Numbers currently swimming through my head: 5 AM, 101 freeway, 12-hour shoot.
Baby blue fills the windows of my Saturn, but I don’t see the sun. I’m still listening to the new Juliana Theory, and I’m feeling Chinatown grow further and further away from me.
Some USC kid I met on a TV show a few months back asked me to be the Assistant Camera on a short film shoot, a six-page script about the Asian-American crime scene. He knowsaguythatknowsaguy who runs Chinatown, so we’ve got carte blanche to do as we please in its back alleys. We’re using tons of lights from USC, mostly 1Ks and 650s (watts), baby lights by studio standards but big guns to any student. They’re suprisingly mostly on par, and some even less, with the equipment that I get at Long Beach. My job goes from being Assistant Camera to Gaffer, which is basically�the�set electrician. I’m�running�half�a�dozen�extension�cables�to and�from�the�gas�generator,� hoping that it doesn’t rain.
It rains.
It now becomes my job to cover every socket with plastic wrap, or cardboard boxes, or whatever I can find to keep the set from becoming a giant electric wok. Somehow, nobody dies. This is considered a good day on a student film shoot.
The entire time I’m in Chinatown I’m exploring, but it feels more like intruding. Not that I’m Chinese anyway, but it feels the same as when I’m in Little Saigon — I play the tourist, the curious Westerner, except I stopped just playing the role long ago when American public school blanched me of most Vietnamese literacy, and now the game is to see how long I can go before I speak, and my flawless English accent makes audible my shame.
Traffic’s the same on the way back to Long Beach, but I’m driving faster, much faster. Not that it matters. I’m a tourist anywhere.
April 5th, 2006 at 05-04-2006 @ 11:04 PM
eh. Going to a small town in Oregon with some UCSD Habitat for Humanity people, I heard some kids say “Why are there all these Chinese people here?” “Must be from out of town”.
Just thought I’d share. (seems as if you’ve been doing some dipping yourself)