Double - Part 2 - The Tao of Exposed Film

"There is no greater misfortune

than not knowing what is enough

There is no greater flaw

than wanting more and more"

-Tao Te Ching

There are many contexts in which the ineffable question 'how much is enough' can lead to deeply philosophical answers, filled will moral implications.

To the line producer, how much 35MM film stock is exposed on a given day can answer many questions about how the shoot is going.  None of them bring spiritual or emotional closure.

If very little stock is being exposed, that tells you that not much time has been spent actually shooting, and that is not a good thing.

If too much stock has been exposed, in proportion to how much of the script has been covered, then you will likely go over budget.

On Double, we experienced both.

As explained in Part 1, the nature of the film, about twins, led to a number of difficult shots, dealing with reflections. Set-ups took a very long time.

A number of people are involved in how long it takes to set up a shot. First and foremost is the director, as they must clearly convey their idea for the shot, and have an idea of how it will fit in the final cut. The DP needs to make it clear to the grip department how to lay out track, if needed, the camera crew to get the right lens set, and the gaffer to get the scene lit as efficiently as possible.

Then, of course, we have the 1st AD. The AD can give the DP, et al, help by keeping them in the loop as the order of shots change, taking set-up times into consideration when scheduling the work, and answering questions about things such as what we see in shot ("Does that truck have to be moved?"" Can I put a grip stand here?" "Is this a good place to stage equipment?") Once all this is done; once the wheels are properly set in motion, the AD has less control over the time for set-up.

A good AD knows when it's time to get a camera rehearsal going; crew will tend to continue to tweak until someone tells then otherwise. While some DPs take set-up times very personally, rushing their crew, a vigilant AD knows when it's time to ask the DP if we can at least look at the set-up.

All of this is done with some degree of balance. Contrary to one of the many misconceptions about the role of the AD, drill sergeant is not one of them. While everyone needs to be kept on their toes, and aware of where the day is going in terms of schedule, and what is required of them, there is little positive effect to
threatening and badgering people to move faster. There are times when everyone is doing their job as quickly and as efficiently as they can - and it's just taking longer than anyone would like. Those can be the most frustrating times for an AD, and, ironically, can be the easiest time for an AD. A good AD knows when they have done everything in their power to move things along, and now they just have to wait.

AD's don't create the shots, and our AD on Double, Karen, certainly didn't choose the difficult set-ups. It was clear, right from Day 1, that the blame for the long set-ups was going to fall on her, regardless of how hard she worked.

As line producer, I was in the difficult position of trying to make sure Karen was doing her job, while also pushing Leslie, the director, on time. Every time I pushed Leslie, she would push harder on Karen. I tried, as diplomatically as I could, to explain to Leslie that in many cases, it was the set-ups, and not Karen, that were responsible for the time lost.

Admitting that would mean that Leslie was to "blame," if blame is the right word. She is the director, and she has the right to shoot the look she wants, but then she needed to be realistic about how much we could accomplish in a day.  As both director and the source of funding, Leslie was feeling that typical push-pull in two different directions, toward keeping us from spending more money and getting the shots she wanted.

As if all of this wasn't enough, the personal chemistry between Karen and Leslie was about as bad as it could be to start with, and only got worse. Sometimes we know why we have a bad response to another human; sometimes we don't. Does that person remind us of someone else we have clashed with in the past? Are there unresolved issues from childhood at play?

There is no degree in psychology on my wall.  Discovering the origin of the bad chemistry here was above my pay grade, but, with simple observation and years as an AD myself, I could find nothing Karen did, originally, that set this off.  My best guess was that this was one of those instances where two strong, assertive women could not get along. I have seen this dynamic in political work that I did in the past.

I could explore the sociological implications, the way a paternalistic society puts undue pressure on women showing the same assertiveness that is valued in men. Then, again, you don't come here for my dime-store sociological analysis, so I will just leave it at this: they never got along.

Once Leslie started to blame Karen, an entirely new dynamic took shape, in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Karen, understandably, resented blame that was not due to her, and she began to show that resentment ever-more-openly to Leslie, entering into a game an AD can never win.

Once an AD goes down this road, regardless of how understandable it is, the turn-off ahead can only lead to one place - a new AD. The Chain of Pain strikes again. I brought in a new AD.

Those who have followed this blog know what happens next. Leslie loves the new AD - they always do.

This should mean that we moved faster, and because the communication had become so bad with Karen, the  new AD "(I forget his name - let's call him Tim) was bound to be better. Still, there were days where we exposed very little film.

Then, one fateful day, the opposite happened. As I left set to attend to other matters, I reminded Leslie that we needed to keep moving, to keep shooting.

When I returned, I stopped in at the camera holding area. This is where the 2nd AD would load back-up mags, and also where the exposed was taped and labeled before being sent at the end of the day to the lab.

I was met with a mountain of exposed film. If my 2nd AC had been any shorter, I would not have been able to see him behind the wall of exposed. My first thought, my deepest hope, was that this meant we had covered a lot more of the script than I had expected, but a quick moment with the script supervisor told me that was not true.

Scipty followed me back to the camera holding area, where I began to match up the amount of the script covered with the exposed. As my eyes widened,  the 2nd AC looked at me, then the exposed, then me again, and said, "Hey, it's not my fault." He had been on enough sets to know what I was thinking.

