogging than a childish essay about Final Fantasy.

Speaking of which, my little brother and I have finally met our crystal caravan's match: the limits of time. While we spent many a late evening and early morning marching our virtual party toward conquering the planet, we found ourself stymied by the secrets of a place called Mag Mell (a weirder city has never existed) and were ultimately unable to complete our mission and finish off the entire game before he left for summer camp -- an event that will last two weeks, up until the very day I leave the state. Sadly, the game will never see our knock-off Justice League emerge victorious.

On top of the geekdom, I'm still wrapping up a bunch of films before I head out of state (for good), one of which is the long-anticipated Batman and Spider-Man Save Christmas. Yahoo tells me they're taking down my Fungus-Ridden site in October, so a priority now is to update and backup each page before I leave, so (with the help of an LA Prog Beard) I can set up a new server Apache-style in LA and keep the site online. And of course, I'm still revisiting my Thesis, and trying to undo the things that were done... Goodness knows that the grade's in and it's time to forget it, get professional, and move on to a career in Hollywood... but keeping an entry in my cinematic library that feels as unfinished and impersonal as it is almost more than I can stomach. Only two other movies are omitted from my collection: one, my first group project in Cinema Production II (which the producer never released copies of), and an action figure movie for which the only movie file went south and became corrupted.

But in the words of Batman, "Sherwood Forest's not beyond saving."

Here's proof.

New Country ProtoIntro from AJ Pinkerton on Vimeo.