Recurring Themes

"The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out that you're wrong -  that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out - those are the exceptions."- Conor Oberst, musician

This blog can sometimes be like a bad movie pitch for me, where Bill Murray movies meet other Bill Murray movies. Right about now, it's Groundhog's Day meets What About Bob meets Lost in Translation, only without Scarlett Johansson.

After over twenty years of practicing zazen meditation, it is not surprising that my therapist recently said to me that I had 'introspection down pat,' nor should it be surprising to regular readers of this blog that I have a therapist, something that should be a requirement of anyone who is or, for that matter,  aspires to be, a line producer.

I had found myself on the doorstep of Shooting Gallery after experiencing a dark night of the soul after working with members of my close movie family on Town Diary, a feeling similar to the one I felt more recently after finishing Keep My Brother, where I questioned if this was the right direction for my life.

In preparing this post, recurring themes in my life presented themselves. How similar the challenges and questions of one film is to the next. The feeling of being pulled back in to a world that often did not serve me well. Wondering if this was the right path. Returning to my movie family like the grown kid who keeps going back for that nightmare, Home For the Holidays, Thanksgiving get-together.

The Oberst quote above has more truth for those of us who work in any of the arts than it seems at first glance.  We are constantly chasing after the truth, and scared that we might actually catch up to it. What would we do then? How empty our lives would be if we ever found all the answers.

Likely,  I could have been happy at Shooting Gallery for years, had it not hit that damn iceberg.  For sure, there was a period of time after Shooting Gallery had it's doors closed (that request came from an eviction marshall) where I found myself adrift in a lifeboat,  which was, in my case, funded by that small inheritance I'd received from an aunt.

That time was filled with pursuits both artistic,  where I pursued my writing,  and wanton, which included stays in Atlantic City playing poker. Indeed, there had been times in between shoots where I had made quite a good living after the movie Rounders and amateur  Chris Moneymaker's World Series of Poker victory had driven a number of would-be poker players to the table. It was a time when the quote from Rounders, "if you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, you are the sucker" rang true.  Those of us who had played for a while could make a tidy living.

All good things must eventually come to an end. Poker players started getting better about the same time that the dotcom bubble burst, stock prices tanked, and it seemed a good time to get back to work.

There is a great story about actor  Omar Sharif. The dashing co-star of Lawrence of Arabia and star of Dr. Zhivago and Funny Girl was a world -renowned contract bridge player, good enough that he had a Chicago Tribune syndicated column on bridge that was distributed worldwide.

Sharif did not simply engage in cards as an academic endeavor,  and he enjoyed all forms of gambling.  As the story goes, he had lost most of his money while in Monte Carlo, something that seems to have happened to him more than once. *

Legend has it that after a particularly rough night,Sharif ordered a large breakfast,  asked for a house phone,  called his agent and said, "It looks like it's time to go back to work.  Get me a movie."

My Sharif moment was less exotic with troublesome annoyances such as paying rent and utilities getting in the way.

It was about that time that Phil and Donna from Paper Blood were actually getting close to finally getting funding for their second feature, a script we will call The Holoflux

Years from now, it's possible that a film historian will analyze my career by the fact that two of the films I line produced had names involving the fire of the unattainable and the holoflux universe.  No one will ever accuse me of chasing commercial scripts.

I was back working with close members of my film family,  two people who were closer to me than blood relatives. I would bring in people I knew and trusted. 

Famous last words . What could go wrong?






* Sharif Quote from IMDB "I stopped making movies because for the last twenty five years I've been making a lot of rubbish because I was in debt all the time. You know I used to gamble quite a bit and then I was always broke. I was always one film behind my debts and so at some point you know I had to work all the time to support my family and myself and all my expensive tastes and then I decided that it became ridiculous at some point. "

1994-The Wonder Year:The Ones That Got Away - Pt. 2 - "Welcome to the Dollhouse"

"Yo, Weiner, you better get ready, because at 3 o'clock today, I'm going to rape you."

-Brandon, Welcome to the Dollhouse

I can't swear that the line above was exactly as it appeared in the movie, Welcome to the Dollhouse, when I received a script to consider, then entitled Middle Child, in 1994. I remember there being a reference to meeting  by a tree, but, in any case, it was not the mere appearance of the word rape that caught my attention.