Unlike the picture at the top of this post, there was no lovely lady sitting atop the skyscraper of exposed film, only the knowledge that we were in trouble.

We had exposed almost 10,000 feet of 35MM film - that is not a typo, 10,000 feet - to cover one page of the script. One page. One.  In describing this moment later to Henry, Leslie's producer, in a moment of the dark humor to which I am prone, I said that at this rate, Kodak would have to open up a new facility to keep us in 35MM stock.

You have to understand the implications of something like this. First, it means that the shooting ratio is so high that we will go way beyond the amount of raw stock (un-exposed film) we had planned, what this very good article describes as the "budgeted stock."

The problem with "budgeted stock" is that it is only a guide. If the director has no concept of the ramifications, it is hard to undo. It's not like when we hit the final number, we can just stop shooting, stop buying raw stock. I can't walk in, like a punitive parent, and tell the director, "You have used up all of the budgeted stock. We will not buy more. You cannot play anymore. Bad, director. Bad. Go to your room - the movie is over!"

That is, as my grandmother used to say in Sicilian, like "biting your nose to spite your face."*  You need to finish the film.

This now means that beyond the obvious added expense of more raw stock, there will also be more exposed processed, more developed, inevitably, more printed, more transferred. You get the idea. It's not a good thing.

To truly appreciate the irony that is the line producer's life, when I discussed it with Leslie at the end of the day, she had a decidedly different take.

"JB, look at all the work we are getting done now, with Karen (the previous AD) gone. We didn't waste any time this morning. We were rolling all morning. I've never seen the crew this efficient, and everyone seemed really happy."

Again, I have to point out that Leslie really was (and is) a good director. This was her movie, and she liked getting all of this coverage, and that was it.

In Part 3, I will tell of another interesting day, and the eventual end of Double.

Below, what I would have preferred to see.

*The American idiom is "cutting off your nose to bite your face" - I liked the physically-impossible image Rose Polito's translation of the phrase suggested.

Double - Part 1 - Seeing Double

Fill my eyes with that double vision

No disguise for that double vision

Ooh, when it gets through to me

It's always new to me

My double vision gets the best of me
-Foreigner

In almost every way, Double* could not be more different than Plaster.

Where the director on Plaster was ill-prepared and inexperienced - always a bad combination - Leslie*, the director on Double, was a successful and talented commercial and music video director who had pain-stakingly prepared for her first feature film with clear and brilliant story-boards.

Where the producer for Plaster could sometimes be as immature as its director, Henry* was a seasoned commercial and music video director who could not have been more professional, and more of a gentleman.

Moving to below-the-line, the DP - Mike* - had worked with the director previously. They had a good relationship, and he was experienced and -you guessed it - talented. He brought along a solid camera and lighting crew (although I did augment).

What Double had in common with Plaster was that we had to fire the First AD (this time not her fault) and that it was not finished.

Unlike Plaster, where the producers were working with a wish budget  they thought would finish the film, both the director and producer on Plaster knew that more money would need to be raised. Leslie was confident it would happen once she could show her backers some solid footage.

This sort of thing happens occasionally, and it's something I discourage folks from doing. Filmmaking certainly requires some leaps of faith, but this is a leap that usually leaves someone face down in a ravine. To their credit, both Henry and Leslie were upfront about this, so I went in knowing we might be looking at a countdown to zero, and planned appropriately. Basically, that meant starting the "shut-down" process as a back-up from Day 1 of prep, and hoping Zero Day would not come.

I did do a breakdown to let them know how much money they needed to raise, and then sent them on the business of doing it.

I liked and respected both of them, but really got along well with Henry and enjoyed working with him. I have done commercials and music videos, but somewhere along the line, I got a rep for being an indie-film guy, so I did a lot fewer of them than most. Henry was a pro in that area, and there was a mutual respect as well as a sense we could learn from each other.

Having been Leslie's regular producer, he knew the good and the bad. The good was her talent. The bad was the excess. Music video directors, and to a certain extent commercial directors, use a higher shooting ratio than indie-film folks - or feature folks in general, for that matter.

Let's talk shooting ratio, a topic that was much more important in the days when even low budget indies were shot on film.

In short, shooting ratio tells you how many feet of 35MM raw stock is needed for one minute of screen time. I found a script supervisor blog that does an excellent job of explaining the math.

At the time, all the "books" told you that indies should shoot a 3:1 ratio. That would mean estimating approximately 270 feet of raw stock per page. Frankly, I don't know anyone who did that. Stan Bickman, my mentor, always said 1000 feet per page was safe and left you a little cushion. That is a more than 10:1 ratio, and it's a ratio that proved itself out for me on most shoots. Some came in lower, an occasional few came in higher, but usually only slightly so.

Henry warned me that even that number might be a little low for Leslie.  Here, we should talk about the script, and coverage.

The script involved many aspects of the life of a specific pair of female twins in the their 20s, but reflected on twins everywhere. Every scene had reflections, and sometimes reflections of reflections, and sometimes - well, my favorite was where one twin is outside of a cafe window, looking at the other twin. We sees a reflection of both of them in a glass of water, while the seated twin sees the same reflection in the glass of water, but from a different POV. The reflection from the outside window is also seen in one of the reflections.

