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.

1994: The Wonder Year - Taxicab Confessions - Part 1 - The New Reality

"Oh, can you see the real me,  can ya?

Can ya?

Can you see the real me, can ya?

-The Who

On the HBO show Cinema Verite, the 1973 PBS show featuring the Loud family, titled An American Family, is credited as the first reality show. While communications professors might agree, there was not a rash of similar shows to follow in the Seventies. The show is credited with inspiring MTV's The Real World 19 years later, which might be the better template for the mindless reality shows that now fill our airwaves.

I certainly wasn't thinking of the Louds, or even MTV, when I got a phone call from two brothers from San Francisco in the Spring of 1994. They were going to be doing a show for HBO, and they were looking for a production coordinator.


The pair were Joe and Harry Gantz, and at first meeting, you would hardly think them brothers. Joe was a photographer whose work had received some acclaim, serious to a fault. Harry, to me, was an aging hippie, not a pejorative in my book. I had always gotten along with people who fell into that category, from the talented director of "Hair" and other plays, Tom O'Horgan, to the puppet-theater creators I had worked with in Allentown, PA.

It would take me the run of the show to realize how well they worked in unison, how where one ended, the other began. Truth be told, I never got that close to Joe, a really talented guy with laser-like focus that I found to not always be approachable. I was much closer in personality to Harry, and since he handled a lot of the logistics, I spent most of my time working directly with him.

Joe Gantz, Harry Gantz

We met at a little Italian espresso place on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village, at a time when before Starbucks became the interview halls for those sans office.

I sat as they explained the concept to me. They would put five wireless microphones and a few (I forget the number) lipstick cams in a taxi. They would pick people up, and tape the ride, then pick the best ones for air.

Nice idea, I thought, but, frankly, I didn't see how it was going to work. First, what interesting ever happens in the back of a taxicab, unless the guy in the front seat has a Mohawk haircut and talks to himself in mirrors. I kept that reservation to myself, something I learned from recent experience.

As a practical matter, I was curious how they would get releases from people. This was before the spate of shows that made people celebrities for acting stupid on television, before everyone was aching to prove Mark Twain correct, that it was better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Sure, it was the height of the newly-minted "trash TV" shows, such as Maury Povich, Jerry Springer, and the late Morton Downey Jr., who I always found the most fascinating of the bunch if only because he was such a character himself that I always expected as much weirdness from him as from his guests. I always assumed it took forever for those shows to cast and find those people, and that once they did, they probably paid them decently to look like fools.

We would not be casting people, and we would not be paying them, the brothers informed me. They had first tried this sort of thing out with a short they had done in San Francisco, where they would set a camera on a street corner, pick people at random, and ask them about their lives. The concept was more fleshed-out than that, but they had tested it, and it worked. Furthermore, they had done a pilot on a shoestring for HBO the year before, and it had worked out well.

They already had a contact with a taxicab company in Queens. One cab would be outfitted by Mitch, the technical director who had done the pilot the year before. The two would follow the cab in a van, where they could listen to the ride, as well as communicate with the driver, a real taxi driver, via earpiece. At the end of the ride, a woman riding with them would get out of the van. The driver would have explained the basics at the end of the ride, the woman would seal the deal and get a release, which we would also tape for verification.

Having a young woman was crucial, they had learned, since both men and women signed more readily when a young woman approached them than a man. There would also be a PA to help.

I was to help find the PA and the girl getting the releases, as well as find them inexpensive office space. They would ride for 30 nights straight - sunset to sunrise. If mama always said that nothing good happened after midnight, our reality was that nothing interesting happened before sunset.

The young lady we found, Felicia, went on to production coordinate for the show in subsequent years.

I worked mostly during the day, reviewing tapes, looking over their notes, helping prepare them for the next night, filing, and being the go-between with HBO. I went on parts of some rides in the beginning, and on one or two full evenings later on to get a feel for what was happening.

The executive producer for HBO was Sheila Nevins, and one of the uncredited handlers on the project was Susan Benaroya. While I always consider specific budgets to be propitiatory, I can say that whatever you think the budget was, it was significantly less, certainly less than almost any of the low-budget features I had worked on. Both Nevins and Benaroya had backgrounds at PBS, and as such, understood how to manage the relatively-new documentary division of HBO on a small budget.

The original office space I found was tiny for what we were paying, and I felt cutting into money that could be used elsewhere. I lobbied for an office at HBO, and eventually, an available space opened. The new space was hardly bigger, but the proximity to people at HBO and the fact that we weren't paying for it freed money elsewhere.

I also helped negotiate the rate, and everything else, with Mitch. It seemed like during the filming of the pilot, some tension had arisen between Mitch and the brothers, the origin of which I was never able to objectively track down.  All three were consummate professionals, but over long hours, these sorts of things pop up from time to time. The three have subsequently worked incredibly successfully over the years, so I assume those tensions were worked out after the first year. That year, I acted as a bit of an intermediary, something I had done many times in my experience as line producer and assistant director.

Once we started, I found everything Joe and Harry had said to be true. I was amazed at the number of people who signed releases, even after revealing embarrassing sides that most of us would prefer to keep to ourselves.

Time and time again, I would watch a ride in the morning and think to myself, "He is never going to sign," only to find the person in question cheerfully signing away their image.

One of my favorite examples was a well-dressed man who got into the cab with a younger woman who was clearly not his wife. She seemed to know he was married, as they actually joked about being out on the town, and how the wife would never know.

Sure enough, when they got to the end of the ride, there is Felicia with her clipboard. He asks when it will air, and Felicia gave him the closest to what we knew, which was about six months later on HBO. "Ah, six months, I'll be able to talk my way out of it by then," he said.

For legal purposes, there was some concern that he may have been drunk - he certainly had been drinking - and I was asked to follow-up with him the next day. I caught up with him at his workplace on the phone. "Oh, you're the television folks from last night. That was cool." He assured me again that there was no problem with his release, but he did ask if he could contact "that cute girl with the clipboard."

In  Part 2, I will answer some of the more common questions people have asked me about Taxicab Confessions, as well as talk about some rides that did not make it on the show, including one that was truly heart-breaking.