When JB Met JR - Part 1 - The Birth of JB

We now move into my work in the early 90s (you were how old?  no, I don't want to know).  It is the period that began to shape who I became as an AD, and later as a production manager, line producer and producer.

After all the talk of the lengthy prep work I discussed in the previous post, my first feature as an Assistant Director was on a film called Walls and Bridges, where I took over after shooting began for a young lady who was fired (you thought I was kidding about that getting fired thing?  This wasn't the last time, either!).

Now, there is an interesting twist to coming on a project to replace someone who was fired.  They want to like you, they really really want to like you.  Why?  Because the person who got fired gets the blame for everything that went wrong up until that point, which works well if you come on and everything goes  fine.  If, however, you come on and things still go badly, then everyone has to take a deep look in the mirror, and people would rather not do that.

I never met the girl I replaced, and what I did learn of her was from the Director of Photography, John Rosnell.  John and I would go on to become the closest of friends, and we would do four more features and countless commercials and PSAs together.  It was through John that I met the person I consider my mentor as line producer, and, later, it was with one of John's partners that I co-wrote my first produced feature.  Those connections mean that no one shaped my career more than John did, in so many ways.

John owned his own camera, a 35mm beast that was the same camera that has shot Clockwork Orange.  It was huge and heavy, and I joked with John often that we needed sherpas to move it.  John was part tough, rugged individual who carved his own path, part cowboy, part geek who invented or fixed or adjusted every piece of equipment he owned, part sci-fi nerd, and full time train enthusiast who had an elaborate train set at his warehouse in Hoboken.

Today's owner/operator DPs usually have digital cameras.  John had a 35mm camera, a 16mm camera, and an equipment list worthy of a small rental house.  One could shoot an entire feature using just his equipment, and John shot a number of them, more than IMDB lists because not every producer back in the day was up on including information.

John will probably best be remembered for the feature Straight Out of Brooklyn, by Matty Rich.  It was one of those feel-good stories (the movie, not the plot) of the early 90s indie scene.  Seventeen-year old Black kid from the housing projects in Brooklyn's tough Red Hook area raises money through family, friends, listener donations from a radio station plea and credit cards.  Lots of credit card movies back in the day, and while the urban myth often led to the reality of a movie seen only by family and friends, that was not the case for Straight out of Brooklyn, which won numerous awards, among them a Special Jury Recognition at Sundance.  The film's official budget was $450,000, though it was shot for a good deal less, and after release by Samuel Goldwyn company, it reportedly made close to $3 million.

Of John's cinematography, the Daily News compared the opening sunset over the city as the way the bigger-budgeted Dick Tracy should have looked.  John could do amazing things behind bear of a camera.

I worked with some other owner/operators of their own equipment in the 90s, and frankly, many of them were hacks whose only concern was the check they would get at the end of the show.  That wasn't John.  He fought hard to make the director's movie, and he watched out first and foremost for his crew, who often got paid before he did.  There were times on Straight Out of Brooklyn when John paid crew out of his pocket while Matty was raising money to continue.  That was John.

I don't think John particularly liked ADs.  It was part of John's personality to lead, and he always thought he knew the best way to shoot things, to plan things.  However, we got along immediately.  Unlike the previous AD, I did not have my head "buried in paperwork" as John would describe her.  I deferred to him on things technical, asked for his input on things, but kept the schedule running as smoothly as I could (more on that later) and, in the end, took a burden off of John.  He realized life could be good if he only had to shoot and not try to do my job as well.

That doesn't mean John didn't like to remind me of my place at times.  One day, when he assumed we were done, he said "that's a wrap."  I made it clear, in no uncertain terms and in a very stern message to the crew, that only the AD called wrap.  Indeed, on any set, this is true, but I think I went on about it just a little longer than I needed to.  Touchy, anyone?  When I belabored the point, John and members of his crew would take great joy in calling "wrap" under their breath at various points throughout the day.

John's crew became part of my first set of usual suspects, or, more accurately, I became the production guy on a crew of techies.  This is kinda like being the straight-man singer in a Marx Brother's movie.  

There is a lot more to talk about regarding this movie, but that will take a number of posts.  I thought it was important to introduce this important person in my career fully, so that later interactions will make more sense.

Among John's crew were the lovely Lorelei as assistant camera and general girl-Friday for John, a second AC, Joe, who had a hyena-like laugh, Russell, a key grip who seemed  more like a general handyman at times, and a young gaffer who has gone on to quite a career as gaffer and DP himself, Jeffrey Eplett.  Jeff had a great sense of the lighter side of set, and could crack the crew up at any time with anything from his dead-perfect Wookiee to his interesting impersonations of famous people doing lines in unexpected movies.  My favorite was probably Jimmy Stewart playing Frank Booth in Blue Velvet.  It gives an interesting insight to how Mr. Stewart would have delivered the line, "you get a love letter from me, you're fucked forever!"

It was also on that film that I became "JB."  As much as it might seem a reasonable assumption that I gave myself that name out of hubris, that is not the case.  Besides Mr. Rosnell and me, there were a few other "John's" on the crew and staff, and it got out of hand pretty quickly on walkie.  It wasn't long before I became "JB" and John "JR" while some other "John's" went by their last name.  Between this film and another I did with John, I started referring to myself as "JB" with vendors, and soon, that was it.  People knew me as JB and not John, and so it began.