You see where this is going.

As one of my favorite ADs once said to me, "Whatever happened to pointing the camera at people and filming them?" You know; master, single, close-up, with the occasional hero shot thrown in.

There was little of that here. Everything was a dolly with a focus pull with a reflection.

In low-budget filmmaking, when I would see things like this, I would explain my own little conversion chart, and it went like this:

You can either do multiple angles (more coverage) or multiple takes. If you went with more coverage, you needed to live with fewer takes, knowing that even if not every master worked, for instance, you had it covered somewhere else, such as the single or close-up. If you wanted to do a cool 360-degree dolly with 3 focus pulls, that's fine. You will need to do multiple takes to get it right - and you have to keep shooting until it's right because you have no back-up. In that case, you don't also shoot coverage.

What you cannot do is lots of coverage with lots of complicated shots that require lots of takes. There is almost never the budget for that on the indie-level we are discussing.

When I gave this little speech in a meeting with the Leslie, Henry and Mike, I got the following reaction. Henry  looked skeptical. Leslie said she understood, but the fact that her mind was already elsewhere halfway through the explanation suggested she didn't care. Mike, her usual DP, looked at me with a slight grin, as if to say, "yeah, that'll happen."

The latter told me a lot. It wasn't that Mike was blowing me off; it was as if he was saying, "You don't know Leslie."

The key thing to remember here is that these folks worked big, well-paying jobs with Leslie on a regular basis. Under no circumstances were they going to do anything that bit the hand that fed them. I don't hold this against them, I really don't. I get it.

That is why I was there.

The next hint of trouble was in the hiring of a First AD. Because Leslie was a member of the DGA, we had to hire a DGA First AD. I was happy about this, knowing that I would get someone with professional experience. I asked if there was a regular AD that Leslie worked with, and was told there was pretty much always a different AD.

DPs like to keep their operators; operators like to keep their 1st ACs. We develop relationships. Directors like working with the same First ADs. When an experienced director is working with a different AD every time, it does suggest that there might be some difficulty in that relationship.

I was relieved when we found a strong female First AD. As I've stated, films can reflect the personality of keys, and I didn't see Leslie as someone who would respond to a testosterone-driven AD. Our AD, Karen*, was a big, assertive and well-prepared woman. It was going to be great to have someone who could relate to Leslie and still run a tight ship.

While Leslie agreed to use Karen, I got the feeling she saw her as the best of a weak lot, which was certainly not my take. There was a definite coldness toward Karen from Leslie; but I thought, "Hey, they don't have to love each other, just work together."

It was a good script that was more visually than dialogue driven, on the border of being impressionist. Actual twins were cast, so we were not using one actress to play both of them, and they were solid actresses.

While the issue of having to raise more money as we were shooting was challenging, we certainly had the right group to pull it off; or so it seemed.

If only it were this easy:

*All names changed here. You know why.

The Dream in the Drawer

Secrets are a dangerous thing, Ben. We all think we want to know them, but if you've kept one to yourself, you come to understand that doing so, you may learn something about someone else, but you also discover something about yourself. I hope you're ready for that.

-Nick Sloan (Robert Redford)

The Company You Keep

Much of this series has been about the past. This one is about the letting go of the past to move forward.

Writer/Director Ray DeFelitta talks about having a script "in the drawer." It is something his father, Frank, also a writer/director, told him.

For me, that script was my first screenplay, Never Waver. It was my first screenplay, and one that was close to my heart for many reasons.

It took me longer than any other screenplay, and I dd a great deal of research to finish it. My ex-wife, Maureen, was incredibly supportive, helping me with the typing and formatting before Final Draft was on the scene. It led me on a number of adventures to try and get it made.

The story was one I was passionate about; the story of a journalist involved in an ROTC bombing in the 1960s in which a woman was killed. It was now the Reagan 80s, and this journalist had run to Canada, hiding and working under a different name. The bomb was not supposed to be  real, and the journalist - David - never knew who planted a real bomb. When as former political mentor - a professor and one-term liberal congressman from NY is killed, and one of the members of David's group is accused, David decides he must find out the truth, at risk to the life he now has.

If this plot sounds a little familiar, it is because it is very close to the plot of The Company We Keep, the new Robert Redford film. In his film, Redford plays a lawyer now living under the name Jim Grant in Albany, NY. When a member of the Weather Underground group (Susan Sarandon)  he was a part of is arrested while trying to turn herself in, his life is turned upside down. In 1971, that group was involved in a bank robbery where a guard was killed. Jim, then Nick Sloan, has been named as an accomplice all these years, When a young journalist (Shia LaBeouf) finds him, he must find an old lover and member of the group (Julie Christie) to make sure the truth comes out.

You can look up more about the film at the link above, or the book it is based on at this link

I first noticed it because it was a return of Redford to the screen, and when I read the synopsis, I had mixed feelings. The plot, and more so the theme, were so close to the plot and theme of Never Waver. I tried a number of times over the years to get Never Waver made, and it never happened. It's not that I think someone stole my idea - clearly the author of the book did not see my script all these years later. It just makes me wonder if I would have gotten my script sold if I just kept at it.

The story of the lessons from the 1960s that are lost on people today (or, when I wrote it, the Reagan 80s) is an interesting one to me. The older you get, the more you realize we really are doomed to repeat mistakes of the past by forgetting the lessons - or so it seems sometimes. The parallels are everywhere.

