Cut and paste from a series of tweets I made this morning.
Sudden flashback to when I bitched out John K for coming in after a crunch weekend he’d caused and finding nothing but bad in what we’d done.
He’d held up a whole episode in layout. The Flash crew got it Friday; it was due Monday. As Flash director, I thus worked 48h straight. He, meanwhile, stayed at home all weekend with a cold. Came in on Monday morning to see what we’d done and started ripping it apart. Nothing but “this is wrong, this is wrong, this wasn’t in the layouts, did you even read them?”. I was all, “John, we saved your bacon. You won’t pay any non-delivery penalties. You have an episode. Sure, it needs lots of work; we had no time to get it done.”
Then I went home and crashed for a few days, and refused to touch that episode again. Ever. I basically stopped caring about my work after that. I faked it for a while, but I was done.
I think the next episode was the one where we upgraded to Flash 5: Crash Fest, and I put a post-it with the word “fuck” on my monitor every time Flash crashed while I was trying to assemble and refine that episode. Couldn’t bring it back into Flash 4 as there was no ‘save as 4’ and it didn’t start crashing until the sunk cost felt too high. I stopped swearing after a while, and just sighed every time it crashed, wrote “FUCK” on a post-it, and stuck it to the monitor’s bezel. By the time it was done I had enough to spell “FLASH 5” in post-its on my office’s window.
If I keep playing with that show proposal and end up getting it happening (these are several big ifs here), I feel like I will tell all my John K stories to the crew, and ask them to call me out if I ever start doing the same stuff. I’ve heard the shows Gabe ran were pretty mellow; I stongly suspect this is because he had a similar reaction to working under John.
(When I rambled this out on Twitter, I got several of my vfx/tech/games friends applauding my actions here, and noting that it sure ain’t changed much nowadays. You wanna pursue that dream job in one creative industry or another? You’ll probably run into a situation like this too. If you’re at a studio with people doing their best to avoid this kind of shit, treasure it!)