Reminded of Michael Moore

Today, a co-worker was complaining about having to clean up another co-worker's mess in our kitchen, and it reminded me of something I haven't thought about in a while.

In 2000, I interned at Michael Moore's United Broadcasting while they worked on The Awful Truth (yes, that Michael Moore). During my time there, I had to deal with a lot of shitty jobs (like fetching Michael Moore his McDonald's.) One of those jobs was cleaning up a shitmess made by one of the producers.

In film, producers are kind of the unseen prima donnas. The directors and the "talent" are the seen prima donnas - you do things for them because they are the big names that are going to make you money. The producers are the people who make things happen, and they usually do it without credit. But they make the entire thing go 'round.

They also boss around the production assistants, and the interns. And "boss around" is the only appropriate way I can think of to describe what they do.

So one of these producers had some bad luck with some microwave popcorn. She apparently nuked it for 20 minutes instead of 2 minutes, leaving a horrible smell throughout the floor of the building and fusing most of the popcorn to the microwave. That was inconvenient, because us poor slobs who brought our microwave lunches because we were living in New York on our own dime couldn't nuke our food.

And I'm assigned to clean the microwave.

A bucket of bleach and a half-hour of scrubbing later, the microwave is passably clean, although it seems to have taken on a permanent light-yellow hue from the butter molecules permanently merging with the plastic molecules. And I've completely bleached my shorts and the shirt I'm wearing.

As I mentioned previously in this tale, I'm staying in New York on my own dime without receiving a paycheck of any kind. So I think it's perfectly reasonable, having just ruined one of the two pairs of shorts I brought and one of the five shirts I brought, that I ask the company to replace them, as they were damaged in the line of my duty of cleaning up after slobby rich prima donnas. Not that I'm bitter, that's just what the film industry is about.

They told me, and I quote: "well, bleached clothes are fashionable, so no."

Notice I'm not working in the film industry at the moment.