Corporate Cuts and Thievery

News from the boardroom: I just got out of a meeting where they explained the new merger of all our television divisions under one roof. The big announcement was cause for celebration since it streamlines procedures and puts a face to afore mentioned individual units. In discussing this however, I found out it was also cause for dismissal. When you take two divisions, each with their own advertising dept. and put them into one, the corporation goes “hey, we can completely do away with one of the advertising departments, and save a lot of money!” So of course, now 40-some-odd people are out of a job, but of course that is never mentioned in the official press release. In another vein, a little birdie in archives (where they take care of all the props and costumes from all the movies we’ve made) informed me that a lot of people from the productions take off with a lot of the props and costumes from the movies before the studio can gather them back up for display/storage etc. I witnessed this firsthand when I worked on Alexander packing up all the costumes. The only ones from the principles that were left were the bloody war armor…all the cool stuff that was shiny and clean was probably swiped before it was even shipped back to the states. All of this stuff is the property of the studio that paid for it, but I know some do get taken. I was told a certain leading man kept a Batman hood from the most recent movie, and our studio never got back any of the original Willy Wonka outfits. We do have prototypes, but if it wasn’t for them, a certain pirate might be indicted for the pilfering of very feminine, purple, Michael Jackson looking costumes.