It was with all of this on my mind that I went to see the movie, which did not bode well for what my reaction might be.I was even prepared to get up and leave if I found myself getting angry at any point.

That did not happen.

The script, and the movie, are good - really good. Besides the themes above, it is also a treatise on journalism in the age of social media, and in the aftermath of the disastrous coverage by both traditional and new media of the Boston Marathon bombing, it proves to be very prophetic.

This is also a big issue for me, as most of my best college friends went into journalism in some form, and I don't see a lot of the values we talked about in many journalists today.

The cast of veteran actors, from Sarandon and Redford to the too-rarely-seen Julie Christie, Nick Nolte Chris Cooper, Richard Jenkins, Stanley Tucci and more, make you miss all the old pros who seem to be out of fashion (unless they are bringing them back for action movies to reprise themselves, such as Willis and Ah-nold)

The movie does a great job of showing the strain responding to big, passionate social issues takes on human beings and their personal lives.

The latter was also a theme of Never Waver, one that always haunted me from my days stage managing, and then stage directing, Hair, and the song "Easy to Be Hard"

And especially people
Who care about strangers

Who care about evil

And social injustice,

Do you only
care about the bleeding crowd?

How about

a needing friend?

I need a friend.

That song has always stuck with me, how fighting for what is right is so much easier if you can look past the human consequences and look past the sentient beings all around you. We humans are a messy lot, are we not?

As I was heading home, what struck me is what a better script The Company You Keep is than Never Waver - it just is. The difference is in the details, as it always is with writing.

I am a better writer than I was then, and it might have inspired me to take Never Waver out of the drawer and fix it, work on it, reshape it, and make it better. That did not happen.

What I felt on the way home was relief, the relief of letting Never Waver go. The underlying themes are something I might still seek to explore, but if I do, it will be in another script, another story. It is liberating. It is time to move on; it has been for some time.

Hanging on to the past can wait for the days when I'm in a retirement home somewhere re-living past triumphs and defeats. I am a better writer who has lived more of life and has more to give to my work. Whatever my writing becomes, it won't be re-hashing of ideas I suffered through a long time ago, I worked those emotions and feelings out once, I gave them life in those old scripts, and even though they lived a sheltered life, never got to spend time in the outside world, getting through them helped make me the better writer I am today.

It's time to move on, and let the dream sleep peacefully in that drawer.

(The Clip below is not because Cheryl Barnes is not amazing in the movie, but because it was written as the character of Sheila's song. They changed it in the movie, one of many things that I hated about the film version.)

Plaster - Part 6 - Show Me the Money

"Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It's time to start thinking."

-Sir Ernest Rutherford, Noble Prize Winner, Physics

Here's a lesson in line producing you won't learn in any film school, and, hopefully, one you never have to put into practice. Call it "How To Responsibly Shut Down A Film."

It is unique to independently-financed projects. As I've repeatedly said, when Studio Films go over budget, they just do so on paper. When Indies go over budget, checks bounce, Literally.

It's the line producer's job to see that does not happen, and it starts with cash flow.

Before you, the line producer, ever started, you prepared a budget. In a perfect case, you prepared a budget based on the script, and then the producers went out and raised that amount of money.

In some cases, they have raised all the money that they could, and now want to know if they can make the movie. It's backwards, but it happens more often than you might think.

The challenge, then, is to give them a hard budget, along with hard decisions that need to be made. You'd like to shoot for 30 days? Sorry, budget says you can do 24. You want a helicopter shot? Sorry, you can't afford it.

You want to pay one actor $10K for one day's work? It's not in the budget.

As you have already seen, on Plaster, that last one got ignored. So did the one about making the schedule work, as our director wasted a good deal of time insisting that we try shots that either didn't work or took too much time. In fact, Jean-Baptiste, the director, claimed that the problem wasn't his lack of preparation, but rather, that two people experienced at doing schedules, myself and my First AD Susan, were wrong about how long it should take. This is not to mention the time lost while he tried to figure out scenes on set that he should have had prepared.

Add it all up, and it was clear to me that we did not have enough money to finish the film. Keeping close track of cash flow and reconciliation are important on movies of any size, but especially so on indies.

Even well-financed indies have accounting departments, but Stan Bickman, my mentor, had taught me how to work with a coordinator and an assistant to do most of the same work during production on projects under $1M.

Cash flow indicates how much you will be spending, by line item, per week. You project this from the very beginning so that you know where you are at any given point.

Reconciliation is a comparison of how much you budgeted, again by line item. versus how much has been spent.

No film comes in exactly on budget by line item, which is where moving money around comes to pass. However, you can easily see where there is no money to move.

On Plaster, we had borrowed all we could from post-production. The producer and director already knew they would, at best, have to raise more money once we got the film "in the can." Now, we were talking about how much of the film we could finish - it would not be the entire film.

The line producer, at this point, has a number of responsibilities.

He has a responsibility to the producers to not leave them with debt. That means you pay off all vendor and crew with the money you have left.

It is okay to put off some vendor payments for a short time, say, until the SAG Bond is reimbursed, or art department returns are done and deposits returned. It is not okay to put them off indefinitely with money that the producers hope will come in.

