Last Wednesday I got a surprise phonecall from Ivan, a fellow MA Screenwriting graduate who since then has worked as an intern for independent film company Slingshot. I’d applied for a script reading position at Slingshot before, along with about a hundred other places, and gotten as far as submitting a report ‘on spec’ for them. A combination of that report and my chumminess with Ivan has resulted in the phone call that basically said “Hey, still interested?” He’s getting on a plane tomorrow to respond to a job offer in New York, and they want someone to start as his replacement from Monday.
Because of the sort of person I am, my first reaction to getting offered a job after wanting one for two months was “Oh Gods, I don’t want this!” And a part of me still feels this way, even after going to see them, ostensibly for an ‘interview’, but – also because of the sort of person I am – I’d agreed within ten minutes and spent the next 90 being taken ’round the hip, open plan office, shown my desk and the threatening piles of paper on it, as well as furiously taking notes. Because Ivan’s leaving so suddenly a lot of stuff, from arranging for an office chair to be sold on Ebay to sorting out a cupboard full of stationary and directors’ showreels, is being left to be resolved next week.
But yeah, my nerves have reached sweaty palms level, and I’m constantly going over the downsides of taking this internship – even though I’ve already accepted and really can’t back out now, with the single bright spark being the knoweldge that I’m not shackled to a contract and can potentially leave within three days of saying that I will, like Ivan has done. Considering it’s £2.50 each way for me to get between Zone 3 and 1 on the Tube (and once in Blackheath, which has actual trains instead of the Underground connection to the centre, it’s likely to be even more) I’m losing half the £50 expenses they pay per week on transportation alone.
The workload appears to be chaotic and full to bursting. Part of it is script reading, writing reports on scripts submitted to the company so those in power know whether it’s worth their time reading the whole thing. This is the job I initially started out sending CVs around for. But at Slingshot there’s also typical office work, keeping tabs on the calendar, fielding and forwarding calls, booking flights for the bigshots and fetching their lunch. Ivan’s already informed me the boss likes mint tea and decaf soy latte. It’s all a bit Swimming With Sharks.
There can be so much of that sort of work that Ivan has warned that the actual reading can sometimes be pushed to one’s own time at home, after the 10 to 6 (or 9 to 7, if you count travel time) work hours. And that’s perhaps the biggest worry of all – will I have any time at all for my own writing? Waithera expects a draft, Counter Culture needs developing, competitions have deadlines. Unlike an intern at a law firm or hospital, I have no real interest in the business side of things – I just want to write and be given a decent amount of money for doing so.
Wow. That’s a lot of negativity over something that’s essentially good news. I went looking, they want me, and at this level there’s no contract so it’s not like I’m losing my soul and committing a year to this. A couple of weeks will give me experience, contacts, and something nice to put on my CV. Although a ways out of the centre the office itself seems nice, as do the people. One of the producers, Uzma, apparently shares both a love of the novelist Bret Easton Ellis and Dutch heritage with me. There’s the opportunity to sit in on production meetings and though Slingshot usually doesn’t read screenplays by writers without representation, they’ll make an exception for people they know, like Ivan and, now, me. That’s worth indexing scripts and calling up tech departments for a little while, isn’t it?
Straight after my interview and ‘induction’, I went off to Soho – the traditional home of production companies, Slingshot being an exception that proves the rule – and spent close to an hour looking for the office of Rise Films, which was squeezed in between the roof and the floor below, a tailor. I was there to drop of a script, as they’re running a competition for which the deadline was that evening. I was working on it until the last possible moment, so dropping it in the mail was not an option. I clearly wasn’t the only one with no time to spare, as two other people arrived at exactly the same time with brown envelopes in hand. One couldn’t find the door, but I restrained myself and did not point him in the wrong direction.
This weekend I’m writing a script report for Slingshot (already), redrafting two short films for submission to a competition in New Zealand, and a feature for a competition here in the UK. Somewhere in the middle of this we’re preparing to move house too. And that’s what’s called a weekend. Under pressure, as David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sang so memorably.
