Don't Save Me 'Cause I Gotta Save Myself

Like I've written once or twice before, the freelance nature of my profession leads me to work in fits and starts, twelve and thirteen hours a day for months at a time, followed by weeks of unemployment while I seek out the next project. Typically, I welcome this. It's a vacation of sorts that lets me reset my psychological and spiritual mechanisms, unburdened by the stress and shimmy of a buzzing production office.

Unfortunately, the winter doldrums of film and television production often leave me unengaged for longer than I'd like and this is not at all good for me.

When I don't work for an extended period, I float. I loose my center. I become despondent. With little to fill my days but television, blogging, the occasional household chore and extremely long walks, I find myself keeping much too much of my own company. I go into and stay too deep into my own head. I worry. I obsess. I ponder my own mortality. I freak out about my negative income stream. I mull and muse on all the roads not taken. My fickle fears, my silent inadequacies and my petty jealousies make meals my excess attention. I start to really dislike myself.

This last bout of idleness has been both uncharacteristically long and particularly difficult, full of unwelcome surprises, hostile uncertainties and aimless obligations. Plans went astray. Friends turned away. I felt that I couldn't please anyone who mattered and I didn't understand what I'd done to earn the Gods' ire.

I was hired onto a new project this week. They haven't guaranteed me a slot for the run-of-show, just for the next two weeks but it doesn't matter. The gloves are back on and the challenge is afoot. I'm back where I belong, doing what I'm meant to do and all of the minutiae that is best unconsidered can be left thus.

A very dear friend, who's wisdom I trust, worries that I define myself too much by my work, that I'm too bound up in something that should be extrinsic to my sense of self. She fears that my dedication to, my obsession with my work is like an untreated disease or an addiction that will ultimately bring me low. She is probably right but, for as much weight as I give her consideration, I don't know if she understands the alternative.

I've heard that retirement is a killer, that people live longer if they have a reason to get up in the morning, if they have a job to do. I can see now how true that is in me. I'm glad to be back where I belong.

Picture's Up.

Color Coding for Scripts and Film Documentation

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A recent visitor to my house snuck a peek at my collection of callsheets, production reports and scripts that goes back the better part of a decade. She was struck, not by how data-dense, nor how specific they were, but by the fact that, like folders full of 8 1/2 x 14 Skittles, they came in assorted colors.

Almost all production documents are color-coded by edition. Callsheets, Production Reports, Travel Movements, Memos, Shooting Schedules, One-Line Schedules, DooD Schedules, Exhibit G's, Cast Lists, Crew Lists, Vendors' Lists and even the pages of the script, will go through several versions in the course of production. Some of them will change dozens of times as the studio makes changes, as new rolls are cast, as new crew are hired, as weather plays havoc with scheduling, as re-writes are ordered and on and on.

Even though a movie work day starts at thirteen hours, there are still not enough of them to accomplish every last task or to read every piece of paper that passes through one's hands. To streamline the transfer of information across departments and to make sure everyone is operating from the same assumptions, every set of changes leads a document to be printed on a new color of paper. This way, a person can tell at a glance if they have the newest edition of a document.

The editions generally go as follows:

1st Ed White
2nd Ed Blue
3rd Ed Pink
4th Ed Yellow (Sometimes called "Canary")
5th Ed Green
6th Ed Goldenrod
7th Ed Salmon
8th Ed Buff
9th Ed Cherry

And then it starts over with "Double White," "Double Blue" etc.

The system is nearly standardized, but not quite so. Some studios and some production entities abbreviate or modify the list and, once you get past the Goldenrod version, you should probably double check the studio handbook.

What struck my friend most were the scripts. It would be truly wasteful to reprint a hundred or more copies of a hundred page script to indicate a re-write of only one scene, so the color-coded edition changes affect only one page at a time. The new pages are printed on the appropriate color, the old page is removed, replaced with the new one and the script is re-bound. By the end of a show, copies of the script are piles of colored layers, an edge-on pastel rainbow, the edition of which is indicated by the cover page.

I wish the IRS, the DMV, my bank and the other institutions with which I'm forced to deal would adopt a similar policy. It would make the world a whole lot more colorful.

Job vs Calling

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I just got a resume that highlights the PA applicant's "flexible schedule."

Talk about just not getting it.

If there's one thing that knocks people out of this industry, it's the hours. Your schedule is from when-we-tell-you-to-be-there until sometime after when-we're-done. There is no wiggle room on this. Once you've been around for a while and you're part of an established team, you can work it out where you get to attend family events like weddings. We're not so big a bunch of assholes as to tell you that you can't attend your mom's funeral but taking the evening off to go to a concert or to celebrate an anniversary just isn't in the cards if you're a rank and file filmmaker. You just have to learn to make life accommodate work because the reciprocal won't happen.

