communication breakdown

I've got this friend.

Maybe.

The trouble I find in describing who this person is relates to moviemaking. In the industry, the professional and social intermingle in interesting ways. There's always a need to keep people a phone call or e-mail away just in case you might need them, er, need to use them down the line. Is that a friend?

This is why burning bridges is such an unsafe way to travel.

Well, I've got this friend, let's say. We've worked together on three different projects during the last three years. The first time around I was an outsider to the gang of people that had been gathered and this person didn't even introduce themselves until about two hours into the day. We sat and chatted movies and about my writing the next morning, but you couldn't help but notice it was less me she was interested in than what I might be able to contribute.

One might suspect we hit it off professionally as that show went on, but honestly I showed dependability and competence and she seemed to run things from afar, never really keeping the little workers apprised of what was going on. We were left sitting, waiting, wondering why we had a 10AM call when nothing had seemed to begin happening before 230PM.

I followed her onto the next project. My involvement was discussed over a year in advance, yet when the first production meeting came around I wasn't told about it until two or three hours beforehand.

Things went well with this one, as I continued going beyond expectations, earning myself several different jobs and a couple promotions during the long production. There was always a struggle. There were always missing elements. I always kept myself up-to-date on what I needed to do, but somehow I was always still behind. As I got closer and closer into the center of the production, I started to recognize that things just weren't being said. Always was this expectation that we were all mind-readers.

The third production saw me in charge of the communication with the cast, which helped things enormously. I still felt incapable of fielding most of their questions without making stuff up.

There's supposed to be a film to be shot toward the end of summer. It's possible we could just shoot scenes to promote the script to see about getting funding together. Regardless something is supposed to be happening within the next month and a half. I'm again working with this person.

I know more about her than I did three years ago. I know her birth date, her spouse, a couple tidbits about her separate from film chatter, but I still don't know if I think of her as a friend. She must think of me that way, though, since she shared some particularly personal info last time I saw her. At any rate, there has been some toiling with getting together to talk about this third person's script.

It's been an act of pulling teeth.

She doesn't show up for the meetings we had scheduled or canceled them without telling me. She doesn't return e-mails or phone calls. I've really become cognizant that there's a lot of backlog of information I never got over the years, because of all of those reply-less e-mails I send getting thoughts off my mind and such.

Many of her friends accept her the way she is. They chuckle at her being her with the forgetfulness or the tardiness or whatnot. As for me, I think I'm getting tired of the joke.

I know I'm going to see this next project through, because honestly that's what people see as "me being me". I realize she helped springboard me onto that first project, but as the years wear on I start to see more and more distinct differences. Our paths and goals are different.

Maybe that's not the case.

Maybe I was just never told.

I'm seeing similar blasé attitude in the short film guy.

I spent the last entry spotlighting the good stuff. I was feeling alright about the overall picture. Unfortunately, I felt like the last one to know that we had an exceedingly limited timeframe to put this thing together. I came to discover that he will be out of town "vacationing" for about three weeks and he and most of our slapdash crew he assembled are leaving town in a month and a half. In my opinion the script isn't even ready to cast.

The question is (suddenly feeling like Carrie Bradshaw): Do I get myself in these positions or is most of the world like this?