I’ve been working as a cast assistant for the last few months, and somewhere between sourcing trailers and snacks and delivering scripts, I’ve been chipping away at my screenplay.
I pitched the concept to a producer recently. She wants to read it.
There’s something intoxicating about the movie business—the sense that anything can happen at any moment. A conversation, a glance, a favour, and suddenly your life tilts in a new direction. It has a kind of circus energy. I enjoy the controlled chaos, the intensity. After a while, you start to see what it asks of people.
The stars spend their days exhausting themselves being wonderful. I don’t blame them for being tired. The flip side of being so wanted is… being so wanted. Some of them are so famous their assistants have assistants, and their fluffers have fluffers.
(A fluffer, I learned, is a term for someone who organizes discreet sexual encounters in exchange for the possibility of an associate producer credit.)
And days on a film set can be absurd. But in the middle of it—something in me has settled.
Not because I’ve arrived. Not because I’ve made it.
But because I want to be here. And I like the work.
There’s a kind of comfort, too, in being part of a temporary family—producers and production assistants, talented technicians, icons, breakout stars, executive producers, stand-ins, cooks, nepo babies—the power, the care, the laughter, the prestige, the failures, the entitlement, the ego…
I wonder if underneath it all, we’re just people trying to have an experience.
We’ve decided this matters to us.
And so it does.
Lately, that’s included finishing my own film.
Some Girl is playing this weekend at the Portland Panorama Film Festival.
If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you.
Hollywood North
This was the summer of meeting up at the beach to talk about artificial intelligence. My good friend shakes out her towel and says she thinks she’s losing her brother to the manosphere. We decide he’s young, impressionable, and probably just looking for a way to belong.
I don’t know much about the manosphere. I assume it’s those entrepreneurs-in-cars who pop up on my feed and call me a femcel. From what I gather, it’s about men falling behind in education and earning capacity, and an existential resentment about not being able to give birth. I can relate to the latter. It’s a strange feeling to put a full stop on millions of years of ancestral evolution.
But it’s hard to reconcile the mean-spirited online personas with the men I know in real life, who are so often gentle, thoughtful, and kind.
Maybe this is the backlash against feminism we were warned about, which would explain why I’ve been working through my neglected stack of feminist theory. I like the idea that feminism returns as needed.
Lately, I’ve been reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, her 1970 exploration of how women’s limited perceptions of ourselves shape our lives.
I especially liked the chapter on romance, where she describes how romantic stories soothe women — how they offer escape from the drudgery of unpaid emotional and domestic labour. Greer writes that romantic storytelling flourished among bored homemakers alongside the invention of the printing press.
She says men don’t understand how deeply entrenched women are in romantic fantasy. But I think the womanizers probably do. And the drearier my schedule, the more susceptible I become to wishful thinking — romance becomes a kind of escape hatch: a fantasy of being chosen, seen, swept away.
On the drive home from the beach, windows down and music up, I wonder if the answer isn’t to shut the door on romance completely, but to meet it with open eyes. After all, the romantic brain is millions of years old, older than language itself, wired to light up at the possibility of connection.
And maybe there’s a romance, too, in becoming.
In knowing ourselves better.
In trusting our bodies.
In expressing our creativity.
In living beyond the need to be saved.
What the TikTokers might call “main character energy.”
The sun is warm on my face, the wind in my hair, the sand from the afternoon still between my toes. For now, I’m finally content in the quiet romance of my own life.
Field Notes from a motel room in Mission—between film sets, apple boxes, and petting a show pony’s nose.
This week we’re working in Mission, staying at the Best Western between long days on set. I’m just heading to bed, watching A Beautiful Mind. The secret service is definitely up to something, as usual. Russell Crowe gives his students a math problem that will take all semester to solve, then Jennifer Connelly asks him out, then they make out—and I don’t know what happens after that, because I fell asleep.
Running around dressing actors in the wilderness, petting horses, and questioning all my life choices is exhausting. In between, in film life, we hurry up and suntan, half-perched on apple boxes. And somehow, I still find myself loving the adventure of movie-making. The fresh air. The sunshine. The new friends and co-collaborators.
I keep thinking about that Carl Jung quote I posted above my desk at home:
“If the way before you is clear, you’re likely on someone else’s path.”
As my head hits the pillow, a feeling washes over me: maybe it’s okay not to have everything perfectly worked out.
Maybe a little uncertainty is how we know we’re on the right track.
#clarity #Carljung #uncertainty #moviemagic #righttrack #curiosity #unfolding #Bestwestern #abeautifulmind
