A Dolly Grip Says: ‘I Don’t Know How Long This Career Can Sustain Itself’

San Diego native and lifelong “Star Wars” fan Diego Mariscal came to Hollywood at age 19 with a dream of working in the movies. He ended up becoming a dolly grip on more than 80 films and TV shows, including “The Mandalorian” and “Ahsoka.”

But with the advent of AI and the specter of virtual film shoots replacing real behind-the-scenes people, he’s worried that his decades of on-set experience won’t transfer anywhere else.

“I never went to college, I really have no other skills. It’s a very specialized thing that I do, as a dolly grip being able to move an 800-pound dolly to a three-ton camera crane and getting it in a specific place,” the 41-year-old told TheWrap. “No one really cares about it outside of this industry,”

Mariscal is not just concerned for himself. He worries about his fellow crew members, especially anyone just now coming into the industry with the same dream he had. “There really is no security blanket in this industry, even for people who dedicate our whole lives to it,” he said. “There’s a whole generation of kids that are coming in right now, in their 20s. I can already tell them, ‘You’re not going to be able to fulfill all the hours you’re going to need to actually make it.’”

That feeling of uncertainty led Mariscal in 2017 to start the Facebook group Crew Stories , a place for dolly operators and others in the entertainment industry to share their personal struggles and help each other find work.

As the group’s administrator, he’s noticed a troubling pattern: Accidental deaths of crew members are on the rise, as are suicides in the industry. He somberly referred to the July suicide of a transporter driver at Trilith Studios in Atlanta.

“She was in her car in the parking lot and committed suicide at the studio. That’s a message; it’s not like she just picked a random place,” Mariscal said. “It’s always happened, but now you’re hearing about it every week.”

When Crew Stories first started it was “just the funniest stories in the world,” he said. “I wanted to have a place for good news and I wanted it to be a celebration of crew members.” As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, the online group “took a very real turn” where members started talking about their personal and professional struggles.

Today the Crew Stories community is more than 96,000 strong on Facebook (with nearly 53,000 members also on Instagram) and has become an indispensable resource for crew members as opportunities for work — especially in Los Angeles — shrink. And last year, on the first day of the writers’ strike, Mariscal broadened the scope of Crew Stories by organizing his first in-person event.

As TheWrap has explored in its Holding on in Hollywood series, Mariscal is part of a growing pool of Hollywood workers — both above and below the line — who are fighting to stay in the industry to which they dedicated their lives.

Mariscal said he never used to contemplate doing anything other than making movies, but realized over the last few years he’s got to have a Plan B. At one point recently, he was even considering starting a power washing business.

“Deep down, I think it’s literally in the name — ‘below the line,’” he said of his and his colleagues’ place in Hollywood. “Like we are below the line, we’re the shadows. We’re just the little people behind the curtain and we’re replaceable,” he said with a sigh.

From Star Wars-inspired home movies to the real thing

Mariscal lives in Eagle Rock with his wife, Ami, and their two dogs, Indiana Jones and Deckard, both named after iconic Harrison Ford characters. He proudly showed off his collection of Star Wars figures and models, and a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” baseball cap signed by Ford himself.  “I was working on ‘Shrinking’ and I was wearing it and he just pulled it off my head and signed it,” he said.

He found his first set job as a production assistant in 1999 thanks to the Mandy list — a site for crew, acting, and other jobs in the industry —and was quickly  promoted from just fetching coffee. He was sent on an errand to Home Depot to get a piece of breakaway glass. “I saw this other piece of glass. It was the same price, but it was double the size,” he recalled. He bought the larger piece and had it cut in two and arrived on the set with the asked-for pane and an extra.

“The art department guy was like, ‘All right, you’re with me.’ And then the grip was, like, ‘No, that guy’s with me. I need that kid.’ They started fighting for me. They asked me what do you want to do? I said, ‘I want to work with cameras.’ And then I was a grip for my first little show,” he said.

He liked being in the camera department, but realized that shooting “digital stuff” as an assistant cameraman was not for him. “I do not like being at a monitor. I don’t like pulling focus like that. I feel detached from everything,” he said. A director of photography suggested, “Hey, maybe you should think about dolly gripping.” Mariscal said, describing the person on set who directs the camera operator away from obstacles. “It hit something in me. I love pushing stuff. I like being in shape more. I like to be able to move around a lot more. And then I just slowly gravitated towards that.”

