And then, all too quickly, at the end of an hour-long drive that had afforded me just enough time to relax into my seat, if not the situation I had so ambitiously, strangely, put myself in, we pulled up to a film lot. There’s a little slice of LA to be found in the suburbs of Long Island – who knew?
The van approached the side of a single, warehouse-looking white building – there were no grand doors or entryway, so I assumed this was the side – slowed in front of, and perpendicular to, several rows of parking spaces, and stopped. Everyone got out. In a move almost comic in its speed and disorienting efficiency, each passenger headed in a different direction. One woman made a beeline for the row of trailers parked to the right of the main building, moving indifferently past a series of narrow wooden tables shaded by white tents, beneath which three guys in beige aprons and matching baseball caps were busy setting out steaming metal containers of food. Another woman turned to the left and vanished around a corner. A few, including the driver, the blow-dried and be-sweatered girl, and the technician with the tight, tight curls, angled about the van and the lunch spread, smoking. The Game of Thrones fan, along with one or two others, opened a small door at the base of what I began to appreciate was a very tall building, and disappeared inside its dark caverns like sacrificial offerings obeying their marching orders into the belly of the beast. So broad, the building did indeed look capable of belching.
All this activity, which took maybe 10 seconds from start to settling, left me feeling like the bird in a children’s book I’m not sure I’ve ever read, but which has a very repeatable tagline: Are you my mother? The problem was, I had never actually met Joe, the head production assistant and man who had first told me to catch the 2:30 van leaving from 36 and 3rd avenue that Monday afternoon. It had been all texts and phone calls between us, a connection brokered by another man I had never actually met, one of the film’s assistant directors. This AD was the friend of a friend I had actually met, but only once. In other words, the randomness of the universe – to speak grandly in the context of an industry known for grand spectacles and the grandiloquence of its self-congratulations – had had a hand in my landing this job, my first PA role, on Spiderman II. But now, having seen me this far, it seemed the cosmos had other and one would assume more pressing matters to attend to. I took to asking random people if they were Joe – Are you my Joe? – the closest thing to a mother I had, at the moment. I wasn’t having much luck.