When Emily Pendas Sobel was interviewing for her first job as a script supervisor on the TV series "Miami Sands," director Andrei Zinca asked her to describe the room she was sitting in.
"He was basically wanting to know my observation to details and things like that," she recalls. "We argued over what color the couch was and I was right. And I told him what color socks his receptionist was wearing, so at that point he hired me. They were purple, by the way."
Born and raised in Miami, Pendas Sobel attended Miami Dade College while holding down a series of jobs, the last of which was doing customer service for a wholesale distributor of eyeglasses.
"I had this little cubicle with half of a window outside, and it just kind of dawned on me, like, I really don't want to be here anymore," she says.
So she transferred her credits to the University of Miami, where she pursued a communications degree with a concentration in directing for film and theater.
After graduation, she sent her resume to everyone in the production guide, and Zinca asked her if she wanted to be a script supervisor. "I said, 'Of course! Yes!' I did not tell him, but I had no idea what a script supervisor was."
Eleven years later, she's still happily employed in the profession. She's serving as a script supervisor on her second season of TV's "Burn Notice," and she recently worked on "Sugar," a coming-of-age baseball drama about a Dominican player, currently in theaters.
Total breakdown: Pendas Sobel's job begins during preproduction, when she breaks down the script and approximates its running time. "I'm tracking what happens to the actors, what happens in the script, breaking it down scene by scene and just doing my own cheat sheet so I can refer to it instead of having to go through the whole script," she says. "I take notes as to what's going on continuity-wise, meaning if the actor gets into a car crash in Scene 25, and he gets cut up and bruised up, we carry that through the rest of the show. And also, we do page counts, so I have to see how many pages are in a certain scene. And we keep a running tab on how many scenes there are in a script."
