Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1456671
GHOSTS OF THE PANDEMIC THE PAST TWO YEARS HAVE CHANGED OUR UNION – AND OURSELVES – IN WAYS WE NEVER DREAMED Rob Callahan By Rob Callahan A ghost, or even multiple ghosts, many of my coworkers maintain, haunt the Hollywood headquar- ters of the Editors Guild. The building is a mid-century modern affair, boxy steel and glass fronted by a colonnade of spindly palms and bathed in relentless Southern California sunshine. There's no whiff of the gothic about it, and it's unlikely that any location scouts would select it as the setting for stories spooky. But over the years, colleagues have on occasion half glimpsed the fleeting shadow of a dim figure lurking on the periphery of their vision, or else heard the fall of Foley footsteps issuing whence there could be no walker, or else felt a momentary chilling draught that couldn't be blamed on the building's buggy HVAC. At least half a dozen or so tales of such mysterious encounters circulate regularly among my coworkers. I don't have any such ghost stories of my own, and you can color me skeptical. But even though I fancy myself a sober rationalist, I will confess that the now long-empty office has acquired a certain air of eeriness by virtue of vacancy. It sits on Sunset silently, uncrewed and undis- turbed, preserving as if arrested in amber every incidental detail of that moment two years ago when it was abruptly abandoned. In its disuse, the building is evocative of a ghost ship — desolate, adrift, and spookily anachronistic. Or perhaps the structure calls to mind not a ghost ship, but Norma Desmond's lonely mansion in "Sunset Boulevard," aptly described in William Holden's voiceover as "stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis, out of beat with the rest of the world, crum- bling apart in slow motion." The out-of-beat wall calendar hung next to my desk remains stubbornly stuck on March 2020. It is as though the office itself were obstinately, dissociatively insisting that the past two years have been but an unpleasant dream. The order to temporarily shutter the Guild offices in the interest of emergency social distancing came down on St. Patrick's Day, 2020. It was initially intended as a 10-day measure. The reports out of Italy at the time were harrowing, and closures and shutdowns were already starting to result in the layoffs of IATSE members nation- wide; we knew things were taking a bad turn. But it was hard to imagine then, with the virus still only newly dominating the news, that these unusual exigencies might prove enduring. Thus began, for Guild staff as well as for much of our membership, a regime of re- mote work that would last for years rather than for weeks. By the time this column sees print, Editors Guild employees will likely have returned to work in our L . A . and New York offices in at least a hybrid way, the pandemic permitting. This homecoming 9 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E G E T T I N G O R G A N I Z E D