Chain of Pain - Part 2 - Bad Day for Johnny

Fate can be a cruel mistress who toys with us, proof that sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel really is an oncoming train.

I think of the moving scene in The Perfect Storm, when the brave men of the Andrea Gail fight their way through what they think is the worst of the storm, only to be confronted by that giant rogue wave that they know they cannot overcome.

Stacey coming aboard made life on the film almost bearable.  As kindred production people, Van and Stacey got along great, and the producer and production coordinator loved her.  Things I requested from the production office got to me in something remotely resembling reasonable time, and she got the until-then awful crafty situation under control.

So it came that to pass that there was a day with four company moves.  As the person who had to coordinate this along with my other duties, and still having that one passenger-van, I came into the day primed to get it all done.

There is a masochistic element to being an AD, where the harder the day ahead seems to be, the more psyched you are to navigate it.  I know days when I had a large page count and tons of extras always got my juices flowing.

I was so ready for this.  I had a battle plan.  I knew that after the fourth move, our final location would include about twenty children, and the forecast for the night exterior was for rain.

Bring it on, I thought.

Van and I hit our stride and after the first three moves, we were about a half hour ahead of schedule.  The little I got to see of Van on set - I was always hustling the back set and one location behind him wrapping while he was onto the next set - he was in peak form.  There is that point as a First AD where you blow through everything - a newbie director, difficult DP - just keep truckin'.  Van was in a zone.

The only hold-up was that juggling all this had me behind on the call sheet for the next day, but as long as I got to the final location on time, I would be able to make it happen.

As things turned out, we had some extra day players to move, and as I put the last one in the passenger van, I realized there was no room for me even in the 2nd trip.  As I closed the door, I looked at the PA/driver and said:

"You drop the crew off and you wing right back here for me.  Don't stop for coffee.  Don't get out of the van.  Wheel around and pick me up."  He nodded with absolute understanding.

You know where this is going, right?

As I wrap the holding area (we had only paid for a certain number of hours) I realized the charge on my laptop computer was almost done.  So much for working on the call sheet while I waited.  No worries - as soon as I got to the last holding area, I would plug-in.

I wait.  I wait more.  Calls to the office.  We can't get hold of the driver - Stacey's call to the other location confirms he has dropped people off.  Where is he?

Stacey's relentless pursuit of the facts uncovered the fact that the idiot producer had taken the van from the driver, ignoring what I had told him, to pick up craft for the next day.

He had found a place where he could get it cheaply, so somehow that trip made it to the top of the priority list over getting the night done.  Van was on set with a ton of extras, fighting time and the weather, with no 2nd AD.

"JB," Stacey said haltingly.  "Van asked about the call sheet."

Stacey knew full well how frustrated the question would make me - remember, she had been my 2nd AD.  She got it.

Not one to give in, she improvised.  She had just hired a new PA that day from a shoot she had just worked on, a really bright young girl who was new to film but had smarts.

"Jenny has her own car, and she's going to pick you up in that. "  I love Stacey.

Of course, by now it's rush hour in Manhattan, and we have to get crosstown, a Herculean feat at any time, but punctuated now by the rain that has started.

Jenny is not just chipper - she is too chipper by half.  I am reminded of Lou Grant's line to Mary "You got spunk.  I hate spunk." Yes, another dated cultural reference.

We are moving at a snail's pace, and there is really nothing Jenny can do.  Her instinct, in this case, led her in the wrong direction, and that was to try and cheer me up.  She didn't exactly break into a version of "The Sunny Side of the Street," but I specifically remember her looking at the motionless bus ahead of us and saying, "Let's go, Mr. Bus.  JB wants to get to set!" and then smiling at me.

It was her first damn day, she had done nothing wrong, and Stacey said she would be a great PA.  I couldn't yell at her, so I held it in, held it in when she decided that our shared theater background meant this would be a good time to break out her collection of show tunes on the car's cassette player.  Yes, show tunes.