It would be nice to go do the things that everyone else gets to do, like have drinks on a Thursday evening, arrive at or leave work while the sun is up or know what my nieces and nephews look like. But, that's just not how this works because the culture of shooting-unit film makers is much more akin to that of presidential campaign staff, deployed Marines or lifetime missionaries than it is like that of the modern office professional. We do this, all day, every day and, as long as there's still days until picture wrap, everything else is secondary. Frankly, that's the way we prefer it. Life is just simpler this way.

The very notion of a "flexible schedule" gets snickers of derision because it smacks of someone unprepared for the lifestyle and you have to be prepared for the lifestyle if you're going to be any good or at all happy doing this.

In Which I Pick Some Nits

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Not to be an elitist asshole, but there are certain twists of phrase that absolutely give you away as an on-set first-timer. It's not that there's anything innately wrong with being new at a job, it's just that, in this business at least, a distressing plurality of the greenwoods are cocky and entitled well beyond what their level of experience would justify. If you're going to be that guy, fine, but try to remember these things:

Length of a script or of a scene is articulated in eighths of a page and not by some common denominator. We say that a scene is one and six-eighths long, not one and three-quarters.

The vacuum tube and filament in a light fixture that actually produces the illumination, it's called the "lamp" not the "bulb."

Those products that we use up in the course of shooting a film: tape, sash cord, recordable media, canned air, office supplies, razor blades, p'touch tape, cleaning supplies, batteries etc. are collectively referred to as Expendables, like the 80's action homage. They're not 'consumables,' 'disposables' or 'supplies.'

PR means "Production Report" -- Not Public Relations

Time, especially for the purposes of payroll, is articulated on a decimal clock, the minimum unit of which is a "tenth" of six minutes. So, if I get to work at seven in the morning and leave work at seven thirty in the evening, my time card will read 7.0 - 19.5. Also, the clock does not reset at midnight so if I come in at noon but don't leave until ten after two in the morning, it will read 12.0 - 26.2 .

NDB stands for "Non Deductible Breakfast." What that actually means is a discussion for another time.


These are just a few little bits of jargon but they're a few of the ones that seem to be misunderstood the most often and they're the ones that I've noticed today. Learn the lingo is all that I'm saying.

Pretty Little Soldiers

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Dash and I went to junior high together but we went to separate high schools. We flew in similar circles, went to all the same parties and had lots of friends in common but we weren't all that close. Fifteen years on, though, he's one of only two childhood pals that ended up in the movie industry and our two lives, while superficially similar, could hardly be more different.

First, I planned for this to be my life since my earliest days. Once I got over those half dozen when-I-grow-ups that all little boys have: astronaut, fireman, paleontologist, president, I knew that I wanted to make movies. Dash, on the other hand, wanted to be a stage actor, to be a Broadway triple threat.

We spent fifteen years wandering our respective early adulthoods. He did a spate as part of a roaming troupe that did educational theater all across the country. He was a stage hand and then a PA. I did the rounds as a bartender, customer service rep and then a boom operator. Ultimately, I landed in the production department and he found himself an East Coast AD.

Owing to the different roads we've taken, we have huge differences of opinion as to the nature of each other's careers. He works in indie world, helming small shows destined for the festival circuit and second-tier DVD release. He manages edgy, original, artistically daring films made by aspiring auteurs and small crews that are lauded by critics, coo'd over by kinophiles and ignored by the world at large.

I'm at the other end of the spectrum. I work on mult-million dollar studio pictures. Behemoth movies created largely by committee that are often forced to side-step grit and gumption in favor of spectacle and profit. But, the food is always good, the accommodations always comfortable and the checks always clear.

The cultures of these two worlds are different. His colleagues are mostly young and eager idealists, people who are looking to do what has not been done before. One perpetuates a career through enthusiasm and willingness to suffer, in the form of long days and low pay, for the artistry of the endeavor. My compatriots are slightly older, deeply jaded, fantastically ambitious, mercenaries who covet the number one slot at the box office. One keeps working in the studio world through one part luck, one part schmooze, one part grit and three parts professional flawlessness.

We've never worked together and we probably never will. On the rare occasion that we see one another, there's always a bit of tension, a complex tension built of posture, opposing experience and perhaps just a touch of envy. He ranks higher than I do but I make more money. I get to rub elbows with celebrities but he's integral to his productions in a way that I am not. On some level, he thinks that I'm a sell-out and, on that same level, I think that he swims in the shallow end.

