The Price of My Time

If you are a busy professional in the working day who wishes to tell me that I am wonderful, the average cost for you is £5 per hour.

If you wish to abuse me because of your fearful, fearful state of mind, I charge approximately £4.70.

None of this involves writing books.  That is a different economic calculation.  But the maths looks something like this….

Every so often – with increasing regularity in fact – I am invited to meet people who have read my books and will tell me that I’m awesome.  This is a very lovely thing and I’m generally up for taking a couple of hours out of my time every now and then to hear this.  Sometimes it’s incredibly rewarding for more than my ego, as you make new and exciting connections with interesting and groovy people, as well as getting a warm glowy feeling inside.  But a large amount of time, especially as concerns the film industry, it’s an exercise in being told why you’re amazing but nothing much is happening at all.  At these meetings I will usually have something to nibble on or drink.  I am teetotal, so if we run to a lunch of being told that I’m awesome, my bill is frequently around £10.  If it’s a cuppa, I’ll probably have a hot chocolate, and maybe something small to munch on, averaging a cost of about £5 for the experience.

I have no objection to this at all.  If I can, I will go out of my way to buy cake for people who I think are amazing, and tell them so, at great length.  Happily, a great many of my mates a) like cake and b) are incredible human beings, so it all works out.  This is a win for all.

Then we come to abuse.

An average fee for a lighting designer on a fringe show in London, or indeed a somewhat larger show in the regions, is £600.  It should be more.  It should be £1000-1500, and sometimes is, and frequently isn’t.  But let’s for a moment assume I’m being paid £1000 to light a show.  Where does this money goes?

1.  Time in rehearsals.  I spend approximately 20 hours in rehearsals for an average production – sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on how fiddly I think it’s going to be.
2. Time in meetings.  I probably spend another 15 hours in meetings, both in the build up to a rehearsals, and heading into tech week.
3. Travel.  If I am working regionally, as I do a lot, a commute can be anywhere between 2-4 hours for every trip to work, until tech week, when I’ll go out of my way to make sure it’s less, as during tech my priority is work (13 hours a day) and sleep (all the rest of it).  But let’s say approximately… 24 hours of travel.
4. Emailing, phone calls and quote-chasing.  How so much of an LD’s life is spent on email with fellow team members, and trying to get hire quotes, I do not know, but it’s a lot.  I’d call this another 20 hours.
5. Drawing a lighting plan.  This takes me anywhere between 12-48 hours of solid work, depending on the complexity of the design.  Sometimes complexity doesn’t come from the size of the venue, but rather from its smallness, and trying to coax something decent from bad kit, and the choices you have to make as to what is gained and what is sacrificed.
6. Pre-plot.  Like many LDs I will often pre-plot the bare bones of a show before going into a tech, as there’s not usually enough time for an actual plotting session.  8 hours.
7. Fit-up.  If a fit up is two days long (average minimum) – 26 hours.
8. If tech is two days long (an average minimum) – 26 hours.
9. Dress rehearsals should only be 3-4 hours, but invariably the tech team is called at 10 a.m. for a 2 p.m. dress rehearsal start, and invariably you end up staying late doing other stuff, so let’s say another 12 hours.
10. Previews.  During previews, directors are very thoughtful about protecting actor’s wellbeing, and while this is good and correct, the swing of that tends to be that you are called by nervous directors at 10 a.m. to ‘chat through the lights’ (a phrase to dread) only for actors to turn up at 12 p.m. while the director hasn’t actually used you at all (because they were looking at sound/talking to producers/doing something else and forgot they called you) and for the next five hours you’re kept waiting in the venue unable to do actual useful work because they might ‘need tech support’ (another dreaded phrase).  As a consequence, even if you only have on hour of notes to do during previews, you end up pulling yet another 12-hour day, often running to 13-hours if there are notes after a show.  Repeat three times.

And so where does that leave you?  From your starting fee of £1000, you have put in over the course of 6-months to 5-weeks, approximately 214 hours of labour on an average production.

Or, to put it another way, you are making somewhere around £4.67 an hour.

I achieve a great deal more for this lesser sum than I do when receiving £5 an hour worth of baked goods to be told nice things.  But while achieving more, I’m often also on the receiving end of more crap.  Not necessarily malicious crap, or inept crap; just the crap that comes from a high-tension environment of frightened people who genuinely aren’t sure how this thing that they’ve worked on for possibly years of their life is going to pan out.  And as we all know, fear isn’t necessarily a good first step towards behaving well in a tense environment.

So world… if you are hiring an LD, please be kind to them, because even with a decent fee the odds are that the time they’re putting in is disproportional to their ability to eat afterwards.

And if you just want to buy someone – anyone – cake, and speak kind truths about the excellence of their humanity in general, that too is a generous deed in a wicked world, and we should all do a little bit more of it.