Back then I used to strategically place my phone on the shelf beside my bed at night for it to charge in the event that some anxious HR person would call to discuss my experience with me early in the morning. Of course I would never answer it when it rung. I''m a night person. I do my best work at night and am at my clearest and most open-minded then too. Therefore, having no work or school to go to I got into the habit of staying up until 4 or 5 am and sleeping until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. It just worked for me. It probably wasn't the best idea. I should have been up and prepped for my job hunt every morning at 9:00am sharp but that just never worked for me.
The reason I never answered the phone then is because 1) if it was important they would leave a message and 2) I had once jumped out of bed to answer my cell phone about 6 months prior. I give my number out to very few people and get very few calls so I always used to figure that, if my phone was ringing it must be something important. It was some lady to call about some volunteer job that I had applied for but never really wanted. I was still half asleep and must have sounded to her to be either stoned, hung over or retarded (maybe a combination of all three). I struggled to complete coherent sentences to answer her routine questions and it must have sucked for her because I can't imagine it took her too long into our conversation for her to decide that I wasn't getting this job.
Anyway, whenever the phone rang I would wake up, listen to see if a message was left and then go back to sleep. None of my friends or the barrage of wrong numbers I got ever since changing to a Toronto phone number left messages so I knew that if a message was left it was either a job opportunity or a death in the family. Either way it could wait a couple more hours.
The number one proponent against my sleeping in was my girlfriend who still went to school and juggled a part time job every other day on top of that. So when my phone rang that Thursday morning at 9:00am and a message was left, she poked and prodded me until I rolled over and checked it. It was X saying he had some good news for me. I called him back. He told me of how both he and the girl he had hired came to a mutual agreement that she just wasn't the one for the job and now it was all mine. He didn't really ask me if I still wanted it. For all he knew I could be harbouring deep resentment against his going for a girl just because he thought it would give his company a new dimension. Served him right. But really, when movie people need something, they don't ask for it and deep down he must have known he was offering me something I really wanted.
He went into a typically long-winded explanation about what had happened and repeated about how the business isn't for everyone and other variations of the same material I had heard repeatedly to death already. He told me to grab a shower and some breakfast and meet him at the Starbucks. This seemed strange as I told him at both of our prior meetings that I had a car but I figured he knew what he was doing so I agreed to meet him there at 11:00am. I grabbed a shower and went to McDonald's for breakfast (now that I was a working man I could afford such little indulgences) and headed for Starbucks.
I had asked X if I needed to bring anything. He said only my laptop. Curious, but I made nothing of it, realizing now that these are maybe oversights that need to be made from a naive and over zealous small town boy going off to his first big city job, in the movie business no less.
I arrived at Starbucks early and went on my laptop. I blogged and Facebooked about my new found employment and waited patiently for X to show up. He arrived and we loaded into his old beater, which took us hurriedly to his house where his office resided. No one said this was going to be pretty. The house was a modest affair in a nice neighbourhood. It was roomy enough for him, his wife and his son, with a nice back yard (a luxury if there ever was one in Toronto). There was no air conditioning in it. I hoped it was more a matter of them being a naturly family as opposed to a film sales guy who couldn't afford such a simple luxury. The house had recently had work done to it and been painted and it was strangely empty. X explained to me that he and his wife had recently decided that they had too much stuff just lying around and therefore were in the process of getting rid of it all. Why bother having books when there are plenty at the library. Ditto for DVD's when Blockbuster stored so many of them for you.
He gave me the tour and showed me to his office. The office was a medium sized room off to the side of the house and beside the bathroom who's door didn't entirely close; something that kept me paranoid the entire time I worked there. The office had two desks. Well one desk and one large sheet of wood that was help up by two wooden signs that looked like they were swiped from a construction site. I don't bring this up in mockery, it was a large and sturdy surface that was just as good if not better than any desk could have been. My desk, in the other corner of the room, was covered in skateboard stickers and was completely bare. I set up my laptop on it, fired it up and sat down on the most uncomfortable wooden chair I had ever sat on. I wondered if his one-room-in-the-back-of-his-house company had a policy on ergonomics (to be fair he later gave me his chair to use which was better and on wheels but still hard and unpleasant on those hot sweaty days where only a single electric fan atop a high shelf gave us any relief).
X was in a hurry. He explained that he had worked night and day by himself for over a year building the company up and now he needed some relief so that he could focus more on taking business to the next level. What he had learned from the girl, whose name I did know but now eludes me, was that he is not an easy man to work with and that he sometimes takes for granted that he has been in this business for a long time and has a wealth of knowledge that not everyone else has. In hindsight he may have been prepping me for every time he displayed a condescending attitude towards my not knowing something off the top of my head, but at that time it was all just talk. I lasted in the business for almost 3 months. I now wonder what had gone down in this 3 days to have made that poor girl jump ship.