Other scripts, both theater and film, had dealt with the subject of rape, but rape was not the subject of this script. In fact, what caught my attention was not the threat of rape, but rather that, in the context of the story, it was not a threat at all, but more akin to a date with the hot guy at school, and a date that Dawn Weiner, the 7th grader to whom it was directed, was actually hopefully anticipating.

Coming of age stories are grist for the mill of films in general, especially indie films. One wondering about the insanity that is our business would also wonder if anyone who made a film actually had a happy adolescence, but I guess all those people went on to become CPAs, or something akin.

So many things made this script stand apart. First, this unattractive, unpopular girl is the victim of the type of emotional abuse both at home and at school that she makes Carrie look like a head cheerleader. Any attempt to deflect this abuse is only made worse by the fact that her older brother is almost, if not more, unpopular than she is.

I was being considered as line producer because I had a mutual friend with one of the producers (at the time), Jason Kliot. I had the reputation of being able to do a lot with a little, and producers Kliot and Joana Vincente had a similar reputation with their company, Open City Films. Ironically, I firmly believe that this would be reason why I did not get the job.

I had made good movies, mediocre movies, and, well, a few clunkers.  What I had not worked on was a movie that was a critical success on a big scale, even for the burgeoning indie movement. 

To put it in context, it seemed like the time of miracles.  All around me, I saw films with minuscule budgets and sometimes razor-thin plots succeed on what seemed like nothing more than an edgy "feeling". Brothers McMullen, Clerks, and El Mariachi were all examples of this.

My resume was starting to get long, and it was getting to that point where I started to think, "What am I doing with my life?" I was starting to feel like Jack Lemmon (or later, the actor his spirit invaded, Kevin Spacey) in all those mid-life crisis movies (which seemed to last forever, from about The Fortune Cookie to Save the Tiger).

It goes beyond the feeling that life is slipping by, that the hourglass on your masculine prowess (and, with it, your physique) is getting bottom heavy.  You are in a field where people make their mark in their twenties, and you are already past the age where you can be a wunderkind.  

What ever happened to those heady high school and college days, when you were often "the smartest guy in the room" (or, at least you felt that way).

It was with this unhealthy attitude that I approached my interview with Jason, Joanne, and Todd Solendz. 

A line producer needs to be a take-charge guy, and I'd learned to turn interviews around, to take charge of the interview by coming in prepared with how I was going to navigate this ship, asking more questions of them than they did of me. 

This often worked very well, giving the exact impression I wanted - "Wow, this dude knows what he's doing.  We better hire him"

If it were the right approach, it was the wrong room.

First, although I only met Todd this and one or two other times, anyone who has met him knows that it is unlikely that that are the smartest guy in a room with him.  Todd has all those things you expect in a great artist - both book knowledge and a keen insight into the human condition, a perfect compliment of head and heart, and certainly a very agile mind.

Jason graduated summa cum laude from Amherst, and was a Fellow at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris; Joana had  Masters Degree in Philosophy from The Catholic University of Portugal.

Beyond that academic prowess, all three were veterans of the film wars.  Todd had survived an unhappy fling with studio films with his first feature, Fear, Anxiety and Depression. Jason and Joana were two of the real pioneers of not only getting creative small budget indies made, but distributed with Open City.

To take the other side of that old poker maxim from Rounders, if you look around the room and everybody there can be the smartest guy in the room, well, you, are the "other guy".

I started by expressing how much I admired the script, which was not the least bit flattery. I had never read anything like it. It was clear that the writer and force behind the script had a great intellect, but also that this man who was only two years younger than me clearly had an ear for the cruel language of middle-schoolers in a way that seems familiar all these years later, but was rarely if ever seen in any film at the time.

When they got around to what I thought would be the difficulties of the logistics of the script, I mentioned the two that struck me; where would they find a school that would let us shoot there if they read the script, and where would they find a girl the right age who had the self-confidence during her own puberty to handle the image-shattering action and dialogue of the script.

The answer to the latter clearly came in a remarkable actress, Heather Matarazzo, who later has made public her own personal struggle in school with the lack of acceptance of her sexual feelings for other girls.  Clearly, this, and naturally strong character, had toughened her for anything the script offered.

More importantly, she saw, as Todd did, Dawn's strength and confidence and pride in being different.

My background in Dramatic Literature and love of structure usually makes me pretty good at understanding both the spine and themes of a script, but missing this was only one of my misinterpretations.  Upon meeting Todd, I immediately assumed that he "was" the character of the older brother, the "king of the nerds." 

