Picking up from last time –
So, all of this is taking place around the last weekend of January (just to give you a little of the timeline of where we are at this point).
So, many of the pros are obvious – better credit, better money, better hours (somewhat), more respect in the world, your own office… Lots of good stuff.
You also get to work closely with producers (and even sometimes to some extent Larry and the EPs). So, you’re more in the world.
The cons were basically just two…
1) I had never been an editor before. And if I chose to become an editor, she was going to (of course) make someone else the assistant editor. She believed that I could hack it, but she warned me that if for whatever reason I just couldn’t keep up, I wouldn’t have the ability to fall back down. I’d succeed or be out.
(That’s not a huge con, ’cause I’m sure that’s true all the time when people get promotions. I think just in this case it was brought up because if I were to be fired, then I’d be in a new city, having committed to an apartment, not having a huge network, and would possibly be a little screeeewed-ish….)
I’m cool with that. I’ll jump.
The other con though was that I wouldn’t have nearly as much autonomy.
Don’t get me wrong. As the AE, I worked all the time. (A lot.) But I had a lot of control over when that was. Not all the control, of course. But often something would need to be done by a certain time.
That meant if I wanted to come at 8am, okay. Or if I wanted to come later and stay until the building closed, that’s cool too. As long as stuff was done when it needed to be, I had *some* (kind of a lot, really) autonomy. (Though of course my schedule did revolve around certain things – such as wrap times of field shoots with right turnarounds, etc., it was still flexible-ish.)
The point is, it was almost guaranteed that I would be able to do BMI for the two years because as long as I could get a bunch of work done, a specific few hours a week could be carved out for me.
However with being an editor, my boss made it very clear that that had to come first. It would still be maybe possible to work it out that I could leave on Mondays as soon as my rolls were in (meaning I’d still usually be late to BMI – but at least I could go).
…But she wasn’t sure. If I wanted to be an editor, there was a real possibility that somewhere along the line, I’d have to quit BMI, because it would just be no longer feasible. (It was looking like maybe we’d try to at least let me finish year one, but that we’d table the talk of year two for a bit. But it was made exceptionally clear that I had to be willing to leave if I needed to.)
And I had to decide if the possibility of leaving BMI was worth being an editor to me.
Oof. And we’ll get into that more tomorrow.