This Post is Dedicated to Nancy

"Perhaps, therefore, ideal stage managers need not only be calm and meticulous professionals who know their craft, but masochists who feel pride in rising above impossible odds."
- Peter Hall, Director of National Theater, England

Before I worked in film, I worked in theater, and my first real experience was as a minor actor in an ensemble play about Michael Servitas and the Protestant Reformation. It was a very long play. One reviewer said he felt like he had sat through the Protestant Reformation. It was done at a hot theater in summer and we wore heavy clothing, but it was there that I discovered the joys of stage managing through meeting Nancy Juliber.

I've told the entire story before, so I will spare long-time readers a complete recount. Suffice to say that Nancy took me on as an ASM on her next play, and I went on to stage manage probably close to a hundred small, Off-Broadway and so-far-off-Broadway-you-couldn't-find-them-with-a-map plays. Some were done with some of the best "downtown" companies and actors and directors.

Every play asked for a bio. As stage manager, you realize that nobody but your family cares about your bio. I always kept it brief. Sometimes it would be just one line - the line that would end all my bios in theater as stage manager and later as director and even the few times I got back to the stage as an actor.

This play is dedicated to Nancy.

I must admit that part of this was my own sense of humor. I loved the fact that if anyone bothered to read my bio, they might wonder who Nancy was. A lost love? The sister I lost as a child? My high school English teacher who inspired me to a life in the theater? At least, I hoped they wondered. More likely, they never gave it a thought.

However, in part, it was a sincere tribute. Nancy taught me how to stage manage, and later got me my first film production office job as assistant office production coordinator on a feature and showed me how to do that. I have talked lots about mentors, but no one contributed more to the direction of my career toward the production side more than Nancy. Indeed, stage managing prepared me for film production in many ways, from understanding how to protect and care for actors, how to make directors feel that subtle suggestions were, in fact, their ideas, and how to remain calm in the middle of storms. All of these skills helped me as First AD and, later, line producer and producer.

I got to thinking of this the other night when I went to see an old friend in a play at Soho Rep in Manhattan in the Anne Washburn play 10 Out of 12. 

The title refers to the number of hours Actors' Equity allows their members to work in a twelve hour period. The entire play is a tech rehearsal of a play we never see. It covers what Jesse Green of Vulture accurately calls "the only part of theatrical life almost everybody hates: the intense, soul-crushing boredom of tech rehearsal."Audience members are given headsets and can hear backstage chatter,  including the lighting and sound designers making adjustments and the stage crew reporting on how things are going.

And, of course,  the stage manager. Although the actress playing the stage manager is seen only briefly, she is, in many ways, the center of the show. The play is, intentionally or not, an homage to stage managers. If there is any doubt, check out the playwright's interview with three stage managers at the end of this post. 

Theater is not simpler or easier than film in many ways, but it is different. Watching this play, and laughing along at every inside joke, I was transported back to a time I remember now with fondness and love.

My first love, and I miss it. Like most first loves, the memory of it is likely way more satisfying than reality,  the bad days and the disappointments conveniently forgotten. 

The show is hilarious, and Gibson Frazier (the actor Upstage Left in period costume), who was writer, lead and producer on the film I am most proud of, brings the same incredible skill set I remember. He also gets to deliver a line that reflects not only the immediate crisis (a difficult actor making tech even more difficult) but, on a larger scale, maybe the absurdity of creating art at all:

“It’s too hard. It’s too complex. It’s too much of a task. It’s going to always lack. There will always be a kind of failure. We have to find a beauty in that.”

The characterizations were very much spot on, with just the right touch of existentialism and dramatic license. I also especially loved the director, played by the always wonderful Bruce McKenzie ( featured at the front of the stage above). Directors are often portrayed as fierce dictators. This director is much more what I remember, a benevolent despot who, in the end, is being blown around by the forces around him just as much as anyone else.

World-weary cynic that he is, he asks:

“With the playwright gone, where’s that little nimbus of panic and criticism right over by my right shoulder? How am I to know that I’m getting everything very subtly wrong?”

That reminds me of my stage directing days.

I would dedicate this post to him. Or to Gibson.

Except it's dedicated to Nancy.

(Un)Lucky Stiffs - Part 3 - Hookers and Hussies

Least my previous two posts on Lucky Stiffs suggest that all was gloom and doom, I should point out that, with a good crew and Matt's calm direction, we had a number of good days.  It was, after all, a comedy, and comedies can have intended, and unintended, humorous elements.

This post will deal with some of the lighter moments.