How To Be an AD in B.C.

or How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Computer

You know the stories.  No matter how old you are, and what generation you're from, you've heard the stories.  Your father had to walk five miles to school in the snow.  Your mom learned math with an abbacus.  We used the old math before the new math, and then we did the new math by hand - long division and all that.

There are no singers these days like when we were young either Rudy Vallee or  Frank and Billie, or, for a different generation, no one like Janis and Grace Slick.  Ok, the latter is absolutely true and I don't want to hear any discussion on it.

In any of these stories, two things remain unquestionably true; first, that we had it harder, and, second, for some inexplicable reason, that somehow harder meant better.

One of my mentors stared producing in the 1950s, and did so up until his death in the late 90s.  When I would complain that we needed more of some technology, whether it was computers or cell phones (back when there were production cell phones and it wasn't just assumed that everyone had one) he would meet me half way, understanding that time never stopped.

Still, when the moment was right, he would come up along side me on set and start a discussion that went something like this:

Him: Gunga Din
Me: Great Movie.
Him: It really is, isn't it?
Me. Absolutely.
Him: No cell phones then, you know.

The movies changed.  The modern device changed.  The haiku remained the same.

I worked regularly with an AD a little older than myself who right up until a few years ago used to argue for hand-written call sheets, argue that with a blank call sheet, a clipboard and a pen everything was quicker than doing it in Excel.

I'm not that old school.  From early on, I embraced early versions of Movie Magic in helping to break down, schedule and budget a script, and I would never go back to trying to write a script in Word with pre-set tabs rather than use something like MM or Final Draft (no less the old typewriter and crumpled paper days).

 I'm far from a tech whiz - my first "smartphone" was too smart for me the day I bought it and my younger assistant had to show me how to answer the phone.  Still, I do not miss the "old days" before computers (B.C.) became a staple on every set.

However, as we are about to go into a period where I was AD on a number of projects that shaped my career, I thought it an appropriate time to explore some of the ways, in those early computer days, we used to approach the work in the A.D. department.

Rumors to the contrary, I'm not old enough to remember the very old days when all of this was done on manual typewriters, though let me say this.  Anyone who has been around a set, or more so, a production office, knows that one of the promises of technology, that it would reduce paper or paperwork, just ain't so,  If anything, I think the ease of making changes has led to us making more of them, and creating more paperwork.  If you watch very closely on set as the third draft of the call sheet is circulated for approval, or the second set of sides are handed out after key crew loses the first one, you will see a tree in the background, quietly weeping.

So, how I used to approach a project as A.D, with many of the things I do still similar.

First, I read the script numerous times.  First read was just to get the story.  Second read would prepare me to start numbering the scenes.    Then, and this may be a little anal, I would go through the script for each element for one pass and highlight it in the appropriate color.  Highlighting in color was standard, but I would do one pass for characters, one for art department, one for special effects, one for stunts, etc.  This meant I went through the script numerous times.

Then, I would hard-write out breakdown sheets with those elements.  The next step would be for a 2nd AD to take the breakdown sheets and create a stripboard.

Now, stripboards are still used today, at least in name, but they mostly just exist in cyber world.   We might print them out, but few in the indie world actually carry an actual stripboard.

Then, and for many many years before, stripboards were actually wooden charts with cardboard strips of many colors that would represent a script's production schedule.

Here is a good video of most of how the old process was done - watch if you're really interested - its less boring than me describing it:

How to Make a Production Board? -- powered by ehow

Below, from a film museum website (which I am not affiliated with - buy at your own risk).  It shows some of a handwritten board from Close Encounters:

The modern version, whether you use EP or Gorilla Software (my preference) is infinitely easier, and I don't think you lose anything, in fact, the linking gives you more information more quickly in the end.

If you look closely at the above Close Encounters cast header, you will see lots of movement, arrows, and, yes, that marvel of yesteryear's technology, white out.

Ah, do I remember fondly being the 2nd AD, sprawled out on a floor, trying to write tons of information on tiny strips and, if you got them wrong (or things changed, as they are known to do), using white-out or white strips to correct (which the AD always hated).

You rarely saw a 2nd AD without white-out on their fingers.

No, I don't miss the old days.  Yes, computers and the new software are better - by far.  If there was something to be said for the old days, it is that after going through the script all these times, I really believed the AD knew every aspect of the script and the scheduling inside and out.  I believe to this day that I knew the specifics of scenes better in those days than the director did.


In the next few blog posts, I will get into the gigs in the early 90s that really set the table for what these low-budget indies were for me.  I just wanted to give a little overview of the process, then, so you would appreciate.

Of course, some things NEVER change, as is evident from the wonderfully clever video below, made by a current frustrated AD (language warning!).  No matter how you get out the information, people have to READ it!




(A note.  It is totally coincidental that while I had this blog post in my head for some time, I wasn't able to get to it until yesterday, when I was running around without my laptop.  The ironic result is that the first draft of this was written, by hand, in a notebook.  I can only look at it and realize how many poor production members will be spared having to decipher my illegible handwriting).

