The Indonesian Job - Days 3 - Let Me(a) Culpa

Sometimes finding the right photo for the post is hard. None, though, was easy as this one - a layup - as the author actually chose to title the person who refused to fall on his sword "JB." Photo and caption all done for me. How convenient!

This fortuitous find kept me from trotting out my Christine Vachon quote from Shoot To Kill: "It's all my fault. Now can we just move on?" (Ok, so I still managed to get it in here)

It's probably true in other businesses as well, but folks in this business often want responsibility, but are not always as willing to take responsibility. The good ones do.

We weathered the many delays pretty well, with the exception of having to come up with locations at the last minute. One of our replacements for "iconic" locations was a theater as part of the replacement for Grand Central Station, because Raisa is a singer and we got to put her on stage.

After originally going after the Apollo, and then realizing it wouldn't work, we secured a verbal agreement on a theater where a friend had an Off-Broadway play running on the Friday before our Monday shoot. We didn't have a signed agreement with the owner of the theater until we actually got there. All of this meant that we had no time to get permits from the Mayor's Film Office for our exteriors of the club, or the our one company move that day, the closest park for the final Magic Hour sunset shot.

The day went relatively well, with sidewalk walk-and-talks being no big deal. We had a hard out at the theater (they had a show that night) and while we wrapped camera in way enough time, getting gear and such  out cut it close.

The theater staff - the Production Stage Manager, a lighting tech and a rep from the owner - were great and made the experience a lot of fun. The Indonesian team got everything they wanted.

And, then, there was the rush for the Magic Hour shot.

The word "idiot" comes up in front of many things. "Idiot check" - that check you do to make sure everything has been taken out of the space when you leave and that nothing is left behind - is a perfect phrase because what seems obvious often is not.

That morning, Brian (AD) and Leigh (PM and LM) and I had made a point of explaining to the Indonesian team that we did not have a permit for the walk-and-talk outside. In fact, it was borderline, under the new rules, whether we even needed that permit.

The important Magic Hour shot - it would be the last shot of the movie - we did not discuss. We had scouted a park, and thought we could get a shot off.

Somehow, none of us - Brian, Leigh, nor I - told the Indonesian team that we did not have a permit for the park.

Between that and the fact that we were rushing to make sure the light was right, the company move was a little hectic. Leigh was trying to make sure we were out of the theater on time, and had left her assistant with specific instructions of who should be in each vehicle and in what order. Somehow, her instructions weren't followed and the move was choppy.

Worse, by the time we set up at the park, a park official came by and shut the shoot down.

We knew we had another opportunity to get the shot later in the week, but with all the good work we had done, it was our first fail. The Indonesian team had not complained about anything to that point, and my experience with them was that it was not in their nature to be difficult. Still, when they got back, they were clearly disappointed.

I could see from their questions that they were disappointed with our team, and as it was a location issue, I could see how the blame, such as it was, could fall on Leigh, as their questions were directed toward her. This was completely unfair, and I knew I had to nip it in the bud.

Again, there was no way, given the late notice, that we could have gotten that permit. Why none of us mentioned it to them eludes me, other than that with all of our discussion that morning about not having permits outside, we thought it was understood there were not permits for the entire day.

Another reminder that in our business, nothing is obvious.

The rest of our team had worked too hard and too well to have any doubts about their ability remain in the minds of the Indonesian team, and that night, I wrote a heartfelt email to the director and producer, apologizing and taking personal responsibility.

I have worked with too many producers over the years who would find blame with everyone else but themselves, who were quick to accept thanks but would never accept responsibility for things that went wrong.

It wasn't easy writing an email that basically said I screwed up, but it was what I had to do. It is also a lot easier when you reach a certain age and you are pretty comfortable in your own skin. Any regular reader of this blog knows that I have had my share of grief sent my way over the years, and a little more wasn't going to kill me. The same can not be said of Brutus.

