8. Unpaid Film Internships That Are Also A Waste Of Time
Unpaid internships can be frustrating; they'll land you in your ideal place of work, except rather than getting any hands-on experience, you'll be fetching coffee, taking lunch orders, and cleaning up after actors like they're puppies. Such is the argument being presented by a number of interns presently suing Fox Searchlight over their shoddy internships on the production of Black Swan, which equated less to learning about the filmmaking process and more the aforementioned activities. While the nature of an internship is that you do a lot of mundane work for free, it should at least be work representative of the job you signed up for! If you're schlepping away for free, whether it's in some office or on a film set, the expectation is that you're going to learn something of value in kind; after all, essentially being an unpaid waiter/maid is a waste of your time, as you could do that outside of a movie set and get freaking
paid for it. That a multi-million dollar movie operation can be so brazenly exploitative is, to me, pretty disgusting.