HOW A BIG YELLOW
TRUCK CHANGED MY LIFE
(for the better)
by Christine DeMaio-Rice
An orange peel grapple is a big machine. Excavator on the
bottom. Long arm in the middle. And a metal grapple on the end that looks like
a horror movie claw. The base spins. The arm moves up and down. The grapple
grabs stuff like SUVs and big piles of metal.
You may come across one while driving, and if you have a
little boy in the car, you may have to pull over to watch the thing move cars
into a tractor trailer. Otherwise, nothing about this machine will rock your
world.
But an orange peel grapple changed my life.
My life was a complete disaster at the time. Though I had a
beautiful baby boy and a good husband, I had a job in an industry I swore I
would never return to, at a company that wanted nothing more than to suck the
blood directly from my heart with a curly straw. This, after I had already sold
all the blood in my heart to the film industry, which after a few meetings and
screenwriting awards, looked like it might want to take a sip from that straw.
A sip, because as good as things were looking, I saw a long
road in front of me. My work was not “commercial enough,” and my manager had
made it clear that years would pass before I would be able to convince anyone
that this lack of commerciality was a quality that was, well, commercial.
But no. My husband lost his job, and I found work in the
fashion industry soon after. What I rapidly discovered was that, though
out-of-towners could schedule meetings back-to-back all over town, Angelenos
were expected to take a meeting at the last minute, or blithely accept a
rescheduling. My boss, on the other hand, had no interest in moving around my
personal days, and my sick days dwindled in my first three months on the job. It
took only a few months for the meetings to dry up and for me to start writing a
Santa Claus script out of desperation.
So, the blood-sucking fashion job with the inflexible hours was
right next to a scrap yard, which apparently opened at the crack of dawn because
when I got there at seven thirty every morning, the orange peel grapple was
already grabbing away. If I had a minute, I watched it go up and down as I
clutched my coffee, and I thought, one day I should get a video camera and film
this because my son would love it. Really love it.
My son was about eighteen months old and just learning to
talk. I missed him while I was at work, adored him when he was awake and with
me, and the rest of the time, I found room to resent him for taking me away
from writing. He was then, and has remained, a fireball of energy. His teacher
alternated between calling him a Jack Russell terrier and a buzz saw. He is
also obsessive. Right now, he has a room full of Legos. Before that, it was
Thomas the Tank Engine, and before that, it was trucks. Big yellow trucks. He
wouldn’t fall asleep unless he gripped a toy truck in each fist. When he received
a Tonka loader for Christmas, it was love at first sight. He called it “lolo.”
One morning, with the vision of that big ‘lolo’ that I would
later know as an orange peel grapple dancing in my head, I dialed a friend’s
number. I’d known this man from Brooklyn, and he’d come to Los Angeles a few
years earlier to attend the American Film Institute. Most importantly, he had a
camera. When I got his answering machine, instead of asking him for the camera,
I said something else entirely, something like, “Hey, wanna produce a kid’s
video together? Here’s the pitch. Trucks. Okay, bye.”
That moment may not seem pivotal, but most turning points
don’t when they happen. That moment, I took control of my creative life. My
friend called me back the minute he got up, and we began the journey toward
becoming business owners. We did not pitch the idea around town, and we did not
ask permission to bring the work to the public. We put the DVDs on Createspace,
and eventually had to hold inventory to meet the demand.
Lolo Productions and the Totally
Trucks series have had ups and downs, but the process taught me two things.
One, my concepts need to be simple. If I can’t pitch it in five words, it’s not
a concept I should develop. My second lesson is that I can be in control of my
product and my creative life. If I think something is worthwhile, I can bring
it to my customers. Becoming the producer and publisher of my work means I understand
now what agents and studio executives meant when they said “commercial.”
Without my son, I never would have taken the life-sucking
job. And without that job, there would have been no orange peel grapple. And
without that scrapyard, there would have been no Totally Trucks. No eye for the commercial and no control of
self-publishing. Who knows what I would have made without all the things that
pissed me off for interrupting my work.
~ ~ ~
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