The Rook- Part 3 - Who Killed the Chauffeur?

"One day Bogie came on the set said to Howard [Director Howard Hawks], 'Who pushed Taylor off the pier?' Everything stopped" 

-Lauren Bacall, By Myself and Then Some




Bacall, above, is referring to the maze-like plot of The Big Sleep, in what has since become a wonderful bit of Hollywood lore, spurred in part by the response from the author of the novel when Hawks and the screenwriters inquired into the answer.

"They sent me a wire ...asking me, and dammit, I didn't know either," Chandler recalled in Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane's The Raymond Chandler Papers.

I have always resisted the temptation to take this response at face value, not sure that Chandler wasn't being cute, or whether the question was irrelevant to the plot for him.  Owen Taylor's murder is just a plot device to keep detective Phillip Marlowe from dropping the case, and it clearly didn't matter to Chandler who killed him.

On one level, this story tells you everything about what is wrong with the Big Studios today.  I'm not saying that the Studios in their heyday did not interfere in negative ways; indeed, much of the confusion on the plot of The Big Sleep was due to the Hays Code, which prevented the story being told as it was in Chandler's novel.  However, today, some focus group would have sent this movie back to editing room based on its twisting plot, and a good deal of the fun of this noir classic would have been lost in the "fix".

Sometimes mysteries are good; other times, not so much.

Plot was something of a mystery on The Rook,  and, if you ask me, it's part of its appeal.  Oh, the "who-dunnit" aspect isn't all that hard to figure out, but exactly where and when "Sutheridge" may be is another matter altogether.

The plot of the film is something like this; John Abbott, a devout religious man who is serious to the point of seeming humorless, is a detective and an official from a central theocratic government.  He is sent to a dreary industrial down of Sutheridge  to investigate the murder of a previous female investigator.  He encounters a revolution and a number of cryptic clues ( the working title of the film, "The Circle in the Square", was a reference to one of those puzzles).  The story is set in an intentionally ambiguous time period, where horse-drawn carriages take people to places that have archaic versions of modern devices, such as computers, telephones and inter-office communication.

He is met in Sutheridge by the same local official who met the last investigator, Bob Brice, whose loyalties come into question during the investigation.  Abbot's ultimate fate is determined by his own rigidity.

Neither writer Richard Lee Purvis or director Eran had any desire to explain the contradictions that existed in the story; rather, they reveled in them as part of a deeper philosophical discussion.  This led people to either love or hate the movie, depending on how literal they were.

The pejorative term that both plots shared at one time or another is "convoluted", which often means the reviewer wasn't interested enough to figure it out, or that the film didn't entertain them enough to care.

Mysteries are good for plot, but bad for production people.  Whether you are an AD or UPM, your most precious and important time is prep, where you lay the groundwork for how the movie will be structured.  I previously discussed that in breaking down a script, I like to go over it enough times that I feel like I even know it better than the director.  (How To Be an AD in BC)

As UPM or line producer, I start with a budget I prepare that is not only a financial plan for the movie, but a blueprint that determines all parameters of shooting.

On The Rook, I was reading this crazy script before and after long work days, working with a schedule I had no involvement with, and a budget that was more like a rough draft.

I soon learned that there were better uses for my time than trying to decipher the plot.  One day on set, I was siting with Martin, our lead who played Abbott, and John, who played Brice.  I asked them a question about the plot, and both admitted they had stopped considering that particular point some time previous.

There were no cables to Richard Purvis.  I addressed a plot question to Richard some time after the film was shot, and his response was like one of the puzzles in the film; I got off the phone knowing less about the plot than before, if that was possible.  The closest I got to an explanation of the time period was "it's a vision of the future as seen from people in the past."

As a viewer, this makes it possible for me to watch this film endless times, and the DP Zack and production designer Sebastian created a look that the Village Voice positively compared to Brazil.

As production manager, I put deep understanding aside and satisfied myself with the elements of the script that affected shooting, and making sure we had all of those.

The less satisfying mystery was the budget, and the accounting.

One of the first things I would explain to students in discussing preparing a budget is that there is no line item known as "petty cash," or at least there shouldn't be.  Cash is a form of payment, like checks or credit cards, and you wouldn't create a line item for "checks", but somehow, people feel comfortable creating a catch-all category called "petty cash."   A more accurate term might be "those things I can't really think about right now, but I know we'll spend it someplace."  This is not to be confused with a contingency, which is, well, those other things you know will come up but you can't really think about right now.

I went about unraveling the mystery of our budget, which began with figuring out how much we had already spent, and Mr. Chandler would have been proud of the mystery there.  The checkbook was a bit confusing, but I could usually put vendor or contractor's name with a line item.  Credit card receipts were a little trickier, with some from places that could have been for any number of things, but this was just a matter of picking a line item.