By nature, producers are optimists. That's all well and good, but reality must kick in. As line producer, I have a responsibility to my vendors. If they are not insisting on C.O.D., then it is because they trust me. That relationship also allows me to get the best deals for filmmakers. Once I burn that, I ruin my reputation, and I hurt the next filmmaker who is looking for a break.

You say, "hey, it was the producers who ddin't pay, not you." Uh, Uh.  The deal happened on my word; my reputation, not the first-time producers'. That makes it my responsibility.

There is also the responsibility to the crew.  On low-budget projects, crews are working for below their regular day rates, sometimes way below. They do that for me because they know I will take care of them, that they will get paid, and on time.

On low-budget projects, I pay crew by having them submit invoices the next-to-last day of the shooting week, and hand out checks on the last day of that week. Sure, on jobs using a payroll company for crew, pay is a week behind, and that's fine, but they are getting paid a good deal more. The trade off with me is that they leave that week's work with a  check for that week, they are never behind.

This is a policy I started when I took over that project where the director had stiffed crew. The previous production manager on that project had trusted the producer/director, and that crew paid for that trust. I swore that would never happen to me - and it never has.

Anyone who has worked low-budget knows of folks who have waited some time after a production closed to get their last checks - or had their checks bounce. Not on my watch.

Filmmakers will beg you for more time. I know, in reading the work of both Christine Vachon and Ted Hope, that many of the great indies of the 90s got finished even after the original money had run out, that the producers were raising the last of the cash even as they were approaching the last dollar. That works if you have a solid fund-raising history -my first-time producers do not.

Further, the picture at the top of this post is too true on some productions. Anyone who has checked their ATM balance, thought they were fine, only to be over-drawn when an un-cashed check came due, knows how that works. To paraphrase the saying on checks - just because you have money left in your balance doesn't mean you have money to spend.

Vendors sometimes take a while to cash checks. I always have crew people who don't make it to the bank. One of my favorite crew folks - an assistant on more than one project, tended to deposit her checks at irregular intervals. That means, at any given time, she might have up to five, un-cashed checks. That money is  still in the bank, but it isn't ours to spend.

This is obvious, you say, Home Ec. 101. No one would be stupid enough to spend that money, you say?

You have never dealt with a desperate filmmaker.

So, it was, that I had to tell Joey, the producer, that we needed to shut down. He had begged and borrowed  what he could, and none of his sources were coming through. I pointed out that if we wrapped with no debt, he could take the footage we had to date and try to cut a fund-raising trailer. If he were mired in debt, that would be hard to do, as any potential investor would be scared off by a project with pending debt and possible civil action.

These discussions were all with Joey, the producer, as Jean-Baptiste, the director, would hear none of it. Of course, he was still collecting his check. By this point, there was a serious rift between the two partners, and disagreement as to exactly who had control of the project.

That was for them to figure out later. My job was to wrap us neatly, and wrap us neatly I did.

Oddly, months later, Jean-Baptiste contacted me, as if he and I had never had those conflicts over his work ethic. He blamed everything on Joey, and asked, if I would work with him to get the project off the ground. At that point, Joey was off the project.

This is a guy I had screaming arguments with on the street! It is amazing how folks are willing to put pride aside to get what they want, and he conveniently forgot all of our disagreements, hoping I could put aside the problems in our relationship and use my connections to finish the film.

When your potential girlfriend tells you that all of her previous boyfriends were jerks, you start to wonder how long it will be before you become the jerk. (Are you listening, potential boyfriends of Taylor Swift?)

The same goes with filmmakers who tell you that the previous people they worked with were the problem, and  especially in this case, since I was there to see with my own eyes how Jean-Baptiste had carried himself.

No, by the end I had enough of Jean-Baptiste and his way of working.

The other movie that goes into the category of unfinished films we will call Double, The circumstances could not have been more different, but the (unhappy) ending was the same.

Boston You're Our Home

"In Boston, they ask how much does he know. In New York, how much is he worth. In Philadelphia, who were his parents."
-Mark Twain

My own version of the quote above is "You know how old you are in Boston by whether people ask you 'where do you go to school' or 'where do you teach,'" a reference to all the colleges in the Greater Boston Area.

The events of the last week have brought back my own special relationship with Boston.

Growing up, English was my favorite subject, and Brother Louis (Marist Brothers) of Mt. St. Michael Academy was one of my favorite teachers. He was from Boston, with the accent to prove it, and a huge Red Sox fan. The year after Carl Yastrzemski won the Triple Crown, he proudly played a 45RPM record (yeah, I'm THAT old) in tribute to him.

Here it is:




Sorry about that, but, hey, a little history.

I made my dad take one of his two vacation weeks on a inauspicious trip to Boston. On the way there, we got lost in the endless series of rotaries. We had tickets for a Red Sox game, and it happened to be a game that Vida Blue was going to pitch for the Oakland As.

It was 1971, and Vida Blue was the hot pitcher, on track to possibly win 30 games (he wound up with 24). His games were a big deal in every city, and Boston was no exception. The problem - there were hurricane warnings. On our way to the park, we saw people boarding up the windows.

They were not going to rain the game out; and we waited for about 2 hours in the rain. They finally got the game off, Blue was very human, and I don't remember who won. I loved Fenway.

