“It’s Chinatown, Jake...”
“Chinatown” 1974
Note: You might want to read last week's post first -- otherwise, the following might make even less sense than usual...
Early in June, the set lighting Best Boy from the pilot of “Gary Unmarried” phoned to tell me the show had been picked up for CBS’s Fall lineup. I’d already read the good news in the trades, but his call was a welcome confirmation that I would indeed have a job on the crew. In late July, the construction gang began assembling the sets on stage, and two weeks later, the set lighting crew started hanging lights. Now, in mid-August, production on the first of twelve new episodes -– and probably many more -- is well underway.
But as the Gods of Hollywood giveth, so do they taketh away – which is why the crew that worked so hard to make the pilot (including this juicer) will once again be on the outside looking in. Yet another Hollywood promise evaporates into the smoggy haze above LA.
Why am I not surprised...
Disappointed? Sure, but I had a lingering suspicion something might go sour with this deal. Call it intuition or just a hunch, but everything seemed to fall into place a little too neatly – and although good things do occasionally materialize without much visible effort (and truth be told, the pilot dropped right into my lap out of the big blue sky), this was not one of those times.
What happened? We got hosed, that’s what, and if the manner in which this hosing occurred is a rather convoluted tale, it’s also a useful lesson in the facts of life here in Hollywood – and yet another graduate-level tutorial from the Joe Frazier School of Higher Education.
First, some seemingly irrelevant background information, then what I actually know, followed by an intriguing (if unverifiable) rumor.
The cancellation of “Back to You” at Fox a couple of months ago was a blow to all of us who work – or used to work, and want to work again -- in sit-coms. Starring Kelsey Grammer (still glowing from his eleven year run on “Frazier”), “Back to You” was widely viewed as the White Buffalo of the sit-com world: a very tangible symbol of hope and renewal. This wishful thinking sprang from a basic Industry truism: all it takes to start a stampede in this desperately restless town is one Really Big Hit. If “Back to You” became a monster smash, the networks might see the light, burn off their reality-show garbage over the summer months, then rush en masse to fill the Fall lineup with multi-camera sit-coms. This would provide work for us all – not the easy life of picking hundred dollar bills from the heavily-laden branches of the Money Tree -- but decent, humane, non-abusive work at union scale. Such was the gauzy, sepia-tinted dream, anyway: a return to the fat-and-happy glory days of sit-coms. Adding fuel to the hopeful fire was a wide-ranging media blitz accompanying the launch of “Back to You,” painting this new show in the shimmering rainbow hues of the Next Big Thing. I turned on NPR one afternoon – the public radio network known for its measured, thoughtful coverage of national and world events – and was amazed to hear a twenty minute piece on “Back to You”, including long interviews with Grammer and legendary director/executive producer Jim Burrows.
The buzz was hot before the first episode even aired, but buzz alone can’t make a hit. In a season hobbled by the WGA strike, “Back to You” never quite managed to hit its stride, and was eventually overwhelmed by the dark shadow of failure. That such a high-profile show would flop isn’t in itself so unusual (shows drop from our television screens with metronomic regularity), but the real shock was that it happened to a Jim Burrows show. In the shaky world of television -- a hothouse of ass-covering, over-caffeinated insecurity -- Burrows is as close to a Sure Thing as ever walked the star-spangled sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that deep in the plush enclaves of the network suites, high-echelon executives sink to their knees and pray at shrines dedicated to Jim Burrows, murmuring His Name in hushed and reverential tones. In above-the-line Hollywood, there is no more enduring love than that generated by a long track record of big-money success. Having cut his teeth on shows like “Bob Newhart” and “Mary Tyler Moore”, he moved on through “Taxi”, “Cheers”, “Friends”, “Will and Grace”, and dozens more to emerge as the Big Dog producer/director of the sit-com world. More than any other living human, Burrows has the Midas Touch in television. If ever there was a Messiah to lead us all back to the Promised Land of sit-com heaven, Jim Burrows was the man. Given his track record, “Back to You” was an exceedingly rare failure -- the proverbial exception that proves the rule.
I got a chance to watch Burrows in action while day-playing on “Will and Grace” during that show’s final two seasons. He’s everything a director/executive producer should be: smart, quick, and blunt. He knows what works and what doesn’t, and will neither mince words nor waste time in his drive to make each show as good as it can possibly be. His intolerance for incompetence pays off for everyone involved; Burrows routinely blocks a complete show by noon, at which point, most directors would still be picking their way through the rubble of Act One. Having already made more money than God, he continues to work because he likes to, and is thus in the enviable position of not having to take bullshit from anybody.
Given all this, there isn’t a new sit-com on the Fall schedule that wouldn’t gladly sell its soul to have Jim Burrows involved. How much “soul” our pilot had in the first place is debatable, but when “Back to You” went down, Burrows suddenly became available – which is why he will now be directing “Gary Unmarried.” The specifics of who approached who remains a mystery, but none of that matters now. With Jim Burrows on board, this show’s chances of success just got a lot brighter.
You might assume this would be good news for moi. After all, with The Legend Himself at the helm, might not that eight year ride into the sit-com sunset I’ve been looking for have a better chance to morph from fantasy to reality?
For somebody else, maybe. One of Burrow’s exemplary qualities is loyalty: whenever possible, he uses the same crew. The cancellation of “Back to You” left his crew high and dry for the first time in a decade – a crew not familiar with being unemployed -- so Burrows reached back and brought them on to “Gary Unmarried.” But there are only so many jobs on a sit-com crew, so when they came in, we were out, just like that. The Hollywood promise I was given last Spring vanished quicker than a quarter in a Las Vegas slot machine.
I’ve worked with Burrow’s crew, and they’re good people -- it’s not as though I want those guys to be unemployed -- and I have a great respect for his sense of loyalty. “Loyalty” is not a word generally associated with above-the-line Hollywood, which typically takes a cavalier, there’s-always-more-where-they-came-from stance towards those of us who do the dirty work. In that, Burrows remains a laudable exception, but it’s still galling to watch a crew that has enjoyed such a long and lucrative run of success slide in just under the wire to snatch my show away. A year that started out so badly, then seemed to turn around in a big way, is once again taking on water and listing to port.
But that’s the way it is here in the zero-sum world of Hollywood, where the rich get richer and everyone else fights for the leftovers. Same as it ever was.
There’s a Machiavellian twist to this story, though – and here’s where we venture out onto the very thin ice of a rumor I have no way to confirm. According to the story, while Kelsey Grammar was riding high on the success of “Frazier” at Paramount several years ago, circumstances arose that brought him into conflict with a certain unnamed Paramount executive. Maybe that exec had a good reason for doing what he did, but unless you happen to be Sumner Redstone, it’s seldom a good idea to get in a pissing contest with one of your company’s big money stars. Not being Sumner Redstone, the exec lost the battle, and eventually his job. In time, he slithered over to Fox and managed to worm his way up the shit-stained ladder of success to a position of power – and right about then, who should come tap-dancing onto the Fox lot with a brand new sit-com?
That would be Kelsey Grammer, now needing another hit show, and no longer quite so high-and-mighty. I’m told the ex-Paramount exec waited until “Back to You” was teetering on the slippery side of the bubble, then pulled out the long knife and took his revenge. Only then was “Back to You” officially dead.
If all this is true, I should probably curse Kelsey Grammer when I end up manhandling hundred-pound rolls of 4/0 in the hot August sun, while the fat-and-happy crew of “Gary Unmarried” kicks back in the air-conditioned comfort of the sound stage... but that and five bucks will buy me a small cup of Starbuck's finest -- assuming I still drank the stuff.
Hollywood. It is what it is. Life in the Industry has a lot in common with ancient Greek mythology, where the Gods played their scheming little games up in Olympus, heedless of the collateral damage suffered by those helpless mortals below. All you can do is roll with the punches, hope for the best, and be ready for the next opportunity. But even after all this time, that’s easier said than done.
“Shit happens,” I tell the face in the mirror. Chewing on the hard, sour bone of bitterness won’t land another sit-com, nor lead to that eight-year wave. Maybe something else will come along. It always has, and I suppose it always will... until it doesn’t.
And when that day comes – ready or not – it’ll be time to go.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The Gods of Hollywood Giveth
Attentive readers might recall a post back in May describing an untitled pilot I worked on during that truncated Spring pilot season.
A typical sit-com pilot takes eight to ten days to rig and light, followed by a one-day shoot, then three more days to take all that equipment down. For the set lighting crew, this adds up to nearly three solid weeks of work, pushing that big rock uphill all the way. Waiting at the top is a promise -- implied or explicit – that if the pilot gets picked up by the network, the guys who did the heavy lifting will go along for the ride. For those of us who prefer the cozy world of multi-camera sit-coms over other forms of Industry toil, working a pilot represents the first rung on the ladder to employment nirvana. The next step is for the pilot to get picked up – and if that happens, you’ve got yourself a show, at which point you can get greedy and start praying the show becomes a hit. The chances of that are slim, but when a show does manage to click, the results are very sweet indeed. The lighting and grip crews who worked on “Cheers,” “Frazier,” “All About Raymond,” “Will and Grace,” and “Seinfeld,” enjoyed a fat, eight-to-ten year run. That meant no day-playing or jumping from one job to the next, and no more calling around looking for work, hoping some crew might need an extra hand for a day or three. Once you land a hit show, your work-related worries are over: you’re cruising on the smooth side of Easy Street.*
Back in the good old days (which ended a few years ago), sit-coms more or less ruled the television earth. Every Spring, the networks would order something like five hundred scripts for pilot season. Of those, ninety might survive the winnowing process to be filmed as pilots, of which twenty would land a slot in the new fall lineup, or as mid-season replacements. Sit-coms have fallen on hard times since then, drastically reducing those numbers, but I doubt the ratio of success-to-failure has changed all that much. With only one in five filmed pilots going the distance, navigating pilot season has always been a bit like walking across a minefield at night. In the last ten years, very few of the pilots I worked on survived this brutal winnowing process, and of those, none made it past their first season.
