ENTRY LEVEL ERIK (A Message from Your Friendly Neighborhood Production Assistant)
This past July, I was (for the second time) drawn back to glamorous Los Angeles in search of my start as a screenwriter in the Film and TV industry. With this second attempt at my dream career, I was determined to make it work. On my high school security guard salary, I saved just enough money to feel comfortable with moving into a house somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, back to my valley girl roots. I easily made the move and after being scammed out of $2000, three different roommates, moving into the doorless den of a house, working as a Production Assistant on two different iterations of America’s favorite reality show, the WGA, SAG and AMPTP settling their historic strike, lifeguarding countless hours at pools all across Los Angeles county, and most importantly, writing a grand total of zero pages (excluding this). I take comfort in saying that being an entry level screenwriter in this industry could be better.
It’s hard to even consider what I do as “entry level” to screenwriting (I have a hard time making the connection between picking up trash left behind by people who make two to three times as much money as me to the Three-act structure.) Being between Production Assistant jobs means I work full time as a lifeguard. I know it seems funny that I work a job that is completely unrelated to the production industry, but for a variety of reasons those jobs are extremely difficult to get. In college, our professors brought in a woman who told us her story about how she seeks out 100 rejections a year because at around 100, she was close to getting her projects made. It's some real masochistic stuff, this industry. At the risk of sounding ungrateful (or like a kvetch for those of you who are familiar with yiddish), I’ll just say I really enjoy working the same job I did during summer breaks in high school. I've made obvious progress because lifeguarding in highschool was just a part time gig for me. I'm full time now, baby! Staring at water six days a week really gets my creative juices flowing.
Attempting to move up the production industry ladder by way of my lifeguard career may seem far-fetched, we all know that this industry is built on the idea that, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” As I previously mentioned, I got to work as a Production Assistant on America’s favorite reality show because of the recommendation of my best-good-friend, Victoria (I was highly qualified, of course. The job consists mostly of picking up groceries. A trained chimp could figure that out. I'm not bitter, I swear! I once had to have a cast member's hearing aids fixed. That took more skill than a chimp.) It may be a show without any technical screenwriters, but the leap from reality tv show PA to writer’s PA is not so crazy, not to mention the value of being in the company of other entry level folks who have similar industry aspirations (I have PA friends that make music, write screenplays, do stand-up, have engineering degrees, work as coordinators on other projects and PA in their spare time for the extra cash, the list goes on.) It really is a shame that I haven’t been able to work as a Production Assistant for more than 19 days out of the four months that I’ve been in Los Angeles. With no hate for my reliable fallback job, lifeguarding, those 19 days as a PA were just enough for me to know that it’s the job I prefer.
As I write this on November ninth, the day after SAG officially ended their strike with AMPTP, I am optimistic that I, along with all of you other entry level Film and TV workers, will soon have an abundance of new and exciting opportunities. It has been a hard path for me to get to the point I’m at now (seriously, I will, without shame, take any handout I can get right now), I cling to the hope that it will all be easier soon. In the meantime, I suggest all those reading this, non industry and industry folks alike, give your friendly neighborhood production assistant a big hug, they need it.
by
Erik Anguiano
DEC 2023
