OK...my experience with Daryl Duke :
I was hired to be the "set P.A.", assisting the director, D.D., on set of a feature filmed in Atlanta.
The day he arrived, I was assigned to take him to his first meeting with his actors. The meeting was close to the hotel, so I picked him up in plenty of time. I had no idea he had a detour in mind...
He had me take him to Friedman's Shoes, a shoestore in a bad part of town. He went in and shopped for shoes while I was parked illegally outside. He did not want me to leave and come back later, so I had to risk getting a ticket. Various shady characters started hanging around my littie VW bug, thinking I was looking to buy drugs.
After about an hour, D.D. emerged from the store. (I don't remember if he bought any shoes, I was so freaked out by having to hang out there.)
The next morning, the production manager called and fired me over the phone. I asked him why, and he said that the director missed his first meeting with the actors because some dumb little girl they'd hire got lost driving him there because she didn't know her way around Atlanta. (I'd lived there 12 years at that point.)
This was the first time I had been fired from a job and so I took it very hard. I had other friends working on the film, and over the course of filming, many other people were fired. But at that point, I was the first and had no basis for comparison so I was emotionally crushed and depressed.
Ironically: the name of the film was "Hard Feelings"!
