A Freelancer's Life - When It Rains it Pours

Many things in the indie film world have changed, but some things remain the same, and one of those things is that when it rains it pours.

With short breaks, I've been a freelancer most of my life. I started pretty much as a stage manager in theater, and the minute I said yes to one play, two more offers would come. Often, I was able to juggle two at a time, rehearsing one while running another. During this period, more calls would come

Inevitably, when both would end, the phone calls would stop.

There have been incredibly busy periods in film as well. I can think of stretches of up to a year or a year and half at a time when I would go from one project to the next. For a freelancer, this is just great, and if there is a little voice inside of you that suggests you pass on one, there is a much louder voice that asks that little voice if he likes eating.

Some choices are easy, determined by which comes first. Others are hard and involve passing on projects that excite you, as I've shown here.

There was a busy period where I was offered the chance to work on a unique sci-fi short. At the time, I was ending one short and starting a feature. I talked with the producers about over-seeing the project and having one of my proteges producing, but the reality is that would never have worked. The project went on to garner a good deal of acclaim. Luckily, I am still good friends with the writer and producer, and regardless of the fact that it would have been very little money, part of me still wishes I had been involved with the project.

As line producer on an indie project, where often you are working with a first-time director, you are the guiding hand. This makes it very hard to do what, say, an AC or Best Boy Grip might be able to do, which is switch themselves out with someone else as competent. I am not suggesting that no one else can do what I do; I know way too many talented line producers personally, and even more by reputation, to think that is true.

Each of us has our own style, and we set projects up in a way that works for us, and might not work for another. That director puts himself or herself in your hands, and you can't just walk away.

There was a project I handed off after starting prep because friends, who I had line produced a movie with previously, finally got their financing. I had been with that project for a few years at that point. doing budgets, taking meetings, pitching investors. I had no choice but to stick with that project, and I did make sure the other project had what it needed and found someone good.

Both projects got released.

The best way to attract work is to try to take something steady. When I started teaching at New York Film Academy, I was able to juggle my professional schedule. Then, I was line producing a fantastic US-Tamil project, Achchamundu! Achchamundu! in Edison, NJ, and found that I was deciding between leaving set when I was needed and asking students who paid good money to switch their schedules one more time. Later on, my mother's illness conflicted with my teaching schedule.

I was absolutely ready to leave the freelance world when I took a job as Operations Director at Gun For Hire, and from Day One. I got other freelance offers. It was not hard to pass on them - I liked the job and I liked my boss. By the time Shooting Gallery. Gun For Hire's parent company, shut it's doors (a story for another day), I was off the radar in the freelance world, and gigs were nowhere to be found.

The winter, as it tends to be in New York, was incredibly slow for me. So, as I reached my 100th post here, and was ready to get to my review of Man of the Century and wrap up that series, I found myself getting swamped with requests for my time.

Right now, I have my foot in two worlds: writing, which has always been my source of enjoyment, and line producing, which has mostly been my source of income.

I am producing a short I am very excited about that is scheduled to shoot early April with a talented writer and first-time director. A person with a great project has asked me to do revised budgets for new investors. Then, yesterday, two people, one former client and one referred from a former client, called me about budgets within hours of each other. Both seem like exciting projects.

In the meantime, I am writing a revising a treatment on a horror script that I worked on for the rewrite, consulting on one other script with a novice screenwriter and helping a friend format a web series.

The end result is that I've had to read three new screenplays in the last two days, and all of them are unique, and frankly, all would make powerful movies. I've said in these pages before that I always think back to those days when I was stage managing and someone would hand me a script, and the excitement I had opening the pages and reading it on the subway the way home.

The only difference is now they email me and I'm reading it on my Kindle. Excitement still the same.

All of this means that I have had little time to attend to this blog. No complaints. I decided a while ago I would not rush posts and sacrifice quality for a schedule. This post, as a matter of fact, formed in my head last night as I took a break from the treatment (narrative is so much harder for me than script writing) and I figured if I was going to get that treatment done today, as promised, I needed to clear my head and get this post out.

So, here it is. The final post in the Johnny Twennies series will probably not come until next week. I appreciate those who follow here, and thought you deserved an explanation for the break.

Inevitably, somewhere mid-budget, the numbers will fill my head and I will need to write that post, but work comes first. The Yin and the Yang.

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.