A voice for the techies
HER arms are covered with dime-sized burn marks and her left wrist is popped out of its socket, but this is not a bad thing. Injuries are part of the job; injuries mean she's working steadily, and as any electrical lighting technician or grip, gaffer or best boy in Los Angeles will tell you, that is not always the case.
An electrical lighting technician, she is one of the thousands of dayworkers who make up the stage crews at studios and set sites around Southern California. The work itself is incredibly varied -- she can spend one whole day sitting, wrapped in a sleeping bag, minding a light 70 or 80 feet above a set, another dodging rats as she runs cable under a Beverly Hills mansion -- but two things are not. The days are almost always long -- 12 to 14 hours --and whatever she's doing, it's bound to involve lifting things that are very heavy and often very hot. Hence the burns. She doesn't make the credit list often, and she won't be buying a house in her West Hollywood neighborhood any time soon, but she likes the life well enough to have lived it for 15 years.
"But someday," the woman says, "I am going to make a chart describing how darn heavy some of the things are."
When she makes the chart, you will be able to read it online at www.filmhacks.blogspot.com. Because on top of being a steadily working lighting technician and a budding independent filmmaker, Peggy Archer is also a blogger.
Peggy Archer is, in fact, her nom de blog; for almost a year, her Totally Unauthorized site has offered one of the few truly behind-the-scenes looks at the film and television industry on the Internet. In cyberspace, where everyone can hear you kvetch, Hollywood blogs abound, written by personal assistants, low-level agents, publicists, journalists and, most often, screenwriters. Names are dropped, salaries estimated, unflattering celeb photos posted, and swimming-with-sharks encounters mercilessly, and often hilariously, described.
There is a blog devoted to stupid pitch letters, another detailing bad plastic surgery, a site where you can read about famous bad (and good) tippers from the waiters who served them, down to the dollar amounts. And when all else fails, there's always Defamer, fast becoming the IMDB of industry gossip.