Television is a tough business.
Fortunately, doing a pilot isn’t the only way to land a show. I didn’t do the pilots for any of the five sit-coms I’ve had the pleasure to work on as a member of the main crew -- not because Hollywood is a pit of grinning, back-stabbing mendacity (which it is, of course), but because pilot season has never been remotely even-handed when it comes to doling out the work. At any given time, there are only a handful of “hot” cameraman in the sit-com world: guys with a track record of doing good work on hit shows, who have managed to schmooze their way onto the "A" list. When pilot season rolls around, they're first in line for the best jobs.
The sad truth is, most producers have no clue what makes a show look good on film or tape, so when it’s time to hire a cameraman, they revert to their former insecure selves: high school geeks hopelessly lusting after the “hot” girls -- the cheerleaders -- simply because every other teenaged guy in school wanted them too. Never mind that a non-cheerleader cutie might be a lot more willing to go out with a geek, these guys wanted the "hot" girls. So it's no surprise that during pilot season, all the producers want the same three or four cameramen to do their pilot.
The power of the herd mentality in Hollywood can never be underestimated.
In a way, you can’t blame them -- for any producer, there’s a lot riding on a pilot. If landing a hit show is great for the crew, it’s even better for a producer, who can make enough money on a good ten year run to retire in style. Not that many have any intention of retiring, mind you. The Holy Grail of television producers is to rise to the exalted state of “showrunner,” where the benefits of success transcend mere money to the ultimate high: power. Some (the bad ones) being bullies at heart, crave power for its own sake: they just love being able to make other people jump. Others (the good ones), need that power to put projects close to their heart on film, shows that otherwise would never make it to the television screen. So when a producer needs a cameraman for his/her precious pilot -- and a shot at the brass ring of power -- he’s not about to take a chance on a D.P. he doesn’t know: the first calls go to the agents of the cameramen du jour. It doesn’t matter that any of the dozens of unemployed sit-com cameramen out there could do just as good a job. To the nervous producer, using a “hot” guy means one less thing to worry about. With his ass covered on that end, at least, he’s free to unleash all his nervous energies and turbo-angst on the many other troublesome aspects of production.
A few years ago, one cameraman landed seven pilots during the two months of pilot season – three of which were in production at the same time (including one I worked on) -- which meant he spent most of his days driving from one studio to the next, spending a few hours at each show. In the meantime, another cameraman I know (a guy whose work has always sparkled on the screen) got bupkis that same pilot season, simply because he didn’t happen to be one of the “hot” guys that year.
That’s just the way it is.
This absurdly unfair process holds sway only during the crazed frenzy of pilot season. When the regular television starts up in late summer, the “hot” cameramen go back to work on their established, returning shows (the hit shows they already had, which made them “hot” to begin with), leaving any new shows – pilots that got picked up – for others. This is how cameramen (and their crews) who aren’t considered “hot” manage to get shows, in essence, scavenging the scraps left behind by the in-crowd.
In this rugby-scrum of confusion, occasionally the wheel turns such that none of the “hot” cameramen are available for a pilot, which then goes to one of the many competent D.P.’s out there. If that pilot gets picked up, he and his crew are in business. Such was the case with “The Untitled Ed Yeager Project,” the working title of the pilot I did last spring, shot by a veteran Director of Photography with countless sit-coms under his belt. The show went well, and at the end of the wrap, each of us on the grip and electric crew were promised a job if the show were to get picked up.
That’s one huge “if.” Getting picked up is a bit like drawing to an inside straight – and sometimes you do get lucky -- but after a while, you learn not to get too excited by such a promise. It’s not that people are lying when they swear to give you a job – at the time, they mean well -- but situations change with dizzying speed in this business. A Hollywood promise has all the hang-time of an air-kiss on the warm summer breeze. All you can do is put the memory in your back pocket with a grain of salt, and hope for the best.
Truth be told, I didn’t pay much attention to this promise because the pilot wasn’t all that good. I’ve worked on several that were much funnier, but still didn’t get picked up, so there was no reason to think this one would. Imagine my surprise then, when the announcement hit the trades a few weeks later that our untitled pilot made the Fall lineup on CBS, under the new name of “Project Gary” – an awkward, ugly-duckling title that soon gave way to “Gary Unmarried.”
This was great news. After two-and-a-half years wandering through the wilderness of rigging and day-playing – nine hundred long days and nights without a real show – the dice were finally rolling my way. I was already scheduled to work the last five episodes of “The Bill Engvall Show” (replacing a crew member due to leave mid-season), which meant I could go straight from that show into “Gary Unmarried.” I’d be working all the way to Christmas, and with any luck, on until next Spring. A year that started out in the bleak, wintry despair of the WGA strike was turning around fast – and if this show managed to take off and become a hit, maybe it was that big wave I’ve been waiting for, the one I could surf all the way in to the sunny beach of retirement...
But as the sage advice of everyone from The Gambler to my mother has long warned, a wise man doesn’t count his money at the table, nor his chickens before they hatch: and he never -– ever -- banks on a promise made in Hollywood.
Next week: the deal goes down.
*Until your big hit show runs out of steam and gets cancelled, that is – then you’re back to Square One.
A typical sit-com pilot takes eight to ten days to rig and light, followed by a one-day shoot, then three more days to take all that equipment down. For the set lighting crew, this adds up to nearly three solid weeks of work, pushing that big rock uphill all the way. Waiting at the top is a promise -- implied or explicit – that if the pilot gets picked up by the network, the guys who did the heavy lifting will go along for the ride. For those of us who prefer the cozy world of multi-camera sit-coms over other forms of Industry toil, working a pilot represents the first rung on the ladder to employment nirvana. The next step is for the pilot to get picked up – and if that happens, you’ve got yourself a show, at which point you can get greedy and start praying the show becomes a hit. The chances of that are slim, but when a show does manage to click, the results are very sweet indeed. The lighting and grip crews who worked on “Cheers,” “Frazier,” “All About Raymond,” “Will and Grace,” and “Seinfeld,” enjoyed a fat, eight-to-ten year run. That meant no day-playing or jumping from one job to the next, and no more calling around looking for work, hoping some crew might need an extra hand for a day or three. Once you land a hit show, your work-related worries are over: you’re cruising on the smooth side of Easy Street.*
Back in the good old days (which ended a few years ago), sit-coms more or less ruled the television earth. Every Spring, the networks would order something like five hundred scripts for pilot season. Of those, ninety might survive the winnowing process to be filmed as pilots, of which twenty would land a slot in the new fall lineup, or as mid-season replacements. Sit-coms have fallen on hard times since then, drastically reducing those numbers, but I doubt the ratio of success-to-failure has changed all that much. With only one in five filmed pilots going the distance, navigating pilot season has always been a bit like walking across a minefield at night. In the last ten years, very few of the pilots I worked on survived this brutal winnowing process, and of those, none made it past their first season.
Television is a tough business.
Fortunately, doing a pilot isn’t the only way to land a show. I didn’t do the pilots for any of the five sit-coms I’ve had the pleasure to work on as a member of the main crew -- not because Hollywood is a pit of grinning, back-stabbing mendacity (which it is, of course), but because pilot season has never been remotely even-handed when it comes to doling out the work. At any given time, there are only a handful of “hot” cameraman in the sit-com world: guys with a track record of doing good work on hit shows, who have managed to schmooze their way onto the "A" list. When pilot season rolls around, they're first in line for the best jobs.
The sad truth is, most producers have no clue what makes a show look good on film or tape, so when it’s time to hire a cameraman, they revert to their former insecure selves: high school geeks hopelessly lusting after the “hot” girls -- the cheerleaders -- simply because every other teenaged guy in school wanted them too. Never mind that a non-cheerleader cutie might be a lot more willing to go out with a geek, these guys wanted the "hot" girls. So it's no surprise that during pilot season, all the producers want the same three or four cameramen to do their pilot.
The power of the herd mentality in Hollywood can never be underestimated.
In a way, you can’t blame them -- for any producer, there’s a lot riding on a pilot. If landing a hit show is great for the crew, it’s even better for a producer, who can make enough money on a good ten year run to retire in style. Not that many have any intention of retiring, mind you. The Holy Grail of television producers is to rise to the exalted state of “showrunner,” where the benefits of success transcend mere money to the ultimate high: power. Some (the bad ones) being bullies at heart, crave power for its own sake: they just love being able to make other people jump. Others (the good ones), need that power to put projects close to their heart on film, shows that otherwise would never make it to the television screen. So when a producer needs a cameraman for his/her precious pilot -- and a shot at the brass ring of power -- he’s not about to take a chance on a D.P. he doesn’t know: the first calls go to the agents of the cameramen du jour. It doesn’t matter that any of the dozens of unemployed sit-com cameramen out there could do just as good a job. To the nervous producer, using a “hot” guy means one less thing to worry about. With his ass covered on that end, at least, he’s free to unleash all his nervous energies and turbo-angst on the many other troublesome aspects of production.