Just Sit on the Bed

(N.B.  I said earlier that I would not be a slave to timeline.  This post is one of those examples.  It is a theater story that I recently remembered that happened much earlier than the events in the blog currently, but I thought it was a story worth relating.  It is also an opportunity to talk about a few of the many unsung heroes in the acting community.  Enjoy, and think of this as one of those mid-season repeats – new episode soon!)

Although I spent time as an acting coach and have directed actors in theater, I was never a very good actor.  The last time I acted on stage was in the mid-90s when a fellow I mentioned in the last post, Chris Kelley, asked me to play Jesus appearing on a Springer-like talk show.  It was wonderful and scary.

Acting is easier to explain than to accomplish.  I don’t know the exact percentage of talent to training, but both are needed.

This incident took place during a period where my support job was working as a subscription assistant at New York’s Roundabout Theater.  The Roundabout is known for its great revivals, and this was during the period when Gene Feist was the Artistic Director, and The Roundabout had two stages, one on 23^rd Street, and a smaller one on 26^th Street off 8^th Avenue.

I have been a huge fan of Harold Pinter since I first studied his plays in college, and I saw most of the best productions of Pinter plays in New York.  Among my favorites will always be 1980 Broadway production of Betrayal with Blythe Danner, Raul Julia and Roy Scheider, directed by Peter Hall. 

You could not ask for  a better combination of talent; Pinter’s crisp and biting dialogue, Hall’s insight and surgical precision, and three different but remarkable talents, all of whom are under-rated when discussion of great acting comes around.

Blythe Danner’s work is always so seamless as to seem effortless – it most certainly is not. 

Roy Scheider is able to give as nuanced yet powerful a performance as any actor; witness his portrayal of the Fosse character in All That Jazz, where Scheider, who is not even a dancer by trade, plays one of the most accomplished dancers and choreographers of all time without, please pardon the pun, missing a beat.  His raw power flourishes in such gritty films as 52 Pick-up or The Seven-Ups, his performance is over-looked for its contributions to The French Connection and Marathon Man. 

Rarely has anyone played a shell of a man with more gusto – one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite films.  Scheider carries power and pain - often, literally - in almost every scene.

He later tells the girl (and I’m doing this from memory – my apologies if I’m off by a word or two), “I can’t make you a great dancer.  I don’t even know if I can make you a good dancer, but if you stick with me, I promise I’ll make you a better dancer.”  He manages to make it seem like the nicest complement imaginable.

Then, there is Raul Julia.  His untimely early death robbed us all of one of the truly great talents.  He had some great movie roles, including those in The Eyes of Laura Mars, Tempest, Kiss of The Spider Woman, and Romero.  He was the quintessential Gomez Adamms.  His exceptional talent was best displayed on stage, where I saw him within a few years do Two Gentlemen of Verona and Three Penny Opera.  I remember thinking when I saw him in Two Gentlemen that I’d never seen a sexier human being, man or woman, and to this date, that is still true.

The consummate scene in the film is this one.  The best friend has been having an affair with the wife for years, and the husband knows it.  This scene shows the brilliance of Pinter’s dialogue.  The husband is talking about being on a motor boat – and is not talking about being on a motor boat at all.  It is at a lunch with his best friend, who he knows has been cheating with his wife.  During it, he describes the motor boats in Torcello, and the way they go “whoosh, whoosh” through the water.  Each time, the physical expression of going through the water is the embodiment of his anger and betrayal from both of them.

That scene isn’t available ( I will spare you the one version of it on Youtube – it is from a beginning acting class -  and I like you too much to subject you to it); here is the one where he gets his wife to admit to the affair.  Pinter’s use of language is also on display here:

It is this hidden meaning of every action and word that brings me to a rehearsal of Pinter’s The Caretaker at The Roundabout.  The production, from 1982, was directed by Tony Page  and featured Anthony Heald and F. Murray Abraham.  Heald has been a talented character actor his entire career, often playing villains.  Murray is probably best remembered for his performance as Salieri in Amadeus, for which he won an Oscar.

Here is a wonderful scene from the excellent 1963 movie:

As a subscription assistant, I was usually far from rehearsals, but I was a big Pinter fan, and learned that Pinter would be attending a rehearsal.  It was the first time that Night of 100 Stars would take place in New York, and Pinter was in town for the event.  Gene Feist was kind enough to allow me to watch, as long as I stood in the back of the large theater and remained silent, which, of course, I agreed to immediately.

Pinter’s own quotes can lead to the mystery that surrounds many of his plays, especially his early work.  Wiki points out this oft-related quote:

"I went into a room and saw one person standing up and one person sitting down, and a few weeks later I wrote The Room.  I went into another room and saw two people sitting down, and a few years later I wrote The Birthday Party.  I looked through a door in a third room and saw two people standing up and I wrote The Caretaker."

Now, that's helpful!

Much is made of every action, every pause, every word.  The Caretaker is the story of two brothers, Aston, who is mentally-challenged, his younger brother Mick, and a homeless person Aston brings home, Davies.  The play follows the subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in power in the small flat the brothers’ share once Davies is brought home.

