Transcript: Craft Services Warning Signs

Rob Long on what disappearing Nespresso pods tell you about TV today

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Every television or movie set has a crafts services area, which is a fancy and old-fashioned way to describe a place where the location caterer lays out a spread of snacks and treats, coffee and drinks, jars of candy and bagel spreads, and pretty much every sugared carbohydrate imaginable. The better and richer the production, the better the spread. It’s impossible not to get fat in production.

A few years ago, I was in New York and working on a project, and on my morning walk to the parking garage where I stored my car for a comically large fee, I passed at least one location shoot, often two or three. New York, back then, was overpacked with television productions, and I found that if you act like you belong there, you could zip through the craft services area of pretty much any production location and grab a coffee and a doughnut to tide you over until you got to your location, with your craft service table.

Which, in my case, was shot not in a studio but in an old, retrofitted factory. This kind of thing was happening all over the place — even in Los Angeles, where there are now lots of empty soundstages, but at a point it was nearly impossible to find a free spot to shoot a show. It wasn’t that long ago that a studio executive told me that even if the network ordered my pilot to series, it would be nearly impossible to find a place to shoot it.

So when the network did not order my pilot to series, I called him up to say, “Congratulations! Dodged a bullet there, huh?”