A few years ago, one cameraman landed seven pilots during the two months of pilot season – three of which were in production at the same time (including one I worked on) -- which meant he spent most of his days driving from one studio to the next, spending a few hours at each show. In the meantime, another cameraman I know (a guy whose work has always sparkled on the screen) got bupkis that same pilot season, simply because he didn’t happen to be one of the “hot” guys that year.
That’s just the way it is.
This absurdly unfair process holds sway only during the crazed frenzy of pilot season. When the regular television starts up in late summer, the “hot” cameramen go back to work on their established, returning shows (the hit shows they already had, which made them “hot” to begin with), leaving any new shows – pilots that got picked up – for others. This is how cameramen (and their crews) who aren’t considered “hot” manage to get shows, in essence, scavenging the scraps left behind by the in-crowd.
In this rugby-scrum of confusion, occasionally the wheel turns such that none of the “hot” cameramen are available for a pilot, which then goes to one of the many competent D.P.’s out there. If that pilot gets picked up, he and his crew are in business. Such was the case with “The Untitled Ed Yeager Project,” the working title of the pilot I did last spring, shot by a veteran Director of Photography with countless sit-coms under his belt. The show went well, and at the end of the wrap, each of us on the grip and electric crew were promised a job if the show were to get picked up.
That’s one huge “if.” Getting picked up is a bit like drawing to an inside straight – and sometimes you do get lucky -- but after a while, you learn not to get too excited by such a promise. It’s not that people are lying when they swear to give you a job – at the time, they mean well -- but situations change with dizzying speed in this business. A Hollywood promise has all the hang-time of an air-kiss on the warm summer breeze. All you can do is put the memory in your back pocket with a grain of salt, and hope for the best.
Truth be told, I didn’t pay much attention to this promise because the pilot wasn’t all that good. I’ve worked on several that were much funnier, but still didn’t get picked up, so there was no reason to think this one would. Imagine my surprise then, when the announcement hit the trades a few weeks later that our untitled pilot made the Fall lineup on CBS, under the new name of “Project Gary” – an awkward, ugly-duckling title that soon gave way to “Gary Unmarried.”
This was great news. After two-and-a-half years wandering through the wilderness of rigging and day-playing – nine hundred long days and nights without a real show – the dice were finally rolling my way. I was already scheduled to work the last five episodes of “The Bill Engvall Show” (replacing a crew member due to leave mid-season), which meant I could go straight from that show into “Gary Unmarried.” I’d be working all the way to Christmas, and with any luck, on until next Spring. A year that started out in the bleak, wintry despair of the WGA strike was turning around fast – and if this show managed to take off and become a hit, maybe it was that big wave I’ve been waiting for, the one I could surf all the way in to the sunny beach of retirement...
But as the sage advice of everyone from The Gambler to my mother has long warned, a wise man doesn’t count his money at the table, nor his chickens before they hatch: and he never -– ever -- banks on a promise made in Hollywood.
Next week: the deal goes down.
*Until your big hit show runs out of steam and gets cancelled, that is – then you’re back to Square One.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Quake Week
“You can run, but you can’t hide...”
“Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior” 1981
This might have been “Shark Week” as far as Discovery Channel was concerned, but in LA, it officially turned into “Quake Week” at 11:42 Tuesday morning. As earthquakes go, this one wasn’t much -- at 5.4 on the Richter scale, releasing far less energy than previous quakes in Southern California’s recent memory.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t utterly terrifying to those unlucky people near the epicenter. When an earthquake hits, there’s no way of knowing how big and bad it’s going to be. All you know is that everything you’ve always assumed was real in your world: the physical integrity of wood, cement, and steel – and the very concept “solid ground” itself – is suddenly, shockingly upended. When the ground beneath your feet turns to jello, when the street under your car ripples in liquid waves like a sheet in the wind, or when a plate glass window five feet from your head flexes in and out as though made of rubber, you’ve entered the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the earthquake. Only gravity remains constant, enforcing the ancient mandate that what goes up will indeed come down. A lot what went up did so a long time ago, in the form of bricks, mortar, and glass – and when that comes down, things get ugly fast.
An earthquake is a nightmare come to life with no warning at all. One moment, the world is its normal, troublesome/wonderful place, and the next, all hell is breaking loose. In the meantime, there’s not a damned thing you can do but hang on, ride it out, and hope for the best. And then -- just as suddenly as it came -- it’s over. The ground returns to a familiar state of terra firma, the street becomes as hard and unyielding as stone, and a window is once again something to look through, rather than at. The experience is as surreal as it is scary -- the sense of vulnerability engendered by even a relatively modest quake can be overwhelming. That feeling lingers, too. You don’t soon forget an earthquake.
I missed this one, having fled The Doomed City for a brief return to my home planet, but the images in newspapers and on television evoked vivid memories. I had the good fortune to grow up during a quiet period in California’s tectonic history. Minor temblors rumbled through every now and then, but never anything strong enough to do more than rattle the dishes. As kids, we thought earthquakes were fun. Stories of the great earthquake that nearly destroyed San Francisco in 1906 appeared in newspapers every year around the anniversary of that seminal event, but they were just that – stories from the past. In my naïve and youthful innocence, I thought I knew all about earthquakes.
I didn’t know shit.
The first quake to impact my consciousness hit Alaska in 1964, a ground-ripping monster that pegged the Richter scale at 8.4, shaking for a full five minutes. At one point, the meter hit 9.2 – an unimaginably huge earthquake. Alaska’s population was very small at the time, but this quake still managed to kill 130 people, including those who died when a 27 foot tsunami swept into Prince William Sound and smashed through their village.
Alaska was a long way away, though, and with television news technology still primitive, photo/video coverage of the quake was minimal. The pictures in “Life Magazine” a week later were horrifying enough, but in the turbulent 60’s, shocking events seemed to happen with metronomic regularity. News of the huge earthquake in the north quickly faded into the high level of background static. Down in the lower 48, we had other things to worry about.
Then came the Sylmar quake, which struck Los Angeles at 6:00 in the morning of February 9, 1971. As a college student in Santa Cruz at the time, all I knew about LA was the Dodgers (boo...), Disneyland, and the harbor at San Pedro, where my dad and I embarked on a three day scuba diving trip a few years before. I’d never even heard of the San Fernando Valley, just north of LA, which suffered the brunt of the damage: 65 people killed, two hospitals destroyed, and a couple of freeway interchanges brought down. Many of my friends in school had families living in the Valley, and were thoroughly freaked out by the stories they heard. It was “only” a 6.6 quake – miniscule compared to the Alaska or 1906 San Francisco quakes – but the resulting damage gave me an inkling how serious an urban earthquake could really be. Earthquakes weren’t “fun” anymore.
Still, that one happened in Los Angeles, far from Santa Cruz. I’d yet to personally experience the eye-opening terror of a real earthquake -- a state of blissful ignorance that ended October 1, 1987, at 7:42 a.m. I’d fallen into bed only an hour before, after working a brutally long day and night on a Miller beer commercial in a disgusting little South Bay bar. The place seemed okay when we started the job, but 25 hours later, the reek of spilled, sour beer (and 25 hours of endlessly repetitive commercial idiocy) transformed it into the Pit from Hell. LA was in the grip of a typical October heat wave, accompanied by the Santa Ana’s – hot, dry winds that howl in from the desert to turn LA into a giant convection oven. The day was already heating up as I drove home at 6:00 in the morning, sweaty, filthy, and tired beyond belief. Ordinarily, I’d take a shower as soon as I got home from work – especially after a job like that – but I was just too tired. Still sweaty and stinking, I fell face-first onto my bed.
It seemed like I’d only been out for a minute when a deafening rumble shook the bed like a rat in the jaws of a terrier. Too tired and confused to be scared, I stumbled from bed and rode it out hanging on to the door jamb as my apartment bucked and shuddered. Then it was over, with nothing but the sound of barking dogs and a thousand car alarms wailing in the distance.
So much for sleep. I lost nothing more than a few dishes, but although the Whittier Narrows quake wasn’t all that big – a 5.9 that killed three people – I’d now felt the power of an earthquake first-hand.
It wasn’t a good feeling.
Two years later, I was sitting in the same apartment on the phone with a cute make-up artist who was working on a feature in Florida (a young lady I pursued with romantic – and sadly, unrequited - intent), when she suddenly became upset.
“There’s been a 15 minute earthquake in San Francisco!” she blurted, then hung up.
I turned on the TV and saw a chunk of the Bay Bridge gone.
Fortunately, she’d got it wrong – the 6.9 quake lasted for 15 seconds, not 15 minutes – but that was long enough to kill sixty-three people, and inflict horrendous physical damage all around the Bay Area. The Loma Prieta quake was centered near the beautiful little town of Santa Cruz, my old college stomping grounds, which lost some of its most historic buildings downtown. Nobody I knew was hurt, but two nasty quakes in two years meant it was no longer possible to ignore the uneasy reality under my feet.