In the scene they were rehearsing that day, Aston first brings Davies home.  He proceeds to allow Davies to sit on Mick’s bed.  Much has been made of this over the years, and Heald broached the subject directly with Pinter, asking how Aston having Davies sit on his bed signified the changing dynamic in the apartment, an affront to Mick and a challenge to his control.  Heald was very enthusiastic in his question; he went on for a bit in great detail and it was clear he had done a good deal of thinking on the subject.

Everyone waited as Pinter sat and gave it a good, long consideration – a true Pinter pause!  Finally, he revealed the secret.

“I don’t know.  The old man is tired, and Mick’s bed is closer to the door, but I guess all that other stuff can be true as well.”

It was just closer to the door?  Really?

It was like climbing a mountain to seek wisdom from some great sage and finding that the answer was simple and you knew it all along, and maybe that was the brilliance of it, and maybe Pinter was being playful, but I will always remember that moment as a good example of how sometimes the answer to a given scene is right in front of you the entire time.

Beginners Mind, Beginning Again - or the Great Reboot

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind

After my operation and the frustration of not working while recovering, I was anxious to get back to work, and this time, really put my focus more on film.

My degree was in Dramatic Literature, and I had never studied film, and was starting to feel a little behind the curve on film sets.  I had worked my way up through every job imaginable in theater, and that was what made me so confident.  In film, I was on the production side, and always dependent on people with more technical knowledge.  With this new opportunity, I went back to NYU and took their Six Week Intensive, as well as a screenwriting course. 

Remember what it was like to be a freshman, the excitement of being on campus for the first time?  Being back on the campus of NYU, walking past students in Washington Square Park, but older now, all those feelings came back to me.   Even NYU’s ugly purple logos looked good to me.

I took a number of things from those few short weeks. 

One was our next to final project.  They would choose two scripts, and then split the class up to shoot two versions of each script.  In one night, I wrote a story of a bookie that desperately looks to collect money owed him.  It was, to be kind, homage to David Mamet.  Hey, it was a class project and we had little more than one night to write it.  I love Mamet’s style, the way he invents his own language that is a slang that we think we know but we don’t.

One of my favorite examples of Mamet’s dialogue is from American Buffalo:

"Lookit, sir, if I could get a hold of some of that stuff you were interested in, would you be interested in some of it?"

The other students loved it, and it was picked as one of the projects to shoot.

The catch was that whoever wrote the script could not direct it.  I am thankful for that to this day.  Watching someone else interpret my work gave me insight into the collaborative process of film, and respect for the fact that the written word is only one stage of the process.  One scene brought this clearly into focus.

The scene was one where the bookie goes to a priest who owes him money.  Yes, in my scripts, even the priests were a little shady.  The priest gives him a small part of what he owes.  The bookie is frustrated, but says to the priest “OK, Father, well, if you can’t pay me, at least pray for me.”  I think I wrote the dialogue a little better than that, but I don’t quite remember it verbatim right now.

One of the directors was French, and in his interpretation of the scene, he didn’t change a word of dialogue, but the action of the scene was different.  We open on a close-up of the bookie saying those same words, but, when we go wide, we see that he is holding the priest’s face over a steaming hot pizza.  He lets the scared priest go as he walks out angrily.

I never conceived of the scene this way.  It was my words but it wasn’t my scene.  It was better; much, much better.  I can’t tell you how much this has helped me not only as a writer, but as a producer working with first-time writer/directors .  The auteur in the independent film world is much lauded, but the collaborative process and the ability to bring others’ creativity into your vision makes for a better tapestry and more energy.  One of the great ironies of filmmaking is that it needs to be one person’s clear vision, but it also needs others input to achieve that vision. 

Then there is the issue of taking credit.  We had two German girls in the class, and they could not have been more different.  One was very serious and studious; the other, a model who wanted to be a filmmaker who could not be more flighty.  Stereotypes come from somewhere, and they both represented their own stereotype; the serious, unsmiling German and the ditzy model.  They were friends, and the serious one would sometimes admonish the model to be more serious, to which the model would reply, “Oh, don’t be so German.”  When you’re cute, you can get away with a good deal.

Writing something in English was difficult for them, and the more serious one asked if I would help them write the script they were to submit for the final project.  I forget how many final projects were chosen, but there were few, and if you wrote the project, this time you did get to direct.  I had written my own project – this one better than the last, and had the time to work with them on their project, which was more abstract.

Of course, their project was chosen, and mine was not.  No good deed…

It wasn’t entirely disappointing, though.  Once again, I got to learn a skill I would not have if I had directed, which was editing.  This was old school – you know, where you hung up strips of film?  You’ve heard about it, I’m sure.  I’ve edited on Final Cut, and, no, I wouldn’t go back to cutting film, but it did force you to make harder decisions.   This was the first time I learned a sense of pace and timing.  Overall, I would say it was a very satisfying experience.

There were other good things that came out of that class.  Our teacher, Thierry Pathe, had a very down-to-earth approach to filmmaking, which I always related to better than complex theory.  Sadly, Thierry passed away in 2002.  I also met a few people I would later work with, including someone who would become a great friend, Chris Kelley.  See, I gave his full name, so you know that good things are to come about him, and, indeed, we would work on a number of projects together for more than the next ten years.

