Reputations

From what I have come to understand, in film your reputation is pretty valuable, as it is in life in general. No one wants to surround themselves with undependable people who they cannot trust. Not even untrustworthy people want to be around untrustworthy people. Who would? When you give your word to do something, you do it. If you don’t, you are by most definitions untrustworthy. On Thursday, our second day of production for Car Trouble, one of our actresses decided not to show up, and to not tell us about it beforehand. There we were, trying to run a professional set, and this girl makes our lives all the much more difficult. She didn’t call, email, telegraph, or perform any other attempts at communicating her absence. She turned off her phone, and would not respond to any forms of contact on our behalf. Now, I’m not going to sit here and slander her or anything, but what she did is completely wrong. We were basically screwed. We allocated that day for what we were filming, the entire cast and crew was present, and we were held back by an inconsiderate person.

We waited an hour and a half. I suppose we were foolish for waiting that long. I think we’re nice people, and we wanted to give her a chance. Maybe something happened on the way down. Who knew? We gave her the benefit of the doubt. After we felt that we had waited long enough, we didn’t panic. I’m proud that we kept cool heads and handled it well. We called one of the actresses who auditioned and we liked, and went down mercy street. Luckily, she was totally down. One of the grips drove out and got her, and we filmed a scene that her character was absent for until she got to the location.

Overall, here’s the message: if you’re going to bail, don’t agree to do it in the first place. Okay, that’s easier said than done. Here’s the real message: if you’re going to bail, communicate. If you don’t communicate because you’re afraid whoever you’re bailing on will get mad, you are making a foolish mistake. If you say nothing, it is an absolute that they will be mad. If you say something, you have nothing to lose.

We still haven’t heard from that actress…