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How to Book Fiddy for a Bat Mitzvah, Use the Method and Work Decent Hours in Hollywood

by Leslie Gornstein | April 8, 2006

Hollywood people look like they know how to put in the hours. What's the average workweek for a cinematographer, editor, critic, writer, director, producer and star?
  George, Tauranga, New Zealand

Those long hours make you look awful, Rebecca. Just wretched.

A.B. Replies: The camera crew couldn't get back to me in time. They were too busy working 100-hour workweeks and then crawling into their studio-provided shanties, on tenterhooks at the prospect of a 15-minute nap and maybe a morsel of maggot-infested cheese.

Yes, this B!tch does exaggerate a bit. But not by much.

The work hours of many Hollywood drones are regulated by union contracts. Film editors, for example, have a guild that ensures decent breaks for the hack-and-slash crowd.

"That's totally enforced," an exec at the Motion Picture Editors Guild tells this B!tch.

Actors, per their own guild, are entitled to 12-hour rest periods between work bouts. That isn't to say actors don't work long hours. Rebecca Romijn recently told Leno she "works 16- to 18-hour days" on her new comedy Pepper Dennis. (Fifteen of those hours are spent getting splatted by various liquids while cameras roll. High-larious!) However, I suspect those work periods are followed by union-enforced breaks of 10 to 12 hours.

It's all very civilized, almost French. But that kind of Yiddish-mama protection stops with movie crews--with the best boys, the boom studs, the hapless guys in black T-shirts and ponytails with all those keys on their belts. Crewmembers tell this B!tch that during a typical filming schedule they often get thrashed with nasty hours and little to no sympathy.

"For crew folks involved in the actual day-to-day physical production of a film, I can tell you it is entirely all too common to experience 80- to 100-hour workweeks," says Roderick Stevens, a cinematographer and the founder of a crew-rights organization called 12 On 12 Off.

"On a bigger film, this goes on for 10 to 20 weeks straight," Stevens says.

Yes, many crewmembers do have unions, but, Stevens tells me, "The unions are not protecting [crews] when it comes to hours." Union contracts may assure overtime, for example, but not work-hour limits or rest periods, he says.

A documentary about the issue, called Who Needs Sleep?, is also making the rounds in Hollywood. In it, Julia Roberts is quoted as saying, "As an actor, I am given a kind of union buffer, in that I have to be allowed a certain number of hours from the time I leave work and the time I have to come back to work. So, if I see the crews getting worn out, tired and overworked...then I'll say, 'No, I have to have my 12 hours.'

"Because if I have 12 hours, then I know they have a fighting chance at a nap or something."

Many Hollywood writers and producers also complain of overwork, particularly in reality TV. The issue has yet to be resolved. Though, once it is, I'm sure we'll be seeing a show about it on Fox.

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Watch for the next installment of Answer B!tch Sat., Apr. 15