Gender had confused me here, and I missed the obvious; that much as Tennessee Williams is Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Todd is Dawn. He is not the victim older brother, but the fighter "middle child".

The school location did turn out to be a problem, but the line producer who eventually was hired, Priscilla Guastavino, was a tough lady who I would later work with on a few projects. She got it done.

There was one area that I turned out to be correct, and that was in questioning Jason and Joana's suggestion that it be shot on 16mm to save money. My work with JR and on other projects had convinced me that the cost-saving measure many used at that time - shooting on 16mm and then getting it blown-up to 35mm if it got sold - was a bad choice, one that seemed to invite failure.

I had a good deal of success shooting 35mm using resold raw stock, which has to be differentiated from the even cheaper "short ends" method.  I would only use stock that was still sealed and resold back to a broker that I knew, not those that were repackaged from full loads. I had a very reliable broker, and had never had one frame of bad footage  (a fear many producers had with even resold).

I made an argument for not shooting 16mm, and though I turned out to be correct, and the film was shot on 35mm, I could see in the eyes of Joana and Jason that if I hadn't failed the interview before, I had certainly lost them here.

Other producers ultimately came aboard; with them, a bigger budget and shooting on 35mm.

As a postscript, a few weeks later, Todd called me, asking for a reference for Van, the AD I had worked with on The Rook and the ill-fated Corman film. Of course, I gave him a glowing reference; of course, he didn't get the gig either.

Of all the projects that slipped through my fingers, I most regret not working on this ground-breaking film with a great indie pioneer in Todd Solendz.

Chain of Pain - Part 1 - Suckers at the Table

Listen, here's the thing.  If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.
-Mike McDermott, Rounders

The AD is the person you fire when you can't fire the director.
- Raymond DeFelitta*




In his epic book on poker, Super System, Doyle Brunson talks about how what gut reaction really represents is all your combined experiences and observations, many of those observations being subconscious.

Shortly after The Rook wrapped, our AD Van was on to another project.  Three days before production started, he learned Annie, his regular Second AD, could not do the shoot.  He asked me to come on as 2nd AD.

One would think that if someone was a good 1st AD, they would automatically be a good 2nd AD.  That isn't necessarily the case, although it is often true, since inevitably one needs to have been a Second to move up to First.

I had done more 1st AD work on small projects, and had only been a 2nd on one feature, before I was 1st AD on my first feature, Walls and Bridges, so I pretty much was the exception to the rule.  The 2nd AD runs the backset, something I could do very well.  They also handle most of the paperwork, not my strong point. It's not that I don't know the production paperwork, I'm just not naturally a paperwork person.  Additionally, I wasn't the fastest typist in the world at that time (writing constantly has made me a much faster typist).

Van was undeterred.  Van was very much a details person, and a person who had set routines, and didn't like change.  He felt more comfortable with someone he knew.  What a long, interesting trip it had been, from Van not wanting to talk to me on my first day as production manager on The Rook, to feeling he needed me on this film as 2nd AD.

I loved working with Van, and thought we would be a good team, because our different styles complemented each other, and we were on exactly the same page about the big things, especially our belief that professionalism was not a function of budget, and that we could run even the lowest budget project in a professional manner.

Of course, on this film, we would not have any influence on the production side, and this turned out to not be a good thing.

My first day was the production table read meeting, which is sometimes called (I understand) an elements meeting.  I am a stickler for it as AD or LP, and I usually put aside an entire day for it.  The AD runs the meeting, and its mandatory for all production heads.  We go from scene to scene, read the scene, and then go around the table dealing with production issues with the department heads.  Scene reads "Billy gets into the car", the props master is asked if we have the car, what it looks like, etc.  We determine that the actor playing Billy can, indeed, drive.  DP is asked about car mounts, camera car, etc.  So it goes.

It's not as easy a meeting to run, and run properly, as most people would imagine.  Inevitably, people who are not as involved get bored, and everyone feels there is someplace else they need to be and something else they need to be doing.  If you hit a long stretch where one department is not involved, they want to just move on.  I have pretty much banned cell phones, so I don't have people walking off during the meeting taking a call, but its sometimes hard to do with the producer, for whom I make an exception.  Assistants or seconds can come in if something must dealt with during the meeting.

For all of that, it is important to hit each scene, cover each item.   This is the last chance you will all have seated in the same place without the pressure of making the day, and things that seem obvious are exactly the things that will screw you if you don't ask the question and don't deal with them.

