Things That Annoy You

[Alehksunos]

If I ever write a show, I'm just going to end it at the fifth season. And that is, I would never be able to find quality writers and those who would understand the show well, which is why I would end its run that early.

[RavynousHunter]

And thus we have the reason I'd much prefer to write for movie series and games.  The latter most especially.  Much, much easier to create a cohesive narrative.

[Alehksunos]

And thus we have the reason I'd much prefer to write for movie series and games.  The latter most especially.  Much, much easier to create a cohesive narrative.

I agree with all this very much.

Also, speaking of television shows, I've never liked the Status Quo is God trope. While it doesn't drive me nuts, I much prefer a show whose continuity evolves rather than fixed/negative continuity.

[Art Vandelay]

I can imagine a good TV show (at least a drama of some sort) would be one of the hardest things to write. You have one or more overarching plots the span the entire series, a few more that span each season and yet more smaller stories that begin and are wrapped up within a single episode. Writing all of those stories in a coherent and compelling manner and in a way that fits neatly into 20/40 minute episodes must take a hell of a lot of skill and effort.

[Witchyjoshy]

Kinda like how difficult it is to knit a whole lot of different types of yarn together to create something that has a positive visual benefit?

[Art Vandelay]

Something like that.

[chitoryu12]

I write as well as act, so I've tried my hand at helping with write web series. It really is as hard as it looks if your episodes are longer than 10 or 15 minutes, because there's always enough content for you to screw up but not enough to let you drag on too long before needing to wrap things up. You could end up closing on the last few pages, only to analyze your script and realize that you've got 15 minutes too much content. Likewise, 50 episodes down the line you forget some details (or you never knew them in the first place, because you're the new writer on board) and end up contradicting a ton of stuff and it's so far ahead that nobody remembers well enough to even fact check in the first place.

There's a good reason Hollywood relies on professional writers as well: all of this has to be done on a strict time limit. You'll generally be writing the next season as soon as you get time, possibly even before it gets officially confirmed. And unless you're someone lucky enough to be an independent in control of the project who can focus exclusively on your baby (which usually happens with small time shows where one or two guys get an idea for a new show or movie and shop around for a distributor), you're going to be contracted out to a bewildering number of people from every corner of the world for anything from commercials to TV to film and having to balance multiple projects at once. That's why it's so important for the people who have creative control to be working with the writers as much as possible, or even have the writers BE those guys if you can do it that way, so they can make something decent.

Really, nobody in the business has it easy. Anyone who thinks people in Hollywood are overpaid should try to take over their jobs.

[Katsuro]

Really, nobody in the business has it easy. Anyone who thinks people in Hollywood are overpaid should try to take over their jobs.

Getting a proper, real life behind the scenes look gave me a much greater appreciation for what everyone in the TV and movie industry does, even the actors (though I'd still argue some of the more famous actors are overpaid - I think the writers and crew need a sizable salary increase).

The crew work insane hours without a proper break.  On GoT a shoot is a minimum of 12 hours, but they can over run so sometimes it can be more like 13-15 hours.  But most of the crew are there before the extras and actors arrive on set and they're still there after we leave so they must be puling 20+ hour shifts some days, with virtually no break.  Taking into consideration how long it takes to get to and from the set (a lot of them are in the arse end of nowhere) I don't know how they ever get any sleep.  Some of them must just not go home and sleep on the set or something.  I also heard somewhere that on Star Trek: Voyager they regularly did 20+ hour shoots, actors and all.

Also, acting is harder than it looks.  I've obviously never had any lines but you sometimes get told something like "look hard, tough and like you want to get stuck in to these people" and you think yeah that's easy I can do that.  But then you see yourself later when the episode airs and you don't look tough, you look like a fucking twat.  And it gets harder when you've spent the last 12 hours standing up nonstop in a costume that weighs almost as much as you do and is even heavier when wet - and it's rained continuously for those 12 hours.  And it feels like it's minus 100 degrees Celsius.  It's hard to act tough when you feel like a drowned rat and you're so cold and tired you honestly feel like if they don't wrap soon you might actually die.