In a way, though, we sometimes look at each other with eyes for what is greener. Dash's work will never have the prestige or recognition that mine has and mine will never have the legitimacy of his. I wonder what it would be like to make a movie without having to kiss above-the-line ass and I bet he wonders what it would be like to know that you're going to get paid on time and that the catering isn't going to suck.

It's of no consequence, though. We've each carved out our niche and, despite some puffing of chests to one another, we're making the careers that we want and we're both doing better than most at it. It's just funny how careers turn out, how our intentions brush with and sometimes push against reality, how our opinions of our work evolve as we learn and mature in our fields. It's strange how we end up in places we never thought we'd be and places we always knew we belonged and it's even stranger that sometimes they're the same place.

Why Did You Leave the Swamp in the First Place?

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The film, more than any other, that made me want to one day work in the movie business was the original "The Muppet Movie."

I can even remember the scene, right at the very beginning, just after Kermit is done singing "The Rainbow Connection." Dom DeLuise, lost in the swamp and beset by alligators, says to Kermit as he sits on a log in the middle of nowhere, "Singing, Telling jokes, playing the banjo, who knows, if you get your tongue fixed, you could make millions of people happy."

As Arnie, the agent, paddles away in his rowboat, Kermit muses for a moment and says aloud, "Millions of people happy?" And, the scene cuts to Kermit, riding his bicycle and on his way to the dream factory.

Kermit left the swamp, traveled across the US, gathering a band of dreamers, dodging the machinations of a murderous fast food entrepreneur and having all sorts of misadventures with the express intention of "Making millions of people happy."

It's been more than twenty-five years since I first saw that movie. Since then, I've seen it at least fifty more times. I even wrote a paper about it my senior year in film school. More than any lust for fame; which I'm not likely to get, more than any greed for riches: a losing proposition in today's media market, that one statement did more to inform and inspire my younger self to this career than any other, "To make millions of people happy."

I don't much acknowledge that ideal anymore. In the interim decades and through two different movie careers, I've become much more of a mercenary. I don't pick my shows based on their message, their artistry or what awards they might win. I pick my shows based on the rate of pay, the length of the engagement, the places I might get to travel and how much I like the UPM. Owing to the fact that my work is administrative and virtually none of my contribution actually ends up in the screen, whether or not anyone who watches or likes the movie doesn't much figure into my professional calculus.

This morning, though, I remembered what that old desire was like. I got a hint of why I got into this in the first place combined with a token to my own adult vanity, a touch of mercenary pride and the chance to "Make millions of people happy."

Weekend of February 26th, 2011, we're number one at the box office.

The Secret to Low Budget Film Making

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Actually, the two secrets.

I've worked on a number of small shows, from the simply low-budget where I was paid on the lowest tier union contract, the one specifically crafted for producers that don't have any money to throw around, to micro-budget shows where I was paid less than I would make frothing cappuccinos, to all deferment shows where I was paid nothing at all.

Some of these productions ran like well oiled machines; some were agony for producers and crew alike and this had next to nothing to do with available funds. Despite all the warnings from college professors and indie rags about the difficulty of getting a good crew for little money, it's not actually that hard provided you do two things right.

Film crews, even crews full of seasoned professionals, will strip naked in the winter and crawl miles over dirty broken glass* provided you remember two things: food and paychecks.

Simply, you must feed your staff. You must feed them tasty, hot, professionally prepared, abundant food and you must feed it to them on time, everyday. No matter how small your show, find someone with experience on big movies and have them handle your catering and your craft service. Do not be afraid to spend and even waste money in this regard. If it comes to a choice between catered meals and a second camera, or a fancy crane or an expensive location, put your cash into the chow. It will save you money and time in the long run.

The Crafty table must be stocked with hot coffee, bottled water and an abundance of beverages and snacks every minute of the working day. Lunch must have several hot choices, as well as salad, side-dishes and other accouterments and there must be enough of it so that the entire crew can eat as much as they want without risk of running out. Your crew must be able to sit down somewhere warm and dry and have a full thirty minutes to eat. Lunch must be served six hours from general crew-call time and not one second later. Do not serve pizza. If your shooting day goes more than twelve hours, you need to serve an additional meal. You should also serve breakfast if you can afford it.