At some point in this meeting, it struck me.  It wasn't anything specific, it was just a gut feeling, that the producer, who was a first-timer, was setting Van up to be the fall guy.

We were at the table for more than a half hour, but I knew we were the suckers.

I got the feeling that he did not respect Van or intend on letting Van run the set the way we both felt a set should be run, that he didn't really understand that the AD's job was not, as one person once described it to me, a grip with an attitude.

Van was not a screamer, and I had no patience for screamers, but clearly the producer saw the AD as simply some sort of wagon master whipping the crew to keep them at break-neck speed.

Van and I went for dinner that night, and I told him my feeling.  He didn't see it at all.  Van was always an optimist,  certainly more so than I am, and I hoped he was right and I was wrong.

Day One I learned how some of the cost-cutting done by the producer would hurt us.

The entire production office consisted of two people, the producer and his production coordinator.  If the producer had little experience, the coordinator had none, though he was as a much nicer person.  The producer was young, snippy, and arrogant.

Even at that time, the production office would typically have those five-line phones, and at least three phones.  This would be an absolute minimum, and most of my offices had more.  Those phones would "hunt" (that is the phone company's term for it), so if one line was busy, it would go to the next line.

What this office had was two phones, and, in one of the best examples that we were in trouble, the producer  chose to NOT get call waiting, because it cost a little more.  This was a classic example of being penny-wise and dollar-foolish.  Of course, with the high cost of cell phone rates at that time, they weren't going to pay for a cell phone on set, so I had a beeper.  In the beeper days, an emergency call (something that absolutely had to be dealt with) would get a "911" at the end of it, to distinguish it from just suggesting that you call back when available.

The combined result of these cost-saving measures was that I would get pages from the office with 911 at the end of them, have to find the closest working pay phone, then call, only to get a constant busy signal because there was no call-waiting.  Often the busy signal was actually a result of the coordinator paging me again.

This process meant I often got important information very late, in some case, I didn't get it until someone was actually sent to the set with a message from the office.

We had barely improved on the carrier pigeon.

It was ridiculous, and would have been laughable if it wasn't so frustrating. 

The least favorite part of the 2nd AD's job for me was preparing the call sheet, as it was for most people.  The process, for those who don't know, is that you prep the call sheet with all the information you have from the schedule and the breakdown of the elements, and propose call times to match for crew and cast.  You then show a draft to the AD for their input and approval, and make changes until it gets approved.

Often information throughout the day leads to changes; long days to call time being pushed back, scene missed needs to be added, along with its elements, etc.  Information needs to go back and forth not only between people on set, but also with the office.

Not being able to contact the office meant that getting the information I needed was delayed, and getting the call sheet to Van was delayed, and anyone who has ever been a 1st or a 2nd knows how frustrating that is for both people.

Additionally, I had to coordinate company moves, and I had no UPM or location manager or other help on set.  Of course, I had one passenger van to do the moves, so I was constantly sending 1st team ahead, and having to wait for that van to return to get the next group there, and, inevitably, this lead to delays.  Surprisingly, though, we were not far behind schedule as the end of the first week approached, but we were behind.

If we were struggling on set, the coordinator was so far over his head that he was struggling even more.  Nothing ever got to set on time from the office, in no small part because the coordinator was doing too many things at once and would often have to wait for the producer to get off the phone to make calls that needed to be made.

One morning, as we waited on something we needed to start shooting, I explained to the producer that this could not continue, this for maybe the umpteenth time.  This producer was one of those people who was more concerned about who was to blame than how to get things fixed, so he finally agreed to add a person, if he could find someone with experience that would work for the low rate.

Luckily, I knew just the person.  I called Stacey, my friend from the films I had done with JR.  Stacy, who had worked as location manager and 2nd AD with me, had also worked as production coordinator in the meantime.  She was incredibly well-organized, was capable of turning chaos into order, and she knew how I worked.  All of this made her perfect.

I woke her at about 7AM, and she was showered, dressed and in the production office about an hour later.

Stacey took hold of the office, and things got slightly better, but now that the office was covered, albeit with a slight increase in cost, the producer would focus on anything Van did as an excuse for why we were behind, including rookie errors by the director.

This set up some interesting days, and one so frustrating that it still is clear in my mind all these years later, a day that had everything, including four company moves, rain, overtime, and children, and an overly-chipper new PA.



*Follow the link with Raymond's name for his perfect description of "the chain of pain."