Choose your battles

Got a phone call close to midnight last night from a glamour photographer I work with quite often, asking if I was able to assist on a shoot today. It was for a French magazine with the possibility of landing the cover. Normally I wouldn’t mind these last minute phone calls and would be totally cool to come help. But I think I’m gonna pass on this one. I’ve worked with Jake several times and I’ve come to see that, perhaps in his enormous success, he’s forgotten how to treat people like people.

He’ll find things to be argumentative and hostile about, leaving the whole set feeling awkward and uncomfortable. Even if the shoot is going fine, he’ll twist a situation into something you’re doing wrong. Terrible for the morale. And he’s developed a reputation for making models cry. 

He loves working with me, though, and is constantly calling to assist him on projects. This works in my favor in that he is in great demand and has a constant flow of clientele. However, it has come to the point where it bears weight on my conscience working with him. The last time we worked together, we were working on the new Pitbull and Neyo music video and I had to help organize the featured models. They weren’t getting paid very much and one of the models came up to him and wanted to talk about pay. Maybe the number she quoted was higher than was originally discussed, maybe she was being a diva, who knows. But he suddenly exploded in furious outbursts of cursing and swearing, followed by her prompt escort out of the building by security. It was a little extreme, and short of calling his wife a cunt, I’m sure whatever she had said to piss him off probably could have been handled more gracefully. There was another model, who was very pretty but soft spoken and clearly not used to the LA hustle. She got shorted half of the amount he verbally agreed to pay her because he thought she didn’t sound like she was clear on the exact number and figured she wouldn’t notice either way. She didn’t want an outburst like the other model, so just took half the amount and left it as there must have been some misunderstanding. Not cool…

So I’m kinda torn about working with this guy much longer. It’s been a great experience in some ways, but in others, not so much. But as far as this gig for today goes…yeah, I’m cool.