MSM First Stage Production Reviews

To many to list. He a liar and a cheat. Doesn't pay more than $13 to $15 bucks an hour. Doesn't return your call unless he needs you. Doesn't tell you that you'll be 1099 until you've already started. Chases people for money then makes employees wait on their paycheck. Thinks he is a BIG SHOT in a very small, disgusting part of town.

This "company" is a joke. The company owner Mark Mina (MSM = Mark S. Mina) is a huge scumbag and will do just about everything he can to get a leg up, including screw over his employees. He hires people to fill many technical positions, including stagehands, electricians, lighting people, etc, but 90% of everyone's job is to load and unload trucks. On the rare occasions when we'd have a job that involved actually doing something other than load ins/outs, we would either be scheduled for really crazy hours (for example, two fifteen-hour jobs back to back with only four hours in between) or put in dangerous conditions. (one job was a week straight of installing 50-ft tall steel rigging with a group of people who had never been trained or gone up in a rig. We had several incidents of workers getting extremely injured simply due to their lack of training, the worst being a guy dropping a hammer from 30 feet onto another guy's head, because he didn't know he was supposed to secure his hammer before climbing). While this is the worst of it, it is by no means the extent of the sketchyness of the business. Mark Mina instructs his workers not to discuss their salaries with each other (this is illegal in the state of New York). If you do anything that annoys him, it could literally be anything, he will fall off the face of the planet and not give you any work for weeks. My employment ended when my cell phone broke and I had to call in to be scheduled for jobs using my land line. This pissed him off for some reason and he offered me an advance on my paycheck to pay for a new cell phone- I was already really skeeved out by him and didn't feel safe borrowing money from him, so I said no thank you. That was the last I heard from him for seven weeks, even though I called his office at least once a day trying to get in touch with him so I'd be scheduled for jobs. After that I found a new job and stopped taking his calls.