Assistant to the Assistant

Apr 18
2 min read

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.