Going and Coming - Mentors Passing On

            "Master Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?

             Caine: No.
             Master Po: Do you hear the grasshopper that is at your feet?
             Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
             Master Po: Young Man, how is it that you do not?"*

When I was setting up a timeline for this blog, I knew there would be a time where I dealt with the death of people who had an affect on me and my career. One of those posts I knew I would write would be on the death of Stan Bickman, who most influenced my work as line producer and production manager.

In the "timeline," I have passed that point. As I started putting this post together, I realized that there was one thing in common when three of my mentors passed - I wasn't there for any of them. I also realized that, to this day, they are there for me, that they had already "passed on" what I needed, hence, the play on words in the title.

We often think of mentoring as it is depicted above; the master-student relationship. In that image, there is the wise master passing on knowledge - in one direction - to the student, directly telling the student what they need to know.

Most mentors impart knowledge more like this example from Charlotte Joko Beck, talking about her days at Oberlin Conservatory wanting to study with the "best" piano teacher in Everyday Zen:

When I went in for my lesson I found he taught with two pianos. He didn't even say hello. He just sat down at his piano and played five notes and then he said, "you do it." I was supposed to play it just the way he played it. I played it, and he said, "No."He played it again, and I played it again. Again, he said, "no." Well, we had an hour of that. And each time, he said, "No."...At the end of three months, one day, he said, "Good."...Finally, I had learned to listen.

How familiar does this sound to those of us in film - or any area? We learn by example, not by words or instruction.

As someone who taught film school (New York Film Academy), and who feels I have taught more on set, the process is not that simple.

Oddly, it is pop star Phil Collins who may have put it best:

"In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn."

I know that I learned a good deal from preparing lessons, and in answering questions from students. The formality of planning lessons forced me to consider what I do in detail, point-by-point, and not just go about doing what I've always done.

On my last shoot, I had to train a production coordinator - she had a great deal of experience producing, but had not specifically done the functions of POC on a feature. As usual, I also had an assistant, who also did not have experience with a lot of the things she needed to do. Having to create and offer a structure was important to me.

If my Zen practice has taught me anything, it is how what seems like the simplest thing - just doing the task in front of us and not having our mind many other places - can be the biggest challenge. Look at your day -how many times are you doing one thing while also focused somewhere else.

More on that another time.

As for the mentors here, they are my father, actor/director Kevin O'Conner and Stan Bickman. I have talked about all three, and will offer links to cover ground I have already covered. Here, in discussing Stan's passing, I also wanted to devote the proper time to mentors, in one place.

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My father. For all of the years I lived at home, my dad was a manager and repairman for an air conditioning and television repair shop in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Later, he would go on to be a construction foreman.

He had offers to run his own business many times, and to take office management jobs. It was not his style - he would have died in an office. He was fine with leading men if he was out there with them. If he had stayed in the military (highly unlikely, as he hated being told what to do), he would have been a platoon sergeant who turned down officer rank.

He always referred to "his men." He could tell them anything, but he would defend them completely to anyone above him. He would never ask them to do anything he hadn't done.

On a personal level, that was what he most left for me. There were other things: I remember him sitting down with me after a long day of work making me do spelling quizzes every day after I failed one when I was in grammar school. He also took interest in anything that interested me, reading many books on Buddhism after I took an interest, though he was never a religious man in the traditional sense.

When I worked at the radio station in college, at WNYU-FM, he would always listen to my show if he were home, just to listen to my breaks, even though he had no love for the music that took up most of my show. When I went into theater, first as a stage manager, he would come at least once to every show, even though he had no great love for live theater.

There were little things, too, like he would never take a drink at work, even though he was often offered when he did repair work. Remember, my dad was from the Mad Men era, where having a drink at work had no stigma. This is why I will rarely have a drink in a work setting, even when it might seem ok and others are.

When my Dad found out he had cancer, he met me for lunch, and said he did not want to go like his father, who suffered for years. He said that when the time came, he wanted me to let him go. Unfortunately, like his father, my Dad was pretty tough, and lived years beyond what doctors thought. By the time he could no longer leave his hospital bed. he looked nothing like the father I knew - my Mom actually thought they had transferred him because she didn't recognize him one day.

Weeks before he died, he made me promise not to come anymore. One feature he still had was his stern eyes when he was serious - and he was serious. He had a way he wanted to remember him. He wasn't asking - he was telling me. Many would disagree, but I honored his wishes, and did not see him for weeks before he actually died.