The reasons for this are two fold, first, food keeps your crew well-fueled. Set work is physically grueling, emotionally taxing and the hours are horrendous. Making sure that your people stay fed, caffeinated and hydrated ensures that they will have the energy and the will to carry out your vision. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it makes your crew feel valued. It is the most obvious, most visceral thing you can do to let them know that their hard work is appreciated. It goes a lot further than a pep talk or assurances of how great the finished movie is going to be.

If you have any real budget to speak of, you will have a professional crew that expects to get paid. Paychecks must be delivered on time and they must be correct to the penny. There is no wiggle room on this. While the popular conception of American film shows us a world of glitz, glamor and wealth, the truth is that most people in the industry are working-class mercenaries that are doing it to make a living. They are probably taking a steep pay cut and enduring a major headache by working on your project. You have to show that you respect their experience and participation by paying them the correct amount and paying it to them when you say you are going to.

If your project is truly micro-budget and you are either paying your people a token stipend, (I did a show for $20 a day, which worked out to about $1.40 and hour), or if your crew is entirely volunteer, you must make up the difference in pay with food. The less your people are getting paid, the better you have to feed them.

This post is probably a let down to those of you that googled independent film making looking for tips on how to get your movie picked up for distribution or how to get slots at prestigious festivals. The truth is, how well your crew is treated, how much faith they have in you as a producer or director and how committed they are to your project, affects the entire endeavor. Keeping your crew on task and moving efficiently by force of will alone is going to burn you out, turn you off to your own work and make you unpopular with the very people that should be most behind you. Keep your people full and properly compensated and your production will be a thousand times easier.

Heed my advice, food and paychecks. Everything else will take care of itself. Here endeth the lesson.



*This is a metaphor any hyperbole. Do not actually ask a crew to do this.

A Suicide Rap - We've Gotta Get out While We're Young

This is a strange day.

It seems that I've said this on each of my last several shows but this gig isn't closing out as usual.

I've gotten used to being that last man out, that single soul left to shut down the facility, to send back the office rentals and to walk through with the landlord. There's something cathartic about it, about walking the ghostly halls once so abuzz with the clatter and cacophony of movie making. I like the spiritual punctuation of locking the door behind me, ending the project with the loose ends all tied, knowing that that chapter of my professional life has been proofread and sent to the archives of my career.

Times are good for film makers in Atlanta, though, and a new project from the same studio is moving into this space directly on our heels. Thus, I've not sent back the copiers or the furniture. I've not cleaned out the kitchen. I'm not going to lock the door behind me. All I'm doing is closing the vendor accounts, tidying the office and changing the sign on the door. On Monday a new Production department strolls in, takes over the vacated desks and resets the clock.

I'm left to float in the void of idleness, without a gig and bereft of the neat coda that normally concludes a job.

No complaints, though. The next job will come soon enough and I will be redeployed to the front lines of the celluloid campaign. I should enjoy the R&R while I have it.


Good gate. Moving on.

I am the Screen, I Work at Night

Crew call was 18:00 hours and they will be working hard through the night, lunch at midnight, camera wrap sometime just after dawn, weary eyes and welcome beds come morning rush hour.

I'm not with them, as much as I would like to be. I've worked many such nights. I did one show that was nothing but. Since that time I've traded my career on location for the life of the production office.

The junior-most of administrators, I arrive shortly after my colleagues have had lunch and remain until the wee hours of the morning. Someone has to be here, you see. Like a flotilla upon the sea, the shooting company on location needs a connection to port, a single voice on a telephone waiting to take messages, deliver documents, record milestones and sometimes to extinguish fires.

I can't do much besides wait. All our vendors are closed on east coast and the west. No deliveries will arrive until morning. The accountants and gate keepers have all gone home to whatever semblance of a regular life this industry can offer.

And I am here, alone, a single sentry soul amidst a quarter million square feet of production space, left to stoke the braziers and email the wrap report.

It is the life I have chosen, and proudly so.

How Not to Get a Job on a Movie

Part of my job is sifting through the resumes. As soon as Hollywood Reporter, Variety or Production Weekly report that a studio has opened a production office, calls and resumes begin pouring in by the hundreds from people of all backgrounds looking for film work of all sorts.

Like book queries and American Idol, the vast majority of applicants are rejected. Resumes are glanced across furtively by a department head with barely a second to interpret the characters on the page, or worse, they never land before the eyes of someone empowered to hire crew at all.

The following is for people trying to get a toe hold in the industry. It's partly a list of "Don'ts" for people trying to get past gatekeepers like me and partly a list of gripes that will be appreciated by other such gatekeepers. Please understand that this is not advice for getting hired but rather advice for not being summarily rejected.

