Back to blog

G., my best friend and first filmmaking partner, called me one day and said, “I need to talk with you – this afternoon.” I was at my job as an assistant editor, a deadline was bearing down on the editor and me. It was a corporate film, there’s no flexibility in those things.

I asked the editor if I could accommodate my friend’s request, he said coldly, “20 minutes.” He had never been happy with me as his assistant because when the position became available, he wanted to hire his own needy friend in the film business, but I knew the executive producer and without consulting him, she hired me. I was good at the job and he was starting to soften up, but my asking to take time off with this deadline looming made him regret all over again that I had the job.

It was winter and when I met G. at the building’s front door, the sun was already low enough to throw long, dark, cold shadows. We tromped around that enormous building, looking for what she wanted: a place in the sun.

When we finally found some steps in the sun and sat down, half of my allotted time was gone.

Without any niceties, she started talking. “When I was in Reno researching my new film, I met a man, D. I stayed an extra several days…”

“Yeah, I wondered where you were.”

She carried on, “He drove me back to San Francisco. We named our children as we drove over Donner Pass.”

“Ah,” I said.

“I need to pack my stuff and be out of here tomorrow. Can you afford our office alone?”

“Of course not,” I said.

We had worked hard to make our documentary do well out there in marketplace, but its time had pretty much passed. We weren’t making a penny.

“Then we have to close it,” she said.

That was that. Even before D. came along, G. and I knew we weren’t going to co-direct/produce/edit/write any more films together; we weren’t a happy match on the first one. Before we left our spot in the sun, we agreed to keep our company, Cattle Kate Communications, alive and make our separate films under its umbrella.

After she left, I was desperately unhappy. She already had a film underway. I saw her as the creative one and had no confidence that without her, I would ever make a film again. I passionately wanted to but had no ideas. Spending 12 hours a day in that little windowless edit room was not likely to inspire any.

Forty minutes after I left, I slipped quietly back into the edit room and worked as fast as I could to make up for lost time.

At the end of the job, the editor told me that I had done great, that he was glad to have discovered me and hoped we’d work together again.

Although G. threw me aside for marriage and family, I tried to stay close. When she was 8 months pregnant, we sat together in her and her husband’s house – she was so uncomfortably pregnant, she couldn’t sit, the only way she was comfortable was lying on the stairs. She told me she had discovered D. was an alcoholic and decided that after their baby was born she was going to leave him. Go back out on her own as soon as she could.

Knowing what a hard thing that would be brought us back together.

She was throwing him aside and she needed me.