Big costs, such as equipment, became a fun game of matching invoices, both paid and pending, with checks or credit cards.  This was like the Monday NY Times Crossword Puzzle, challenging, but if you know what you're doing, it can build confidence for subsequent days, which become increasingly harder.

If these big costs were like the Monday Crossword, cash expenditures, aka petty cash, was like Saturday's NY Times Crossword, a cruel invention of  the sick mind of Will Shortz where hyphenated hip-hop slang intersects with French interpretation of Greek mythology.

Eran had assured me that we had each and every petty cash receipt, and that turned out to be true.  When I requested these receipts of the production coordinator and her assistant, she was quick to hand them over.  Rather than the neat top sheets, numbered and listed by line item and followed by pages of receipts taped or stapled in order, what I got was two big, brown paper grocery bags, filled to the brim with streams of white paper that were, indeed, receipts.  Notes written on them?  Not a chance.  They pretty much looked like a larger version of your night table when you empty your pocket after a long day; I was just happy there were no gum wrappers.

Good

Very Good

Not Good

From Raymond Chandler at his home in Hollywood to Will Shortz in whatever leather-and-shackle filed abode he dwells in to my production coordinator, the look was the same, the look of "glad you're here, have fun figuring it out."

So, the priority was getting at least a big picture of how much was spent - Eran could certainly tell me how depleted his account was - and figuring how much we had remaining and how we were going to finish the film .  I did set up a two-fold system, one for accounting for past petty cash, and another for accounting for how we would track it moving forward.  The ladies of the production office became efficient versions of Bob Cratchit, assigning receipts based on a legend I provided and bringing those in question to me while also keeping the machinery of the movie, like sides and call sheets, in motion.

When you're in production, it's no time to look back, and no time to indulge in mysteries.  The mystery of the plot took a back seat to making sure we had what we needed to shoot today, then tomorrow, then the day after; the mystery of where the money was spent would not be solved before we figured out how to spend the money we had left.  It's not the way you draw it up on the drawing board, and it's not the way you teach people to produce, but it's the reality of making a movie under difficult circumstances.  You need to have rules, but you need to be able to adapt.

For the record, I have a pretty good idea of who killed the chauffeur.








The Big Sleep - Book Store Scene

Great artists can take limitations and turn them into advantages.  The Hays Code prevented writers from being sexually explicit, so the great ones found ways to to be clever and seductive in ways the censors would pass, but the audience would still enjoy.  The scene linked above from The Big Sleep has always been one of my favorite examples of this - do you really need to be told what happened during the time lapse?

The Rook - Part 1 - Meet the New Guy

Before

After

“After a half hour, remove your jacket; after the second half hour, loosen your tie; after the third, roll up your sleeves; after the fourth, muss your hair a little.  At the end of the day, you should look utterly exhausted, and everyone will say you are a hell of a stage manager.”

Bert Gruver, The Stage Manager's Handbook

I read the book quoted above over 25 years ago, and it still sticks in my mind.  It comes at the end of a book that goes into all the nuts and bolts of the job of stage managing; then, on page 213, Mr. Gruver turns humorist, offering a survival guide for the real world the stage manager will face.

His point was that since people didn't really know what you did, if you look like what they expect, you must be doing your job.  Look the part.

The same can be said of a UPM or Line Producer, and, to some extent, the First Assistant Director.  People know that the UPM and Line Producer worry about the money, the First AD the schedule, but beyond that, often not much else.

What they expect in all of those positions is command of the situation at hand.  Change at this level usually means things are going poorly.  Much like managers in baseball, the degree of responsibility of the person involved as opposed to the players (crew, director, etc) is a matter for debate, but the fact remains that they are being replaced because there were answers they didn't have, and you, as the new person, better bring those answers, and the sooner the better.

I came to the producer and director, Eran, on the recommendation of one of the associate producers and original editor, Alan.  He noticed on my resume that I had helped another project (that I will discuss after this one - it was shot first but released later), he knew the people involved, and they had assured him that I would be a big help.

Eran lived in a very large loft, that also served as the production office, and it was more than big enough;  indeed, he had chosen it precisely because he could use it for both purposes, as he had other films planned.  The production designer was a sculptor named Sebastian, who worked with his girlfriend.  This was Sebastian's first film, though the results would suggest otherwise.  Sebastian lived in a loft across the hall, which also served as the de facto art department office.  Together, we had the entire floor of the building.

I met Eran and Alan on a day off after week one, and they definitely felt the production manager was in over her head; they had hired someone without a lot of experience at that level who was moving up.  It always amazes me that people will put a novice in charge of controlling their money in order to save money.  Can anyone imagine a start-up corporation bringing on an accounting student as CFO in order to save money?  No.  Production manager on a film?  Sure.