In the Land of the Blind...

...they say the one-eyed man is king.  Don't know the similar analogy for legs.

In a previous post, I referred to an injury that affected both legs. 

The pain increased, and after meeting with a number of top doctors, we realized the only realistic option was an amputation below-knee on both legs.  My prognosis for a normal life was much better with prostheses, and, indeed, I have never regretted the decision.  I could not have moved on in my previous condition.  I will spare my readers the entire rehab process, but will share one incident which drove me.

When I was in rehab, I saw a man with his wife and two children being helped up onto a board.  He had been sitting on his stoop one day, and was the accidental victim of a drive-by shooting involving a drug deal gone bad.  Wrong place, wrong time.  He would always be paralyzed from the neck down.   I was determined that day that I would never complain about my situation, as I was going to walk out of that place.

I was going to move on from this, but realized that by doing so, it would seem like I was avoiding the subject, so let me deal with all here, as opposed to dealing with it in every other posts.

Frankly, it’s been a source of pride over the years that while I know actors and other craftsman that were bi-lateral below-knee amputees, I don’t know anyone who worked as a First Assistant Director who worked with prostheses.

In the beginning, I wouldn’t discuss it with potential employers, though I walked with a cane.  I used to make a joke that I couldn’t catch PAs, but I could trip them.   OK, I never actually tripped a PA, but I thought about whacking one with it (and definitely a production designer or two).

That was a joke I made because I felt I had to address it during interviews.  Film is, in many ways, a bastion of stupid prejudices.  I remember having women who worked with me as 2^nd ADs who couldn’t get respect from male crew because they weren’t used to taking instruction from women.  I have a friend who is a very talented AD who I know for a fact was turned down for one job because he was Black.  This was with an established television actor who was directing.  Thankfully, both of these things would be rare today, but they point to the fact that in many ways, film can still be an old-boys network.

I rarely had problems with people once on set, though.  As I got older, I would feel more comfortable taking a chair when AD on an interior.  In the early days, I would never take a chair, and if I got really tired, would pull up an apple box, which seemed more manly and acceptable.  The reality of prostheses is that they don’t hurt – I mean, they’re hard plastic and steel – and my legs got tired where the prostheses rested much the same way an AD without prostheses would have their feet get tired after being on them all day.   I once read that the Directors Guild of America had done a study that ADs had a life expectancy of something like seven years shorter than the average male (this was when most of them were male), and much of this came from time on their feet, stress, and inability to use rest rooms when needed.  None of this was different for someone with prostheses.

I was an AD on a feature once where the main character’s father had lost his leg in an accident.  This movie was shot near Walden Pond, and was especially difficult for me as it involved a good deal of going up and down hills and time on sandy shores, neither of which are particularly good for prostheses.  Still, I never failed to get anywhere on time.  In fact, I had a habit of pacing a lot, especially on this shoot, where the director and I did not get along at all.

One day we were doing a scene where the father, who was not really an amputee, had to put on an artificial leg.  He had no idea how to do it, of course, and they had chosen a very old model that no one would use anymore anyway.  I took the actor aside before the scene and showed him how to work with it.  When we did the scene where he was to walk with the prosthetic, the director made a comment how someone with an artificial leg (only one mind you) couldn’t possibly do stairs.  This amused the actor, and many of my regular crew, who had seen me go up and down stairs and hills with two artificial legs over and over.

I will share the funnier stories having to do with my situation when I can tell them in context, especially given the characters involved.  For the time being, suffice to say that I consider myself lucky to have worked in this business my entire life, and given everything and obstacles others have, I have no complaints.

They Also Serve Who Paint Houses

“I’ll think about it” means nothing in L.A.

-Karen (played by Rene Russo).  Get Shorty

So here’s the thing.  If you work in film or theater, there is this constant comparison between New York and Los Angeles.  You know all the clichés.  People in LA are plastic.  New Yorkers are heartless.

Like everyone else in this business, I spent time here in NY and time in LA.  Like everyone else, I had a screenplay, or, like everyone else, should I say I had screenplays.  Though I was born and bred (I always loved that term – what am I, a racehorse?) in New York, these two incidents, years apart, represent my interaction with the differences in the screenwriting scene in New York and Los Angeles.

I found myself in theater because I loved English and I loved writing.  I loved everything about writing.  I loved, and still love, research, and I think I loved research more when “google” was not a verb, not a word, not even a thought.  It is easier, but it’s not about easy.  It’s about the whole process;  having one book in a library leading you to another in a bookstore to some microfilm in the main library on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The first full-length piece I wrote was a play.  It was called “The Beast” and it was about Aleister Crowley.  Before you assume I am some demon worshiper, I was more fascinated with Crowley the man, the Charlatan, the guy who would do anything for a buck and use religion as his excuse.  It was the Eighties, and there was a lot of that (and still is) on the holier-than-thou preacher side, and I was fascinated by this guy who literally sold out his country, England, for a price to Germany in World War I, and got believers to put up money to support a “religion” he didn’t believe in for a moment.  He made money by being called the worst man in the world, and reveled in the attention it brought him.  He watched the woman he “loved” go mad after being bit by a bat, and though he professed himself a superior mountain climber, he abandoned a group of fellow climbers, leaving them to their death.

