ShowbizU: Getting a Start in Lighting Design- Brian MacDevitt

You can't, you can't take a job as a technician. I did, actually I did for a little while. I worked at Rockefeller Center on the dress crew for television, but I thought that was a safe place. But if you take a job as an electrician, like an off-Broadway theater, everybody who sees you on a ladder and sees you focusing is not gonna ever refer to you as a designer. We don't have— in Britain it's a little bit different, that you can go from electrician to to associate, assistant associate, and then designer. And that's typical. Like everybody who's, you know, the greatest lighting designers in London have all been master electricians at some time. It's just how their system works. And here, if you work as an electrician, first of all, you get paid and the design, as an early designer, you don't get really any money. You need to like subsidize your career. You need to find some way to make money to keep that art floating. And it would be the same as if somebody came to New York to be a painter. They're not going to just sell their paintings right away. They have to work in a gallery. They have to find work. And a couple of things that I did that were really convenient, I worked at a— I had a fruit stand with an actress. She asked me to cover her 1 or 2 days a week. And just that, the cash I made from that was enough to pay my rent and enough to live on, just working 1 or 2 days a week. And I don't know if that would be true now. I also worked for a moving company, and the moving company was great because the week before rent was due was when movers are really busy, so I could get on board there and, you know, I could— and I could leave for 2 months because it was all like kind of on a per-job basis.