So yeah, anyone who gives the people who work in Hollywood shit can just shut right the fuck up.

[Søren]

Dexter is still great. Its later seasons still have the vibe of a second.

Also...theres ton of stuff out there on...period love

The smells and tastes and....chunks...normally i have to scour for weird shit but this is

Chunky

[chitoryu12]

Really, nobody in the business has it easy. Anyone who thinks people in Hollywood are overpaid should try to take over their jobs.

Getting a proper, real life behind the scenes look...

It's like that just about everywhere; 12 hours is actually the industry standard in Hollywood, compared to 8 hours for other jobs. The easiest long job I had (not counting a few hours for Shadowglade) was for Game On!, purely because we mainly worked in a soundstage on the Universal Orlando backlot that was used mainly for Blue Man Group stuff and other offices (it's the former Nickelodeon Studios), so actors would load in by 7:00 or 8:00 AM, the crew a little bit before that (since we were the only users of the soundstage, we could generally leave a lot of equipment where it was after locking up, or at least store it on site),  and we'd need to wrap up and lock up by 7:00 PM so the Blue Man folks could take over. All with actual air conditioning, snacks, TV and some early Nintendo games, etc.

On the other hand, the first thing I ever did was a concert scene on Wall Street in Orlando for Renee with Chad Michael Murray and Kat Dennings. I was one of thousands of extras, but I was part of a group of about 100 that signed on to stay the entire night in exchange for extra screen time. Lo and behold, the (mostly drunk) extras wandered off or quit by lunch. So halfway through and we're trying to fill an entire plaza that previously had a crowd of thousands with about a hundred people. They began shooting as carefully as possible, shuffling our little group back toward the street as Renee Yohe crowd-surfed her way to the sidewalk. The whole thing lasted about 14 hours from the time I showed up, which was before even some of the crew was there loading in. All with no snacks or extra food for the extras, since they couldn't afford to provide unlimited chips and cookies for thousands of people and had no clue almost all of them would bail. Oh, and I was lucky enough to be wearing a sweater on a not-very-cold night packed in with a gigantic crowd. Couldn't really leave the crowd, which was packed so tightly that I couldn't sit if my legs got tired over the 6 or 7 hours of shooting before lunch. Which extras had to pay for.

It was a similar situation with Rockabilly Zombie Weekend. Getting principal photography done in 24 days on a film that primarily took place at night meant fighting daylight most of the time. It wasn't uncommon to wrap up just as the sky started turning blue from sunrise, and I still have a picture on my phone of the orange sky over Lake Monroe that was taken mere minutes after we finished a scene that takes place around midnight at the latest. EVERYONE pulled those long work days, with lunch coming at midnight.

Oh, and the physically demanding stuff? People watching movies and TV forget how many takes are done. You need multiple angles, so even if everyone manages to get everything right on take 1, you're still doing it 4 or 5 more times at a minimum. You won't enjoy doing a crowd scatter from gunfire, and think twice before signing on for a fight scene if you're not up to doing it over and over and over and over until you're at risk of pulling a muscle. And then you get paid $100 for it. If that much.

[Katsuro]

Oh, and the physically demanding stuff? People watching movies and TV forget how many takes are done. You need multiple angles, so even if everyone manages to get everything right on take 1, you're still doing it 4 or 5 more times at a minimum. You won't enjoy doing a crowd scatter from gunfire, and think twice before signing on for a fight scene if you're not up to doing it over and over and over and over until you're at risk of pulling a muscle. And then you get paid $100 for it. If that much.

I did a fight scene for season 3 of GoT

(click to show/hide)

the Red Wedding,

at the end of a three day shoot (all night shoots too) but it was actually suprisingly fun despite the mud and the exhaustion.