I thanked her and got out of the car about a block or two before we got to location, figuring that even with a cane, I could make better time than she could in traffic.  I was numb to the rain as I arrived, dripping wet, when Van looked at me hopefully and said, "JB, you have the call sheet right?"

I dejectedly had to tell Van that I did not, but he would have it shortly.  Man, did I hate letting him down like that.  He was busting his tail against all odds, and I wasn't holding up my end.   At that moment, that was the worst part - not the frustration, or the rain, or the show tunes.  It was letting my partner down.

Just as I flew into a Tourettes tantrum expressing how I felt about the job and the producer and headed up the stairs to our second floor holding area, I saw the young girl who was rustling the kid extras at the top of the stairs.  They were behind, the kids were cranky, and she had deftly gone into babysitter mode, having the kids do a sing-a-long to keep them from thinking about how long they had been waiting.

Much like Bruce Banner once someone had made him angry, there was no turning back.  A better man would have restrained himself in the presence of these innocent tots, but I could not, and I can only wonder what their impressionable minds thought of the mean man storming up the stairs with a cane and an attitude.

They weren't going to like me.

Without losing the beat of her sing-a-long, the wrangler turned the kids around just as they were going to head down the stairs, and actually sang "Let's step back and let the busy man through."

They didn't need her lead - they were already flying in every direction and clearing a path.   I plugged in the laptop and pounded out the call sheet.  Van approved it almost without looking at it, which was very unlike Van, who would have me correct a missing comma in the element breakdown.

As Jenny sped off to make copies, I hurried to secure the lock-up and make sure that we did not lose one more moment shooting.  This included holding traffic for takes on busy NY streets, and to the credit of the PAs, they flew around and made it happen.

When we wrapped, we were around the corner from my apartment, and, more importantly, around the corner from Kennedy's, a truly wonderful Irish bar.  All of the bartenders were from Northern Ireland - knee-capping was spoken of as an honorable end for those who opposed the cause.

At the back bar was a bartender named Morris, a dapper gentleman with gray hair, a bow tie and handle-bar moustache.  I was born John, and always hated the name Johnny - I would never allow friends or relatives to call me that growing up.  Morris had taken to calling me Johnny, and he was so classy that correcting him seemed rude.  He was my favorite bartender there, and he ran the back bar, which was in a separate room from the main bar.

Van was too tired to go out drinking; I was too wound-up not to.  I decided to take two of the PAs, Jenny and Joe (they later became a couple) out for drinks.

"How was your day, Johnny" was Morris' usual welcome.  I decided to tell him, over the next hour or two and many drinks.  We were the only customers in that back bar on that rainy weeknight, dripping wet and talking a mile a minute.  We must have been a sight.

I was sure I'd run up quite a tab, but it was alright, I needed it.  When I asked him what I owed him, that wonderful man looked at me and said, "Sounds like you had a bad night, Johnny.  It's on me."  Of course, I left a hefty tip on the bar, but that wasn't the point.  It was the old-school bond between a bartender and a regular that one would probably never see today, and, truth be told, was extravagant even for that time.

Not long afterward, Van and I were asked to come into the office at the end of a shooting day.  Even the optimistic Van knew what that meant.

My original estimation of the situation proved true.  The producers asked Stacey to stay on, and she was much too professional to leave because we were fired - I would have been disappointed if she had.  She believed, as we did, that you fulfill your obligations.

She drove us home that night - she had now taken ownership of the production passenger van, trusting it to no one else.  She started kidding us about bringing her on and then leaving, and Van and I replied with, yes, a  show tune, albeit an improvised one.

Where ever we go - except tomorrow's set,
Whatever we do - except this job,
We're gonna go through it together - well, not exactly together.

After reminding us that we sucked, she dropped us off.

It was only a day or two later that remorse set in.  I started thinking that maybe there was something I could have done to make the shoot better for Van, that maybe I hadn't served him well.  Stacey and I had a serious talk, and I realized that even if I had been better - and I wasn't perfect - it would have ended the same way - badly.

