Downtown Filming: The Crew Perspective

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Up on the LA Times site but dated Dec. 4 is a piece profiling “Peggy Archer”, the pyseudonym’ed blogger from Totally Unauthorized. Last month I linked to her post about Downtown’s coffee-drinking rats. This piece includes more about the joys of working crew on a shoot Downtown:

But when she’s working downtown, she puts a pair of surgical gloves on first. Downtown shoots also usually mean a lot of “L & D ” – lost and damaged – especially when it comes to electrical cable. Some of the cable is full of copper, “so if we don’t have an armed guard on it, it gets stolen,” she says. And homeless people often relieve themselves on the cable that runs down alleys or through warehouses.

“Then we just cut the connectors off, return those to the rental house and leave the cable,” she say. “The rental house understands. Believe me. No one wants to deal with that.”

I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt that “leave the cable” actually means throw the cable away (or leaving it to let a different part of the crew take care of that). Simply leaving stuff lying around wouldn’t be cool. It’s like camping: pack out what you brought in.