Seven years later, another rough lesson was delivered from below in the pre-dawn cold and dark of January 17, 1994, as the ground began to shake with an intensity that hit 6.7 on the Richter scale. Centered a few miles away in the Valley, the Northridge quake jerked me from a sound sleep into a state of full adrenal panic. I knew what was happening, but the dream-addled image in my mind had me trapped in a shoe box being shaken by some malevolent giant.
As soon as the first shock subsided, I staggered from bed and jumped into some clothes. There wasn’t much visible damage to my apartment, but the power was off – the whole city gone dark. Car alarms blared for a few minutes, then all was quiet. A few minutes later, sirens began to rise and fall in the distance. I waited, flashlight in hand, as an aftershock rocked the building again. It was too dark to see outside, but that wasn’t all bad: in the pitch blackness, it was evident that no fires had broken out my neighborhood. I tried my battery-powered radio, but there was only silence. Sitting there in the dark, waiting for the sun to rise, I felt a sudden kinship for my primitive ancestors – like them, I was just another puny human huddling in his cave, afraid The Monster outside might return. That got old after a while, so I started washing the dirty dishes in the sink by candlelight. It seems absurd in retrospect, but so long as I had hot water, I might as well put it to good use. If nothing else, it was something semi-useful to do while waiting for the sun to rise, and reveal how bad things really were.
Bad enough, as it turned out. As I washed those dishes, people were dying over in the Valley – seventy-two in all - suffering horrific, violent death simply for being in the wrong place at the worst possible time. Earthquakes are fickle killers.
At the time, I had no way of knowing any of this. I was still wondering if any more quakes were on the way – maybe what we’d experienced thus far was only the warm-up for the long-dreaded Big One. Aftershocks kept rocking the building, rattling the dishes as well as my nerves. Then the radio crackled to life – one of the local NPR stations was finally on the air, broadcasting what little was known.
I was lucky. My building stayed up, with the only obvious damage a big pile of bricks that had been a fireplace and chimney a few minutes before. The dawn brought electricity back to to my area, and I watched the television news reports from disaster sites all over the city. One helicopter shot showed a big three story apartment, still upright, but now only two stories tall. The first floor, and all those people who lived there, were dead or trapped underneath. Another shot from the air revealed a street flooded with water erupting in huge sheets of flame as gas leaked from broken pipes below ground – fire and water all at once, like something out of the Old Testament.
The quake hit early enough that most Industry people weren’t yet on the job. A few were, though, one a set-dresser (friend of a friend) who was working on a show at Warner Brothers. Up on a ladder when the shaking started, he reported making a rapid, gravity-assisted descent, then running for his life as the set walls followed him down, like an “Indiana Jones” stunt come to life. He barely made it out in one piece. In a post on his blog here, Nat Bocking tells a good story w/photos (“ a picaresque tale,” in his own words) detailing his experiences coping with the quake’s aftermath that morning, then reporting for work as a prop man on “Full House” at Warners, where the stage’s fire sprinkler system had soaked the entire set with thousands of gallons of water.
Tuesday’s quake in LA was nothing like that. It was only taste, reminding us all of the tectonic Sword of Damocles under which we live here on the West Coast. LA, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle are all built on geologically unstable ground. According to geologists, California faces a 99.7% chance of a major quake sometime during the next thirty years in LA or the San Francisco Bay Area – or both. Those are steep odds. After seeing the toll of death and destruction in China’s recent devastating quake, the thought of what we’ll face when a major quake hits our urban areas is sobering.
I could always move to Kansas, I suppose, but that would be leaping from the frying pan of earthquakes into the fire of tornadoes, in a land as flat and featureless as a billiard table. No offense to Kansans, but I was born here in the rolling hills of earthquake country, and here’s where I’ll stay, for better or worse. There’s no escape, really -- wherever you go, some sort of cosmic sledgehammer awaits, cocked and ready to smash your world to bits.
As I type these words, I’m looking out at miles of bucolic pastoral beauty, four hundred long miles from Los Angeles. On a day like today, sunny and clear, it feels a lot like paradise -- but a serpent lurks in every Eden. Down at the bottom of the hill lies narrow sliver of water marking the San Andreas Fault – the very same fault that leveled San Francisco a hundred years ago, and which (according to the experts) is once again loaded for bear and ready to rumble. The tectonic clock is ticking, our date with earth-shaking destiny one step closer every day.
No wonder I don’t sleep easy anymore.
Enough of this grim stuff. For a much lighter view from The Onion on the effect The Big One will have on LA, click here
“Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior” 1981
This might have been “Shark Week” as far as Discovery Channel was concerned, but in LA, it officially turned into “Quake Week” at 11:42 Tuesday morning. As earthquakes go, this one wasn’t much -- at 5.4 on the Richter scale, releasing far less energy than previous quakes in Southern California’s recent memory.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t utterly terrifying to those unlucky people near the epicenter. When an earthquake hits, there’s no way of knowing how big and bad it’s going to be. All you know is that everything you’ve always assumed was real in your world: the physical integrity of wood, cement, and steel – and the very concept “solid ground” itself – is suddenly, shockingly upended. When the ground beneath your feet turns to jello, when the street under your car ripples in liquid waves like a sheet in the wind, or when a plate glass window five feet from your head flexes in and out as though made of rubber, you’ve entered the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the earthquake. Only gravity remains constant, enforcing the ancient mandate that what goes up will indeed come down. A lot what went up did so a long time ago, in the form of bricks, mortar, and glass – and when that comes down, things get ugly fast.
An earthquake is a nightmare come to life with no warning at all. One moment, the world is its normal, troublesome/wonderful place, and the next, all hell is breaking loose. In the meantime, there’s not a damned thing you can do but hang on, ride it out, and hope for the best. And then -- just as suddenly as it came -- it’s over. The ground returns to a familiar state of terra firma, the street becomes as hard and unyielding as stone, and a window is once again something to look through, rather than at. The experience is as surreal as it is scary -- the sense of vulnerability engendered by even a relatively modest quake can be overwhelming. That feeling lingers, too. You don’t soon forget an earthquake.
I missed this one, having fled The Doomed City for a brief return to my home planet, but the images in newspapers and on television evoked vivid memories. I had the good fortune to grow up during a quiet period in California’s tectonic history. Minor temblors rumbled through every now and then, but never anything strong enough to do more than rattle the dishes. As kids, we thought earthquakes were fun. Stories of the great earthquake that nearly destroyed San Francisco in 1906 appeared in newspapers every year around the anniversary of that seminal event, but they were just that – stories from the past. In my naïve and youthful innocence, I thought I knew all about earthquakes.
I didn’t know shit.
The first quake to impact my consciousness hit Alaska in 1964, a ground-ripping monster that pegged the Richter scale at 8.4, shaking for a full five minutes. At one point, the meter hit 9.2 – an unimaginably huge earthquake. Alaska’s population was very small at the time, but this quake still managed to kill 130 people, including those who died when a 27 foot tsunami swept into Prince William Sound and smashed through their village.
Alaska was a long way away, though, and with television news technology still primitive, photo/video coverage of the quake was minimal. The pictures in “Life Magazine” a week later were horrifying enough, but in the turbulent 60’s, shocking events seemed to happen with metronomic regularity. News of the huge earthquake in the north quickly faded into the high level of background static. Down in the lower 48, we had other things to worry about.
Then came the Sylmar quake, which struck Los Angeles at 6:00 in the morning of February 9, 1971. As a college student in Santa Cruz at the time, all I knew about LA was the Dodgers (boo...), Disneyland, and the harbor at San Pedro, where my dad and I embarked on a three day scuba diving trip a few years before. I’d never even heard of the San Fernando Valley, just north of LA, which suffered the brunt of the damage: 65 people killed, two hospitals destroyed, and a couple of freeway interchanges brought down. Many of my friends in school had families living in the Valley, and were thoroughly freaked out by the stories they heard. It was “only” a 6.6 quake – miniscule compared to the Alaska or 1906 San Francisco quakes – but the resulting damage gave me an inkling how serious an urban earthquake could really be. Earthquakes weren’t “fun” anymore.
Still, that one happened in Los Angeles, far from Santa Cruz. I’d yet to personally experience the eye-opening terror of a real earthquake -- a state of blissful ignorance that ended October 1, 1987, at 7:42 a.m. I’d fallen into bed only an hour before, after working a brutally long day and night on a Miller beer commercial in a disgusting little South Bay bar. The place seemed okay when we started the job, but 25 hours later, the reek of spilled, sour beer (and 25 hours of endlessly repetitive commercial idiocy) transformed it into the Pit from Hell. LA was in the grip of a typical October heat wave, accompanied by the Santa Ana’s – hot, dry winds that howl in from the desert to turn LA into a giant convection oven. The day was already heating up as I drove home at 6:00 in the morning, sweaty, filthy, and tired beyond belief. Ordinarily, I’d take a shower as soon as I got home from work – especially after a job like that – but I was just too tired. Still sweaty and stinking, I fell face-first onto my bed.
It seemed like I’d only been out for a minute when a deafening rumble shook the bed like a rat in the jaws of a terrier. Too tired and confused to be scared, I stumbled from bed and rode it out hanging on to the door jamb as my apartment bucked and shuddered. Then it was over, with nothing but the sound of barking dogs and a thousand car alarms wailing in the distance.
So much for sleep. I lost nothing more than a few dishes, but although the Whittier Narrows quake wasn’t all that big – a 5.9 that killed three people – I’d now felt the power of an earthquake first-hand.
It wasn’t a good feeling.
