: - ) ALL All Things Peaks

[Jackwithoneeye]

i hear ya Jordan. I've worked in Film/TV for twenty years. collected unemployment all summer. seems bleak and hopeless at times.

 

[Dom]

i hear ya Jordan. I've worked in Film/TV for twenty years. collected unemployment all summer. seems bleak and hopeless at times.

It's been a rotten year for media work. You both have my sympathies. I've had bad periods down the last 30 years, but this year is definitely a stinker. I'm fortunate that I left London and moved back in with my folks on the other side of the country in late 2019, just before the lockdowns started and, due to them both being in poor health now, have continued to live with them. If I was still in London, I'd have long since gone bankrupt!

Work is 100 per cent from home now. Last year was insane: a massive catch up for the business. I was worn out! This year, on the other hand, has been dead. I've been ticking over and I saved enough last year to be able to cope with a quiet year, but I'm living on a shoestring, never going out anywhere, no holidays, only buying second hand books and so on. In essence, my bank accounts are keeping stable, but I'm only breaking even by being a hermit.

My concern for the future, really, is that I'm no longer going out and about meeting clients and generating work. I'm completely dependent on my agent. I haven't met anyone I've worked for in person since February 2020!!

 

[Jordan Cole]

Work is 100 per cent from home now. Last year was insane: a massive catch up for the business. I was worn out! This year, on the other hand, has been dead. I've been ticking over and I saved enough last year to be able to cope with a quiet year, but I'm living on a shoestring, never going out anywhere, no holidays, only buying second hand books and so on. In essence, my bank accounts are keeping stable, but I'm only breaking even by being a hermit.

Yeah, so I essentially have three jobs:
- Working as a background actor on film/tv. This got me tons of extra money, until this year.

- a work at home job on my laptop that taxes calls "document editing"...it gets me a little money but not enough to pay rent. I used to make decent money doing this (highest was $600 a week but it would be around $400 a week or so usually), but around COVID it dried up and then somehow it never got back to normal again. Now it's like around $200 a week. It's boring, easy, but it's not enough.

- Freelance composer work. Jobs are very rare, and I charge very little. I'm working on somebody's podcast theme song now for $150 bucks, but I don't get these jobs often enough. Like it will go dark for 4 or 5 months at a time. And I've never been good at getting my name out there. I'm always amazed when somebody emails me for music.

I really need the background gigs to add that extra few hundred every week and also it kept me sane, it was something I actually enjoyed doing and I'm surprised I miss it (cause it could suck sometimes.) It got me out of the apartment, meeting tons of people, networking a lot (tons of creative people do background work), and it was just something that helped my week feel kind of structured.

 

[Jackwithoneeye]

i've had a few slow periods. first few months of 2009 w financial crisis, some films and shows I was supposed to work on fell through and were pushed back. but as you get older, you want to be able to have family/ house. etc. gets tough in this business.

 

[TheArm]

Random thought - having just rewatched the pilot in full for the first time in a while (and the European extended/alternate version at that, which I really hadn't seen in many years), it was remarkable to me how different Kyle's performance as Cooper is in the pilot compared to the rest of the original series. Even come the second episode (which I know was shot many months later in 1989), that Cooper hanging upside down in the Great Northern is much chipper and perkier than the Cooper of the pilot, who has more of an edge and is a little less sensitive. You can really see it when he interrogates Bobby IMO; when Bobby loses his temper and Cooper gives Harry that big smile, and later on when he says "You didn't really love her anyway" to Bobby - I just can't imagine the Cooper of eps 2-30 (or even when he briefly resurfaces in S3) delivering these lines in quite the same manner.

 

[Cappy]

I somehow never noticed Donna Hayward’s Barbie car until fairly recently:

 

[eyeboogers]

TheArm, I have always noticed the big shift from FWWM+pilot Cooper and the series Cooper. For me Cooper as he is remembered in pop culture should be at least 50% credited to Harley Peyton and his extreme gift for memorable dialogue and likable yet complex characters. For this reason, those that miss there being more of classic-Coop in TPTR should seek out Peyton's excellent romantic mystery series "Moon Over Miami"(ABC,1993), which he created following Twin Peaks. The protagonist (Walter Tatum, played by Bill Campbell) certainly has quite a bit of Coop-character DNA.