What wasn't fun though was shooting the 1st episode.  A massive crowd of us spent an entire day's shoooting marching up and down the wet and slippery side of a dis-used quarry in our aforementioned stupidly heavy and uncomfortable costumes.  That was more tiring than the fight scene, largley because we were supposed to be marching in formation but the horse riders couldn't keep the horses at a steady pace on the downslopes so we had to keep running after the bloody things.  And then I managed to pull a muscle in my back trying to avoid falling over and had to sit the rest of the shoot out, along with a handful of other extras who managed to hurt themselves.  We got a mere £20 extra for our trouble (you get a standard £80 for a 12 hour shoot but the extra's agency takes a cut of that so it's more like £70 for 12 hours) and even worse in the episode the scene lasts literally a few seconds.  12 hours of agony and torment for what amounted in the end to an establishing shot.  Hardly seemed worth it.  It was one of those days that makes you think, "Why the fuck am I doing this?"

[chitoryu12]

I've gotten all my gigs but one through my own connections so far, so I haven't had to worry about anyone "taking a cut." Game On was $30 every day, standard. At the end of the week you got a check compiling your weekly pay. I made about $500 total over the course of the season. Still waiting a few more days to bug Front Runner about my lack of a $125 check for the Disney ads I did, though.

The most well-paying gig I've had was a scareactor at Halloween Horror Nights last year. Made a bit over $1000 for a month of work. I lost out on a bit when they started making us clock out for lunch (which was about $7.75 of missed pay every day), but I made up for it when they made the decision to expand about half a dozen nights to peak nights, meaning I made an extra hour or two of pay for each.

If you want an example of what the top billing for lower level TV shows like Game On is, a leading role made $1000 a day there. You could get a cool $40k or $50k off of that. The guy regularly gets work, so he's able to move to NYC now.

I need to ask a family friend, Justin Sargent, what he's making as lead on Rock of Ages on Broadway....

[Witchyjoshy]

Now that I've read the above, combined with all of the PR stuff that actors have to do when they're not acting, I think I understand why, at least in the USA, there is a high propensity for a self-abusive downward spiral among actors.

Not to mention, big name actors generally have no legitimate privacy.  Every thing they try to do as a normal person gets analyzed, criticized, and exploited by the media.

...Yeah, they pretty much earn their paychecks, don't they?  With their own labor...

[chitoryu12]

Just look at the usual paparazzi pics of celebrities. They're usually just going about their day and everyone starts snapping pictures of them from afar and uploading them to the internet. How would you feel if you literally couldn't leave the house without people leaping over tables to smother you in insanity-tinged affection and demanding pictures and autographs? Or you go out to buy some underwear and milk and you only find out a week later that someone with a telephoto lens was taking pictures of your ass for a magazine 20 yards away? And you cannot avoid it at all unless you become a complete recluse.

Robert Pattinson's personal Facebook actually uses a pic of him in his truck hauling his stuff out of Kristen Stewart's house as his cover photo. He figured he may as well use it, seeing how popular it's become.

It doesn't help that quite a few actors also have some kind of mental disorder or illness, often depression at the very least or bipolar disorder. Robin Williams is completely bipolar, but refuses medication so he can take advantage of his changes in thought for his work. That also means he risks falling into deep depression for no apparent reason, and he struggled massively with a drug addiction early in his career. More than one actor also suffers badly from self-esteem issues, and may crave attention so they can feel like people care about them.

And then there's child actors, who are notorious for having "stage moms" that pamper and spoil them while working their kid to the bone to try and ride on the fame and money earned. That's what gave us Lindsay Lohan and the Olsen Twins. It gave us Justin Bieber as well, though he dropped his family as soon as he turned 18 and truly began his downward spiral when he had nobody but equally fucked-up adults as his friends and mentors.

I act not because I desire fame and fortune, but because I enjoy acting and participating in the creation of entertainment. I'm fully aware of what kind of environment Hollywood is. People are there because they want to be there, not because it's really enticing once you get past the starry-eyed newbie era.

[Witchyjoshy]

Sounds like fame is more of a burden than reward...