The show was Malcolm In the Middle, but the look and feel is typical of almost any show that lives on stage, a place of manufactured reality where time stands still. Once the big stage door closes the outside world seldom intrudes; such elementary notions as day or night no longer apply -- hours pass, focus is maintained until the work is done.My longest stint in this manner was 28 straight hours on a Diet Rite commercial, working the smoke machine for a tyrannical cinematographer. Back then, my wage in commercial props was $300 for ten hours, 1.5x from ten to twelve, double-time after twelve hours. When the dust cleared, the "day's" work amounted to nearly a thousand dollars.
In Hollywood you're always looking for that next job -- commercials can go for a day, a week, a month; feature films last from three to six months; TV shows typically shoot for about nine months. Always moving from one job to the next, you can never be sure what the next will bring; there are good jobs and bad jobs -- "Malcolm" was a great job -- Diet Rite was a bad one; the money was scarcely worth it.
