Page 27 of Between Takes
Shaun watched me go with a slow, knowing smile.
Nightmares. I was going to have nightmares about this entire thing. Oh, who was I kidding? They’d be anything but nightmares.
The production office was nothing more than a shipping container with plastic foldable tables and chairs. Two huge printers took up the far corner and a table was laid out with piles of call sheets and script sides. There were only two other people in the room. One typed furiously and the other hissed into a phone, talking in firm tones to someone who I’d guess wasn’t doing as they’d been told.
I didn’t know what they did here. The fear that she’d throw some completely foreign task, like formatting a call sheet, at me filled me with a dread I hadn’t experienced in years. Not even working for Shaun had made me that uneasy.
“That’s Heather, our production manager.” Alys pointed to a dark-headed woman with streaks of grey peppering her hair. She nodded towards the woman on the phone, a small smirk gracing her lips as she took in the scene. “And the woman with the acidic bite is Cassie. She’s the second AD. Have you guys met yet?”
“In passing, I think. I’m not in here a lot.”
Alys nodded before pulling out a chair next to Cassie. “I’ll set you up here. There’s a laptop for you to use for the day. It’s our only production laptop. We all use our own normally.”
I took a seat and powered it up while Alys went around the other side and sat down next to Heather. They’d pushed two tables together, making it easier to talk across the space.
“You know we’re shipping out for some location filming in a couple weeks, right?”
I nodded, and Alys’s shoulders relaxed a little more.
“Our accommodation arrangements just fell through and I now need to find an alternative.”
It was my turn to sink into my seat. Hotels. I could book hotels.
“Okay. How many rooms?” Surely they wouldn’t take all the people I’d seen on set.
“Sixty.”
My eyes bulged. Sixty hotel rooms in West Wales? Were there even hotels that big in West Wales?
“Three of them need to be premium suites for Shaun, Carys, and Gary,” Alys continued as if I wasn’t having a minor panic on my side of the table. “Try and find something near Pembroke Dock and St Clears. It needs to have loads of parking. If we can be all in one hotel, that’s preferable. A tall ask considering it’s six weeks away, but try.”
“Does that include breakfast?”
“Don’t worry about breakfast. We’ll rarely be at the hotel late enough for it, anyway.”
Of course not. The land of 4AM starts right here. If that wasn’t a mood dampener, I didn’t know what was.
Alys laughed. “You’ll get used to the hours. I promise.”
“I’m not sure I believe you,” I said, eying her smiling face critically.
Five PM rolled around, and I finally hit an ah-ha moment. I’d blame the replay of Shaun’s wicked smile for how long it had taken, but then there were a lot of possibilities to sort through. Thankfully, there was an estate just outside Tenby that could house the entire crew and provide catering for our insane hours.
Alys sat taller in her seat as I filled her in. The furrow between her brows from whatever she’d been staring at for the last hour finally cleared too.
“That’s perfect,” she said. “What rate did they quote?”
“£125. I know it’s too high. They said they might offer some kind of a deal.”
While I spoke, Alys pulled out a calculator and started tapping away.
“Not necessarily too high if they could come down to say £95 and supply a VAT receipt. We work without VAT anyway.” Alys focused on the calculator, her smile slowly widening as the numbers came together. “What do you think, Heather? We could avoid catering overtime and have this place provide breakfast for all waves of the crew.”
Heather glanced at the calculator, her glasses slipping down her nose. “Sounds good if they can actually do it.”
“Do you want to call them back and see if that deal will work for them?” Alys asked, her grin becoming infectious.
There was a thrill here I’d never experienced. I’d solved what appeared to be an impossible problem, and they were all actually happy about it. In all of my other jobs, someone would have been displeased that I’d found a solution. Someone always wanted you to fail so they could take your place. This felt different. Solve one problem and the entire team wins. It gets crossed off a collective list.
Yes, the hours were crazy. From what I’d seen and Alys’s comments, it didn’t change from production to production. Yet here I felt more fulfilled in three hours than I’d ever had at another job or as Shaun’s assistant.
What if this was it, the sense of direction I’d been looking for? I could go back to Scotland in six months and work on drama in Glasgow. Studying Alys, I couldn’t help but wonder if she felt like this at the end of every job. If she did, I understood why she’d deal with the hours and the stress. It was addictive.
