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.