Actors and Crew

As of today, some of the posts that were first published here will begin to appear on a website called Actors and Crew. The first few will be culled from the archives to help a new crop of readers come up to speed, but if all goes to plan, current posts will eventually show up on Actors and Crew shortly after publication here.

I mention this only to let you know what's going on should you happen to stumble across some of my older posts over there. We were going to do this last year, but life got a bit crowded for a while, and in the crush, those plans fell through the cracks -- until now.

Don't worry, I haven't sold out just yet, given that this is a strictly non-monetary deal. It's really just an attempt to expose the blog to a wider audience, and like all such experiments, may or may not succeed. At any rate, my first loyalties will always lie right here at Blood, Sweat, and Tedium -- and with you, the readers who have helped shape this blog.

And for those who have urged me to write a book based on these posts, perhaps this represents the first step down that road. The jury's still out on that decision, but we shall see...

Green Beds

            The good old days, when green beds were standard on every soundstage set...
                             (Mary Poppins, 1964, Stage 4 at Disney Studios)

A recent post mentioned green beds as my own favored platform for rigging lamps above sets on stage, which brought a question from one reader who has only worked off pipe grids, and thus wasn't sure what green beds are all about. Once standard equipment on every serious Hollywood sound stage -- for features and television -- green beds have been replaced by pipe grids on lower budget productions. From what I've seen, big features and major network episodics still use green beds, but in my little world of pilots and sit-coms, the odious pipe grid now rules supreme. I briefly addressed the subject a while back in a post that opened like this:*

"The widespread use of pipe grids for lighting on sound stages is a relatively recent phenomenon in Hollywood. Studio sound stages were built to facilitate the use of “green beds” – rectangular wooden platforms hung from the overhead perms on chains, then securely fastened together and braced to form a stable work platform over each set. A properly constructed system of green beds provides a safe, user-friendly environment for juicers and grips to work, with plenty of room to deploy most of the lighting equipment required for any production. Green beds allow quick and easy changes or adjustments to the lighting without disturbing the sets down below, or impacting the other departments at all.

That's how it was when I started in the biz, but times have changed in that regard, and not for the better – and for the usual reason: money. Instead of paying for a crew to hang green beds over the sets, the Money Men now insist on using a pipe grid. Although this might make economic sense for a pilot or other short-duration production, pipe grids are increasingly common on long running shows as well. This represents a false economy at best, and a dangerous one at worst. For the producer to save a few bucks at the start, the crew and production end up paying dearly in many ways on down the line. When working with a pipe grid, juicers and grips must rely on small man-lifts and scissor lifts to hang the lamps, which creates a whole new set of problems for everyone involved. But we live and work in the world that is, rather than the world we'd like to see -- and as always, must bend to reality, make the best of a bad situation, and do whatever it takes to get the job done."

The rest of that post goes on to describe the difficulties in getting a pilot off the ground -- a task made all the harder by that pipe grid. If we'd had green beds over those sets, the job would have been so much easier.










While working on the studio's set lighting rigging crew a few months ago, I took some photos of freshly-hung green beds over sets still under construction, including this view of the green beds from inside a set on the stage floor.








Here's a wider view of the same sets from the pinrail, a wooden catwalk half way up the stage walls that runs around the entire interior perimeter.










And here's a view of a much higher row of green beds secured with high-braces nailed into the perms above. Why they were hung so high, I don't know, but below are set walls waiting to be assembled by the construction crew. As you can see -- and sometimes a photo really is worth a thousand words -- green beds really are green (thus the name), and form a wide, stable catwalk above the sets where the grips and juicers can work.









This last shot is a bit confusing. Taken from the cable portal of another stage's dimmer room (where a big-bucks episodic had just begun rigging lights), you can barely make out what appears to be a 2K and a 5K, along with several 1K Babies and Source Four lamps mounted from the green beds, aimed down at the set below. There's also one or two chicken coops in the distance, hanging from up high. Sorry for such a crappy photo, but this was as close as I could get that day,

Although there are certain satisfactions in working from a man-lift (essential when dealing with pipe grids), I much prefer the old-fashioned, user-friendly method of working off green beds. Over the long run, the time savings alone would probably pay for the extra expense of hanging green beds -- but then I'm not some number-crunching, budget-obsessed UPM being whipped and beaten on a daily basis by a merciless producer wearing a black hat, ass-less chaps, and freshly sharpened spurs -- I'm just a juicer trying to do my job the best I can, and in the process, make it through one more day...

* I've done a little editing on these paragraphs for this post.