First and foremost, make sure we know what job you're after and make sure we know this by reading the resume, itself, not by reading the cover letter. Resumes tend to come through a general queue; they are then sorted and forwarded to the person responsible for hiring for a given department. If we don't know what department to forward to, you end up in a slush pile. The slush pile in my office is a binder labeled "IDKWYW," which stands for "I Don't Know What You Want" and no one ever looks at it. This binder contains nearly half of all the resumes we receive. Don't be coy. By simply stating what job you want in the first line of the resume, you vastly increase your chances of being noticed.

Related to the above, don't call up and say you'll do "whatever is needed," or ask "what jobs do you have available?" A motion picture is not an Applebees. We don't have positions that can be filled by any warm body. If you are right out of film school or are trying to break into the industry, you want to be a Production Assistant. If you know what area you want to go into, costumes, for instance, say that you want to be a wardrobe PA. If you don't know what you ultimately want to do, then you want to be a Set PA. If you get the Set PA job, you will have ample opportunity to observe how a movie gets made and make contacts with the people in the department you ultimately decide to join.

Also related to the above, don't submit for several unrelated jobs. Earlier this week I had someone say that they wanted to do our publicity stills but if that wasn't available they'd like to work in Set Dec and if that wasn't available they can do Craft Service. This person won't get hired because no department key is going to have faith that they are dedicated to or meaningfully experienced in any one craft.

Don't fish for gigs that you know you're not going to get. We're not going to travel a prop maker or a Locations PA in from Seattle if we're doing a job in Miami, for instance. You waste your own time by pursuing this.

Once a production office is open, a number of major positions have already been filled. The production manager (UPM), production coordinator (POC), art director and locations manager were all hired long before the office opened. You waste your time and mine by chasing after these jobs. You have to be offered one of these positions before production begins.

Related to the above, do not put in for a technical job and send a resume that clearly indicates that that is not really the job you want. The most common incarnation of this is from people asking for entry level jobs and sending in a head shot or that ask to be a rigging electrician and list all the short films they DP'd on in college. People who do this are clearly more interested in making it in Hollywood than than they are in working on the movie and they don't get hired for fear that they're going to embarrass themselves, and by extension the person that hired them, by trying to buddy up to the director of producer.

Worse, though, are people who call up asking if we've hired our director, our director of photography or our writers, as if a studio would begin production on a multi-million dollar project without choosing those people in advance. Mincing no words, when someone calls up asking for one of these positions and, after finding out that the job's filled, insists on emailing in a resume anyway, we presume that person is an idiot and simply throw the resume away.

I don't mean to harp on formatting, but you need to make sure that we can actually read your resume. Don't do it in a font that's illegible. Don't do it in a font that's not readable by all computers. Don't set the margins so narrow that we can't print it. Do not try to spice it up with all sorts of graphics that will make it impossible to read. Don't print and mail it on triple-thick card stock that we can't punch binding holes in.

Also, the only thing we really care about is your experience in the industry. If you speak Russian, know advanced first aid and have mastered origami, that's great. You're not applying for college, though and your extracurricular activities don't count nearly as much as your actual grades, so to speak. All those kind of things are going to do is make you more memorable, not more hire-able. If we're not already impressed with your credits, memorable might be a bad thing. Sure, you can list additional skills or interesting tidbits, but do so at the bottom.

Finally, do not try to talk up the person who answers the phone. They're someone like me, hell, it might actually be me. I'm not empowered to hire anyone. In fact, out of a crew of several hundred people, only a dozen or so do any of the hiring and they're not the ones that answer the production office phone. My day is packed from the minute I arrive at work until the moment I leave, thirteen or fourteen hours later. When you try and impress me, all you do is waste my time. Moreover, you waste your own time because I cannot help you get the job.

I know that some of the people that read this are going to accuse me of being an elitist or of trying to crush people's dreams. That's not what I'm trying to do at all. What I am trying to do is inform everyone about the realities of an industry that manufactures dreams. The truth is that it is very hard to get a foot hold in this business. The competition for work is very stiff and department heads tend to work with people they already know and trust. There is virtually no learning curve and money and prestige ride on almost every decision. The best way in is to come across as confident, competent and willing to learn. Once you have the tip of a toenail in the door, the goal is to learn as much as possible and make friends the people who can hire you in the future.

At least that's my $0.02

Crossing "I"s and Dotting "T"s

When I went to produce my first film of any scope, an action short full of fights, gun play, blood, FX-makeup, custom costumes and three locations shot over four days, one of my co-conspirators asked me, "If we're going to spend money on anything, what should it be?"

