What’s Yiddish For “The Fuck I Can Park There, Asshole”?

With the sharp rise in the number of film shoots in the city comes a new worst job ever:

“We get cursed on in every language in New York City,” said Matthew Ancrum, 49, a production assistant who lives in Bedford Park in the Bronx.

Rafael Diaz, 43, also from the Bronx, recalled a day last year when a woman in Washington Heights was so angry that his television crew was restricting parking in the neighborhood that she “spat in my face.”

In New York City, most workers on film and television crews belong to a union. But the people who testified yesterday at the forum, organized by the City University of New York, are non-unionized workers known as parking production assistants.

Their duties include putting up fliers the day before a film crew comes to a neighborhood, dropping orange parking cones on the street, safeguarding a site before filming begins and shooing drivers away from parking spaces at all hours.

. . .

Last year, according to the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting, more than 250 films and 100 television programs were shot in the five boroughs. The productions contributed at least $5 billion to the city’s economy, and parking production assistants played a small but essential role in that effort.

And “for the record,” said Julianne Cho, assistant commissioner of the city’s film office, “we don’t close down streets. A production may or may not hire parking production assistants to reserve the permitted spaces.”

How do the assistants reserve the spaces? “Well,” she said, “that’s a question for the production assistants.”

For Mr. Ancrum, who has been a production assistant for 15 years and now works on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” it sometimes takes street diplomacy, with a dash of blarney.

“I’ve been cursed in Dominican, Colombian, Italian, people from Paris, Irish, Jewish, black, Cuban — and all because I tell them they can’t park their car here,” he said.

The toughest are the drug dealers.

“I know you’re looking at me all crazy,” said Mr. Ancrum, re-enacting the parking pitch he uses on drug dealers. “But, listen, I’m working production here. They’re going to have police officers here and police tow trucks for the cars that are still here. If you want to argue, that’s fine, but the police commander is going to shut you down, and you ain’t making no money.”