Despite long hours and meager pay, recruitment of non-union PAs on TV and film crews has never been better
“What are you filming?” an excited passerby asks me.
“Game of Thrones,” I reply, standing in front of the SDNY courthouse, four years after Game of Thrones went off the air.
“Can I be in it?!” they reply, apparently oblivious to Law and Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay, who’s reciting lines with Peter Scanavino 20 feet behind me. Out on the corners of any film set, this type of interaction with New Yorkers is common.
A film crew’s footprint stretches across city blocks, with big rig trucks full of production equipment lining sidewalks that have been reserved by the locations department. Roaming the campus are actors, camera operators, electricians, grips pushing dollies, transpo drivers, prop department workers ferrying carts loaded with chairs that have celebrity cast names printed across the back, make-up artists with translucent backpacks, crafty personnel, parking coordinators, animal wranglers, graveyard shift rigging crews smoking cigarettes as they make their exit, costume designers, set dressers, and somewhere out there, an executive shields their mouth while seething into a cell phone. It is a circus of specificity, with everyone working to make sure what goes in front of the camera’s iris is so perfectly artificial that it looks real when released to the public four months later as a miniseries, show or movie.
The allure of production is a longstanding...
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