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Kevin, from his days as one of the original members of La Mama theater troupe, a landmark Off-Broadway theater company. Kevin surrounded by women - not at all unusual.

Kevin O'Conner was one of the best actors I ever worked with. I spoke about him extensively in another post. Check it out. It not only covers his achievements professionally, but some of what I admired about him.

He won multiple Obie awards for achievements on the Off-Broadway Stage. His television and film work was not as impressive, although he did play Bogart for a TV-movie entitled Bogie.

A life-long chain smoker, Kevin developed cancer. Even as he was getting sicker, he still had not lost his love for teaching or acting. His acting students often would ask him to work on their short projects - rarely for any money, and I remember Kevin doing a night shoot on one such project while he was wheezing and coughing from the cancer. As in my example from the other post, it just never occurred to him to say "no."

I was in LA in 1991, and when I returned to New York and looked Kevin up at the Chelsea Hotel, I learned that he had died just a few weeks earlier. The last time I spoke to him on the phone, he never mentioned he was in his last stages.


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Stan Bickman is the person I've talked about most extensively here. Check out this post on how we met, or this one, a faux Stan guest blog post.

He had emphysema, and by the time I knew him, he had one lung and carried a respirator. By the time I hired him as my production manager on his last film, Man of the Century, he was dragging around a tank.

Dianne was his longtime production coordinator, assistant, aide, confidant, and friend. I had left messages for Stan and Dianne for a while, and not heard back. One day. Dianne called. I could hear the tears.

"Stan is dying, John. He is on a ventilator at the hospital, and he has asked to be taken off. He probably won't make the weekend."

I immediately asked where he was, but Dianne cautioned:

"That's why I haven't called you back. Stan doesn't want to see anyone, not you, not JR (John Rosnell, who had introduced me to Stan.). Not like this. He insisted."

Same as the instructions I would get from my father years later.

After he died, I got a nice card from his daughters in LA. It was a thank you card for my condolences, and had a picture of Stan at a pay phone - that's how they always remembered him, on the phone and on the road.

I could not find an online photo, and, sadly, that card got lost in a production office (Stan would have been amused by the irony of that), but the results in Google Image when I entered Stan's name (not counting the men shown - none of them are him) gives a good picture - one-sheets and posters for a lot of B-movies. He would be proud. (Also of the fact that the movie he thought would launch his career, T-Bird Gang, can now be seen in its entirety)

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Besides not being there at their death, they shared other things. All were charming with women, in a gentlemanly manner that was neither offensive nor quite flirting when it was inappropriate. I remember each of them being as flattering to a woman of eighty as a girl of ten as to a starlet.

In many ways, all were products of - for better and for worse - another era.

All were mild-spoken men, which didn't mean they didn't let you know when they were serious. Their educations varied, but all of them learned most of their skills at their jobs.

In one way or another, the Ackroyd tribute at Beluschi's funeral from my Kevin post fit them all - they were good men if sometimes bad boys.

There were obviously others who helped and guided me along the way. As Joko Beck says, "Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need....Every moment is the guru."* Certainly, Nancy Juliber, the stage manager who got me into stage managing and later my first film office job, changed the course of my life, as did so many at that WNYU radio station.

These men stand out for the times I met them in my life, and the fact that what they taught, without saying it, was as much about how to treat people, how to approach work, how to respect your work, as it was any specific task.  It is why I think of them more as mentors in life than teachers of any specific skill, though with each of them, there was the latter as well.

I don't know how many other "students" they have out there, how many others were influenced by them. For me, I know that they speak to me when I need them - and sometimes when I'd rather they didn't. They would all agree with the fact that one of the things you need to learn from your mentors is how to move on from them, to adapt, to be someone with something new to offer the next generation.

You can take the time to teach others. To be a mentor, you owe it to yourself to be the best example of what you would like to see in those that come after, and hope that you are, indeed, up to that task; that they will sort the good from the not-so-good, they will take the best and leave the rest.  As one of my past ADs, Chris Kelley, used to say when I tried to influence him specifically to do something my way and he felt otherwise:

"If you meet the Buddha along the road, you must kill the Buddha."*

So, in this moment, what are you passing on today, grasshopper?