When I came back to NY, Maureen and I were living in NY's Hell's Kitchen (although the city fathers would prefer I use the newer title Clinton, I prefer Hell's Kitchen and all the sordid history that went with it).  This is the Theater District and just south and all-the-way west to the Hudson River, where after the theaters were long closed, entertainment remained vibrant.

We started the shoot with some locations in Brooklyn, along the waterfront, and in New Jersey.  One of the more talented PAs I mentioned, Stacey, was assigned to pick me up and get me to set.  Although technically the 2nd AD is first-on-and-last-off, this was still early in my career and I was motivated (in no small part by fear of failure) that I had to oversee everything.  Capricorns.  As such, I wanted to get there before the crew vans to make sure all was well.

The rides with Stacey were great.  She had started out in theater as a stage manager - just like me!  All these years, I have loved to bring stage managers into the AD department; the temperament and skill sets required are very similar.  The differences can be learned.

The two key things I look for in potential production people are intelligence and enthusiasm.  Stacey had  both of these plus leadership skills, maturity, and the willingness to take responsibility.

The first couple of days of any shoot tend to be exterior day, and ours were no different.  This is for a couple of reasons, many of which are obvious to production veterans, but I will point out anyway.

As you go later in the day, it becomes harder to start early.  This is because, even with non-union crew, you want at least a ten-hour turnaround for crew, and must have twelve hours for cast. You want to get those beautiful sunrise (or magic hour) shots done early.  You also want to shoot  day exteriors early to avoid weather problems later on.

On lower-budget films, these scenes often use little or no lighting, only diffusion and reflectors to control "available light" (also known as the sun).  This means it's a good chance to get things moving while the crew and cast settle in.

This also means that your early shoot days have those un-godly call times, such as 5AM or 6AM.  We had our share of these, and Stacey would be picking me up in front of the brownstone I lived in before sunrise.

Hells Kitchen, in those days, had its own special brand of graveyard-shift freelancers, known commonly as hookers.  As I would sit outside, there was one hooker who always passed on the way home.  She later told me that at first she thought I was a detective, especially seeing me getting into the car.  She thought the cane might have been a prop.

After a while, though, she felt comfortable coming up and talking to me.  Yes, her first question involved a date, but after she realized that wasn't happening, she took to just chatting with me.  We would talk about how each of our respective jobs was going - her bad nights were worse than my bad days.

Stacey stoically would pick me up as my hooker friend would wave goodbye.  Stacey's evil grin grew day-by-day, along with her "I'm not going to ask, JB.".  Once we would get past the snicker, we would talk production, and she always got me to set calm and prepared.

Once on set, there were not only the production issues but the cast.  There was talent, and there was insanity.

One moment strikes me as indicative of the insanity that went on behind the cameras.

The script revolved around a jewel heist.  Two young slackers want to plan the heist, and they plan it with an older "experienced" criminal.  Turns out they could have made a better choice, as their veteran had issues.

He also had a moll.

I find myself using some older, classic terms in this post; moll, hussy.  Today, we tend to be more graphic or judgmental.

Hussy and moll are two phrases from a by-gone era, but they better represent the femme-fatales in this movie.

The older, experienced thief was played by "Broadway Bobby" Downs.  Sadly, Bobby is no longer with us - more on him later - but he had a wonderful "Moll," who I will refer to by her character name, Angela.

"Moll" was a polite term used in the old studio days for the girlfriend of a mobster.  It's origin is multi-fold; it comes both from the suggestion that she carries a gun, and "moll" is short for Molly, an Olde-world euphemism for prostitute.

See how it all comes 360 degrees?

Our "moll" was not a prostitute.  Angela's fatal flaw was that she had the bad judgement to be dating Eddie Minuchi, the older criminal.  In the script, Angela came off as a busty, sultry and alluring woman in her twenties.

The first scene in the movie in which she appears goes something like this: Eddie and Angela pull up in a cab, Eddie has bought her lots of expensive presents (this is how he keeps her).  She is about to get out of the cab, the young guys help her.  When they open the door, she drops the presents, revealing her ample cleavage.  The guys ogle her and lose track of what they are doing, impressed by her cleavage.

Do you still wonder why we weren't at the Oscars that year?


These, as I point out, are the light moments.  The real road bumps?  Oh, they are ahead.

Come In Out Of the Rain

“I don't like when somebody comes up to me the next day and says, "Hey, man, I saw your play. It touched me; I cried." I like it when a guy comes up to me a week later and says, "Hey, man, I saw your play... what happened?"

“I don’t want my plays done at the Uris Theater. I want my plays done at some little place in the Village where the only people who see it are people who come in out of the rain.”

Jeff Slater (Bill Murray) – Tootsie

My career in theater would have made Jeff proud.