Crowley was a Mamet character running around in turn-of-the-century England. 

I researched a civil trial he instigated where he sued a newspaper for calling him the ‘worst man in the world’, not because he was offended, but because there was a possible buck in it.  The trial became about his character, which was in no way good for Crowley.  I found trial transcripts in the NY Public Library, saved on microfilm from an old London newspaper.  As a mentor of mine used to say, you couldn’t make this stuff up.  At one point, one of the opposing attorneys challenged him to turn him into an animal.  It was great stuff.

That said, “The Beast” went nowhere.

Undeterred, which is another way of saying I couldn’t take a hint, I wrote a script called Never Waver.  This time, I was shooting not for the small theater crowd, but for the big time – movies.   This was my first full-length screenplay.  Loosely inspired by a true incident when a one-term liberal Upper West Side Congressman is killed by a former student, Never Waver was a story of a former “true believer” from the Sixties who fled to Canada and remained in hiding after an ROTC bombing went terribly wrong and someone was killed.  He was not responsible, but he was the prime suspect.  He came back to “Reagan’s America,” where Abbie Hoffman now said he didn’t trust anyone under thirty to find the truth.

I still think it was a good story, but, hey, I wrote it, what do you expect me to think?  My reference to True Believer is because it is the film that most reminds me of the script, though the stories are very different. 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098524/

I spent a lot of time writing this script in bars.  I wrote a lot in bars because it allowed me to observe other people and feed off that energy.  I also wrote a lot in bars because I liked to drink.  The romantic notion of writers feeling the pain of the common man with every sip worked for me as well.

Geisler: Mayhew, some help, the guy's a souse! 
Barton: He's a great writer... 
Geisler: A great souse! 
Barton: You don't understand... 
Geisler: Souse! 
Barton: He's in pain, because he can't write... 
Geisler: Souse! Souse! Can't write? He manages to write his name on the back of his paycheck every week! 

-Barton Fink

The script is finished, and I start sending it out.  I send it to all the “indie” film companies in New York, all the “indie” film companies in Los Angeles, and to as many agents as I think might like it in either city.  Maureen, ever supportive, helps me get the script typed and copied.  She is temping, and a much better typist than I am, and I’m not working with screenwriting programs.  This is somewhere around 1987, 1988. 

We get responses from New York that look something like this:

“Thank you for considering (company) for your project.  We are not looking for new material at this time, but please keep us informed about your progress.”

You get it.  They are never going to represent you or produce your film, but, on the odd chance that someone else thinks it is good and decides to go forward with it, hey, keep them in the loop, because then they will be interested.

This reminds me of something I once heard writer and director John Sayles say at a script-writing conference.  He had many short stories before his success with Return of the Secaucus Seven, and they were almost all rejected repeatedly.   After Return of the Secaucus Seven, many of the same publishing companies approached him, and a collection was published. 

Sayles’s quip : “It’s amazing how much better my short stories got once I was successful.”

From the Left Coast, I got a much more promising letter.  It was from a company that had a few indie hits, and although they had a big office in LA, their main office was in London.  They showed more enthusiasm, and when I suggested I could come out and meet with them, the person who sent the letter suggested that would be a great idea.

Wow.  They liked me.  They really, really liked me.

I was nervous before the first meeting, but not afterward.  The person I met enthusiastically told me how much he enjoyed the script, so much so, that he wanted me to meet with his boss, who subsequently met me enthusiastically, and set up a meeting with his boss.  This was all happening within a few days, and it had finally happened.  All those days and nights writing, all that typing and copying  and collating, and now, finally, I was going to be recognized.  Inside of two weeks, a meeting was set with the head of the company.

 

This was the guy whose name you saw on the door.  This was the guy magazines interviewed about the company.  He was the  guy, and he was in from London and was going to meet me.

The meeting went something like this.  He started by telling me that he hadn’t read the script yet, but all of his people told him it was very good.  I should be very proud of my work.  There was one catch – his company didn’t produce scripts like this – ever.  They had no intention of producing scripts like this any time in the near future.  If I ever had another script that was nothing like this script, I should send it to them.

Thanks for your time.  Handshake.  Nice meeting you.

It was the same brush off I got from the NY companies, only many meetings later.  I learned later what I should have known, that it was the job of these people to take meetings.  It’s what they did.  It didn’t mean anything.

That was my first taste of the difference between the business in New York and the business in Los Angeles.

So, it’s now some time later, and I have my second full-length screenplay.  It is called Chump Change, and it’s about a guy whose father was in the same union he was now in and the way the union was selling out the workers to the evil company.  It was On The Waterfront with skyscrapers.  It was very much a tribute to my dad and my grandfather, both of whom were honest shop stewards in places where honesty wasn’t always valued.

More time in bars.  More time typing.  More time copying.  More time mailing.

