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Bartkiewicz has played a key role behind the scenes of Semi-Pro, The Informant! and TV's 24.

Long before the command of “Lights! Camera! Action!” someone has to pick up lunch—and take care of a whole lot of other things movie viewers never think about.

Sara Bartkiewicz knows. Movies wouldn’t even happen if it weren’t for people like her.

But glamorous?

“A production assistant is a gofer,” Bartkiewicz said this past fall while taking a break to visit family in Baton Rouge during the filming of v in Lafayette. “You do everything to anything—copying, filing, picking up the coffee, picking up lunch every day for the office crew and anything that needs to be done. Driving around in a car, dropping scripts off to actors, working from 6 a.m. to 8 at night if that’s what it takes.”

As a University High senior Bartkiewicz, like her parents Tom and Jackie, figured she would also go to LSU. But then she got a movie theater job and was influenced by a history of film class.

“And it was one of things that it just dawned on me, ‘Oh! I could really enjoy this.’ I used to go home every day and turn on American Movie Classics and watch like two movies every day. Old black and whites and musicals and things you wouldn’t necessarily think a high school senior would watch.”

So it was on to New York University with the goal of getting into movies.

“But I had no idea what people in that business did at all,” she says. “I knew I didn’t want to be a director.”

The 29-year-old graduated in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, but admits that credential has little to do with what she does.

“The best thing I got (from my education at NYU) were the contacts and living somewhere else other than Baton Rouge,” she says. “Again, I had no idea what I wanted to do in the film business. I didn’t occur to me until the end of college that I’d like to produce. But you can’t really teach a lot of those things.”

Bartkiewicz tried working in New York, but that was difficult because fewer productions filmed in the city immediately after 9/11. Even working pro bono on sets didn’t help much. So she called Mark Indig, a family friend in Los Angeles who had been the location manager for Everybody’s All-American that filmed primarily in Baton Rouge in the late 1980s. He told her to move West and he’d help as best he could.

So in August 2002, Bartkiewicz moved to Los Angeles.

Before getting into films, she worked in television on Lion’s Den with Rob Lowe, on 24 and the final season of Judging Amy. Her first film was Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny with funnyman Jack Black. Other movies include The Holiday, Vacancy, The Informant!, Semi-Pro and Extract. A union member, Bartkiewicz is a freelancer who goes from film to film, sometimes working nonstop—“It’s all networking.” She still loves going to the movies and enjoys watching the films on which she worked.

Oddly enough, Bartkiewicz lives in Hollywood, yet has no pictures with the stars. She rarely even meets them. “I’m in the office a lot, but sometimes I get on set and I meet the actors, meet the director, meet the producers,” she says. “I work closely with the crew, mostly. People have assistants, so in the hierarchy of things you would deal with the assistants.”

Her titles have included production secretary and assistant production coordinator, her most recent job for Secretariat. But it all comes down to the same thing for every film, which is running the office that runs the film.

“Everything anyone could need, we do,” Bartkiewicz says and laughs.

“And we still pick up lunch every day.”