Although these things tend to be sketchy in terms of history, a little research suggests that the term "falling on one's sword" dates to Brutus, and this account from Plutarch's The Life of Brutus:

Finally, he (Brutus) spoke to Volumnius himself in Greek, reminded him of their student life, and begged him to grasp his sword with him and help him drive home the blow. And when Volumnius refused, and the rest likewise...grasping with both hands the hilt of his naked sword, he fell upon it and died.

Clearly, Brutus didn't work on a film set, where neither Volumnius nor anyone else would have refused to help. In fact, the grips would probably build a rig to facilitate it.

Thankfully, my response went a little better.

The director wrote me back a very nice email, basically saying that he understood. It was a relief. As it turns out, we did get the shot on our very last day - but not, again, without its share of drama.

As with the Asbury Park scene in Lucky Stiffs, some scenes just seem to be haunted, or looked upon with disfavor by the Film Gods.

Oh, they do exist, and while they do not always require a human sacrifice (it's why I sometimes hire an extra PA - just in case) they require a hearty mea culpa now and then.

Mea Culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Keep My Brother - I Walk the Line

"Good line producers are not simply fixed on numbers. They known what the numbers mean:which ones are critical - and therefore inelastic - and which one's aren't. They know why it's important to have fifty extras in a particular scene and not thirty, and they wont spend time trying to convince you to do it with thirty; they'll be busy searching for a scene where you can afford to lose twenty extras."
-Christine Vachon, Shoot to Kill

At our production dinner (see below), which has become a new tradition on my films (inspired by a production coordinator I hired last fall), I bought Christine Vachon's seminal book, Shoot to Kill, for two of my production interns who had served as production manager and assistant production office coordinator on Keep My Brother.

I did not buy it for my assistant director, a graduate of NYU's prestigious (and I often think over-rated) Tisch producing program. I assumed that it would have been part of that program, but should have understood that it would not have been.

It has too much damned common sense in it.

Regular readers know my admiration for the book and the author. In the quote above, Vachon succinctly states what I try to explain all the time, which is that line producing is not only about setting the line (items) - but moving it.

Although the origin of the title comes from the studio days*, I think of it in terms of moving those numbers, and the ability to do so becomes the benchmark for success or failure.

In that respect, I like to think of both images above; the unforgiving guardian of the line  on the left, and the guardian of justice and being true to the film on the right.

The fact that I walk with a cane and tend to pace on set inspired one of my favorite ADs, Chris, to nickname me "Walking Boss" after the character from Cool Hand Luke. One day on set, as I dug a groove in the ground, he yelled out "Prisoner requests permission to wish Walkin' Boss a happy birthday!" For years, the nickname stuck.

Yeah, I look like this sometimes when we are behind schedule

On this Ultra Low budget, there was a lot of adjusting, and I have to say that the director, Mike, was helpful when it came to this.

On the above-the-line, we initially talked about no casting director, but, then, Mike decided to go with one (and a good one for indie films, and at a good rate). That meant I needed to make room for that.

He was going to work with a few long-time actor friends, but in budgeting the other featured roles, we originally talked about offering more money for a "name." Now, "names" on this level is a tricky game - suffice to say someone recognizable from TV or supporting roles in bigger films. In the end, we settled on not offering more than the $100 a day upfront in the SAG Ultra Low contract.

This proved a good decision, as we got some great folks and I doubt we could have done better dangling extra money.

As that number fluctuated, so did the numbers for production personnel.

One of the things I hate about very low budget films is not having the right make-up of production personnel. To save money, I was going to originally take the budget for an AD and just bring on an intern "2nd AD" - basically a PA willing to move up. I would LP and AD.

Yes, I am past the age when I should be doing both, but I remember some of the greats like Paul Kurta doing both, and Stan did both in his younger years. Because we would be in one location 9 of twelve days, and only two others with no company moves on any day, I thought this could work. When I realized my regular AD was not going to be on, and because so many of the schedule decisions we would make were intertwined with the budget decisions, I thought it could also be prudent.

