Not for the likes of you
On location. Any given day this year.
Since the start of the year I have noticed a troubling trend: the standard of catering for Supporting Artists has declined. On quite a few recent shoots - all of them mega-budget productions with A-list casts - the Crowd, en route from Set to Holding, has been required to walk through the serving area for the crew's lunch. Each time, we pass within a few feet of an array of steaming hot food served straight from heated vats, with a huge variety of serve-yourself pastries, cheeses, fruit, salads and desserts. With custard.
None of it is for the Crowd. And I am not reading between any lines here: on one of those shoots, a server said it to me, word for word. "Not for the likes of you."
Instead, a sheepish-faced Crowd PA is given the job of handing out lukewarm, soggy polystyrene boxes, the contents of which are laughably poor. It is not the PA's fault. It is not the caterer's fault. Someone in Production instructed the caterers to serve a second-class menu to the SAs.
The pudding
One day this year the dessert was a 65-gram pot of Milkybar White Chocolate Dessert. It would be a fitting packed-lunch snack for Year 2s on a primary school trip. It was actually served to around one hundred and forty highly experienced Supporting Artists who had given up their day to provide the authenticity in the background. It was not a remake of Oliver.
I drew it.
My Instagram followers’ comments told me two things: people knew that pot personally, and while some could quote the FAA agreement chapter and verse, others were genuinely shocked to learn that the section below exists.
Four degrees in Oxfordshire
A Monday in late January this year. Rural Oxfordshire, with a 5am call. By eight we were placed on set, outside, in rolling parkland: freezing, foggy, damp, a slight breeze to add to the chill factor. The temperature peaked at four degrees. My costume had many layers, plus my thermals, but I was shivering after half an hour. The kid next to me - his second ever day on set - wore shorts and a sports top. After about two hours, he nudged me. “I’ve turned blue” he said, disbelievingly. His skin had turned blue. Literally.
We were held on set, without any breaks, until lunch: almost five hours stood in the January cold. Every half hour, the Crew received trays of steaming drinks from Craft. No hot drinks for the SAs though. I asked for some to be brought out for all of us, but apparently it was too difficult to organise. Not the Crowd PA's decision - somebody up the chain considered her requests and thought, Nah, not today.
Lunch was a blessed relief, because Crowd Holding was inside a proper building rather than a tent. The food for the SAs, boxed hours earlier and now lukewarm, was handed out from a table by a bloke who scarpered before everyone had been served. Dessert was a Mars bar - not even a full-sized one. It was a “Multipack Bar - Not to be sold separately”. It is the drawing at the top of this page.
Through the window of Holding, I could see the hot churros stand, set up next to Craft. Crew only.
What the agreement actually says
There is a familiar retort among SAs: you're getting free food, aren't you? Quit whining. It might be applicable, were it not for the fact that the quality of Crowd catering is covered by the FAA-PACT Agreement of 2022 - the collective agreement between the Film Artistes' Association, part of the union BECTU, and the producers' body, Pact - and is part of our contract of employment.
Clause 10.4a, page 18: >The quality of food and interim refreshments and the service thereof provided for an Artiste shall be the equivalent of that provided for other members of the shooting unit.<
Equivalent: equal in value, amount, quality, function, meaning. Same as.
Notice how much of that one sentence gets breached in the stories above. Interim refreshments: the steaming trays of hot chocolate or double shot lattes that came out of Craft every half hour, at four degrees, for the crew only. And the service thereof: the walk past the bain-maries to the polystyrene boxes, the bloke who scarpered mid-serving. The food itself is only the start of it.
The small print
Now the fair part, because the clause is narrower than it first looks.
The equivalence rule applies on location shooting days: Standard Working Days and Nights away from a recognised studio. It does not apply at the recognised studios themselves, and it does not apply on a Continuous Working Day anywhere - the compressed day where lunch is taken on the move.
And here is the detail I find genuinely sharp: whether a day is a standard day or a continuous one is often declared as late as the Assistant Directors' morning briefing. On one occasion, it was declared once all the SAs had signed out - but that’s another story. So whether your right to equivalent catering applies that day can be settled at call time, by the production, and not by you.
The days I am describing, though, were standard working days, on location. The clause applied.
Why it matters
It is not really about pudding. On a film set, food is one of the clearest signals of where you stand. Everyone on that Oxfordshire unit got up in the dark, travelled on the same call sheet, stood in the same fog and wrapped at the same time. When one queue leads to custard and hot churros and the other to a polystyrene box and a Mars bar, the production has said something out loud about who counts.
As one SA colleague said, “The obvious disparity in food quality between us SAs and crew is the most annoying aspect of the work. Properly makes me feel 2nd class and it has been getting progressively worse in the 10 years I've been an SA. The FAA agreement is very obviously broken on pretty much every shoot I've been on - annoying, elitist and disrespectful.”
Nobody in Holding is asking for more than the word the industry itself chose when it signed the agreement.
Equivalent
Equal in value, amount, quality, function. Same as. The likes of us settled for that, in writing, years ago.