The rationale is that since the budget is smaller, there will be less that could go wrong; though nothing could be further from the truth.  When a major film goes over budget, numbers get printed in red as opposed to black, losses are written-off against profits on other films, and life goes on.  On small indies, going over budget means checks bounce and everything stops, so in many ways, experience is even more important because of the consequences involved.

As is often the case on these small projects, the budget that was prepared was more of what I call a Wish Budget - the amount the producers wish to spend on each line item rather than a reflection of the reality of what each line item would cost.  Of course, it failed to include other line items, including those items that would be obtained for free - and we all know the high cost of free.

On the day I got there, Eran and Greg were looking over dailies on a  Steenbeck  in a closet-sized room that was the editing suite.  Welcome to the good ole days of post production.  The footage didn't make much sense to me - there were people in what looked like period costumes and odd set pieces, but I hadn't yet read the script, and assumed that it would all make sense once I did.

That assumption would be challenged soon enough.

The outgoing production manager and Eran agreed that she would stay on in a minor capacity for a bit (she would decide against that after a day or two, which was for the best).  After getting Alan and Eran's perspective on what was going wrong, I got Cindy's (I don't remember her name - Cindy will do), which obviously did not put her at fault.  From her I got that Eran was an inexperienced director who had made the poor choice of following the advice of a stubborn First AD, Van.

I got the entire low-down on Van (from her perspective) on our trip out to set as she drove.  She had tried to change schedule with him, but he would hear none of it, and all he did was complain to her about things that were not being done from the production office side; he was, she pointed out, part of the problem and not part of the solution.

I had a copy of the schedule, and some things made immediate sense, others are different than how I might have done it, but my background as an AD told me there were certainly elements of scheduling that Van knew that I did not.

ADs are as possessive of their schedules as Linus is of his blanket, and for good reason.  As I pointed out in previous posts, as AD, you have to take all variables into consideration, where the person who takes a quick look at it is either just seeing one perspective, or just seeing it from their department's point of view.  ADs hate having their schedules questioned.

There was also the second obvious problem, which was the rift between "production" and the AD department, which included a very good second AD named Annie.  This is something that occurs more often than it should.  Many ADs do not see themselves as part of production, and so see themselves as separate from the production and the production office, leading to tension and a blame game.  Food arrives late for lunch?  AD says, "hey, I told production, it's their fault."  Same with other problems that can arise with transportation, equipment and other issues.

Technically, the AD in this situation is correct; these sorts of things should be handled by the production office.  My issue is not with the delegation of duties as much as the attitude; it's not good for crew to see a rift between the production office and PM and the AD.  Their jobs overlap so often that it's important that they be seen as a team, and that they work together.  Tension and division does neither side any good.

My first encounter with the AD department was when Annie, the 2nd AD, met us when we arrived on set.  She was professional, but I sensed a bit of a chill, no doubt a result of me showing up with Cindy.  They were shooting when we got there, so I took the time to talk with Annie privately for a bit about how things had been going from her perspective.  First ADs are stuck by camera most of the day, so if you want to know what is going on behind the scenes, talk to the 2nd AD; they know where all the bodies are buried ( or are about to be buried, as the case may be).  Also, I knew if I ingratiated myself with the 2nd AD, good word would get back to the 1st AD.  Human dynamics aren't that hard to figure out.

Again, I got the word about transportation and food arriving on time.  I realized that part of this was an inexperienced UPM not challenging a budget that was penny-wise and dollar foolish.  We added a vehicle and made some common sense upgrades regarding food.  Eran was skeptical, but he had asked for a new perspective, so I got some more rope than my predecessor may have.

One of the most important things when taking over a project like this is change; people need to see a tangible difference.  Little things like the craft table looking better and lunch being on time can make a difference with the crew, and the added transpo helped both the director and AD department see that things could actually run more smoothly.  Little things matter; Mussolini won the hearts of a nation by simply getting the trains to run on time, though I try my best to avoid most other comparisons between my management style and Mussolini's, as my upside-down  hanging skills are not up to par.

When we broke for lunch, I introduced myself to Van.  I knew the look on his face; "oh, great, someone new who is going to try and tell me how to do my job."  Without a doubt, schedule would be something we would have to address, and he took out the stripboard, and we started going over some things.  As expected, there was resistance to even considering any changes and exasperation.

I took him aside, and said, look, I knew things weren't going well, but as an AD, I knew what he was going through, and I promised to have his back and do my best to support the AD department on set.  I don't think I impressed him very much that day, but over the course of principal photography, and even after this film, he and I would become good working partners and friends.  He is easily one of the best ADs I've worked with, and I'm happy we worked all of that out over time.

So, the work began.  Being the new guy buys you a little time, but not forever, and next post, my initial head-butting with Eran, the director, and my introduction to the office production staff and the interesting accounting process to date.