N.B. The internet at its best, and certainly blogs, should be interactive. Along the lines of not trying to "teach" as much as point here, I would love to hear of your experiences, either your mentors or experience as a mentor yourself. Pass them along!








*Although influenced by my Zen practice, I try very hard not to preach. Folks don't come to this blog for instruction in Zen, nor should they. As such, I often make light of issues serious practitioners might see as deeper - my reference to Kung Fu or Serenity Now are ways of avoiding being self-important, without meaning to minimize Zen. Along those lines, Joko Beck's quote is much longer, and the 'Buddha along the road' quote is not meant to be taken literally (though Chris sometimes did when I bugged him), but has a much longer explanation, which you are free to explore.

Corporations Are Not People - Film Productions Are

"It will be nice to be working with proper villains again."

-Basher, Ocean's Eleven

The words of the safe-cracker from Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven (not to be confused with the "Rat Pack" Sinatra-Martin vehicle) are the perfect expression of the experience of making films, television, and the like.

This expression updates the way I used to describe the process of assembling crews and my favorites, which was The Usual Suspects. The title of another heist film originates, of course, from the famous line in Casablanca, which also refers to the criminals routinely arrested when any sort of crime were to take place.

Why, I started to think, were all of my thoughts on working with film crews references to a criminal underclass?  Why, not, say, the Shakespeare quote popularized by the story of the men who fought together on D-Day, "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers?"

The answer may lie in the subsequent line from Henry V: "For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be never so vile."

Those of us who work in the we work in the creative arts, in any capacity, from director to third electric to production intern, have a bit of hubris, a touch of pretension, and possibly the onset of delusions of grandeur.

What we do is noble, yes, but we do not save lives or change the course of history. On that level, I side with Charles Barkley, who said of being a "hero," "I am not a role model."

No, my crews are a messy lot, and being a bit of a mess myself, it's probably why I love them. The people I choose to work with certainly have their quirks, but they are quirks I can live with, and as with most of us who grow older in relationships, you learn to accept the quirks of your mate and are reticent to learn the quirks of others.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to do a one-day shoot for a pilot for a cable network that allowed me to bring favorites of mine from two generations in my career, from a 1st AD I first worked with in 1998 to a gaffer who I met about a year and a half ago when he was right out of film school.

Much of the times I am covering, the 90s, were an era where, no matter how low the budget, I was able to work with many of the same people and offer a reasonable, if not great, rate. That meant that if you were a 1st AD, you could work with the same 2nd AD for a while, and a gaffer could keep his regular best boy and grip, etc.

We are now in a transitional economic phase with digital, and often rates are just not there to bring your regular crew aboard. My AD tells me of a feature he did where they did not budget a 2nd AD for him, where he was expected to break in a bunch of interns for support. In fact, over the past two years, I don't know that he has been able to bring on the same 2nd AD more than twice, if that.

Similarly, the DP on this shoot could not bring on her usual IA crew. There I was lucky, because the gaffer, Adam,  I brought on, while non-union, is just great. He brought on a crew that was wonderful as well.

The rates were not exceptional, but they were reasonable, and it was great to have two people from different times in my past with me on the shoot.

As with any shoot, we had our challenges (see "hiccups") and unforeseen situations, but we made it through them, and everybody was happy at the end of the day, including the director.

It is here that I get to make up for generalizations that I make about "this generation" of filmmakers. I have more than once been known to say (in this blog as well as in my work) that there are too many people calling themselves by titles that they have not earned. Among these are "producers" who come out of over-rated schools that just might have their campus around Washington Square in Greenwich Village, and DPs who could not, to quote myself, "read a light meter if their life depended on it."*

Like cliches, generalizations may come from our experiences and have some basis, but they also unfairly characterize an entire group of people.

Years ago, I worked on a one-act play called Chucky's Hunch with the late, great Kevin O'Conner. The Obie-winning play was being done with two other one-acts, one written by a playwright from Yale Drama and directed by another "Yalie"

The director for Chucky's Hunch and the third play, Leonard Melfi's Birdbath, was Tom O'Hogan, a man as lovable as the big, happy dog he used to walk around the Village. He was not only bright, but considerate and warm with everyone in his circle.

Then, there was the Yalie director, who none of us liked. From the moment he walked in the door, he felt he was above all the difficulty of doing this "small" production Off-Broadway. The playwright, on the other hand, was one of those young artists who was always smiling, thrilled to see his work on the boards, and every time one of us did what we were supposed to do, would effusively thank us.

