DESPERATION JOBS – Part II
After a year working with James and his wife on their community newspapers, published in Northeast Los Angeles, I had reached my limit on dealing with incompetence, lying and perpetual drama. Admittedly, there was something fun about putting together the papers that had kept me there for as long as I had. Mostly it was that I could do what I wanted in terms of design. They were so grateful that someone had made their product look professional, that they let me call the shots in terms of design. Plus, they had somehow managed to hire a smart, efficient editor, Mindy, with whom I enjoyed working and commiserating. Additionally, I could do it all from my own home. However, Mindy alone wasn’t enough to get me to cope eternally with their utter lack of professionalism. When their antics reached a crescendo, this past winter (see Community Characters) I finally ran for sanity.
Since my regular freelance employer had been laying-off long-time employees I knew I couldn’t count on getting calls from them, so I was forced to find something else to tide me over. What I found was a job at a publication called Below the Line. BTL is a trade paper, like Variety, for “below the line” movie talent. Instead of headshots and news blurbs about the latest producer or director to make a deal in Hollywood — the stuff that fills Variety and the Hollywood Reporter — BTL features headshots of and blurbs about the latest cinematographer or set decorator to sign on to a film or TV show. It was not scintillating stuff, but not utterly offensive either.
The ad to which I had responded called for a newspaper layout artist to put together a monthly paper. As a part-time gig it seemed like it would provide enough money to pay the bills and leave me time for more lucrative freelancing besides. I suppose I should have been tipped off to what the situation would be like on the day of my interview. I knew that the office was in a garage next to the house. Though, the garage-office-thing is a sure sign that there are no benefits being offered, the poverty it implies does not necessarily rule out the possibility that working there could pay the bills and provide some laughs until one’s ship comes in.
My vision of a pristine guest-house-like garage filled with semi-professional workers was dispelled as I fought my way up the driveway through the cast-off bicycles, scooters, plastic armor, stacks of undistributed papers, dozens of trash barrels, random pieces of lumber and oil-oozing SUVs. I met Patrick, a long-haired, fun-looking guy in said driveway and he led me in though the filthy (rat-infested, I later discovered) garage filled with a startling amount of people and into the messy back yard where we sat down at a moldering picnic bench to talk about the job.
My experience with the term “layout artist” had been that it means one puts together previously collected pieces of a publication using guidelines already established. However, the day I began working I found out that there were few guidelines, and that it was also my job to find most of the artwork to go with the stories. That, by itself wouldn’t have been so bad, but I had negotiated my pay rate based on the standard I had imagined, and this was going to be a lot more work than I’d bargained for.
It wasn’t just that there was more work to do than I’d thought; it was that there was no system in place to make the gathering of art simple, or even efficient. In fact, even when I found artwork, it would often be the wrong artwork because stories never came in until after deadline and once they arrived would announce entirely different needs than the ones the editor and I had imagined. There was no system for informing me what was really needed, the top editor lived 3,000 miles away and was seemingly uninterested in the paper and, in general, the work itself resembled the workplace in its utter lack of organization. On top of that, the print deadlines for the paper were different every month and even those kept changing. Patrick had no compunction about putting out an April issue in May if it suited him.
I learned all of this on the first day and found myself crying on the way to work by the second. Not an auspicious sign. Still, I’d quit James’ paper and had to carry on until I found something else. I managed to put out the first issue two days past deadline, working until 11p.m. and jumping every time I’d hear a rat in the rafters threatening to leap down onto my shoulders.
I informed Patrick that I was quitting the next day.
