The Great Man Directs - Pt.1 - The Long Road to Overnight Sensation

"Movie directing is the perfect refuge for the mediocre."
-Orson Wells

My first job on a film set was as a production assistant on the 1981 film The Fan (the one with Lauren Bacall, not to be confused with the 1996 version with Wesley Snipes). My first directing job came on a short called The Yellow People earlier this month.

Thirty-two years from PA to Director. Think I'm rushing things?

We all know that by-now (in)famous expression, "What I really want to do is direct." It was quite the popular t-shirt for a while, and even wound up as the title of a book.

I had a PA wear one on set once; I really really wanted to fire him, but could not come up with a good enough excuse.

When you've worked in film as long as I have, you invariably get asked things like, "Have you ever directed a film?" and, if answered in the negative, "Don't you want to direct?"

Especially if you  have worked on the production side, as producer and assistant director, the question comes up.

I've never really had a good answer, short of a sidebar answer, which was, "I'd like to direct my film, not someone else's," by which I reference all those folks I see on set, from PA to producer, who seem determined to tell the director how to do their job.

As both First AD and line producer, I have walked my share of first-time directors through the process, and sometimes even a little more, but I always made a point to offer advice when asked, or, if it were a matter of keeping a director from making a mistake, offering the advice in private. As I said in the article linked, the crew must believe in the director, for better or worse, and if you do anything that undermines the director, even if unintentional, you undermine the movie.

More importantly, the director is the one who will be judged on the final product, and I always figured if they were going to be taken to task for problems with the film, they deserved to be judged for decisions they made, not those made by others.  Besides, I have often seen "mistakes" turn out to be creative and compelling, so who is to say.

Alright, that doesn't quite answer the question.

What attracted me to the arts in general was writing, not directing, and I've had two scripts of mine produced as features (albeit one was ghost-written). Another is in development. That has helped to fill the artistic side of me.

Then again, I have directed theater, and, for a while, back in the Eighties, directed a good deal of small, Off-Off Broadway and regional theater. That transition, from actor (very briefly) to stage manager to director, was much quicker.

In large part, the reason I did not have the same path in film is simple: money. The reason I work more as a line producer than a producer is that I have neither the inclination, nor the stomach for, the money-raising side of the business. My few attempts have been frustrating and unsuccessful.

Theater was a little different. There always seemed to be some small production looking for a director, and once I started, I got more offers. In film, the chicken-and-egg Catch-22 - if you want to direct, someone needs to see a reel, and how do you get a reel if you haven't directed - is in full force.

As costs have come down in the digital age, I could, of course, have just gone out with a friend or two and shot something on some low-end digital camera.

Frankly, I am too much of a snob for that. If I had done it, I would be a hypocrite, having often described these ventures as self-indulgent ego stroking.

Now, before you hit the keyboards and spew venom at me while explaining that you have done just that, and I am just being a snob, let me remind you that I already said as much. If I did something, I wanted it to look professional, which means I wanted a real DP and a real crew, and for it to look up to my standards. I will fully admit that this is my hang-up, and I say more power to those who have done it and who find it fulfilling.

I would not.

I learned this about two years ago when I tried to work with two friends to get a web-series off the ground. Web-series can be done very inexpensively today, and often are, and, to me, many of them look like it. When I budgeted how I wanted to do the web series, it came out to $20K per episode, with all crew paid something, if not a lot, and solid art direction.

My partners, two dear friends, pointed out that this was ridiculous, and, in hindsight, they were surely correct. They could not see spending anywhere near that amount of money, and I could not see shooting it any other way. Again, you shout "Snob!" and, again, I reply, "Guilty!"

Hey, I'm a Capricorn, and one of my favorite descriptions of Capricorns is that they aren't stubborn, they just know they're always right. It is exactly this sort of winning personality that explains why I'm divorced (from one of the most patient people you will ever meet) and have not directed previously.

So, how did it come about that I wound up directing a short on an incredibly micro-teeny-limited budget? You notice, I cannot bring myself to say "No-Budget," a term that is so mis-used that it is like nails on a chalkboard to me.

I am, by trade, a line producer, the guy who does the budget. You bought a prop? That's money. You paid for a hard drive? That's money. You bought expendables? That should be in the budget. As such, I cannot call something "no budget" when any money was spent on it.

We did, however, spend very little, and that is in part a tribute to the producer, and the kindness of some very professional people who did it for a song.

This all came about, oddly enough, because of my involvement over a year ago with a reality show, and a producer on that show who spends very little time talking about getting things done, and a puts a great deal of his time actually doing things. He is a one of the real good guys, the type of people who always saw how something could be done, optimists; basically, the opposite of me.

I worked on a reality show over a year ago, and through that connection, he offered me a slot directing a play for a one-act festival, and that play became the short that I directed. How unlikely that reality TV, never one of my favorite genres, and theater, my first love, came together to provide my first film directing effort.

That's the short version of the "how it happened," though, as usual, I took long enough to get to it.

In the next post, the people who made it happen, the script, and how it all came together. For once, I will be able to share information about the actual shooting, like the script, set pictures, etc, and, down the line, when the editing is done, I will share that here as well.

Oh, and for those of you who think the title of this series, "The Great Man Directs," is self-aggrandizing, I direct you to the film on which it is based, a really good 1956 film called The Great Man, itself based on the novel of the same title by Al Morgan. It is \a less-than-flattering portrait of a successful television and radio show host who turns out to have been quite a bit less than the sum of his parts, played by the wonderful Jose Ferrer and rumored to have been based on Arthur Godfrey. Links provided because if you work in the entertainment business, you should know who these folks were, especially Godfrey, who, while it seems not than a wonderful person (my dad never forgave him for firing singer Julius LaRosa - on air live!) was an influential figure.

Arthur Godfrey

Jose Ferrer, in probably his most famous role, Cyrano

Hopefully, I won't wind up like Joe Harris.

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.