The original “Star Wars” films inspired Mariscal to get into movies in the first place. After he saw a behind-the-scenes documentary about the model makers behind the film’s Death Star and X-wing Starfighters, he began making his own home movies.

“When I was a little kid, I would build models and then get my dad’s camcorder and get a jet fighter and explode them with fireworks,” he said.

By the time he was old enough to enter the industry, however, model making was on its way out and CGI was taking over. “I really tried to get into computers,” he said after watching CGI-heavy films like “The Abyss” and “Terminator 2.”

Then he realized, “I am not going to sit down for hours and do little data points. I want to make a model with a camera around it and explode it.”

Being hands-on and in-person proved to be the right career path for Mariscal.

“I’m doing it at pretty much the highest level you can do it at, which is what I’ve always wanted,” he said, but he doesn’t know if all-digital sets of the future or AI-heavy productions will even need dolly grips.

There are currently about 100 to 150 dolly grips in his local, he said. A big movie like “Thor: Love and Thunder” usually employs two people in that capacity, but a small comedy like the Apple+ series “Shrinking,” needs more. “Comedies tend to carry three to capture the unscripted funny moments,” he explained.

With his gripping days possibly numbered, he’s grateful to have broadened his skill set to include event planning. For his next event, he wants to build homages to “Blade Runner” and “The Fifth Element.” “We build the taxi [that Bruce Willis drives in the movie] and have the entire windshield be LED screens, and then put it on a motion base,” he said.

Two of the things Mariscal mentioned most to TheWrap are how important working in person and helping other people are to him.

Recently, the nephew of Rico Priem — a grip who died in June after suffering a heart attack behind the wheel after a night shoot for “9-1-1” — thanked him for setting up the GoFundMe in his uncle’s name.

“I got to meet him three days ago on set and he said ‘Hey, thank you so much,’” Mariscal recalled. “And we hugged. It’s so great to put a name to the person I’ve been talking to online, and then seeing the look in his eye. That means the world to me, where you can actually have real world impact on your peers and people you love and care about.”

Raising money for the crew community and their causes

Crew Stories became a place to vent, share a GoFundMe, or find help for a myriad of issues. But Mariscal wanted to do more. The first day of the writers’ strike, he threw his first in-person event.

He’s thrown three more parties since then. The most recent one in July was the first that he and his co-organizers didn’t pay for out of their own pockets. Thanks to more than 30 sponsors including Matthews Studio Equipment, Chapman/Leonard equipment rental and Milagro Tequila, he and dozens of volunteers set up an ’80s-slasher-themed “Crew Camp,” with DJs, food trucks, a free craft table and mental health experts on standby.

They were also able to raise $1,000 each for three nonprofits: Local 80 Mutual Aid Pantry in Burbank, the Safety for Sarah foundation, and the Outlast Arts and Education film camp in South Dakota.

The food pantry is located in the lobby of the IATSE 80 headquarters in Burbank and is for “local members that are hurting,” he said. “We have milk, eggs, bread, toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, dog food, anything you want. Just come and grab whatever you need.”

The money raised at that event will go toward an industrial refrigerator so the pantry can finally store perishable food.

While there are other online groups for various crew people, he hasn’t seen anything quite like the Crew Stories community.

“It’s rewarding,” Mariscal said. “It just needs to be done, and no one’s doing it. I mean, I didn’t pick this, it just fell on me, and it’s a lot. But we’re helping people, and that’s all that matters.”

Next week: The series continues.

Catch up on Holding on in Hollywood:

Part 1 : Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads (Erin Browne)

Part 2 : A Development Executive Wrestles With How TV’s New Normal Is Crushing the Job Market (Erin Copen Howard)

Part 3 : An Assistant Director Says: ‘There Are 100s of Us Sitting at Home’ as Production Shrinks (Paul Lindsay)

Part 4 : A Sitcom Writer-Turned-Psychologist Counsels Hollywood Workers on the ‘Industry Apocalypse’  (Phil Stark)

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