"A copy machine," I told him. He didn't believe me and we didn't buy the copy machine. We probably would have saved a bit if we had. As it turned out, thrice daily runs to Kinko's gets pricey. When all was over, document duplication was the third biggest part of our budget, behind only equipment rental and catering.

Most people think of film making as and almost entirely artistic endeavor. While the artistry of movies cannot be overstated, even the smallest production is also an administrative bear that must be wrestled and tamed.

As evidence, I offer the following image, taken on my last job.


This is the final shipment of paperwork that we sent to the studio to be archived. These fifty-six boxes contain tens of thousands of pages of records pertaining to the production of a motion picture. Every single document has been checked and rechecked for accuracy. Due diligence has been met in the likely case that the show is audited. Ultimately, every dime, every day, every object, every person involved in the production must be accounted for in detail and here is said accounting.

I want to emphasize that this is simply the final shipment of records. While it is the most substantial such shipment, three other large collections of documents were sent off in the two weeks preceding this one and this pile constitutes a little less than half the records for the whole production process.

Just a visual reminder that it's not all Lights, Camera, Action.

And Then There Was One

I am, in industry parlance, the LMO, The Last Man Out. The production is completely shut down, the facility sterilized, the rentals all returned, the accounts closed, the crew and staff all given their t-shirt and final paycheck and sent on their way. The gig has played out and all the things most people think of as 'making a movie' are done with.

Only I am left to sweep the floor, shut off the lights and lock the door behind us.

Normally I find this to be cathartic, a bittersweet moment, an exhalation and a congratulation after a job complete. I drive away from the empty production office on my final day, secure in the knowledge that all of the loose ends are tied and that I may confidently add a line to my resume and IMDB. Usually I take a week to watch old movies, re-read my favorite book and overindulge in Japanese beer before striking out to find the next gig, before seeking the chance to do it all again.

Not this time, though.

With two days to go on this show and naught but the dumpster and the copy machines to be picked up, I was offered a slot on a new show that starts Monday. Moreover, this new show is moving into the production space that my old show just vacated. I took it, of course. This business is just too fickle to turn down work so I'll just have to make it without the usual decompression. I'll have to forgo the release of saying that I'll never be back this way. I won't get my tidy personal coda of a cigar and a stroll into the metaphorical sunset. And, that's just the way it's going to have to be.

Once more, unto the breach.

Like a Ghost into a Fog

The exciting part is over. By most people's understanding, the movie has been made. The last frame has been shot; the t-shirts have been handed out; the generators are silent and the above-the-liners have all flown back to the west coast. The sweat and elation of shooting disappear, along with most of the crew, with the wrap party's hangover.

The work is not done, though.

And, a handful of us are left to unmake it all, to dismantle the apparatus and return this corner of the world to it's pre-production serenity. The remaining crew, once endeavoring agog over the burgeoning project, now labor, half exhausted, to render its remains.

It will take Accounting a month or more to pay all the bills and close all the accounts. Art, Props and Set-Dec will spend weeks cataloging and storing the warehouses worth of furniture, fixtures, and chotch. Construction and Rigging now go to work on the sets and the soundstage like so many piranhas on a carcass. Production, my department, will spend thousands of man-hours as we ship seventy to ninety tons of rented material back to its owners, as we sell off a million dollars in acquired assets, as we dot every 'i', cross every 't' and finalize thousands of pages of documentation.

Ultimately, when all the others have gone, we will shut down the facility, clean out the offices, shred the remaining paper, donate all that we couldn't sell and lock the doors behind us with barely more than our fingerprints to show that we were ever here.

We will leave the place sterilized, picked clean, five acres of polished concrete and institutional carpet that will wait, as we will, for whatever is next.

An old theatre director of mine, one particularly fond of ritual, had the entire company attend strike and stay until the last moments when she would give a short speech wishing us well on all the shows in our future. Then the stage manager would ceremonially sweep the floor and shut off the lights. The scope is different. These shows employ hundreds, not dozens and cost tens of millions, not thousands, but the ritual is the same. Now I am the one sweeping the floor and, in a few weeks time, I will wish my colleagues well as we turn off the lights before going to look for the next show.

Good Gate, Moving On.

S.P.Q.R.

"Do you ever get sick of it?" she asked.

"Sick of what?" I say, peering over the lip of an over-sized beer.

"Sick of the movie thing. Sick of the fourteen hour days and all the weeks on the road and all the stress and not getting anything for it except a crappy paycheck and a line on IMDB?"

I furrow my browns, "Sick of life?"