Two years later, I was sitting in the same apartment on the phone with a cute make-up artist who was working on a feature in Florida (a young lady I pursued with romantic – and sadly, unrequited - intent), when she suddenly became upset.
“There’s been a 15 minute earthquake in San Francisco!” she blurted, then hung up.
I turned on the TV and saw a chunk of the Bay Bridge gone.
Fortunately, she’d got it wrong – the 6.9 quake lasted for 15 seconds, not 15 minutes – but that was long enough to kill sixty-three people, and inflict horrendous physical damage all around the Bay Area. The Loma Prieta quake was centered near the beautiful little town of Santa Cruz, my old college stomping grounds, which lost some of its most historic buildings downtown. Nobody I knew was hurt, but two nasty quakes in two years meant it was no longer possible to ignore the uneasy reality under my feet.
Seven years later, another rough lesson was delivered from below in the pre-dawn cold and dark of January 17, 1994, as the ground began to shake with an intensity that hit 6.7 on the Richter scale. Centered a few miles away in the Valley, the Northridge quake jerked me from a sound sleep into a state of full adrenal panic. I knew what was happening, but the dream-addled image in my mind had me trapped in a shoe box being shaken by some malevolent giant.
As soon as the first shock subsided, I staggered from bed and jumped into some clothes. There wasn’t much visible damage to my apartment, but the power was off – the whole city gone dark. Car alarms blared for a few minutes, then all was quiet. A few minutes later, sirens began to rise and fall in the distance. I waited, flashlight in hand, as an aftershock rocked the building again. It was too dark to see outside, but that wasn’t all bad: in the pitch blackness, it was evident that no fires had broken out my neighborhood. I tried my battery-powered radio, but there was only silence. Sitting there in the dark, waiting for the sun to rise, I felt a sudden kinship for my primitive ancestors – like them, I was just another puny human huddling in his cave, afraid The Monster outside might return. That got old after a while, so I started washing the dirty dishes in the sink by candlelight. It seems absurd in retrospect, but so long as I had hot water, I might as well put it to good use. If nothing else, it was something semi-useful to do while waiting for the sun to rise, and reveal how bad things really were.
Bad enough, as it turned out. As I washed those dishes, people were dying over in the Valley – seventy-two in all - suffering horrific, violent death simply for being in the wrong place at the worst possible time. Earthquakes are fickle killers.
At the time, I had no way of knowing any of this. I was still wondering if any more quakes were on the way – maybe what we’d experienced thus far was only the warm-up for the long-dreaded Big One. Aftershocks kept rocking the building, rattling the dishes as well as my nerves. Then the radio crackled to life – one of the local NPR stations was finally on the air, broadcasting what little was known.
I was lucky. My building stayed up, with the only obvious damage a big pile of bricks that had been a fireplace and chimney a few minutes before. The dawn brought electricity back to to my area, and I watched the television news reports from disaster sites all over the city. One helicopter shot showed a big three story apartment, still upright, but now only two stories tall. The first floor, and all those people who lived there, were dead or trapped underneath. Another shot from the air revealed a street flooded with water erupting in huge sheets of flame as gas leaked from broken pipes below ground – fire and water all at once, like something out of the Old Testament.
The quake hit early enough that most Industry people weren’t yet on the job. A few were, though, one a set-dresser (friend of a friend) who was working on a show at Warner Brothers. Up on a ladder when the shaking started, he reported making a rapid, gravity-assisted descent, then running for his life as the set walls followed him down, like an “Indiana Jones” stunt come to life. He barely made it out in one piece. In a post on his blog here, Nat Bocking tells a good story w/photos (“ a picaresque tale,” in his own words) detailing his experiences coping with the quake’s aftermath that morning, then reporting for work as a prop man on “Full House” at Warners, where the stage’s fire sprinkler system had soaked the entire set with thousands of gallons of water.
Tuesday’s quake in LA was nothing like that. It was only taste, reminding us all of the tectonic Sword of Damocles under which we live here on the West Coast. LA, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle are all built on geologically unstable ground. According to geologists, California faces a 99.7% chance of a major quake sometime during the next thirty years in LA or the San Francisco Bay Area – or both. Those are steep odds. After seeing the toll of death and destruction in China’s recent devastating quake, the thought of what we’ll face when a major quake hits our urban areas is sobering.
I could always move to Kansas, I suppose, but that would be leaping from the frying pan of earthquakes into the fire of tornadoes, in a land as flat and featureless as a billiard table. No offense to Kansans, but I was born here in the rolling hills of earthquake country, and here’s where I’ll stay, for better or worse. There’s no escape, really -- wherever you go, some sort of cosmic sledgehammer awaits, cocked and ready to smash your world to bits.
As I type these words, I’m looking out at miles of bucolic pastoral beauty, four hundred long miles from Los Angeles. On a day like today, sunny and clear, it feels a lot like paradise -- but a serpent lurks in every Eden. Down at the bottom of the hill lies narrow sliver of water marking the San Andreas Fault – the very same fault that leveled San Francisco a hundred years ago, and which (according to the experts) is once again loaded for bear and ready to rumble. The tectonic clock is ticking, our date with earth-shaking destiny one step closer every day.
No wonder I don’t sleep easy anymore.
Enough of this grim stuff. For a much lighter view from The Onion on the effect The Big One will have on LA, click here
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Christmas in July
It's all fake -- phony brick wall, plastic snow blankets, fake bushes, and a painted backdrop -- but at least the Christmas lights are real...
Making film and television has always been a labor-intensive, time-consuming endeavor. Accordingly, a Christmas movie or television episode – and there seems to be an unwritten rule that all television comedies must do a Christmas episode – has to be finished and ready for release/broadcast well before our seasonal tsunami of guilt-induced binge-consumption actually arrives. With much shorter lead-times than features, television shows can shoot their Christmas episodes as late as November. Marching to the same seasonally-driven schedule, a Thanksgiving episode will thus be filmed near Halloween, while Halloween episodes are shot during September.
In some parts of the country, September brings the cool, crisp air and turning leaves of Autumn, but here in LA, we typically suffer through the hottest weather of the year in Fall – and that means filming Halloween episodes in 104 degree heat. Granted, much of each show is filmed on an air-conditioned sound stage, but scenes featuring suburban exteriors crowded with young trick-or-treaters are usually filmed on the “residential street” back lots at studios around town (each a little piece of ersatz middle class suburban heaven) that have been festooned with ghosts, goblins, and faux tombstones for the occasion. Although the scenes are filmed at night, the street and houses must be rigged with power and lights for the shooting crew in the full heat of a September afternoon.
That kind of rigging is hard-earned money. Still, work is work, and if the end product doesn’t always induce thigh-slapping, laugh-till-you-weep comedy (truth be told, I found the sight of Jim Belushi parading down a suburban street in full drag-queen regalia a few years ago more disturbing than funny), at least it puts another check in the mail.
For this year’s final week of production on “The Bill Engvall Show” (Thursday nights on TBS), we shot the Christmas Episode – Christmas in July -- complete with a pair of live deer on our blessedly air-conditioned stage. Deer tend to emerge from their natural environment when you least expect it here in LA, and since a sound stage is an entirely unnatural environment for any living creature, it was very strange indeed to watch a mature doe and her yearling fawn take their first cautious steps onto an 80 foot carpet of rubber matting leading from the stage door to our Christmas set. The matting had been securely taped to the floor to prevent the deer from slipping – traction being a Big Deal to creatures whose ancestors learned the hard way that survival depends on speed and maneuverability.
With all non-essential personnel herded out of sight -- and instructed to stay absolutely quiet -- the immense stage door slowly crawled open, flooding the stage with brilliant sunshine.* Out of that blazing light came two graceful creatures entering an utterly alien world, each step tentative, their ears at full attention, eyes wide.
For once the stage was silent as a tomb, everybody watching with rapt attention. In the back of my mind was the fear these delicate creatures might startle, and suddenly bolt through the set. A film set is not a deer-friendly place, jam-packed with lots of equipment and many sharp edges. A panicked deer could easily mistake the huge canvas backing – painted and lit to look like the open fields and distant snow-capped mountains of Colorado – for the real thing, and leap headlong into it. But there was a wall behind that backdrop, and many hot lamps. Cornering and calming two terrified, disoriented deer under such circumstances would be a difficult, dangerous task. People and deer could end up hurt.
I’ve seen quite enough blood on film sets, most of it fake, but some that was all too real. I don’t need to see any more.
As it turned out, there was no reason to worry -- these wranglers knew what they were doing. Luring the deer with bowls of food pellets, they quietly positioned both animals in the plastic “snow” just outside the windows of the living room set. When the actors inside were ready, the cameras rolled. On a silent cue from the A.D, one of the wranglers made a low whistle – and both deer looked up at the same moment.
It was perfect.
Nailing such a tricky shot on the first take happens more often than you'd think, but this invariably seems to catch everybody by surprise -- and then comes a long moment of awkward indecision. The whole crew knows the first take will end up on screen, but the brain trust in "video village"** has a hard time accepting that any first effort represents the best they can hope to achieve. I suppose it’s human nature to Always Want More (along with following the unwritten rule of providing sufficient coverage for one’s highly-paid, above-the-line ass), but having gone to all the expense of assembling the specialized equipment and personnel required to get a tricky shot, it usually doesn’t cost any more to give it another try. Or two, or five, or ten... Sometimes – extremely rarely – this pays off with an even better take, but the usual pattern is for each successive attempt to fall short in a different manner, as if to demonstrate just how many things really can go wrong. Eventually, a take almost as good as the first one is achieved – at which point, the A.D. starts looking at his watch. This is the signal for the director to surrender to reality, and move on to the next shot.
