The Walter Brennan Effect

While I have been following the Olympics, I have tried to avoid the hype around it, especially NBC's attempt to make every athlete a human interest story.  Comic Andy Borowitz summed it up with his faux news report - "Athlete without compelling personal drama expelled from Olympics."

So it was that I had (happily) missed the idiotic controversy about South African runner Oscar Pistorius, a bi-lateral below knee (BK) amputee who used prosthetics to compete in the (not Special) Olympics.

Anyone who has followed my blog knows why this would be of interest to me - I am a BK double amputee and get around with standard prosthetics, as well as a  cane .  For those who need any background as to whether Pistorius had an unfair "advantage", let me assure you, he did not.  Even the advanced prosthetics he used to compete are a strain beyond what using your natural legs would cause - a single amputee uses three times as much energy to walk as a non-amputee.  So, no, it was not an advantage.

I have to find the issue of an advantage humorous, as amputees are often referred to as "disabled," so it seems we are both disadvantaged and advantaged at the same time.  Interesting.

All of that said, it reminded me of my experience in this business, being a person who walks in for an interview with a cane.  Let me tell you - no one ever took one look at the cane and said "wow - what an advantage to have this guy!".

My prosthetics are cosmetically correct, so without telling someone, most would not realize they were artificial.  The assumption would then be that either I had some temporary injury, or some permanent condition that made it hard to walk, both of which would be incorrect.

After standing on artificial legs for a long time, the stump that goes into the prosthetic gets sore, much the same as your feet or legs would get tired.

All of that said, I have always made a point of telling potential employers my condition, usually adding the joke, "I can't run with PAs - but I can trip them."  As most of my career in this industry has been since my operation, I would say I have been able to overcome any reservations most people have, though I am sure that I lost jobs here and there because of it.

An interesting effect, though, is that even when I was working in my late 30s and early 40s, I was treated as an elder statesman.  Now, this is a young person's business, but even by our standards, I wasn't old, all of which got me to thinking of Walter Brennan.

Brennan was easily one of the most respected character actors of all time (he is the only actor to have three Best Supporting Actor Oscars), certainly of the Studio era.  My favorite portrayal is probably from the movie pictured above, To Have and Have Not, where he played Eddie, Humphrey Bogart's boozy sidekick.  He played similar characters often, notably Stumpy, a boozy sidekick to John Wayne in Rio Bravo.

People of my generation probably knew him best as Grandpa on The Real McCoys, which is appropriate, as he was playing characters named "Gramps" or something similar even when he was relatively young.  To many movie-goers, there was no "young" Walter Brennan, and this was not a coincidence.

He lost most of his teeth in an accident when he was only forty; additionally, his friend, sound recordist Jack Foley, suggested when he was playing one part that he put a pebble in his shoe to give his character a distinctive limp, and he kept that affectation for many years and in many (though not all) parts.

I could regale you with stories of my other favorite Brennan roles - there are so many - but then I would be missing my point.

Because of a perceived disability and an accident, he was seen as "older" even when he was, in fact, middle-aged for many of those roles.

In thinking about it, my use of a cane over the years may have led to a perception of me being older even when I was not.  I, at least, prefer to think it was that and not the fact that I was cranky.

Like Brennan, I eventually grew into my age, and at fifty-four, have enough of the gray hairs to justify the older designation.

As for Pistorius, he finished last in his heat, simultaneously proving that he did not have an unfair advantage and proving to the haters that he should not have been allowed to compete because he was not as good.  Too bad he didn't have a cane; he could have tripped them. Now, that, would have been a real advantage.


UPDATE:

Pistorius will get another shot at a medal as part of the South African relay Team.  Video also added below

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?