Breaking in my Trailer

I was soon preparing to take my trailer on its first real excursion.  I was looking forward to having more space to work, a powerful workstation under my desk, and better monitors to use to view the footage on.  I was a bit apprehensive about towing my trailer straight through downtown on the busiest freeway in LA on my first trip.  But once we got out of town, driving in the desert seemed to be idea conditions for getting acclimated to towing it.  I had one of the guys on the camera crew join me as a copilot/navigator for that first leg of the journey, and we didn’t have any significant problems.  Once I got on the freeway, I just didn’t stop until I was well outside the city.  It was about five hours to get to El Centro, where we would spend the next ten days.  I dropped off the trailer near the set, and headed to the hotel.  They were having another budget overhaul, and they decided to return the production office trailer to save money.  I had brought my trailer on my own and wasn’t planning to charge them for this first experiment with it.  But when Haggart proposed moving the whole production staff into my little trailer, he promised that they would pay me for it.

 

So while some of the production managers worked out of their hotel rooms, for the rest of that shoot I had at least ten people working in very tight quarters in my 24’ trailer.  There were usually two or three of us sharing the back desk, four people working at the dining table, and three more using their laptops on the couch.  Occasionally there would be more people sitting on the front bed.  The first two days it was like a solar oven in there, in the 115 degree heat outside.  Until I moved the trailer into a spot that was shaded by a large building, and then I had the only spot on set with air conditioning.  And since that was where footage was being reviewed, it was a pretty popular place for people to be.  And since this shooting location was the closest big one to LA, various members of the post-production and support staff came out from the office to visit the set, basing out of my trailer as well.  Ironically I ended up charging the production more for the use of my trailer than they saved by canceling the rental of the much larger fifth-wheel production office trailer, which is exactly what the production crew prompted me to do.  It came to $300 a day, which was a reasonable number for a piece of equipment like that.