What is it like to work as a TV or movie production assistant?

I worked as a production assistant in television at ESPN and then worked on a couple feature film shoots where I either managed production assistants or worked alongside them. These are the specifics of each job as I experienced them: Television - I worked at ESPN ten years ago and I wasn’t at the mothership at Bristol but rather working out of a newsroom in New York. So things might have been different at headquarters or might have changed since then. But in my experience, production assistant was the entry-level job at the company for people who wanted to make television. PA’s did all kinds of work on shows from handling scripts to pulling tapes from the library, to sitting in on edits and supervising highlight cutting. PA’s were assigned to a show or department and generally seemed to fall into a rhythm and schedule based on the assignment. Some things PA’s did: 1. Picked up lunch and office supplies- mostly just at the beginning since our show was just staffing up and didn’t have any interns. 2. Worked the night shift supervising news and highlight editing. This was exciting because sometimes we were literally cutting highlights at the last minute and rendering them on the computer seconds before the anchor would throw to them on air. Amazingly we always seemed to pull it off and the highlights always rolled on live TV. 3. Ran around Manhattan getting props for shoots. I once went to Chinatown at the last minute and picked up a dozen plastic watches to ship to Toronto for a short-lived drama we shot about professional poker players. 4. Our show was new and understaffed so the PA’s were very lucky and had the opportunity to produce segments. This meant doing research, pre-interviewing guests, writing interview questions, putting together footage, and eventually sitting in the control room while the segment was taped. It even meant going on field shoots (usually with a producer to supervise us) and cutting together entire video packages. A lot of people got promoted to Associate Producer this way because they just became dependable at doing the job. Overall I had a really great experience and I’ve heard the same from people that have done the job more recently. I also had several friends in the NBC page program that loved their time there. So if you can get your foot in the door at a network, it can be a great place to learn the nuts and bolts of production. Film - I worked on a couple indy films but they were big enough productions to have full union crews (one had well over forty people working on it). In my limited experience, the PA job was much less structured in this environment than in television. This was due to the nature of film, which is more of a one-off sprint where the crew gets together for a burst of time to shoot the movie and then dissolves. So there wasn’t as much of a routine. On these shoots, the production assistants were basically a flexible, walkie-talkie wielding workforce that did whatever needed to be done. They flowed like water into every conceivable labor gap that the unionized crew didn’t fill. In fact the only jobs I never saw PA’s do were ones that were strictly union and for which they were not qualified. Typical PA tasks broke down into a few (very) rough categories: 1. Locking down the set- this literally means standing off camera and making sure random people don’t make noise or walk into a shot. You’d be surprised how much manpower it takes just to keep a set quiet, especially if you are shooting at one end of a hallway and people are living in apartments forty feet away. Independant films often have to run and gun in locations that are less than ideal. This is probably not the case as much for a big studio project on a sound stage. But if you haven’t spent an hour holding an elevator door open so it won’t stop on the floor above you and disturb the sound guy, then you’ve never truly lived. 2. Running - A lot of time the PA’s needed to run things from one location to another. Script changes are being printed in the production trailer? Someone get a PA to run them to set. The director wants a cup of coffee? Send a PA to Starbucks.  An actor needs to get from wardrobe to makeup and then to the set? You get the idea.   3. Random problem solving and research-  As with any job, this takes up a surprising amount of time and energy. One day I noticed the room we were going to film in was already really hot at seven in the morning. I talked to the director and producer and got them to approve the idea of spending some money on an air conditioner. I asked one of the PA’s for help and the two of us spent three hours finding a warehouse that would rent out an industrial air conditioner, arranging transportation with the crew, getting it on the back of the truck, driving it to set, and setting it up. It’s that kind of stuff that can really eat up the day. These jobs can be tiring and involve long hours and little pay. And like any job a lot depends on your boss (if you even have one). But working as a PA can be excellent foot in the door for all kinds of roles on a film crew. And film and television crews are filled with some of the coolest people you will meet- extremely hardworking women and men who do a lot of physical labor in the service of making something beautiful. Bonus Fact-  Everyone working in film production refers to a movie being shot as a “show.” For example if Steven Spielberg is going to be shooting a movie in town, people will say “Did you hear there’s a new Spielberg show coming to town in December?” or “Frank’s working on that Spielberg show.” It was super confusing to someone coming from a TV background.