There is so much of Tootsie that resonates with my theatrical career, starting with the birthday party for Michael.

Living in Manhattan is expensive, and most of us struggling artists always had roommates, who were usually other struggling artists.

As fate would have it, I lived in a triplex (3 bedrooms on three floors, connected by a spiral staircase). My roommates were a gay woman and a gay guy – both actors. The sexual preference thing worked out perfectly, since there was absolutely no sexual tension in the apartment – none of us were interested in the other. One of our favorite times were our parties – we would invite all our friends, and then watch the wrong people try to hook up with the wrong people (i.e. – My straight male friends trying to hit on her lesbian friends; his gay male friends trying to hit on my straight male friends; her lesbian friends trying to hit on my straight female friends) .

Joe had an audition coming up where he had to present a scene, meaning he needed a partner. He asked me. I had no acting training, and no interest in acting.

“I need someone to do this with me, and my regular partner cant make it. Besides, you work in radio, that’s like performing.” He was clutching at straws. Desperate isn’t pretty, but I couldn’t really say no.

We go to the audition, and it goes well enough. A day or two later, I come home and Joe says : “We got it.” I offer my congratulations, not paying attention to the word “we.” We? Yes, they wanted me as well. Not wanting to be an actor was one thing. Ego was something else. I was in.

The play was done at a downstairs theater in the Village called the Colonnades, directly across the street from the Joe Papp’s Public Theater. I don’t know about coming in out of the rain, but a good deal of our audience were people who couldn’t get tickets to the cutting edge shows at the Public Theater.

Across the street, there were plays by David Henry Wang and Eric Bogosian and Sam Shepard and Eric Overmeyer and Richard Foreman and all the emerging great dramatists. Across the street they could see a young Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Raul Julia, Diane Lane, and Mary Beth Hurt.

At the Colonnades, they got me, Joe, and a play about Michael Servetus.

My theatrical debut was a play about the conflict between Michael Servetus and John Calvin. Servetus was a Spanish theologian who originally joined Calvin as part of the Protestant Reformation, but then broke with Calvin when he felt Calvin’s heart was “darkened by hate.”

I forget the name of the play, but it was translated and adapted from its original Eastern European by a husband/wife team who were incredibly bright. She was a fine director, and the two leads were great. The original play was almost five hours. They “trimmed” it down to a svelte three hours and forty-five minutes, much of which were theological debates between Servetus and Calvin based on their letters. On the “intellectually too deep” scale, the play made “A Man for All Seasons” look like “Rambo”. The comparison continues, as Mr. Servetus meets the same fate as Thomas More.

The Variety reviewer said he felt 'like he had sat through the Protestant reformation.'

It was an ensemble cast of almost 30 (know you know why I got cast – they needed bodies!). I played three roles with multiple costume changes, my favorite of which was a singing bartender who got up on the bar and led a bunch of radical Protestants in a song of protest.

It was also mid-summer, the air conditioning was bad, and I had to under-dress (keep one costume underneath another) to make a costume change, which meant I was dressed for Siberia in a 95 degree theater for about 45 minutes of the play.

For someone more stable, this might have been a traumatic experience that drove them from the theater. However, two things happened that actually cemented my love of theater during the brutal run.

First, in my long span between scenes, I picked up another actor’s book: The Empty Space, by Peter Brook. The book opened my eyes to everything theater could be. It was more than Broadway and fancy sets and elaborate costumes. It could be something raw and honest and powerful. This set as tone me, and the type of theater I subsequently trained and worked in.

The other event was I met a great stage manager, Nancy Juliber. Nancy was a pint-sized bundle of energy, who had become a stage manager when she was out of work and her roommate (a dancer) told her that her dance company needed a stage manager – and they were paying. Nancy lied about her resume and had stage-managed many plays since.

This played right into a dichotomy in my life. I’m a Capricorn, and between that and my Catholic High School training, there was a lot of organizer in me. On the other hand, there was a lot of flakey artist in me as well. Stage manager was a perfect blend.

Nancy and I became friends, and she taught me how to stage manager. I loved it. Even the minutia of creating a production book and marking the stage and timing scenes was great. Better yet, I got to spend all the time with the director, and learn what they were thinking and how they were preparing.

When the play was over, I worked as ASM for Nancy’s next play. I showed up the first day, and she asked me time a scene. I told her I had forgotten my watch at home. She sent me home and told me to come back tomorrow properly prepared. It’s a story too many of my P.A.s have heard over the years, but it set the tone for the level of perfection and professionalism that you were to bring to any project, regardless of how big or how small.

The years from 1979 (when I did the first play) though the mid-80s would wind back and forth between radio, film and theater, but mostly theater.