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. "

Serenity Now

"I'm more likely to lose my temper on a film set than almost anywhere. Often the level of idiocy is so exalted that it's impossible to comprehend"
-John Malkovitch 

The juxtaposition of the image and quote above should be self-explanatory. For one thing, somewhere, someone thought "Buddha" and, in the next moment, thought "Keanu Reeves."

Regular followers of this blog know that I have been a Zen practitioner for some time, and it would not surprise them to find that I spent the last week doing sesshin, an intensive week of mostly meditation, but also includes face-to-face teaching, dharma talks, liturgy, and other elements of Zen.

One of the "precautions" (as the onus is on you, they aren't referred to as rules) is no electronics, cell phones, internet, or reading. The point is to shift your mind away from your usual concerns.

Eight-to ten hours every day is zazen, or zen meditation. Contrary to popular thinking, meditation - at least as practiced in Zen - is anything but escaping the real world, or drifting off into a peaceful place. It is about getting in touch with your true mind - the eyes are lowered but open during zazen. Everything in practice is pointed toward seeing your "true mind" and then taking that into the real world.

That means that practice means nothing if it does not make sense on the subway, at home, and, in my case, on set or in the production office.

And that is where this post comes in.

I avoided using the title "Zen and the Art of Film Production" or something like that because the term "Zen" is thrown around very loosely in a New Age way that has little to do with Zen practice. Phil Jackson is an excellent basketball coach, and surely has studied some with a teacher, but he is not a Zen master.

There is something in Zen called "right livelihood," which basically deals with making a living in a way that does not violate the Precepts. As film production does not (at least necessarily) include killing (thoughts of killing a director are not included if you don't carry it out), misuse of sex (what grips do in their spare time does not count), abusing intoxicants (difficult to determine that fine line of what defines 'medicinal use after rough day'), lying or stealing (add your own wisecrack here), it technically does not count as violating this.

However, day-to-day application of working in film production is a whole other matter.

On a basic level, it's hard to find time for daily meditation when you are barely getting by on four hour's sleep.

The bigger problem, as I see it, is the culture of film. This is something I have thought about in the past, but kept coming to me during sesshin. When you are doing over 50 hours of meditating in a week, you think about a lot of things.

One of the oldest things I remember seeing when I moved from theater to film was the Seven Stages of Film Production. The inclusion in Michelle's blog tells us this still rules strongly today:

Seven Stages of Film Production

1. Wild Enthusiasm
2. Total Confusion
3. Utter Despair
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Persecution of the Innocent
6. Promotion of the Incompetent
7. Distribution of T-Shirts

Definitely not Zen.

There is no need to explain any of that to anyone who has worked in film. Part of this is true because of the unpredictable nature of film production - weather, actors dropping lines, stunts and effects that need excruciating planning, traffic during company moves, and so many more.

Part, though, is a culture of chaos that production thrives on, as the "stages" above suggest. It often seems that producers or directors are determined to eschew time-honored procedures that work for a different way to do things. I can't say how many times it felt like people involved looked at the way to do things that worked and said, "Let's do this instead!"

I'm not talking here about being creative on screen, but, rather, ignoring procedures that work. Yes, there needs to be flexibility, but some things work, and should only be shunned for good reasons Examples? Go to any one of dozens of posts in this - or most other - film production blog.

Just in recent weeks, I saw a writer/actor sabotage getting a $4.5 million film financed (one he has been trying to get done for four years) because he did not want to transfer the copyright to the production company, which is basic procedure* and done on every film.

There is a Sicilian expression I heard a lot as a kid referring to not "Biting Your Nose to Spite Your Face." **Basically, don't do harm to yourself just to do harm to others you don't like. But, in Rule # 4 (Search for the Guilty) above, I have often seen the the need to "blame" someone outweigh the more important priority - fixing the problem. This need some producers or directors have to assign blame poisons the morale of a crew and, from a practical matter, makes it harder to fix problems, because everyone is now in CYA*** mode and thus look to hide rather than correct problems.

It would be easy for me to go through a litany of stupid things others do or have done, but what concerned me more, as this thought kept coming to me, was my own actions.

I started my last feature film on a good note, waking up each morning offering one of the gathas from my original teacher, Myotai Sensei.

"May this be a day of blessing and being blessed,
Honoring and being honored,
Loving and being loved."

Sounds pretty simple and direct, right? Nice way to start the day.

By Day 2 of the shoot, I found myself publicly (and very unkindly) chastising the director and DP for doing some extra shooting prior to moving to our second location even though they got back on time - I wanted them there early to get a jump on what I thought would be a hard scene.

An hour later, I was sitting wondering why I had done that.  Had making the day become so crucial to me that logic and basic courtesy needed to be abandoned?

Yes, I apologized to both later, but, after all these years, the pressures of production still lead to these types of moments, to sometimes doing things that are technically correct but not very nice.

My producer's assistant was an incredibly nice young lady, who was doing this project for the love of it and not for money (it was unpaid,as she could not work for pay here). She was earnest and kind. Near the end of the shoot, I asked if doing this job had given her more insight into producing.

She said that it showed her that she did not want to be on the production side. "Seeing how production works has brought out my dark side," she said.

If you met her, the idea that she even had a dark side would be comical.

I'm not about to give up, convinced that there is a compassionate way of producing film that is also practical and efficient. My way of dealing with folks on set reflects this in a much stronger way than it once did, and I will work to keep moving in that direction, work harder to make that work.

My progress will be noted here from time-to-time. Will definitely try to be more successful than the folks below.












*Film is the only medium I know of where the author does not retain copyright, even if it is not a work for hire. It MUST be in the hands of the production company as part of Chain of Title.

** The phrase evidently goes back to the 12th century when women would disfigure themselves to protect their virginity.

***Do you  really need me to define CYA?