I am about to go out to Los Angeles for other reasons when I hear from an agent in Los Angeles.  He is sure that he can sell my screenplay.  No, he doesn’t want any money up front or anything sleazy like that.  He will, however, need copies of the script – lots of copies.  I don’t remember the exact number, but we are talking, I kid you not, boxes full of scripts.  Maureen and I sitting on the floor of our large Upper West Side studio apartment collating and binding in just the proper fashion, with the brads bent back so no one gets cut, etc.  Scripts stacked into boxes; boxes packed securely, boxes  taken to the Post Office. 

I’m in Los Angeles, I think for my friend Annie’s wedding, though I am not sure right now.  I know I’m not there just to meet the agent, but while I’m there, why not drop in?

Before I go out to see him, I remember watching this local news cast where they did a man-on-the-street interview segment with random people, asking them how their screenplay was going.  These are random people – post men, door men, shoe shine people, business women, women with their little kids, construction workers.  The great part is that so many of them actually do have screenplays.

What most of them don’t have, though, is an agent.  I have an agent.  

Geisler: Look, you confused? You need guidance? Talk to another writer. 
Barton: Who? 
Geisler: Jesus, throw a rock in here, you'll hit one. And do me a favor, Fink: throw it hard. 

-Barton Fink

I head out to the address on a slip of paper, and, a few buses later, walk up to a house.  Ed Begley Jr. and I are the only people who don’t drive in Los Angeles.  The New Yorker in me just never learned. 

Can this be the right place?  It’s outside of Hollywood proper, outside of Los Angeles proper, in a suburban house.  On the lawn by the driveway are painting supplies, not easels and watercolors and oils but rollers and ladders and paint pans.

Maybe he is remodeling?

I ring the door bell, and he is pleasant enough when he comes to the door, until he realizes who I am.  Then, he is a little embarrassed.  I am out here with no car, and he really has no choice but to invite me in.

Once inside, I see boxes, boxes like the ones Maureen and I had sent.  Our boxes were there, but so were other boxes, all of them with screenplays from authors like me.  The house was filled with them.  The guy explained that he really did have connections, and though he hadn’t gotten any sales yet, he just knew that he would get one soon.  Until then, he was paying the bills by painting houses.

He reminded me how much he loved my script.

In New York, I knew waitresses that wanted to be actresses, and bartenders that wanted to be directors and cab drivers that wanted to be rock stars. 

I had to go to Los Angeles to find a house painter who wanted to be a literary agent.

The Raymond Effect

“It’s alright to be subtle in film, as long as you’re obvious about it.”

If you think about books, movies, poems or songs that you love, many of them find a way of saying things that were right in front of you all along in a way that makes them clear.  The same is true of teachers, coaches or other mentors in your life.  Somehow, what they had to say just hit home.

These guides along the way in our life or career don’t come dressed in long robes, and they don’t appear out of nowhere with Yoda-like ease.  Hell, sometimes they are even younger than you.

This was the case on the same Columbia Thesis project I discussed in the last blog.  I was hired on as production manager, and Raymond was hired as First Assistant Director.  For those not familiar with the position of First Assistant Director, I will again paraphrase Raymond.  

He or she is the person you fire when you can’t fire the director.

Well, technically, that’s not the DGA (Director’s Guild of America) description.  An informal description might be the person who prepares the schedule, is responsible for keeping it, maintains that schedule on the set, and coordinates the work of the different departments.  The key tool is communication.

Every position on the set has a light bulb joke.  You know light bulb jokes: how many (fill in the blank) does it take to screw in a light bulb?   I’ve always been particularly fond of this AD light bulb joke.

“How many AD’s does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

“Light bulb?  Nobody told me there was a light bulb in this scene!”

This gives you only a small hint at the oxymoron that can be the AD’s life, as he is responsible for many things that he does not have ultimate control over.

See previous statement on person who gets fired when you can’t fire the director. 

In fact, as line producer, I have fired AD’s who were not the source of the problem.  I got one of my best gigs, years later, as AD, because someone who was quite a good AD left the job in mid-show by mutual agreement with the producers, but more on that in later posts.

Raymond knew how to AD.  In fact, he made it look easy.  The AD and the production manager work closely together (hopefully), and I was intrigued by how Raymond was able to spot problems on the set almost before they would happen.

This was, remember, a student thesis film, so we’re not talking about big crews and big staffs.  In fact, the lofty positions Raymond and I held gave us the opportunity to do such glamorous things as the craft service shopping and scouting the next day’s location.  I still didn’t drive, so Raymond did all of the driving, and in those long hours in the van, I learned a good deal about how to organize a set.  Raymond not only knew more about being an AD than I did, he also knew more about my job than I did, not that he ever held that over me.

The van rides also revealed Raymond’s sardonic humor.  Some people are described as people who see the glass as half empty, others, half full.   I have come to see myself as someone who asks, “Do we really have to use that glass?”

Raymond’s temperament was much the same.

One night we are driving up Third Avenue in Manhattan and make a left onto 14^th Street.   This is us still working after a long shooting day, long after everyone else is home sleeping.  We have an early call in the morning.  As we make the left, a police car pulls us over.  The police officer comes over and asks Raymond if he saw the sign that said; NO LEFT TURN.  Clearly, he hadn’t, and if you know the turn, there is no good reason why you can’t make one there.