I used some of that money to hire a Production Coordinator. I could not keep an eye on the big picture and even remotely try to handle petty cash and day-to-day management, not to mention setting up files is far from my strong point.

Here, I brought on one of my heroes from my last shoot, Tasha. Tasha was the APOC on that shoot, and, working for an insanely low rate, proved a hero when, on the day before Thanksgiving, when everyone was off and thinking turkey, she ran around half the city solving a parking and storage problem herself that she could have easily said was not her responsibility - because it wasn't.

Like a wounded animal that has a thorn removed from it's paw, I will never forget her dedication that day. Anyone wondering if doing the right thing matters should make a note of that.

In the crucial positions of APOC and UPM, I brought on interns. I love to teach and train, and, in Stephanie and Jason, respectively, I got truly lucky - they were incredible.

As production got closer, I was still thinking a 2nd AD who could fill in for me when I needed to leave set when I met "M," a young Asian-American lady who had one 1st AD credit. Usually that would not have impressed, but it was on a feature in Beijing. I have worked on a few Asian productions, and life is not kind to assistant directors. I figured if she could handle that, she could handle this. Thus, the idea of me being a 1st AD at all went out the window - thankfully for all.

M and I talked for about a half hour, but I had a sense she could be a good AD within a minute of meeting her. Much of being a good AD can be taught; much cannot. She had the latter.

Having assigned more money there, I took money from the number of paid PAs we would have rather than interns. I knew we needed at least one driver, and I would not let an intern drive. I hired additional paid PAs for pick-ups, but not for the shoot, as, without the company move, I needed less drivers.

I have always, back to my early days, tried to pay everyone, even if it was not a lot. At $50 a day, I thought it was better than nothing.

We did wind up with one loyal PA - Jack - but the others fell by the wayside, including a few who expressed how excited they were to be on a film. In the end, we spent less here than I planned, although it came with pain and difficulty.

I thought we could get a good 2nd AD in terms of a PA wanting to move up for the credit. That did not work out. As a matter of fact, we found the kiss of death was teaching someone the Exhibit G, the SAG sign-in form. It has a few quirks (it's in military time, cannot be erased, etc) but it's not a Rubik's Cube. In the first four days, EVERY person we taught quit the next day, as did the two people we taught how to do call sheets.

So much for the desire to learn.

This left M on her own in terms of communications way too often. Which brings us to another place we saved money, but it inflicted pain.

Walkies.

The nightclub had about 15 walkies - I usually would want more, but thought we could make do. Although they were good quality, they never seemed to work well with each other. Some would work with some but not others. In the end, I'm glad we saved the money - but I can't say it did not make the job a good deal harder.

Besides M, my G&E team was definitely less than impressed, but, whether they admit it or not, it worked in the end.

Speaking of G&E.

I had a hard number for rental of G&E gear. Shortly before we started, my gaffer, Adam, whose opinion I respect from other shoots, increased our order, much of it for speedrail, The idea was that we would not have to be doing as many relights and could light more from the grid, much like a studio.

It was 45 percent more than I wanted to spend - plus two days of pre-rigging - that I would have rather not spent money on. I trusted that it would solve what I knew would be my biggest problem - time.

In the end, I don't think it solved the time problem as much as I would have liked, and much of that gear was likely not needed, given the way we ultimately lit the film. That was counter-balanced by a vendor (who I had worked with on a previous shoot) giving me an insane discount (a one-day week PLUS a 40% discount) and a camera gear vendor who also worked with me because of past business.

We also made up part of that time because of the success of the G&E interns, who were unpaid and supplemented a crew of Gaffer, Grip and Swing.

We were able to save in one of my biggest areas - transportation - by returning the bulk of the gear when we wrapped the first location. That meant having the more expensive cube truck (as opposed to our cargos) only for the one day where it returned after the extra gear was dropped off. Cubes cost not only in their rental, but in gas and parking - and that is money that is not on screen.

Production is about winning the war even when you lose battles.

I will discuss more balancing in the next post, but I thought this would be informative to producers looking to do very low budget as to the realities of what they can expect, even after the hard work of budgeting is done. Choices made in pre-production are important, but good producers must understand they will keep making choices as the film goes on, and those choices will determine whether you stay on budget or not, and the type of film you ultimately make.

More on the art of compromise in the next post - that one may be a primer for our current-day politicians.

For now, a look at that production dinner I mentioned. From left, the old man (me), my Production Coordinator (and really Production Supervisor) Tasha, APOC Stephanie, First AD "M", and Jack, our loyal PA. Not pictured is Jason, our UPM, who offered the only acceptable excuse - he was working OT on another shoot.

*There was a producer, who dealt with the director and stars, and a "below-the-line" producer, who dealt with the day-to-day operations, the title being shortened over the years to line producer.

The Indie Aesthetic - Then and Now - It's More than Just the Budget

"You cannot be a producer unless you accept that it's all your fault"*

-Christine Vachon

The making of movies has always been a large part craft as well as a large part art. I won't even attempt to offer percentages. So, it is only natural that those attempting to break new ground often met at the crossroads of new ideas and new technology.

Film history professors can talk about pioneers like Samuel Fuller, or any number of the noir guys who took those big, bulky cameras outside of the comfort of the studios and into the streets. Like most art, it's history of renegades is as old as the history of the art form itself. You can call Chaplin a pioneer  for the work he did outside of the studio system, and go forward and backward from Fuller's contemporaries to people as diverse as John Cassavettes and Roger Corman.

Then, there is the whole Easy Rider Raging Bulls crowd.

Those film history professors can break all of that down much better than I can; it's territory better left to them.  Suffice to say that learning to do more with less did not start with the digital era.

What I can talk about first-hand is my peripheral connection to the indie world from the late-1980s through today.

A number of things converged to make this the right time to write this post: my covering a pivotal year, 1994, in my last few posts; a wonderful interview with real producing pioneers, James Schamus and one of my personal heroes, Christine Vachon; and a post on Reddit about "no budget movies."

I remember the day Vachon became one of my personal heroes; it was when I read her quote, "It's all my fault. Now, can we just move on." It was like being hit with a proverbial stick by a Zen master, that moment of enlightenment. More importantly, it exactly put into words my description of line producing, which Vachon had done. It was one of those quotes that I wish I had said.

In their article, they very clearly address the cause-and-effect:

3. Consider your relationship to the dominant culture. The conversation started out with James and Christine remembering the first projects they worked on together: The Golden Boat, Swoon, Poison and Safe. In the ’80s, they remembered, no-budget filmmaking necessitated an almost counter-cultural aesthetic because it was impossible for these films to look like mainstream movies. Now, James said, DSLR production values mean that it’s easier for films to look good — “like good TV.” It’s also easier for films today to uncritically adopt the language of the dominant media culture. Independents should think carefully about whether that’s a good thing for them to do or not.


I don't know how many of those films you may be familiar with, but they all had an aesthetic that transcended budget, yet, the budget limitations played into that aesthetic. The two worked hand-in-hand.

If given a bigger budget by a Hollywood studio, the Leopold-Loeb story would never have been handled the way director Tom Kalin does in Swoon. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, the closest to a "Hollywood" film to reference it (albeit only by inspiration) takes an entirely different focus.

Neither of Todd Haynes' films mentioned, Poison or Safe, have big budget Hollywood counterparts.

For all of the "real world" today's reality shows try to portray, do any of them do a better job of taking  us inside another world than another of Vachon's producing successes, Larry Clark's Kids?

I don't think it is at all a coincidence that Haynes, Kalin, Clark, and their contemporaries like Todd Solendz are still making movies outside the mainstream. Kevin Smith is distributing outside of traditional sources. Joe and Harry Gantz, for all the success of "Taxicab Confessions," are currently raising money for their newest documentary on the unfulfilled American dream on Kickstarter.

It's important to note that for these pioneers, Indie film was not some form of "minor leagues" from which they hoped to be plucked for the "show," that "big league" being Hollywood. The budgets reflected a different sensibility for each of them, though not one they necessarily shared. If the digital revolution had never come along, they would still be finding their way in whatever system existed.

To a great extent, their budgets were, and remain, a reflection of their art. Unlike the Grunge movement in music, and the Punk movement before it, they were never co-opted by the mainstream; unlike the Easy Rider Raging Bulls crowd of the 70s, they didn't go on to become the trend-setters and new moguls, either.

The discussion of an indie aesthetic is important because there is no magic budget number that makes a movie a true indie. I have worked on films in SAG's lower budget categories - the Modified Low and, more recently, the Ultra Low - that were indies solely because of their budget. Their directors would have made bigger (and often better) films if they had a bigger budget - they just didn't. Nothing about the scripts themselves actually broke new ground, or separated them from their bigger brothers and sisters.

Conversely, most of the lists of best "indie" films of the 90s include films that, while commendable and often exceptional, were the "middle-class," where funds really didn't limit them or impact their look. Among them are all Coen Brothers films after Blood Simple, Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects and American Beauty.

So, where does that leave the filmmaker coming up in the indie world today? As Schamus and Vachon suggest, it leaves them with big choices to make.

I don't pretend to be enough of a visionary to know what those new indie ground-breakers will look like. I do know that the fact that it is shot on digital alone will not make it new and different.  Many of the Hollywood blockbusters that are using the same formula they have always used are using digital, and many of them, not so well, in my book. It always amazes me when I see a movie in a theater today with a lazy special effect that was done better when the technology was not what it is today. I fear that laziness will set-in and become a mindset.

As line producer, I get many scripts from first-timers who tell me how much they can do now that they can shoot on their beloved RED or some other new camera. Then, I read the script, and it's the same script I could have read ten or even twenty years ago. Imitation and more imitation.

That is not to say there is no innovation in the movies coming out today; I just have yet to see one that stands tall at that crossroads of technology and creativity that I mentioned at the beginning of the article. Most of the  truly original movies I've seen the last few years were original because of the content, and could have been produced on film just as well.

I omit the horror genre altogether, not because it's not worthy, but because it's a genre that has always done more with less; digital just makes it much less. If you think a surveillance cam and "Paranormal (fill in the number)" is the new aesthetic, then the makers of The Blair Witch Project deserve a lifetime achievement Oscar. As borderline un-watchable as I find Blair Witch, I have to credit them and admire their imagination - and that was on film.

One movie that points in the right direction was shot on film, and is now almost seven years old, and that is Brick. Personally, I hate the term neo-noir, because if you look at how many times that segment of the crime drama has been re-invented, we are certainly onto neo-neo-neo-neo-neo-noir by now.

One of the choices director Rian Johnson made on Brick was to open the doors of of a genre that spent most of its time in dimly-lit rooms and long alleys in the dead of night, draped in keenly crafted shadows. Johnson let the genre play outside in the daytime, opening up the possibilities of working with available light, something that can still be done on film with the right cinematographer. If you want to see what can be done with film and available light, including interiors, check out Whit Stillman's Metropolitan (1991)or Jon Jost's All the Vermeers in New York (1990).

Johnson took his financial limitations and turned them into advantages. We had seen all the great shadows and creepy interiors and hard men and loose women. Johnson moved that sensibility to high school, and in one of my favorite scenes, puts a typical cop/PI scene into detention hall, and moved much of the murder and mayhem outside in broad daylight.

I'm sure one day soon, there will be the definitive cellphone camera movie; I just haven't seen it yet.  I will be the first to embrace a truly original script that marries perfectly with the new technology. I should also point out that I don't spend a lot of time running to some of the edgier film festivals out there, and if a reader has seen what they think to be this perfect marriage, I would love for them to share it here.

A new indie aesthetic will rise, that's for sure. I'll be waiting.





*If you're even thinking of being an indie producer, and you haven't read Shoot to Kill and A Killer Life, then don't be surprised that many of the answers to questions you will always find yourself asking have already been asked and answered.