The reason for the rush was because X was going on a three week vacation to Vancouver the following week and had wasted 3 days already driving down a dead-end road. I had a lot to learn and not a lot of time to learn it in. The first task was to set up my e mail address. We used Outlook in order to manipulate a Google account into looking like a company e mail. The rule of thumb is that if someone from a company sends you an e mail from a Hotmail or Yahoo of Gmail account, they probably don't mean serious business. There was no reason for anyone to know that we were just 2 guys working out of a house with no air-conditioning because we approached everything as a serious business so we may as well look like one.
This process took hours to do with me Googling for tip sheets on how to get everything properly configured while X went about his regular tasks. That was fine. There was business to be done and I certainly didn't need anyone to hold my hand. Getting everything set up took most of the day. In between he showed me some things that he was working on but really, day one was all prep. We ended the day at around 7:00 pm and he drove me back to the Starbucks thinking I would be getting on the subway. I reminded him once again that I had a car. He wondered why I didn't tell him. I figured he had known since I had told him two or three times before and figured that he had a plan. We parted for the day.
Friday morning I drove right to his house for a 9:00am start time. We had a lot to do and it all needed to be done before he left for his vacation. It was more training. I arrived to a list on my desk and a long-winded lecture on how every day he starts by making a list of what needs to get down and stroking them off one at a time in order to best prioritize the day and to measure one's progress so that we would know where we start each day when we make a new list. Made sense. The day lasted again until 7:00pm (I was getting worried about these late days, but figured it was simply because we were trying to cram so much into so little). During the day he showed me how to send via courier, how to prepare screener packages, how to send "e-blasts" (mass e mails to companies about upcoming festival screenings or to advertise the availability of titles in certain regions) and so on. In between both days, during lunch of his deck in the back yard he lectured me again and again about maintaining a positive attitude and thinking like a winner and every other self help advice he had ever picked up.I smile and nodded. I was the young know-nothing and he was the wise old professional who had all the knowledge in the world to give. If it was the part he wanted to play, so be it, who was I to get him off his high horse and all this stuff, in spite of it all, made sense and seemed to have worked well for him.
At the end of the day X was feeling as though we were making good progress and I guess we had gotten to where he had wanted us to be. He gave me a box of screeners, some cash and promotional materials for if I needed them when he was away. We had also went through his sales list, pinpointed what companies he had given screeners to and during what market and checked off which ones I should get in touch with to follow-up over the next three weeks while he was away. I was to work half days. It was a good learning experience.
I started by going through the list and sending e mails to everyone who had been given a screener at Cannes, Berlin, AFM or any other lesser market. It was clear that X hadn't really been doing his job (there had been screeners given out from almost a year ago that had never been followed-up on) and he openly admitted this while we were going through the list the first time around (no wonder he needed someone new). The e mail addresses were collected off of Cinando, a site that is given free on a yearly basis to anyone who attends the Cannes Film Festival and is a large and useful database of company and contact information. It was my best friend for the entire time I worked there. X would check in periodically via phone to see how I was getting along and to have my tend to any miscellaneous business that may arise. You'd never know what kind of mood he would be in. Sometimes he was pleased and sometimes not. Sometimes I had done good work and sometimes I had made made mistakes, which, of course, would be given far more focus on than the good work (one day he was moody because I had gone out for lunch and when he called I did not have a pen on me to write down what he had to say). What can one expect from someone who has spent two days in the business and has a boss who can only be reached periodically. No matter, mistakes are to be learned from and frustration was to pass. After the first week we devised a list of companies that would be good to phone up and do follow-through with.
The phone calls were daunting. Because all of them were foreign, you had to divide your schedule up into knowing who to call at what time of the day. I knew I wanted to start with a territory where they would be guaranteed to speak English so I started with Australia (I was dreading those calls to Japan and the other Asian countries). My first call was a learning experience. It was SBS in Australia, where I talked to a nice and professional man. My method was to just jump right in: this is my name, I'm calling from this company about this movie, have you seen it?, okay bye. From B, the man I spoke with, I learned to not jump right in, make introductory small talk and don't make them feel pressured by jumping right into business. Fair enough. B had not seen the movie but informed me that he hoped someone would have by their weekly meeting and so he would follow-up by the next week. Another movie business rule: no one phones you back unless you have something they really desperately want and it wasn't like we were dealing with the work of the next Spielberg or Scorsese here.
I marked this information down on the sales log, set a date a week from now to follow-up again and went about my business. I wasn't a very good salesman at this point, just accepting that most of the people I called hadn't seen the movie yet but would make sure to put it on the top of their pile and get back to me. Alright, thanks, have a nice day; but hey I was talking to people and getting some feedback (most of them passes). This wasn't so hard after all. I even managed to find someone who wanted to make an offer...
To be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment