About a year ago, I was working as a maintenance tech for an elevator company. I got a call that a particularly touchy elevator had decided it was going to sit around and do nothing.
When I got to the job, I found a movie crew moving in to shoot scenes from an upcoming indie titled “Lillith.” Without the elevator the crew would have to lug all their equipment up four very long flights of stairs to the floor they were shooting on that day.
It didn’t take long to find the problem, but given the fact that the equipment was antique by anyone’s standard, made scavenging parts challenging at best and most likely impossible. After going to all the usual hiding spots where the property maintenance crew kept parts, I could not find what I needed. I called the maintenance manager and he had one of his guys rummage through another pile I didn’t know about until we found the part and I got the elevator running.
I stuck around the job until the crew got all their equipment upstairs.
A few years ago, I was part of making a micro-budget movie and could appreciate the work that went into making even our meager film. To see the tremendous amount of people and equipment for what the writer-director called a low-budget film, made me even more proud of our final product.
Anyway, that was my brush with professional film making and how I contributed even in a small way, to making “Lillith” a reality.
The link below is to the page of the writer-director’s blog about the making of the movie and his thoughts on self-promotion and marketing. He has a lot of great insight on the subject and I think it is important to remember that in the end it is people who make things happen and people like working with friends.
Through the Mill 