A week before opening, Kevin did an interview with the Village Voice during which he was, well, it was not the best of circumstances, and much more open than it would have been a few hours and many drinks earlier. Kevin started going on about the good old days in NY theater, and then about these "fuckin' pretentious Yalies."  He was talking about the director.

Sure enough, the first one to read it was the poor playwright, who certainly thought this was our impression of him.

So it is that I know when I make that light meter comment, one of the people who takes the most offense is the gaffer I brought on. This is a guy who has worked in every capacity in the camera, grip and electric department, and has also done excellent DP work. He has a great eye, and a great feel for what looks good.

He is also the first guy to help out even before he is asked. He keeps - I kid you not- a database of every manual for every camera, every generation, currently in use. He shares this database with everyone and anyone in his circle.

We needed a specific monitor that we were having trouble renting; Adam (the gaffer I speak of) found it inside of an hour for me.

I never worked with anyone from the "good old days" who was smarter or more dedicated than he is. In a short time, he will, I imagine, be one of those people I will be seeking out to hire me.

He has payed his dues and then some.

It is here that I remember that some things never change, and one of those things is that every project, for better or worse, is about the people who work around you,  and about who you are as a person and a professional.

The organized chaos that are film shoots lead us all to wonder at times, "What the hell am I doing here." On the best or worst of shoots, what you owe to the people working with you is your best effort. You depend on each other, and when you allow difficult conditions to lower your standards, you are letting down people around you.

Some of the best people I have met, and some of the longest relationships that I have in this business, are with people who I met on abysmal shoots, shoots that were pure hell. All of those people worked hard every day.

The other reason you do this is for someone even more important - yourself. Once you allow yourself to lower your standards once, it becomes easier the next time. Pretty soon, your standard of professionalism has dropped, and you have become the people you formerly were discrediting.

When I taught production at NYFA, one of the first things I would say is that, "Professionalism is not a function of budget." I fight hard to see that people are treated with the same standard of respect on the smallest of shoots that I do as they would be on a big budget project. No, I cannot always provide the same amenities, but I respect work rules like meal times, turnaround, length of work day, and safety concerns. Those don't get skipped because of the budget.

I've covered most of the topic here in one way or another before, but I wanted to address it again while I am feeling hopeful for the future of our industry, when working with a dedicated crew and two dedicated production assistants and a hard-working intern. The DP was also someone whose work goes back to the 90s, and to see crews from two different eras working together at peek efficiency was really good for me, enough to keep me almost chipper, a description few of my co-workers would use for me.

All of this comes at the perfect time for me, a time when I have become increasingly critical of the emerging economy of the industry, where some producers have tied the lower costs of equipment with lower respect for what it is that crews do. It almost seems like they are saying, "I can get the camera so much cheaper, then the work of the 1st AC must be worth so much less."

Really? The production teams has to work just as hard to make sure that the van gets there on time, and copies of the call sheet are done, which insures that everyone actually knows where they are to be and when. That HMI didn't get any lighter for the electric, nor the dolly for the grip. Pulling focus did not get easier for the 1st AC, and God-help the 2nd AC who drops a lens.

One of my favorite words in this industry is "courtesy," as in, "can I get a courtesy over here," when referring to something to shield glare from a monitor or one's eyes, or a "courtesy pick-up" when production is not required to provide transportation, but does so.

In both of the cases above, the "courtesy" provided, while not mandatory, is and should be expected; not providing it is not really an option.

One of the insightful below-the-line blogs, The Hills are Burning, provides a good guide to newbies of exactly what courtesy is on set.

Still, it is such a delightfully and unexpectedly quaint word for a very gritty business. It conjures up images of high tea at five, not salsa at 4AM.

I know many people just starting out read this blog, and I hope you will remember this when you are working for some producer who has overlooked you, where crafty is day-old bagels and lunch is pizza and turnaround is something people vaguely remember. Look around you, and I guarantee there are some people who are working just as hard as you are, who care just as much as you do, and those people are looking around as well, wondering who they want to work with again.

Make sure one of those people is you.

Enough happiness and light. Next post, its back to the 90s, and a shoot on which my partner and I could not even agree on rats versus roaches.

*I decided early on that blogs have different rules, so it's cool to quote myself. It's not like anyone else is going to do so soon.