Sweat the Small Stuff

                                             The big stuff...

There's an old saying that makes the rounds from time to time: "Don't sweat the small stuff -- and it's all small stuff."

I must have heard that a hundred times over my career in Hollywood, usually uttered by people for whom I had (and have) the greatest respect. At first glance, it makes a lot of sense. After all, we're just making movies and television here, not  -- to mangle yet another worn-out cliché -- performing brain science or rocket surgery. Although every big job is daunting at the beginning, once you start breaking it down, that Large Problem turns out to be made up of many smaller problems, each of which can be solved once the department heads and crew put their minds to it -- and by the time that process has run its course, the Large Problem is no more. Still, many people (especially newbies) can be overwhelmed by the scale of a given project, be it a huge set, a difficult location, or a series of exceedingly complex special effects, and that causes them to lock up, paralyzed by uncertainty. When this happens, those soothing words -- in essence, stay calm and carry on -- can serve as a pat-on-the-back to help bring them back.

Compared to mankind's bleak long-term future, our struggles in the film and television industry really are "small stuff." Even if we manage to avoid blowing ourselves to Hell with nuclear weapons, and find a way to slow/reverse the pace of global warming enough prevent massive sea level rise, ocean acidification, resource depletion, and the resulting geopolitical conflicts that will inevitably erupt as a human tsunami of climate refugees flees the inundated coastal regions for higher ground, we're still doomed. At some point in the distant future, our sun will enter its death throes and begin to expand.  In the words of a noted British astronomer, the fierce heat from that growing thermonuclear furnace will boil the oceans dry, then "lick the earth clean," reducing our lovely blue pearl -- where all the dramas of human and pre-human life have played out over billions of years -- to a charred black cinder drifting through the frozen void of space.

But that'll be then and this is now -- and we don't live our lives in the context of the cosmic big picture. Instead, we grind it out one day at a time, and given that forgetting to pay your rent, mortgage, credit cards, and/or traffic tickets on time can result in significant personal and financial repercussions down the road, details are important.

I got to thinking about all this after reading a couple of comments here.  The first came from "D," a veteran dolly grip with thirty years of experience under his belt, who runs the excellent industry blog Dollygrippery.

"I knew when I started having "work dreams" that I was actually a member of the "industry."  Now I have dreams all the time.  Usually involving not being able to lay track.  Last week I had one in which I got fired because I coudn't do a relatively simple dolly move.  In the dream, the DP said, "You're just not good enough."  Funny after almost 30 years, my insecurities bubble up in my dreams." 

The second was from a veteran sound mixer I've known for decades, who retired two years ago.

"I still have work dreams.  They usually hearken back to my days as a production mixer.  In my dreams I am on the set and they are shouting "Roll Sound" and I realize I left the recorder at home or there is no tape in the recorder and none on the cart."

I can relate -- every industry pro can.

I doubt many of us are truly able to shake our insecurities regarding work during the course of our careers. I'm past that now, but certainly suffered a plague of insecurities during my early years as a Best Boy, then Gaffer -- where a bad decision on my part could cost my employers a lot of money, make my department head look bad, and maybe cause those who hired us to reconsider the wisdom of that decision. I never slept well the night before starting a new job, chewing the worry-bone wondering if I'd overlooked something that might bring the shoot to a screaming halt  the following day.

It's hard to get out from under the shadow of such worries -- all the stress and hard work of building and maintaining a successful career drives them deep into our emotional aquifers, there to bubble up whenever we let our guard down. That pressure has to be relieved sometime, and it often happens in our dreams.

Worrying about details -- the small stuff -- wasn't any fun at all, but it kept me on my toes. That's a good thing. Experience helped, of course, and I calmed down somewhat after a few years, but the steady drumbeat of those anxous work-dreams served as a warning not to get too comfortable. Although I can't speak for anyone else, my feeling was that being totally confident and utterly untroubled about anything that might happen on the job was a sign of pride -- "one of the seven deadlies," as a grizzled character in Urban Cowboy uttered way back when -- and it's axiomatic that pride goeth before a fall.

A department head has to project confidence, of course, whether or not he/she really feels it. You can't allow your crew to get the idea that you don't have your shit together on set -- and a big part of making sure that you don't get caught with your metaphorical pants down is to look at the job from every angle to anticipate what could go wrong, then make sure your ass is covered.

I recall the exact day it hit me that I'd never be able to fully relax as a gaffer. We were in a van scouting locations for a commercial to be filmed in and around San Francisco: the Director, Producer, DP, Art Director, and the Key Grip, Steve Cardellini. Yes, that Steve Cardellini, inventor of the eponymous clamp that soon became standard issue in grip departments all over the world. I always enjoyed working with Steve, who was a great guy, a terrific grip, and a gifted inventor -- the man could rig anything, anywhere, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of utility.*

As we rolled across the Golden Gate Bridge on our way to the next location, he confessed to having awakened at 3:00 a.m. the previous week, worried that he might have forgotten to order a particular piece of equipment for the next day's shoot. He hadn't, of course, but the nagging worry was still there... and that's when I realized that if Steve Cardellini -- a much better Key Grip than I was a Gaffer -- still suffered from these middle-of-the-night terrors, there was no hope that I'd ever shed them.

Oddly enough, that made me feel a lot better.

Hey, we're all human, and every one of us screws up from time to time. The important thing is to minimize your mistakes, and one way to do that is to pay attention to the details. Since every Large Problem is made up of many smaller problems, "the small stuff" turns out to be very important -- and if ignored, one little problem has a way of snowballing into something much worse.

Consider the wisdom of Ben Franklin.

"For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost, 
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horse-shoe nail."

Ignoring the details might not lose a kingdom in our business, but it can damage your good reputation -- and once lost, that's a hard thing to recover. The details matter, so if you want to have a long and successful career, you'd better ignore the warm and fuzzy comfort of shopworn clichés, and make damned sure you sweat the small stuff.


* Steve is still with us, of course -- alive, well, and happily retired for the past ten years.