Exhausted, Raymond just made the best argument he could.  “I’m from Los Angeles.  You can make lefts there.”

He wasn’t trying to antagonize the officer.  That’s just Raymond.  He sees the absurdity of life very clearly.  A little stunned by the simplicity of the reasoning, or maybe just confused, we got off with a warning.

It wasn’t until I became friends with Raymond after the shoot that I learned more about him.  His parents were both in the business; his father, a prolific writer and director, his mother, an agent.  There are many stereotypes of people who grow up in the business, and a lot of them are true.  Raymond was not the stereotype of someone who grew up in the business.  Rather than hanging out with the stars on his father’s sets, he took the time to hang out with the people who made everything happen.  That meant crew people and staff.  The fact that Raymond never talked about his background until I got to know him pretty well tells a lot about him.

Besides his talent in film, he also was an excellent pianist, and, I later learned, composer, with a great love and understanding of jazz.  I always had a place in my heart for jazz, and Maureen loved it, so we all got along great.

Sometime after the student film was over, Raymond told me he was making a short that he hoped would get him into AFI, and asked if I would do production work on it, including AD.  I wasn’t at all sure I could do it, but he assured me that I could.  He gave me pointers on breaking down a script, on using index cards to represent the different shots in the scene so you could switch the order around easily, on keeping the set moving.  Some of this later came more naturally to me than I thought; for instance, dealing with actors.  My years as a stage manager had made me different from many of my colleagues who had only worked in film, whose take on actors could be summed up from the exchange below from Mel Brook’s The Producers:

Leo Bloom:  You can’t shoot the actors.  Actors are not animals.  They are human beings!
Max Bialystock:  They are?  Have you ever eaten with one?

Okay, I have had more than one actor that I wanted to shoot.  In most cases, however, my background as a stage manager handling people and pressure came in helpful.

Raymond’s script revolved around the figurative and literal children of a blustery real-life novelist.  I don’t know if Raymond would want me to share the name of the novelist here.  Some of the better scenes in the short included the novelist coaxing a homicidal prisoner who was a talented writer to accept his offer to get him out of prison by offering to show him pictures of the Challenger disaster, and that same writer, when he got out of prison, stabbing a waiter for seemingly no reason. The latter incident mirrored one that actually did happen in that author’s life. 

You are allowed to do the math.

Yes, this was a comedy, and a very funny one.

There was another scene in the film that is relevant, and that is one where two lovers wake up post-coital to realize that they are both children of the same author by different mothers.  The girl was played by Annie, my friend from that bad melodrama years earlier.  I remember we shot most of that scene early morning, and with the hot lights, the early hour, and the fact that Annie played most of the scene in bed, she had all to do to keep from falling asleep between takes.

There is one other lesson I remember from that shoot, and it has to do with picking the right locations.  Our budget was limited, and keeping to it was part of my responsibility.  We found this one location that Raymond thought was perfect, but they wanted a little more than was in our budget.  To my eyes, it was just a big empty space, and we could find something like it cheaper somewhere else.  Raymond was sure that this was the right place, though, and worth the extra money, and when we screened the film, he was so right.  Over the years, I’ve developed the ability he already had then, to see locations not for what they were but for what they could be.  

It also was something that I grew to learn as line producer, that sometimes you need to find someplace else to save when something is going to make such a difference on screen.

A few years later, I was in Los Angeles looking to sell a screenplay that I wrote.  Raymond, who had grown up on both coasts, met me for lunch.   Raymond greeted me dressed in mostly black, still on East Coast attire.  When I commented on the weather, he said, “Yeah, another damn sunny day in Los Angeles.”

It was when we discussed his opinion on my screenplay that he offered the quote at the top of the blog.  He hadn’t gotten one of the points I was trying to make in the script, and my defense was that I was trying to be subtle about it.

“It’s alright to be subtle in film, as long as you’re obvious about it.”

Once I got past the usual defensive reaction we all have when someone critiques our work (Oh, c’mon.  Don’t lie.  You know you do!) I realized how right he was.  Over the years, it has really stuck with me, and its advice I’ve given on a number of occasions.

For all his talent, Raymond went on to do alright for himself.  He got into AFI, and his student thesis project, Bronx Cheers, went on to be nominated for best live action short.  His first feature as writer/director was the beautiful and powerful Café Society.  Two Family House won the 2000 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, among others.   His hilarious City Island won the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award.

Hey, I could go on with his bio, but I have a better idea.  See the blog list to the right?  Raymond DeFelitta's blog is prominently displayed for a reason.  It started as he chronicled City Island, and it’s a great look at the journey of making an independent film from the inside.  It’s also a lot more than that, because Raymond has not only a vast knowledge of film and its history, but for all his knowledge, he never makes it sound academic or boring.  I don’t think Raymond could write anything that wasn't entertaining.

If you paid for film school, his blog will expand on things you enjoy in ways you had never imagined.  If you didn’t pay for film school, well, stamp yourself your own degree when you finish his blog.

What the hell, if you spent all this time reading my blog, you would be out of your mind not to be reading his.

Oh, and that screenplay that I wrote, the subtle one?  There is a lot more on that one later on in the blog. 

Obviously.