Years later, I'm stage managing for a theater company made up of mostly soap actors who wanted to do real, serious work. They were called The Actors' Collective (and, later, changed the name because a more famous theater company had the same name - we were not that company). The only performer not in a soap was a young actress named Mercedes Ruehl, who later won an Oscar for The Fisher King.

I remember a performance of Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone by Terrence McNally. Mercedes played Nedda Lemon. In a scene with Tommy, they are meant to almost kiss, but then not. That night, the way the play was going, the only logical thing was for them to kiss. Mercedes was incredibly in tune at all times, and they did.

She was always wonderful to watch.

The company had a summer place in Martha's Vineyard, a place I fell in love with almost immediately. Among the odd things I remember from that trip was sitting in a beautiful restaurant, right by the water, having dinner. A few tables over were Tip O'Neill, then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. and Senator Ted Kennedy. We had the same waitress, who seemed unimpressed with the two of them, but very impressed that she had the cast of one of her favorite soaps as customers. We got the preferred treatment. It was a reminder of the power of television, which brings characters into our living rooms; something I would be reminded of years later when my family, for all the movies I have done, were most impressed by my involvement on Taxicab Confessions.

In subsequent years, I would vacation every summer in Martha's Vineyard, and eventually got involved with an avant guarde theater company where I acted and stage managed. Because of the cheap air fares (I think People Express, then New York Air, would do RT NY-Boston for about $19 off-peak) I would spend part of the week in Boston, living near Kenmore Square, a truly great place to party.

When I got married, I dragged my poor ex-wife to Martha's Vineyard and Boston for our honeymoon.

I remember 1986, when my Mets famously beat the Red Sox after the miraculous comeback in Game 6 of the World Series, I spent time razzing friends from Boston on the phone for days.

One of my most interesting times as an AD was on a film called Floating, with Norman Reedus, filmed in Massachusetts with a mostly Boston crew.

Those years have made Boston a second city for years. My love of the Mets goes hand-in-hand with my dislike for the Yankees, so my AL team has been the BoSox for some years.

So, as I watched and read, along with the rest of the world, as Boston became something else this week, a city under siege. It started with scenes of blood and mayhem early, and SWAT teams and military rolling through suburban neighborhoods late.

Additionally, the bombs at the end of the Marathon resulted in many amputations, something I am sensitive to as a bi-lateral amputee below knee. My operation came at the end of a long illness, so it was not traumatic, To think of the emotional pain on top of the physical challenges to athletes participating for nothing more than personal improvement is difficult for me.

In the days and weeks and months to come, there will be a lot of hyperbole, and I will leave that to others. I can only relate what Boston has meant to me, and that what I will carry forward is not their pain, but the resilience I know they will show, just as we went forward after 9/11 in NYC.

If anything, I hope it brings people together. One of my few reservations about my time in Boston was an underlying tension between races. This was years ago, and I hope that tension has eased over time. I truly hope that the positive that comes of genuine pride in country is not used by the meanest among us to shift hate from one group of "others" to another.

If you want to help:

http://onefundboston.org/

I would rather remember a united Boston this way.




* The title of this post comes from the old Standells' song "Dirty Water," but, beyond the refrain "Boston You're My Home," the lyrics didn't work for me.

Plaster - Part 5 - Not A Dry Eye In the House

"When I come home baby,

And I'm working all night long

I put my daughter on my knee

And she says  'Daddy, what's wrong'

Fool To Cry, Rolling Stones

There are no absolutes in film production. Great movies have bad days. Lousy movies have good days. On the best productions, there are people who make things harder. On the worse productions, there are good people doing their jobs.

Even on films that don't get finished, there are sometimes great scenes that you wish had seen the light of day.

In discussing casting, I mentioned that the producer. Joey, and the director, Jean-Baptiste. had gone out and gotten a signed deal memo from an actor for $10K. The actor was quite good and special, and known enough to be worth that much money, but it was a bad idea for a number of reasons.

It was outside of the pay structure we had established with Most Favored Nations agreements with agents. It could have led us to having to renegotiate with actors we already signed. We got lucky on this one.

It was outside of our budget. This is worth discussing.

Hollywood productions go over all the time. For most of them, it is just paperwork. Money is moved from one production to another by the studio. Yes, there might be consequences and raised voices in meetings, but at the end of the day, as long as the final product does well, it is not a big deal.

As I used to say in my line producing class at NYFA, when productions go over budget on small, indie films, checks bounce. I should have added "or the movie doesn't get finished."

Productions constantly rob Peter to pay Paul.* Money needs to be moved around. When it cannot be moved around, the phrase "we can take it from post (production)" rears its head. What that translates to is "hopefully I won't be here when the shit hits the fan," or, "it's gonna be someone else's problem."

During production, post-production becomes that great land of enlightenment when all good things will come to pass. Sound problem? Fix it in post. Continuity problem? Don't worry, we can cut around it. Went over budget? We can take it from post.

There is an incongruity in the above suggestions. If you are dumping all you problems to post, then post will probably need more money, not less. Unless you know there is more money coming from somewhere, it's a recipe for either not finishing the edit of your film to get it to a distributor, or taking short-cuts in post that negatively impact your product.

