Earlier this year, many Conn students received paid internships over the summer.
David Kelley ’11 was not one of those students.
“It was a job, not an internship,” he remarked. Last summer, Kelley found himself working as a production assistant for the popular reality show Project Runway. How did David obtain this position?
It began with CELS. “I wanted a job, but I kept missing those mandatory workshops,” Kelley explained. As any Conn student knows, the CELS workshops tend to sneak up on you, but are utterly necessary hoops that must be jumped through in order to qualify for a paid internship.
During his junior year, Kelley was busy with a variety of projects, and although CELS offers seemingly countless opportunities to make up for missed workshops, procrastination took over until finally…
“I was studying abroad in Scotland when I got an e-mail informing me that I was kicked out of CELS. Shortly before leaving Scotland, I pretty much got the same e-mail again. So, I was kicked out twice.” When he entreated them to let him make up the missed meetings, their response was a curt “No.” Clearly, CELS was done with him, but he hadn’t lost hope yet.
“[Over the summer] I went to New York and shared an apartment with my friend. No job, no prospects for a job; I got in touch with all three of my entertainment contacts.” This list included his aunt, his cousin and a friend.
“My cousin used to work for Real Housewives of New York. I gave my resume to him and he said he’d give it out. I had no idea who was going to receive it, but one day while I was in New York I got a call from Josh. He told me that a production assistant job had opened, but that it had quickly been filled. He said he’d keep me informed if it became open again.” This was all well and good, but there was one perplexing issue.
“Josh was not the name of any of the resume recipients as far as I know,” Kelley said. “In other words, I have no idea how I got this job.”
Still, a phone call was a good sign, and rather than look the gift horse in the mouth, David waited patiently for another call.
Then, in the midst of a seemingly normal night, Kelley awoke and quickly discovered two things: his knee was bleeding, and his phone had seemingly exploded and was lying in pieces on the ground. There was no time to worry about the knee, however. That phone was the only line of communication between Kelley and potential employers.
“I ran to the nearest T-Mobile (which wasn’t particularly close-by) to try and get it fixed. Afterwards I saw I had two new voicemails.”
The calls were from the company behind the hit show Project Runway. His new employer told him to arrive at Parsons in Times Square at 4:30AM sharp. “There was no interview or anything,” he said. “I just had the job.”
Kelley’s first day of work was interesting. “The crew was filming the show’s contestants walking out of the subway. They were just walking out of the subway, kind of looking around and then going back and doing it again. This took hours,” Kelley said. “It was my job to track down the stray New Yorkers that wandered into the shots and get them to sign a release form that was made up of four pages of fine print. As you can imagine, New Yorkers are not very cooperative at 6:00AM.” A dirty job, but someone had to do it. That someone was always a production assistant.
“Production assistants are pretty much the bottom rung of film jobs,” Kelley said. “I got paid $9.50 an hour, and people told me that was horrible, which it probably was.”
After a twelve and a half hour shift, Kelley got to leave. “They told me my hours the day before work, never any earlier.” The same went for his days off; weekends were no exception.
“At one point,” Kelley said, “some co-workers and I were like, ‘What are our lives?’ We’re up from 10AM to 10PM and we don’t see anyone from our [non-work] lives. Every morning we’re getting models French vanilla creamer (they love it), a San Pellegrino for Heidi Klum (who is very attractive, by the way; her calves literally glow!) and delivering envelopes on foot.”
Not all of the tasks were without reward, however. “They always ordered too much food at the catering tables,” Kelley said. “So one of our jobs was to eat whatever was left over, and throw out what was left over from that. There were many days where I did nothing but eat, throw out trash and repeat. My job was basically to do whatever it was that people told me to do, and if I had nothing to do, then I had to at least look busy.”
Despite the obvious trials, Kelley still looks fondly on the highlights. The shining moment of the summer was found in none other than Project Runway’s very own silver fox: Tim Gunn.
“I met Tim Gunn in an elevator while holding a bag of trash. The doors opened up. Then I looked up. He looked up. He said, ‘Hi!’ I said ‘Hey!’ and then I ran out. Minutes after this happened, I was walking up the stairwell, and there he was again. He said he was hiding. I said, ‘I completely understand.’”
This encounter would not be the last. “One day a co-worker and I were walking, and then out through a curtain comes Tim Gunn! He immediately said ‘Hi, how are you, good!’ There was no time to answer in-between any of this.”
After a summer of performing countless perfunctory and offbeat tasks and sharing an elevator with Tim Gunn, Kelley’s experience working on Project Runway is likely to stay with him for the rest of his life, whether he likes it or not. Luckily, he does.