(Un)Lucky Stiffs - Part 4 - Greetings From Asbury Park

When I was in high school, the Jersey shore was a trip from the Bronx to Seaside Heights with fake ID and big dreams.

When I got to college and started working at the radio station, the Jersey shore was a trip to Asbury Park and a hope that in some random night at the Stone Pony, Bruce would walk in and jam with the band.  I mean, we heard that it did happen; why couldn't it happen when we were there?

At some point during the filming of Lucky Stiffs, Asbury Park became my Niagara Falls.  In case you're too young to remember:



(Yes, Abbot and Costello did it as well, multiple times.  Old vaudville routines, like 'Who's on First', made the rounds, and even when they came to movies, since audiences could only see movies in theaters - no  DVDs, no Netflix, no cable, no television -  the idea was you could do the same routine with a slight twist and it would be new for audiences.  Television changed all of that)

Our main location was a warehouse in Brooklyn that got multiple uses.  It was the home of our art department, some main sets, and where we would shoot generic material when we didn't have a set (the location problem) or needed a cover set for weather.

We didn't want to burn our cover sets, as even into early October - we weren't going later than that, remember - we could run into bad weather.

The script required us to shoot one day - actually, about six hours - in Asbury Park.  We had to see the boardwalk and some other attractions.  Glenn, our location manager, with the assistance of NJ Film Commission's David Schooner, had gotten all the clearances for us.

Of course, the scene was about a beautiful, sunny, day so we needed the weather to cooperate.  In those days, you couldn't go to weather.com (didn't exist) to check out hour-by-hour forecasts.  Film companies would often pay a service to a company that would get their information directly from the National Weather Service, and when correct, they could tell you the forecast within a hour or so in any given area.  Farmers used similar services.  For a city boy like me who never needed such services, this seemed like a marvel of modern science.  (Now, of course, you can do it on your phone in a few clicks and we all take it for granted.)

Moving an entire crew with full equipment one-and-a-half hours for crew, and longer for equipment (commercial vehicles could not take the Garden State Parkway)  to a location requires a good deal of planning, and we had that.  We had checkpoints and maps (no GPS - geez, I sound like Stan now) and written directions and times to check in.  As per usual, some of us would go ahead first, Stacey and myself being among them.

That was the plan.

On the first day we planned to shoot Asbury Park, there was about a 50 percent chance of rain.  As I said earlier, I was leery of burning our cover set, and didn't have a lot of location alternatives that I could easily move .  That also meant the art department would have to stop everything and have our cover set.

I laid out a perfect plan, involving all of the drivers checking in with me at a precise time at the office.  I was there an hour before call time (probably looking at 4AM or so) on the phone with the weather service.  JR, Rody, Matt, and probably Stacey and my 2nd AD, Julie, were there as well.

As decision time got closer, it was still a tough call.  Matt and I talked about how much sunshine he really needed, and could we get by if it was clear part of the time, and maybe we shot in looking away from the water or something for a bit.  It wasn't optimum , but there were slight alternatives.  The guy at the weather service gave me hope.

Matt asked me what I thought.  I said considering everything, I thought we needed to give it a shot.  We were behind on locations, and if we kept pushing Asbury Park back, who knew when the weather would work for us, not to mention at some point we would wind up on nights and turnaround would be a problem.

Calls went out and calls came in.  We were on our way.  This was one of those times when someone had to make a decision, and I even remember saying bravely when some of the others were ready to back out that it was my decision, and I would take the responsibility (look in the dictionary under "hubris").

As we headed south on the Garden State Parkway, all signs were positive.  First, there was a slight mist, but as we got about 20 minutes or so from the exit, the sun came out.

I am reminded of that moment in The Perfect Storm when they are in the eye of the storm, and the sun comes out, and everything seems so beautiful.

Then, the skies opened up.

The rain was so hard that I remember saying that maybe this meant it was one of those downpours that comes and goes.  JR and I start talking about how it might look if it's sunny out and the boardwalk is wet, and he says we can make it work, and, in fact, the reflection off the shiny boardwalk might look nice.