The more reasonable solution is what families do in budgeting - they put the money where it's needed, and then decide that they can do with less somewhere else. Money can - and should - be moved from one line item to another when it serves the production, not dumped randomly but with some rationale. One useful example is the relationship between art department and locations.

If you can find a location that needs little dressing, you can take that money from art department. IF, on the other hand, you find a space that is cheap, but has almost nothing, then the money you saved on the location needs to go to the art department to dress it properly. That sort of movement of money makes sense.

If paying this fee to one actor had meant an ability to not spend more on other actors (because we already had a "name" we wanted) that could have worked. If we were still in the process of funding the film, and getting that "name" got us more money, that is certainly okay. In fact, this is the ethos behind the theory that "name" actors don't cost a production money; that their potential worth at the box office will off-set the cost enough that investors are willing to fund the project at a higher level.

Joey and Jean-Baptiste hoped that this was the case with this actor - who we will call Reggie. In fact, they had wrung the Money Tree bare. There were no more leaves. We were now officially $10K over with no way to make it up.

Then, there was Reggie.

While Reggie was - and is - an incredible actor, he had drug dependency issues at that time. Thankfully, he has long-since cleaned up his act, and those issues are very much a thing of the past. At the time, it was an issue, as it was on our production.

On the day of the shoot, the actor was late by a number of hours, and when he arrived, he was in no shape to work. We rescheduled the scene for the next day, having lost a good part of that day working around him.

To his credit, he took his responsibility seriously. He took me aside - we knew each other from previous work - and said he would stay in one of the apartments we were using as sets in the Bronx, so as to insure that he would be there the next day. Further, he said being away from his usual contacts would guarantee that he would be in better shape the next day.

The next morning, indeed, he was a different person.

The scene was one where he played a guy who had gone to prison, and missed the birth of his daughter. When he comes back and sees her for the first time, she is about five years old. She doesn't know him, and is scared of him at first. She runs away from his embrace. He is heart-broken.

Movie crews become jaded, and are rarely moved on set. As one is not watching a movie, there is no context, and with all the lights and trappings, there is no "magic."  There is no sentimental music. There is no editing, bringing the attention of the viewer where it needs to be at any moment. Unlike the theater, there is no context, no lowered lights. There is no mystery.

In this context, I have rarely seen a crew member cry. Forget that weeping could ruin a take; it just rarely happens.

This was different.

Reggie was beyond wonderful. There was no trace of the actor; he was the character.The child actor was perfect as well, but it was Reggie that made it happen.

During the master, as I looked around through my own watery eyes, you could see members of the crew covering their mouths and nose to prevent openly weeping. I cannot remember a case where this many crew members were moved like this during the shooting of a scene, and to this extent. It continued during coverage, as Reggie kept pulling out emotions from even deeper on his single and close-ups.

It was a special moment on a project that had it's fair share of problems. This day - and this scene - weren't one of them.

In the poem by 8th Century Zen master Shitou Xiqian known in the East as the "Identity of Relative and Absolute," a central part of Zen liturgy, the following phrase appears:

Within light there is darkness, but do not try to understand that darkness,
Within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light....

Within the darkness that was Plaster, this day was the light; however, within this light, the darkness of the budget problems would not go away.

"She whispers in my ears so sweet,

You know what she says?

She says, 'Daddy. you're a fool to cry

You're a fool to cry,

And it makes me wonder why."

* The interesting etymology of a phrase that is used less and less today, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul. My dad used it all the time.

Plaster - Part 4 - Who Let the Dog Out?

"I don't know what her problem is. She takes her shirt off to do a voice-over. The country could draw her tits from memory."

-State and Main, David Mamet

While Plaster was never completed, it was not without it's memorable moments.

You would think that for a film not to finish, it had an incompetent crew, but nothing could be further from the truth. Charlie, the DP, did an excellent job, and our grip and electric department was led by a gaffer who is now a premiere DP in her own right.

As an AD, Susan was just the ticket. Exactly as I expected, Jean-Baptiste was enticed enough that she could get away with things that a male AD never could have accomplished. 

One of my personal favorites was how she would find Jean-Baptiste when he disappeared from set, which was often. He was under the misconception that the director was only needed when we were actually rolling or for brief descriptions of shots that he wanted.

If he was not to be found on set, it was a good guess that he was off releasing tension with his "assistant." Susan took an unusual approach to finding him; she would bark into the walkie. When he first asked what she was doing, she said it was the easiest way for her to find a dog.

Jean-Baptiste took it as a compliment, indeed; I think he took it as her flirting with him. She knew that tension would keep him on enough of a "leash" that she could make sure he was around when she needed him. Definitely not a tactic you'll find in the DGA guide - but it worked.

If Susan was the good cop, I was definitely the bad cop on this shoot. The opportunity to direct a feature is a privilege; to watch someone squander it was infuriating. His indecision made things harder for everyone, and when he made decisions, they often were bad ones.

For novice directors, the phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" becomes a mantra. They have seen creative directors use unique shots, and think it's all about crazy shots. As anyone who has worked in the business knows, innovative shots still have to serve the story. Weird shots done for the sake of looking different are just a sign of an amateur.

Together, we all tried to help Jean-Baptiste see this, but there was a limit. 

