It’s a glamorous industry, but the bullying culture can make working conditions unbearable
I woke up this morning feeling sorry for Bond, which was a new one for me. Poor Bond, though, delayed for months, Daniel and his little weapons suspended in the jelly of Covid during lockdown, now opening under a new and curious weight of pressure as the world watches to judge if cinema’s still a thing. Feeling sorry for a multimillion dollar movie is a side-effect, I think, of currently following negotiations in
Hollywood between the studios and IATSE, the union of people who work behind the scenes in the entertainment industry. In the evenings now I’ll watch TV, and while I’m watching TV, I’ll watch the hashtags, too, one eye on the work, the other on the workers.
I’ve been aware of the gentle horrors that go into making films and TV for a while, from the distance of my bedroom. It was from my bed in half-sleep that I’d hear my friend, who works in costume and lives with us when
shooting a film, creep downstairs at dawn, and then at midnight, creep back up. This is a house of small children where early mornings are standard, so sleep is sacred and the impact of its lack visible everywhere, rotten and mean. We would see her sometimes in rare snatches of evening, when she would be drinking a cup of tea while also organising the schedule for the following day on her phone, routinely shutting off the alarm that told her if she went to bed now she could conceivably get six hours sleep. She’s had multiple speeding tickets on journeys between home and work, and once wrote off her car coming down a hill after another endless day on set. I would press her with increasing dread as she explained matter-of-factly what a workday looked like for her, telling me about the hidden, unlogged hours, and the privilege required to say no to overtime. I’d sit aghast and unable quite to conceive of how 14-hour days are sustainable.