Following in the footsteps of tradition, we kept trying the same shot until it was painfully obvious that first take really was the winner. Finally, the wranglers led the deer back along that rubber carpet and out the door, their work done for the day.
Our day, however, had just begun. A full slate of pre-shoots kept us busy until mid-afternoon, after which we had the rest of the show to rehearse and block in preparation for the following day’s shoot in front of the live audience. All day long, the sound crew piped Christmas music over the PA system, and after a while it got into my head – with the all the sets lit up in Christmas lights, ersatz snow all around, and holiday music in the air (which was suitably crisp, thanks to the very effective stage air-conditioning), it really did start to feel like Christmas.
Then we wrapped, and walked out into the steaming cauldron that is the San Fernando Valley in July.
Still, even The Heat couldn’t drive that Christmas music out of my head. On the way home, I stopped at a Rite-Aid, and while waiting in the checkout line, found myself humming “Jingle Bell Rock.” The checker shot me a guarded look, then shook her head. I could imagine the story she’d tell her kids when she got home, about the crazy gabacho who came through her line humming Christmas songs in the middle of July.
Hey, it’s Hollywood...
* While working on a stage, one’s eyes adjust to the artificial lighting. It often seems quite bright on set, but the light level inside is nothing compared to real daylight.
**A cluster of monitors displaying the feed from the cameras -- and thus where the writers, producers, and director gather.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Two Crazy Weeks
Image excerpt provided by Clipland
The last couple of weeks have been rather hectic, to say the least. I returned from my home planet to plunge directly into our final two shows on the sit-com (“The Bill Engvall Show” on TBS), which meant working eleven of twelve days. For their own quiet reasons, the producers moved our last episode up a day, leaving us with only Saturday off before coming back to work six days straight, including two ten-hour, all-work, all-the-time wrap days during which we dropped most of the 250 or so lamps that had been so laboriously hung, powered, and adjusted over the past few months.
Granted, this is sit-com work, not the Death March of Lost Souls that is episodic television. But at this point, sustained work at an episodic pace is out of the question – had I marched through that purgatory these past two weeks, I’d probably be in the hospital right now. Still, this involved lots of very physical work, and if we didn’t suffer the grinding hell of fourteen-hour days, a lot got done in a relatively short span of time. Although losing that Sunday off really hurt, we managed to put both shows in the can, get half the stage wrapped, then enjoyed the warm group-hug of a very mellow wrap party on Saturday.
Free food amid good company, a live band playing the blues, and all the beer/wine/liquour we could drink – what’s not to like?
The upshot of all this? I’m one whipped puppy. As regular readers have no doubt deduced by now, this is a typically long-winded way of saying “I’ve got nothing.” Truth be told, I did work on a post in my few spare moments this past week, fully intending to put it up today... but it’s just not ready -- and to paraphrase the late, great Orson Welles in the sad twilight of his stellar career:
“I shall put up no post before its time.”
That post will appear at a later date, but in the meantime, I did not come empty-handed. Nat Bocking, of “The Water Tower Project”, has unearthed another little gem. Any of you familiar with our Industry will find some resonance here.
Don’t forget to follow the link down at the end, which will lead you on a most unexpected – and entertaining – thread.
That’s it for now. I’ll do my best to post something worth reading next week.
The last couple of weeks have been rather hectic, to say the least. I returned from my home planet to plunge directly into our final two shows on the sit-com (“The Bill Engvall Show” on TBS), which meant working eleven of twelve days. For their own quiet reasons, the producers moved our last episode up a day, leaving us with only Saturday off before coming back to work six days straight, including two ten-hour, all-work, all-the-time wrap days during which we dropped most of the 250 or so lamps that had been so laboriously hung, powered, and adjusted over the past few months.
Granted, this is sit-com work, not the Death March of Lost Souls that is episodic television. But at this point, sustained work at an episodic pace is out of the question – had I marched through that purgatory these past two weeks, I’d probably be in the hospital right now. Still, this involved lots of very physical work, and if we didn’t suffer the grinding hell of fourteen-hour days, a lot got done in a relatively short span of time. Although losing that Sunday off really hurt, we managed to put both shows in the can, get half the stage wrapped, then enjoyed the warm group-hug of a very mellow wrap party on Saturday.
Free food amid good company, a live band playing the blues, and all the beer/wine/liquour we could drink – what’s not to like?
The upshot of all this? I’m one whipped puppy. As regular readers have no doubt deduced by now, this is a typically long-winded way of saying “I’ve got nothing.” Truth be told, I did work on a post in my few spare moments this past week, fully intending to put it up today... but it’s just not ready -- and to paraphrase the late, great Orson Welles in the sad twilight of his stellar career:
“I shall put up no post before its time.”
That post will appear at a later date, but in the meantime, I did not come empty-handed. Nat Bocking, of “The Water Tower Project”, has unearthed another little gem. Any of you familiar with our Industry will find some resonance here.
Don’t forget to follow the link down at the end, which will lead you on a most unexpected – and entertaining – thread.
That’s it for now. I’ll do my best to post something worth reading next week.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Another Reason to Hate Starbucks
“There’s no way to delay that trouble comin’ every day...”
Frank Zappa
Summer. The sun beats down like a blacksmith’s hammer, pounding every living thing into submission. It’s bad enough in Hollywood, but over in The Valley, heat waves shimmer off the pavement as if rising from a barbeque grill, the asphalt turning soft under the relentless thermonuclear assault from 93 million miles away. Out on the streets, the homeless drag their hopelessly overloaded shopping carts under any available shade – a tree, a billboard, a telephone pole -- to wait out the long afternoons until darkness brings a measure of relief. Everything and everybody moves at a slower pace except the eternal rush of traffic, as air-conditioned, over-caffeinated drivers in big black Escalades and shiny new Beemers mash pedal to the metal in their eternal race to be first to the next red light. To the “winner” goes the honor of sitting there -- baking in the hot sun while waiting for the light to turn green – just a little bit longer than the “losers.”
And when that green light finally comes, the race begins anew.
I suppose this rat-race insanity will be with us in one form or another so long as we live in such crowded cities, but it’s increasingly clear that change really is marching our way – big change. The Arabs have a phrase to describe what’s coming:
"My grandfather rode a camel. I drive a car. My son travels in jet airplanes. His son will ride a camel."
Our kids and grandchildren may not end up riding camels, but the ground is shifting under our feet. Sooner or later, everything we now take for granted will be in flux. Nobody can predict exactly how it will all work out, but a hint of our collective future is there for anyone who fills up at a gas station these days. That's just a taste, though – in Hollywood-speak, a preview of coming attractions. Like it or not, there’s more of the same in the pipeline for us all.
A lot more.
"That will be then," we say, comforting ourselves. "This is now." But if the past is any guide to the future, we’ll keep chewing this comfortable old bone until “then” finally does morph into “now.” When that time comes, we’ll find ourselves blinking in the harsh light of a brand new day.
A day that will feel a lot like summer.
* * *
It was back to work on the sit-com last Monday, after our final one-week hiatus -- lighting, rehearsing, and shooting the first of two remaining episodes for this season. That means two more decent paychecks and then... who knows? The immediate future beyond mid-July remains as murky as Baghdad in a sand storm. AFTRA’s vote to accept their new contract jabbed a sharp elbow into the ribs of SAG’s leadership, which had waged an expensive last minute jihad attempting to sway AFTRA members into voting against the deal. Having decisively lost that battle, SAG then rejected the “final offer” from the studios. The upshot of all this is anybody’s guess -- but SAG still has the option to call for a strike vote. Whether they could muster enough member support to authorize a strike -- given the current dismal economic realities in Hollywood and beyond -- remains the Great Unknown. Nobody with a lick of sense wants to see another work stoppage cripple Hollywood.
Whatever happens, I’ll get through the next couple of weeks. Even if SAG decides to go to war, it takes awhile to make a strike happen, so we’ll finish our show -- but late July/early August is when the mainstream of television programming usually gears up for production in a big way. In a normal year, stages that have sat empty since early May would fill up with set construction crews, painters, grips, and juicers in the next few weeks, working long, sweaty days to get the new and returning shows up and running for the Fall season. In an Industry that walks the high wire over raging waters of uncertainty in the best of times, waiting for SAG to make a decision is like having a giant hand shaking that wire. No forward progress can be made so long as the Industry is hanging on for dear life. What should be a fat, money-making part of the year for most below-the-liners has become a time for staring at the calendar and wondering what’s coming. Will the networks take the chance (and expense) of building and rigging all those sets under the assumption SAG will settle soon, or will they hold off in fear of getting caught with their financial pants down by yet another protracted labor stoppage? And if they do decide to hold off on production, what becomes of the 2008/2009 television season?
I guess we'll find out.
* * *
While sitting in our tiny set lighting room last week (where we wait for rehearsals to end, so we can get to work lighting), we kicked around the subject of another work stoppage, which led to a discussion of the WGA strike last winter. K.C. (our Set Lighting Best Boy) mentioned he’d heard that Starbucks outlets in LA were handing out free coffee to any writer who flashed his/her WGA card over the duration of the strike.