Hey, this might all work out.

A little while later, we are standing around in holding, from our vantage point right by the water, looking out at the power of the sea.



Ok, maybe it wasn't that bad, but it was a downpour.  We called the weather service, and they said maybe it would be down to a drizzle by afternoon.  Thanks.

A note about those weather services we paid.  At one point on another shoot I was doing, we were doing a night exterior shoot out in Long Island.  We call ahead to the service, and they said "no chance of rain."  Great.  We get there, and the winds are swirling.  We set up the light stands, but don't raise the heads, out of safety concerns.  I finally get the guy from the weather service on the line (cell reception was bad in these areas in those days).

"Oh, yeah, there's a lot of wind.  You folks are catching the remnants of a hurricane that swept offshore."

"A hurricane?"

"It's not a hurricane now.  It's been downgraded."

"Why didn't you tell me about this?"

"The rain is all offshore.  You only asked me about rain.  You folks shouldn't get any precip (I'm supposed to feel better because he uses cool terms like 'precip').

I only asked about rain?  I didn't ask about tornadoes, either; it's just the type of thing I assumed you'd mention.  "What about the winds?"

"Should be about 40 to 60 miles an hour."

"I can't put light stands up in the air with wind like that."

"Light stands?   You better secure those things.  That sounds dangerous!"

Really?  Thanks for the advice.  Last time I ever paid for a weather service.

Back in Asbury Park, I take JR aside.  I probably sounded a lot like Uzo from a previous post.  Could we cheat some of the shots where we see the characters and the ocean in the background without us being in the rain?  Where, he asks?  With the wind and the rain, even if we found cover, we would get  pelted, not to mention production sound would be useless.

JR and I were talking privately.  Finally, friend that he was, he put his hand on my shoulder, smiled and said,"JB, unless it stops completely, we're screwed."  It's the sort of gallows humor JR and I often shared, but this time, I felt my neck in the noose.  I was the one who said we should come down here, and now we were going to lose a day.

Jeff, our trusted gaffer and meteorologist, looked out at the clouds and said the rain wasn't going anywhere.  I thought that maybe we just didn't have a good enough vantage point.  Without putting on any rain gear, I stormed out of holding, passed Madame Marie's, expecting no good fortune there and headed to the boardwalk.  I perched myself along the boardwalk, looking out at the ocean, getting soaked.  It didn't matter at this point.

Momentarily, I hear footsteps; it was Julie, my loyal 2nd AD.  She was much shorter than me, 5'2" at most, and, at that moment, smarter than me, as she had rain gear.  I shook my head, leaned on the rail, and looked out to the ocean.  She did the same.  Somewhere, someone has a picture of two crazy ADs  looking out at the ocean and getting drenched.

We didn't shoot that day, and as we headed back, there was talk of shooting Asbury Park the next day.  There was still a chance of rain, and I wasn't going to have this happen again.  Rody, of course, was her usual supportive self, reminding me that I had been wrong about today, and that shooting a cover set tomorrow would put stress on her friend's art department.  I didn't care; we were shooting the interior tomorrow.  Trust me on this.

The next day was sunny in New York, and in Asbury Park.

As we struggled with a lack of locations and prepared sets, we headed out to Asbury Park a second time a while later in the schedule.  As we got a little bit outside of the exit, it was a little cloudy.  Please, please, no rain!

No rain.  Fog thick as soup rolled in, fog so thick you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.  Don't ask me about the weather service.

Fog?

JR and I weren't joking as much this time, but, in an effort to cheer me up, he did mention that we hadn't yet seen locust or raining frogs.

There is little worse than objectively knowing you were making the best decisions possible given the information and circumstances at your disposal, yet doubting yourself because the results were so bad.

We did eventually get Asbury Park shot, and it looked great.  Combined with the location problems and the art department problems, though, we did lose days.  At one point, I had to have us down for a few days to regroup and save money from shooting half-days.  Not good.

We were now going to wrap somewhere into the third week of October, and Halloween was looking scary.