She smiles and snickers. "Don't you ever think about getting a regular desk job, nine to five, pension plan, getting to go home before ten at night?"

I mull on this and take a hefty swig. "No," I say. "I have never contemplated suicide."

I don't think she quite understands my meaning.

Movies Are Like Cars

Looking back, I'm often amazed at how little of what I learned in film school is applicable to the practical realities of producing motion pictures. I spent nearly five years reading Bazin, Benjamin, Mulvey and Schatz, thousands of hours hearing long-winded cult-stud types get all gooey over D.W. Griffith, John Ford and the French New Wave. Mostly, I heard ruminating blow-hards go on at great length about how the drive to turn a profit corrupts the art of film.

And they are absolutely wrong about that.

The problem with most film critics, most of whom don't even seem to like movies in the first place, is that they implicitly include movies with, as Walter Benjamin called them, the "Contemplative Arts."* They're comparing film to sculpture, painting or live opera. They're trying to judge Birth of a Nation, Chinatown and Jaws against "The Last Supper," "Oedipus Rex," and The Pietà and they always seem disappointed. This is because they have it bass-ackwards.

There's a reason we call it the "Movie Business." Going all the back to Edison, the Lumières and the Nickelodeons, movies were a profit making enterprise first and a means of expression second. That having been said, the art of film is powerful and profound. It's the defining artistic medium of the last hundred years and it is not to be dismissed. We just need to think about it a little differently.

Rather than thinking of film, as most academics do, as an art form that must operate in spite of it's profit motive, think of film as an industry that is enhanced by artistry.

Strange as it sounds, the best comparison I can make is to the automotive industry. The similarities between movies and cars are actually kind of amazing. They're both expensive and labor intensive to produce with long turnaround times and they're both consumed by nearly every person in the United States. They are both industrial-era technologies. They're both innate to the modern American experience and the US has dominated both industries for a substantial part of the last century. Most importantly, they are both an inseparable fusion of art and commerce.

Herein lies the problem; we think about Benjamin Button as if it were a painting by Van Gogh when we should be thinking about it as if it were a Ford Mustang.

Think for a minute about the Ford Mustang, or the Chevy Camaro, or the Volkswagon Beetle or any other iconic car that suits your fancy. It is rigorously engineered and contientiously crafted. It is aesthetically pleasing. It was designed to be admired, to evoke feeling, to create a specific kind of experience. It has huge cache in American culture. It is a work of art in any reasonable sense of the term.

Absolutely no one is under the illusion that Ford is in it for the art. To even suggest so would be ludicrous. The recent tribulations of the automotive industry notwithstanding, Ford is a for-profit enterprise and, though they produce emotionally evocative and culturally relevant pieces of American iconography, no one begrudges them the fact that they are distinctly a business.

We need to think about movies in similar terms. This is the film industry and our imperative is to produce a product that makes money. The fantastic thing is that, like only a handful of other industries, sometimes we produce something really special, something that turns heads, changes minds and that becomes part of history. Mind you, usually we don't. Neither does Ford. For every Mustang, every Godfather, every 2001, there are dozens of Tauruses, Rangers, Tango & Cash's, Species and formulaic sequels that get made because they are as practical and profitable as they are forgettable.

We don't expect every car to be as iconic as the Mustang. Why did my film professors expect every film to be as brilliant as Citizen Kane?


*See, I really did go to film school, in case you thought I was bullshitting.

You'll Never Work in this Town Again

We'd been dug into a suburban mega-church for the better part of the week. I don't think there was so much as a squeezer left on the G&E trucks. The main company had moved from shooting in the massive space of the sanctuary to the cramped and stuffy confines of the pastor's office.

Passing back through the atrium from base camp I observed Juicers and Hammers lugging out the metric tons of miniutae we'd spend four days hauling in one and two bits at a go. They were making good time considering the single fire door that everything had to pass through.

As I delivered paperwork to the first AD in the sweltering cocoon of the set he said, "Go out in the lobby and see how long they're going to take to finish loading out."

Nodding, I answered, "They're about eighty-five percent done. I'd give them another forty five minutes."

He stared at me as if I had just told him the moon really was made of cheese or that clouds were albatross farts.

"Really, I just came through there." I said, "They're about forty-five minutes away. Maybe an hour."

Dropped the folder to the ground and belted, "Damnit, Thomas!" With this the whole crew halted in place as our AD, normally so reserved and soft spoken, barked at me near the top of his lungs. "How dare you know the answer to a question before I can think to ask it! You're going nowhere in this business! You're fired!"