This was news to me, since I'd been occupied with some surgery and subsequent recovery at the time. As a gesture of right-on, power-to-the-people worker solidarity, it sounded pretty good -- and since writers tend to drink a lot of coffee, a shrewd business decision on the part of Starbucks.
The rest of the story wasn’t quite so heart-warming. Since K.C. -- like almost every other below-the-line workbot in town -- had been summarily dis-employed by the writers decision go on strike, he decided to stop by his local Starbucks and show his union card.
“Can I help you?” said the young, too-cool-for-school barista behind the counter.
“I hear you’re giving the writers free coffee.”
“Yeah,” replied Mr. Starbucks.
“Does that go for the rest of us? We’re out of work because of the strike too, you know.”
“Sorry, dude,” the young man shrugged. “Free coffee's just for the writers.”
So much for worker solidarity. In the eyes of Starbucks, it seems, the writers are worthy of respect (in the form of free coffee), while the rest of us -- we who sweat and toil to turn those scripted pages into on-screen entertainment for the profit of all those above-the-line -- remain the dirt beneath their feet. We’re so far under the radar they don’t even know we exist, even though most below-the-liners I know buy a lot of coffee from Starbucks. But Starbucks decided to get some publicity by giving out free coffee to writers (whose paychecks typically dwarf those of the rest of us) while ignoring everybody else thrown out of work by the strike.
I’m not bagging on the writers or the WGA. They made a hard decision to fight the power of the greedy, soulless, spawn-of-the-Devil AMPTP, and were willing to pay the price of going three long months with no income at all. They stood tall behind their principles, and for that, earned my complete respect.
Starbucks is a different story. Had they offered free coffee to all unemployed Industry workers, the public relations victory would have been huge. K.C. told me that when he called a few other businesses also offering discounts to striking writers, many were quick to sign on. “Give us your union’s phone number,” they replied. “We’ll extend the same offer to the membership.”
So why not Starbucks? Yes, such an across-the-boards policy would have eaten into the corporate profit margin for three months, but they could have offered conditions – free coffee for all out-of-work Industry people three days a week, maybe, or even one highly symbolic day per week. But instead they went for the cheap publicity of “supporting the strikers” while snubbing everyone else – people who wanted to work, but couldn’t because of the WGA strike.
I’m no a fan of giant chain stores in general, but for a company smart and compassionate enough to say “we’re all in this together,” I would certainly make an exception.
Not now. From this point on, there’s no way Starbucks gets any of my business. It’s done, over, terminado, kaput, finito. Starbucks, as Tony Soprano might say, is dead to me. As far as this juicer is concerned, they can take their little green mermaid and shove her where the sun don’t shine.
Frank Zappa
Summer. The sun beats down like a blacksmith’s hammer, pounding every living thing into submission. It’s bad enough in Hollywood, but over in The Valley, heat waves shimmer off the pavement as if rising from a barbeque grill, the asphalt turning soft under the relentless thermonuclear assault from 93 million miles away. Out on the streets, the homeless drag their hopelessly overloaded shopping carts under any available shade – a tree, a billboard, a telephone pole -- to wait out the long afternoons until darkness brings a measure of relief. Everything and everybody moves at a slower pace except the eternal rush of traffic, as air-conditioned, over-caffeinated drivers in big black Escalades and shiny new Beemers mash pedal to the metal in their eternal race to be first to the next red light. To the “winner” goes the honor of sitting there -- baking in the hot sun while waiting for the light to turn green – just a little bit longer than the “losers.”
And when that green light finally comes, the race begins anew.
I suppose this rat-race insanity will be with us in one form or another so long as we live in such crowded cities, but it’s increasingly clear that change really is marching our way – big change. The Arabs have a phrase to describe what’s coming:
"My grandfather rode a camel. I drive a car. My son travels in jet airplanes. His son will ride a camel."
Our kids and grandchildren may not end up riding camels, but the ground is shifting under our feet. Sooner or later, everything we now take for granted will be in flux. Nobody can predict exactly how it will all work out, but a hint of our collective future is there for anyone who fills up at a gas station these days. That's just a taste, though – in Hollywood-speak, a preview of coming attractions. Like it or not, there’s more of the same in the pipeline for us all.
A lot more.
"That will be then," we say, comforting ourselves. "This is now." But if the past is any guide to the future, we’ll keep chewing this comfortable old bone until “then” finally does morph into “now.” When that time comes, we’ll find ourselves blinking in the harsh light of a brand new day.
A day that will feel a lot like summer.
* * *
It was back to work on the sit-com last Monday, after our final one-week hiatus -- lighting, rehearsing, and shooting the first of two remaining episodes for this season. That means two more decent paychecks and then... who knows? The immediate future beyond mid-July remains as murky as Baghdad in a sand storm. AFTRA’s vote to accept their new contract jabbed a sharp elbow into the ribs of SAG’s leadership, which had waged an expensive last minute jihad attempting to sway AFTRA members into voting against the deal. Having decisively lost that battle, SAG then rejected the “final offer” from the studios. The upshot of all this is anybody’s guess -- but SAG still has the option to call for a strike vote. Whether they could muster enough member support to authorize a strike -- given the current dismal economic realities in Hollywood and beyond -- remains the Great Unknown. Nobody with a lick of sense wants to see another work stoppage cripple Hollywood.
Whatever happens, I’ll get through the next couple of weeks. Even if SAG decides to go to war, it takes awhile to make a strike happen, so we’ll finish our show -- but late July/early August is when the mainstream of television programming usually gears up for production in a big way. In a normal year, stages that have sat empty since early May would fill up with set construction crews, painters, grips, and juicers in the next few weeks, working long, sweaty days to get the new and returning shows up and running for the Fall season. In an Industry that walks the high wire over raging waters of uncertainty in the best of times, waiting for SAG to make a decision is like having a giant hand shaking that wire. No forward progress can be made so long as the Industry is hanging on for dear life. What should be a fat, money-making part of the year for most below-the-liners has become a time for staring at the calendar and wondering what’s coming. Will the networks take the chance (and expense) of building and rigging all those sets under the assumption SAG will settle soon, or will they hold off in fear of getting caught with their financial pants down by yet another protracted labor stoppage? And if they do decide to hold off on production, what becomes of the 2008/2009 television season?
I guess we'll find out.
* * *
While sitting in our tiny set lighting room last week (where we wait for rehearsals to end, so we can get to work lighting), we kicked around the subject of another work stoppage, which led to a discussion of the WGA strike last winter. K.C. (our Set Lighting Best Boy) mentioned he’d heard that Starbucks outlets in LA were handing out free coffee to any writer who flashed his/her WGA card over the duration of the strike.
This was news to me, since I'd been occupied with some surgery and subsequent recovery at the time. As a gesture of right-on, power-to-the-people worker solidarity, it sounded pretty good -- and since writers tend to drink a lot of coffee, a shrewd business decision on the part of Starbucks.
The rest of the story wasn’t quite so heart-warming. Since K.C. -- like almost every other below-the-line workbot in town -- had been summarily dis-employed by the writers decision go on strike, he decided to stop by his local Starbucks and show his union card.
“Can I help you?” said the young, too-cool-for-school barista behind the counter.
“I hear you’re giving the writers free coffee.”
“Yeah,” replied Mr. Starbucks.
“Does that go for the rest of us? We’re out of work because of the strike too, you know.”
“Sorry, dude,” the young man shrugged. “Free coffee's just for the writers.”
So much for worker solidarity. In the eyes of Starbucks, it seems, the writers are worthy of respect (in the form of free coffee), while the rest of us -- we who sweat and toil to turn those scripted pages into on-screen entertainment for the profit of all those above-the-line -- remain the dirt beneath their feet. We’re so far under the radar they don’t even know we exist, even though most below-the-liners I know buy a lot of coffee from Starbucks. But Starbucks decided to get some publicity by giving out free coffee to writers (whose paychecks typically dwarf those of the rest of us) while ignoring everybody else thrown out of work by the strike.
I’m not bagging on the writers or the WGA. They made a hard decision to fight the power of the greedy, soulless, spawn-of-the-Devil AMPTP, and were willing to pay the price of going three long months with no income at all. They stood tall behind their principles, and for that, earned my complete respect.
Starbucks is a different story. Had they offered free coffee to all unemployed Industry workers, the public relations victory would have been huge. K.C. told me that when he called a few other businesses also offering discounts to striking writers, many were quick to sign on. “Give us your union’s phone number,” they replied. “We’ll extend the same offer to the membership.”
So why not Starbucks? Yes, such an across-the-boards policy would have eaten into the corporate profit margin for three months, but they could have offered conditions – free coffee for all out-of-work Industry people three days a week, maybe, or even one highly symbolic day per week. But instead they went for the cheap publicity of “supporting the strikers” while snubbing everyone else – people who wanted to work, but couldn’t because of the WGA strike.
I’m no a fan of giant chain stores in general, but for a company smart and compassionate enough to say “we’re all in this together,” I would certainly make an exception.
Not now. From this point on, there’s no way Starbucks gets any of my business. It’s done, over, terminado, kaput, finito. Starbucks, as Tony Soprano might say, is dead to me. As far as this juicer is concerned, they can take their little green mermaid and shove her where the sun don’t shine.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Do NOT Look the Monkey in the Eyes
“Nature red in tooth and claw...”
