SeeingEyeBlog

If you don’t know, I work as a freelance cinematographer on many varied projects. I don’t have a “day job” and I don’t have a regular employer. There are a few clients who regularly use my services, but the bulk of my work is with a new company every time I take on a new project.

When you work the way I do, fueled by a dream and a lot of passion, money becomes a problem. I have the potential to be making $15,000/week on big budget movies by the time I’m 35. As it is now, I make barely enough to survive. It wouldn’t be a problem, but Hollywood is full of deadbeat employers who either don’t pay, or take forever to pay. For example, I can do $5000 worth of work and not see that money for three months. By then, I’m down to eating peanut butter out of the jar because I can’t afford to buy groceries, let alone pay my cell phone bill or buy a tank of gas.

But far be it from me to write a sob story. I have way too much pride to consider myself a victim and go on food stamps or get welfare, as many of my colleagues do. Yes I’m out of work much of the time, but I don’t consider that anyone’s fault but mine. This post is basically just a statement of circumstances, so I can look back at it when I am making $15,000/week and remind myself of what I was going through.

As Thomas Paine wrote during the American Revolution, “What we earn too cheaply, we esteem too lightly.” I look around at a lot of people my age who are getting married, have kids and own a house already, and who are much better off than I am, unable to fix my unreliable used car or pay half my bills half the time. It’s not because of a discrepancy between how hard we work. An eight-hour day is foreign to me, but my friends with houses and wives and kids seem to have a positive cash flow with an eight-hour work day behind a desk. I work days that are never below 12 hours, and are much more intensive. Filmmaking can be just as much a tactically critical situation as a battlefield, and as a cinematographer I am a field commander with a lot of responsibility.

I think the difference between my “normal job” friends and I has to be that I need to threaten lawsuits or labor board intervention in order to receive 30% of my income. 50% is later than expected but not far from legal action. 20% of my income is on time.

Living in a 1099 world means you don’t have a regular paycheck, so you need to generate a backlog of receivables in order to stay afloat financially. This is extremely problematic in my situation because I can’t just pick up work any time I want it. Many times I work for people who will never make another movie again. I can’t just call them and see if they have work, because they’re on their way back to Indiana or wherever they came from. Other times, getting a job is a highly political, competitive process. Quality work does not ensure a job. I’ve been told that I had the best looking work out of all the applicants, but was turned down because someone else could work for free. So not only am I dealing with a high turnover ratio of producers, I’m dealing with a dilution of the market with voluntary slave labor, and many producers are unscrupulous enough to actually let someone work for free.

It forces me into situations where I have to evaluate whether the artistic merit of the project will garner results worthy of my own volunteer labor. I have done several films for free, because I thought the material would be great for my resume/reel. Producers love me when I do that, but the only reason I even had to consider working for free is because the next guy (less experienced than I) will work 18-hours a day, 6-days a week (7 occasionally) for free and thank the producer for the abuse.

The obvious implications of working the way I do are these: During a long project like a 4-8 week feature, you can’t be devoting much time to finding the next job (unless it’s already lined up). So usually, a long job is inevitably followed by at least a week, usually longer, of unemployment. When you’re working for free, the longer you work, the smaller your backlog of receivables, which means that you better have a lot of paid work coming up right after the freebie, or you’re going to run aground financially, and stay that way for at least as long as the free job lasted.

Breaking into the film business is in many ways a leap of faith remniscent of The Matrix. I’m basically jumping off a 50-storey building, hoping to land on the 30-storey building across the street, without falling to my death at ground level. The pile of bodies on the road below doesn’t give much hope, but the 30-storey building is where the rainbow ends.