Meekly, I took of my headset and laid my radio on a lens case and started back down the hallway in search of a time card with head slung low.

I'd made it not twenty paces when the AD called out, "Alright, I need someone to go back to base and run the safety memos." He glanced around the room and found that all the other members of the department were elsewhere on production missions of one kind or another. "Damnit, Thomas! You're re-hired."

And that's kind of how this business goes, sometimes.

I Bought a New Truck

Three of them, actually.

I was on the phone with the freight brokerage getting the quote for our matching trio of tractor-trailers and the woman on the other end asked, "What are you going to use them for, storage, shipping or freight?"

Politely and calmly I said, "We're going to fill the containers with dry ice and vinegar and then drive the whole thing over a fifty-thousand pound pneumatic ram in an attempt to flip it end over end while on fire."

"And you need three trucks?"

"We're going to do it three times."

"There's no drop down box in the database for that."

"I should think not."


I love my job.

He Had Two Bodies in His Trunk

And he drove five hundred miles to bring them to us.

Of course, I'm freaking out because I didn't know that's what he was doing. When someone says, "We have two custom fabricated incendiary mannequins coming from out of state that were supposed to be here today," I presume that means that someone shipped them, in a box, on a truck. Y'know, logos, hand-held scanners, tracking numbers. Being the one who handles all the shipping, I'm seeing my choice gig dangle by a thread as four thousand dollars worth of SFX material fails to arrive where it needs to be. Moreover, I'm looking like a fool rather than a victim because I have no shipping data whatsoever on this pair of faux corpses that are slated to meet the business end of a flamethrower in less than two hours.

Thankfully I'm redeemed when a guy, covered in ink and skate scars and sporting a beard only slightly less bushy than mine, walks through the door and asks if this is the production office and where should he put the bodies. Of course this is after scouring the shipping logs, the label backups, the freight certificates and after saying a few unprintable things to a FedEx CSR to whom I have now written an extensive apology letter.

Everything's okay now that we have someone to set on fire and I still have a gig because hey, no blood, no foul.

Workaholics go to Meetings

I was shoo'd out of the office yesterday. After the fourth consecutive day of fourteen and a half hours my boss told me I had to go home, "before I became a liability." Mind you, at one point or another over the course of preproduction she's done this to everyone on the staff, usually after less time than it took for me. I presume this is because I never complain about how long the days are and I never ask to go home.

There's just so much to do: travel documentation, purchasing, accounting backup, shipping, provisioning, clearances, rentals, housing, transport, tax exemptions, insurance certifications, deal memos, crew lists, vendor lists, paper distro, day files, read-throughs, scouts, camera tests, fittings, catering to talent in town and to producers back on the west coast, and is it all worth it if, in the toss and tussle, you forget to do your time-card. Even sleeping six hours a night and skipping meals, there literally aren't enough hours in the day.

A new intern starts on Monday and principle photography starts on Thursday. The workload will spread and the days will be whittled down to a piddly eleven hours.

This is how movies are made. This is the life I have chosen.

Hawking Mayonnaise

It happens every time. Not usually in the early morning and rarely late at night, but in the afternoon, around the time schools let out, it happens. We're all calmly working our way down the call sheet from each scene to the next. The AD barks; the grips and electrics wrangle; vanity primps and PA's scurry. We're all just doing our jobs and it happens every time.

We acquire spectators. A group of onlookers, anywhere from a gaggle to a crowd forms at the periphery of set, held at bay by the words and glares the production department's junior members. They stare. They gawk. They mumble. They ask useless questions. They ask to be extras. They demand to meet whoever's famous. Most of all, they distract the crew and waste the PAs' time.

Now, I can forgive people for being curious. A location shoot is a big deal. There's trucks, strangers and all kinds of unfamiliar activity. I can understand wanting to know what movie it is that's shooting on your block. What I don't understand is why people will stand at the edge of a set and watch the ongoing work for hours and hours.

There's an old joke in the industry, "What do movies and sausage have in common?"

"You may love them both when they're done but you never want to see them being made, and largely for the same reason."

Watching a movie being made is probably the most boring activity in which one can engage. You'd be more entertained if you hung out at the football stadium when they put the logos in the end zone. Then you at least to get to watch paint dry and grass grow at the same time.

And, if you ever ask someone on location what it is that they're shooting and they reply, "Mayonnaise commercial," please understand that that you are the butt of an inside joke. We tell people that because, no matter how fascinating a shoot might seem, no one is going to hang around to watch a mayonnaise commercial being made.

More succinctly, "Mayonnaise commercial" is industry parlance for "Fuck off."