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VIDEOWhen Your Boss Is a Star: Shelley Long
A gig driving the "Cheers" star drove one assistant to quit.
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The day before the film started shooting, the assistant, who asked not to have his name disclosed, saw his duties reassigned after Long’s designated chauffeur overslept. “Shelley stipulated that she could have only one person that would drive her every day. That was part of her contract,” he says. “I happened to drive a BMW, so I got the job.
“I had to pick Shelley up every morning and take her home every evening for 24 days, six days a week. It was my job to make sure she felt okay, every day,” says the assistant, who now directs music videos. “I was also a liaison between her and the producers of the movie. I got the job because my mom knew someone who knew someone who was a producer.”
In just a month with Long, the assistant had his patience tested several times. "Once I had to get her at 5 a.m. and she wasn’t answering her door or her phone. The producers were yelling at me. There was a lot of pressure. Finally she came out. I told her we had to hurry. Instead, she took her dog for a walk and then got into the car," he recalls.
Another day, he says, "We were driving home from set and she’s in the back reading the script. She tells me there‘s been a mistake. 'I’m not supposed to come to set tomorrow. I am not in the scene that they’re filming.’
“This is a huge mistake for an assistant director to make,” he explains. So, feeling skeptical, the assistant checked the script. “There it was, she was in the scene. She just didn’t have any lines.”
When he pointed this out to Long, she told him she didn’t want to go to the set if she didn’t have a line. “I said, ‘But you’re in the scene.’ She told me to get the director on the phone.”
The director didn't understand Long's problem either. "She kept saying: ‘But I don’t have any lines,’ ” the assistant recalls. “We were pulled over on the side of a mountain hashing this out. Finally there was a compromise from the director to give her a line to get her to come to the set the next day."
On the last day on set, the assistant decided that being a PA was not his bag. "Shelley asked me to gather up all her stuff so we could bring it back to her place. I got every thing I thought she wanted.
"Before we left, she said: ‘You didn’t get everything' and opened the fridge. There were 50 little cartons of cottage cheese. I didn’t have a bag for it and it’s not easy to transport 50 little cartons of cottage cheese.
“Finally, the costume department resentfully gave me a fancy bag. We get to her place and she invites me in. This was the first time I was invited into her house the whole time.
“There we were both in her kitchen on our hands and knees putting away the cottage cheese. It was at that moment that I realized I was never going to be any kind of PA again.”
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THE SALARY: $8 per hour |
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THE PERKS: None. |
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LESSON LEARNED: Always carry a spare shopping bag. |
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