From “In Memoriam A.H.H.” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1849
A few years back, I worked on a sit-com whose writing staff emerged from The Room late one night clutching a script that featured a subplot involving a monkey. For one scene, the writers decided this monkey should crawl from the Designated Actor’s arms up to his shoulders, then atop his head, where it would finally escape to a conveniently located prop tree.
All in the greater service of Art, you understand.
What doubtless seemed like a stroke of comedic brilliance during that long, late night made a rather awkward transition to reality a week later. Before the first on-set rehearsal, the animal wrangler cautioned the Designated Actor against making eye contact with the hairy primate.
“Do not look the monkey in the eyes,” she warned, before taking the creature out of its cage.
Easier said than done. When a monkey is only 18 inches high, even a brief glance in the general direction of the beast can be interpreted by the simian brain as looking into its eyes. Sure enough, no sooner did the Designated Actor gingerly take the monkey into his arms than the little brute suddenly went ballistic – ape-shit, so to speak – baring a matched set of extremely sharp fangs while shrieking at the top of its lungs.
Work on the stage came to an abrupt halt, for this was a primal scream straight from the dark, pulsing heart of the jungle -- a heart-stopping howl of prehistoric rage that sent a jolt of pure adrenaline directly into the crew’s collective Reptilian Brain, that most ancient and unevolved enclave of the human mind.
The poor actor was terrified, his face inches from an apparently deranged wild animal capable of doing horrendous, career-ending damage in a matter of seconds. Before any of the stunned crew could react, the wrangler grabbed the hairy little beast and stuffed it back in the cage.
Had I been that actor, I might have walked off the set, straight to my car, and never come back. Fuck the goddamned monkey – tell those writers to come up with another, less lethal gimmick, and send that crazy ape back to the jungle from whence it came. But the Designated Actor was made of sterner stuff. Rather than fly into a self-indulgent panic, he simply waited for the monkey to calm down, and once the wrangler gave the okay, went about rehearsing the scene until man and monkey got it right. I gained a world of respect for this particular actor that day – who subsequently led the cheer for weeks thereafter, in what became the catch-phrase for the show: “Do NOT look the monkey in the eyes!”
In a way, this sums up the dilemma faced by all of us who work with actors, especially when a new one comes on set – you’re never quite sure what to say or do. The safe stance is to politely acknowledge the actor’s presence, then take your cues from them. Some walk on set like they own the place, and start cracking jokes to get everybody laughing, while others (not many, but enough that you dare assume nothing) remain quiet, nervous, and brittle out there in the glare of the lights, as if haunted by some horrible private pain that threatens to be unleashed by a careless smile – a monster that once loose, might carry them back to their own personal Hell.
Those ones, you avoid like the plague.
There’s at least one well-known actor currently working in sit-coms who refuses to allow anyone not directly involved with decision-making to watch rehearsals -- never mind that on shoot night, several hundred complete strangers will be watching his every move in front of four cameras all night long. Were he a truly gifted comedic actor, a case could be made that such mercurial talent must be indulged – but his talent is garden-variety (at best) in the spectrum of Hollywood. Still, being the show’s headliner gives him the power to make people jump -- and bully that he is, he enjoys using (and abusing) that power. When it’s time for rehearsals, the crew vanishes. They’ve learned the hard way not to look the monkey in the eyes.
To be fair, this sort of behavior is not limited to a few neurotic actors -- pop stars and other glitterati of modern media culture are often afflicted by the fear that non-paying, non-adulatory eyeballs might fall upon their visage, thus somehow soiling their tender psyches. Early in my career, I spent far too many long and miserable days (and nights...) working on music videos. One of those jobs (“Billie Jean”) called me in late, well after the rest of the crew, and thus I missed the warning not to look directly at The Gloved One. God only knows what his problem was (at the time, he still bore a resemblance to a normal human being), but during a slow point in one of the set-ups, I looked up from the lamp I was adjusting and found myself eyeball to eyeball with this strange boy/man, not ten feet away.
Suddenly everything got very weird.
It wasn’t that I wanted to look at him, but once our eyeballs met, his intense, piercing gaze locked on and simply would not release – he stared long and hard, violating every rule of non-verbal etiquette in the book. He didn’t nod, wink, smile, shrug his shoulders, make a face, or in any other way acknowledge my presence/existence: those eyes just bored right through me like X-rays, as if I wasn’t there. It got very creepy, very fast until I broke the spell and looked away.
King of Pop 1, juicer 0.
This may not sound like much, but the incident was way too weird for words. I stayed far away from Michael Jackson the rest of that day.
Many years later, the phone rang one brutally hot summer afternoon with a job to help light some promos for a certain television celebrity who has forged a gold-plated career by administering on-camera therapy to our nation of needy, troubled souls. I won’t identify him in this public space (yes Virginia, I do have to work in this town again), but unless you’ve been holed up in a cave with Osama Bin Laden for the last few years, you know his name -- and since I don’t want to end up on anybody’s Do-Not-Hire shit list, let’s just call him The Great Man.
The job entailed a full day pre-light followed by a one day shoot, which was plenty of time to get everything primed and ready to go. The Great Man did not grace us with His presence during the pre-light, instead sending his official stand-in for us to light. The stand-in turned out to be considerably shorter and wider than The Great Man, but this posed no serious problems -- that’s what apple boxes are for.
The pre-light began with the usual jaw-flapping cluster-fuck of hyper-caffeinated confusion, but order began to emerge from chaos once a few key decisions were made. We commenced hanging, powering, and adjusting the lamps with the help of some of The Great Man’s show crew, who knew the stage rig backwards and forwards. Things went well, and after lunch, the cameras arrived, ready to be assembled and mounted – one on a dolly, the other on a crane. We worked our full ten hours tweaking things while the camera operators rehearsed their moves.
Before we left, the show crew had some advice for those of us who hadn’t worked with The Great Man before: be ready, and don’t fuck up. Once Himself was seated in his enormous Falstaffean throne, any adjustments of the lighting were to be avoided at all costs.
I’d already heard a few stories. Friends who had worked with The Great Man told me of his legendary temper, a veritable tsunami of blind, going-postal rage triggered by the tiniest of perceived slights. The tales were legion: how he’d tried to get a security guard fired after the man had the temerity to politely ask The Great Man’s wife to move her car from a “no parking” zone right in front of the main stage door, that he once stopped the show to go on a half-hour spittle-flecked rant because a camera operator dared whisper a response to the director, and how he’d fired yet another crew member who inadvertently dropped a pair of pliers in The Great Man’s presence.
If it sounds like The Great Man could use some serious anger-management therapy of his own -- well, that’s not my department. As the day ended, the producer gathered us around to issue a final warning: “When he comes on stage tomorrow, don’t stare at him, don’t talk to him, and don’t ask him any questions, okay? If you have to go in there to do some work, don’t ignore him, but please don’t initiate any conversation.”
So here I was on a very different show, once again being told -- in essence – not to look the monkey in the eyes.
We arrived on set the next morning ready to go. After seeing how big The Great Man really was, the director of photography told us to stand by the two back lights, ready to adjust them once he sat down for the cameras. This is standard procedure – no pre-light gets everything perfect, and even if the lighting really was spot-on the day before, the D.P. invariably has some brilliant last-second idea requiring an adjustment or two.
Or three...
The bad news was that those two back lights were twenty feet off the stage floor, hanging from pipes, with no way to reach them other than our single, noisy hydraulic man-lift. With yesterday’s warnings echoing through my head, we rolled the lift into position, whereupon I climbed in and hit the button taking me up. There I waited.
Warnings or not, we had no choice. The lighting crew is hired by the director of photography, and must follow his orders through hell or high water. Whatever else happens, happens, but the D.P. will be obeyed. So there I sat, gloves on, ready to work. When The Great Man finally sat down, I quickly adjusted the lamp, drove to the second lamp and adjusted it, then descended and rolled the lift off stage. Mission accomplished in less than two minutes – no harm, no foul.
Or so I thought. After watching The Great Man speak his softly urgent platitudes to the twin cameras for twenty minutes, I wandered back to the craft service table, where the show crew was grazing. Taking a bite of a cookie, one of them cocked his head and raised one eyebrow.
“What’d you do to piss him off?” he asked.
I assumed he was joking, but the look on his face said otherwise.
“He’s pissed off?”
“So I hear,” he nodded, pointing to his walkie-talkie. “What the hell’d you do?”
“Nothing. We had to adjust the back lights, that’s all.”
“That must be it,” he nodded. “I hear he wants to bring a new crew in.”
“Fine,” I shrugged. “Let him fire us.”
I was dead serious. We were on a ten hour deal, which meant we’d already made our money simply by showing up. If The Great Man wanted to pay another crew to come in, shoot the promos, then wrap all the equipment we’d rigged, so much the better – I'd be happy to take a full day’s pay for two minute’s work.
What happened was... nothing. We went about our business and finished the shoot by late afternoon without hearing another word about it. I’ll never know if The Great Man stifled his famously volcanic temper in the interest of getting the job done (and in the process, saving his company a nice chunk of change), or if the whole thing was just a stupid prank on the part of the show boys.*
All I know for sure is that we waited through the rest of that long day wondering what the hell was going on -- and once The Great Man left the stage, we still had to take all those lights down.
And I never did look the monkey in the eyes.
* There are many below-the-line who hold the practical joke to be a sacred ritual.
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