One day, while Charles was taking a break, Jean-Baptiste described a shot to Susan and I that, well, definitely left an impression. He definitely wanted it hand-held, and from the POV of someone in a rocking chair. The shot would start with the camera operator in a squat, looking up at the subject. From that position, he would "rock" back and forth, then get up and follow the subject. 

This was all with a heavy 35MM Panavision camera. It would be difficult with a steadicam; it would take one of those Russian Olympic weight-lifters to pull off with the Panny camera we had. The move would be shaky enough; the rocking back and forth, on a big screen (remember, we were shooting on 35MM with the intent of distributing in theaters) was likely to physically make the audience sick. Besides, we asked, how would we cut with a corresponding single from the standing subjects POV?

That, Jean-Baptiste had not thought through, but he knew he wanted it handheld and moving as well. Susan and I contained our laughter until, that is, we left the room to describe the shot to Charles. I can still see Charles standing there, eyes wide open in amazement, as Susan and I described what Jean-Baptiste wanted. Because neither Susan nor I could contain our laughter, Charles thought we were pulling his leg, so we got to see his reaction again as Jean-Baptiste explained it to him.

When Charlie tried to explain the physical problem, not to mention the editing problem, Jean-Baptiste was furious that we were being "insubordinate." He insisted he would do the shot.

While we relished the idea of watching him fall over under the camera, we had a safety obligation to him - and to the camera. When he insisted, we said we would show him only if the ACs could keep their hands on the camera the entire time. Jean-Baptiste squatted, and we lowered the camera. The ACs never let it out of their hands, but as soon as most of the weight was on him, he fell over. Of course, the ACs held onto the camera, so it neither fell on him nor fell to the floor.

A series of events such as this one left us behind schedule, and my patience with Jean-Baptiste was getting thin. After a blow-up with him on the street outside the housing project where we were filming, I spoke to the producer, Joey, and insisted that he stay on top of him on set, as I was not about to fight him to make his own movie. Joey agreed, and it was here that Joey started sharing that it was he, and not Jean-Baptiste, who was in control of the money, that he was calling the shots. I wasn't so sure.

After our adventures in casting, I  knew the scenes with our hot, busty Latina would be challenging. I worked out the nudity clause with Jean-Baptiste and Joey separately from the actress, who we will call Carla (not her name). We assured her that she could wear a flesh colored thong, as we would not be seeing that region. The scene started with her in a shower, she throws on a sexy kimono, and then winds up in the arms of one of her "dates" as they bounced around the room. 

As a producer and AD, I absolutely love the fact that SAG requires a nudity clause. In years previous, directors would tell an actress that they would show one thing, only to pressure an actress and change that on set. There is a lot of pressure on any actor/actress to please the director, and that often led to awkward situations. With a nudity clause, there can be no misunderstanding. I make sure the clause is quite detailed, to the extent of being downright clinical.

Hey, I have no problem with any degree of nudity. I did a film where two men had to appear to make love, and we spent quite some time describing genitals, positions and angles. I just want both parties to agree.

The nudity clause makes it fair for both parties. I always tell performers that if they have reservations, tell me when we are working on the clause, not on set where everything will stop. I respect performers; I expect them to respect our time on set as well.

Additionally, as anyone who has worked on set knows, any time there is nudity and/or a simulated sex scene, the set should be closed to minimum personnel needed. That number can vary - especially if there is dolly work, etc. but should never be more than needed. Additionally, "video village," where there is access to a monitor, should only be for those who need to be there during takes (lighting and art folk may need it during set-up).

Common sense - and common courtesy - are the basic rules.

Carla was a talented, trained actress who had a lot more assets than just her buxom figure. Jean-Baptiste didn't see the role as anything more than a "hoochie Mama"

Charles and I did all the right things to make her feel comfortable, and, along with Susan, made sure that as soon as we cut, she had a robe. Charles would take time showing her on the monitor what was and what was not in frame.

On a professional set, most crew have been through nude scenes, so everyone  tries to make it go smoothly, keeping respect for talent in mind. 

So, Susan, Charles and I had set a good tone as we worked our way through the coverage, when somehow, the ample amount of skin we were seeing was not enough for Jean-Baptiste. In the middle of a take, he starts shouting out one of his keenest directorial flourishes: "More tits! More tits"

Well, that was clear enough.

Thankfully, Carla was a real trooper, and just started laughing. It broke the tension for all of us. She stood, arms on her hips, wearing just the thong, looked at Jean-Baptiste and said "is this enough for you?"

She was in her early twenties, and her maturity was refreshing. One day at lunch, she came up to me and thanked me for, along with Charlie and Susan, watching out for her. We laughed about it, and, all these many years later, she and I are still good friends. Yet another example that good things can come from even the worst projects, and to always be your best.

There is much talk about women and nudity in film, but it has been my experience that men have much more of a problem with nudity. Carla was doing the scene with an actor a good fifteen to twenty years older than her named Richard.He had a long track record as a character actor on films large and small. 

For all of her nudity, the only thing we saw of Richard was his butt, and not even all of that. Still, there was barely a take where Richard would not ask us what we were seeing, and if it was okay. You would have thought that he was the one being fully exposed. One of my lasting images from that shoot was Carla trying to make Richard feel better about the nudity.

Lest I suggest that we only did nude scenes, there was a scene with a well-known actor that moved all of us, but not before a predictable problem. More on that in Part 5.