Is it 2009 yet? The hyperbolic rate in which bad news is proliferating through Tinseltown in the first nine days of 2008 is officially starting to freak everyone the fuck out. If it's not the Golden Globes cancellation putting a $100MM dent in local revenue, it's Warner Bros. getting ready to issue rosé slips to scads of employees. And then there's the sad story of Axium, the payroll company that shut its doors yesterday, leaving hundreds out of work and thousands without paychecks (tip: even if you got a paycheck from Axium, DON'T CASH IT -- chances are it will bounce higher than a superball). Tips have been flying into Defamer's virtual P.O. Box fast and furious; follow along for some of the lowlights, including a internal memo issued by Axium subsidiary Ensemble Chimes Global and a firsthand account of the goings-on in Burbank yesterday.

So there's that! And there's also this:

Hi fellow CoProers - I just wanted to share an account of what I experienced today when I visited Axium's office in Burbank.

Having no idea of what was going on, I stopped by there early this afternoon to personally drop off the last remaining timecards from a job I just wrapped yesterday. I live in the valley so I thought I'd save on a messenger and deliver them myself. When I got there, there was no one at the front desk and piles of unopened mail cluttered the space (including tons of envelopes from the EDD). After waiting a few minutes, a woman walked out and told me that if I was dropping off payroll I would need to take it somewhere else because the company went out of business. I thought she was joking. A week prior, we had turned in all the crew payroll for a commercial we had shot a few days before Christmas. We had even spoken to our paymaster yesterday morning who assured us that
the checks would be going out at the end of the day. Guess he didn't know he was about to lose his job.

More and more people starting walking out with their belongings and told me that they had received an email from the CFO yesterday afternoon telling them that they no longer worked there because the company had gone out of business. I was also told that I would not be able to cash the payroll check I had just received in the mail yesterday because their accounts were frozen and the check would be bounced back (along with a bank fee for attempting to cash a bad check). There were a few nice people who tried to gather up all the original timecards from my job so that I could process them at another company, but I was not able to get the ones in which a check had already been issued. Oh yeah, I was told that they were trashing all the timecards! Luckily I was able to get the majority of
mine back.

The moral of the story is... if you have recently received a check from Axium/Avalon DO NOT CASH IT or it will be bounced and you will be charged a fee. If you have already cashed a check, call your bank and see if it has cleared. If it has not - it won't, and the funds will be withdrawn from your account soon and they will charge you a fee. If you have recently submitted timecards to Axium/Avalon and your paymaster didn't think to take the originals home with him when he left, they are most likely garbage. I think we can expect this situation to screw up our Unemployment and our 2007 tax filing since the last of the employees were leaving today. This sucks!

Tags: axium | strikewatch | warner bros.