Lord and Master of the Sit-Com

The last seven weeks have been unusually busy here in my little corner of sit-com land. The four episode pick up – and subsequent company move from one sound stage to another – torpedoed the normal three-weeks-on/one-week-off schedule that makes the multi-camera world so appealing to me.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if I wanted a real job to clamp my nose firmly to the grindstone 50 weeks a year, I’d never have come to Hollywood in the first place. I don’t live to work, I work to live – and I do like my time off.

Lately though, these oases of off-time have been limited to the much-too-short weekends, most of which are consumed by the usual litany of laundry/shopping/banking chores, thus leaving me little chance to plow through each week’s stack of the LA Times. That stack had gotten rather large as of this weekend, so I finally sat down to sift through the chaff and ferret out what kernels of wheat lay within.

And that’s why it took me two full weeks to finally come across this interesting and illuminating article on the Lord and Master of the multi-camera world, Jim Burrows.

I have a couple of minor quibbles with the piece – I’m not so sure Burrows “played a key role in developing a four-camera setup,” and he certainly didn’t pioneer “brightly lighted (sic) sound stages”* -- but overall, Scott Collins paints an accurate picture of the sit-com world’s King Midas. As one of the regular day-players on set over the last two seasons of “Will and Grace,” I had ample opportunity to watch the man work, and saw just how good he really is.
Such a well-deserved reputation can be a double-edged sword, of course (as I learned the hard way a couple of years ago), but having Burrows at the helm is a huge plus for any producer of a new sit-com. Put it this way: if anybody can make “Mike and Molly” a success (and more than a few people in the biz are convinced it will flop), it’s Burrows. His presence alone will induce the network to allow the show enough time to find its legs and a hopefully a sizable audience. If the show works, it will be all because of Burrows – if not, people will chalk the failure up to a fatally flawed concept: building a weekly show around a cast of fat people. The viewing public may or may not be ready to embrace such a show, but if anybody can pull this off, it’s Jim Burrows.


* If you want to see some brightly lit sets, take a look at “I Love Lucy” – the original multi-camera show (albeit with only three cameras) that ruled the airwaves long before Burrows ever started directing. And please, use the term “lit” instead of “lighted” -- it’s much less awkward and more accurate. “Lighted” may have been good enough for Hemingway, but he’s been dead for a long time now...

The Big Move

Getting picked up for an additional four episodes on our little cable-rate sit-com was very welcome news for the cast, production office, and on-set crew. But good news rarely comes to the dance alone, and this time she walked in holding hands with Something Ugly: upon finishing our originally scheduled ten episodes, we would immediately proceed to move everything across the studio lot to another sound stage to shoot the final four. One of last spring’s surprise cable hits had already booked our stage for their twenty episode pick-up under the assumption we’d be long gone by now, so the studio found us another stage to use for the next five weeks.

Moving an entire show already under production is no small thing. Even with an extra juicer helping, it took us a full week of ten hour days to tear down the 200+ lamps, cable, and rigging equipment, then move it all to the new stage for another solid week of hanging, powering, and adjusting those very same lamps over the newly reconstituted sets.

It was like doing the pilot all over again -- and pilots are hard.

I’ve never been on a show that had to make a move like this. In some ways it felt like being a slave back in ancient Egypt, ordered to dismantle the huge pyramid we’d just built, then haul every last chunk of finely-cut stone across the Nile and put the whole thing back together again on a fresh patch of sand more to the Pharaoh’s liking.

After two long weeks of very physical toil, I figured it would be a relief to get back to making shows. Over the course of those first ten episodes, we'd managed to ease into a smooth working rhythm that rolled right over the rough spots that inevitably pop up during the process of making any television show. It just felt so easy coming down the stretch, so there was no logical reason to assume we wouldn’t fall right back into that comfortable groove after making the move.

Unfortunately, the operating system of real life doesn’t function on logic alone. Just as a baseball team that’s been on fire heading into the All Star Break so often loses their momentum and their groove once the season resumes, our first week back in production rapidly morphed into a chaotic ordeal. With nothing but problems that proved endlessly difficult to fix, it was clear that we’d well and truly lost our mojo. Our DP – famous for his endless tweaking of the lighting right on through the live show* -- stalked the floor barking orders like a man possessed. We put scrims in, we pulled scrims out. We moved the lamps from one pipe to another, then panned them right and panned them left. We tilted them up and tilted them down. Nothing seemed to satisfy this man, but the DP is the boss, so we followed orders while trying to keep the inevitable eyeball-rolling and grousing down to a low rumble.

Our rough passage extended right on through the blocking and pre-shoots, normally a day that entails a little tweaking here and there, but nothing more. Not this time – we were running hard all day long and into the evening. At times it wasn’t clear whether we were actually solving any problems or simply creating new ones.

Chaos was the rule, order the exception.

At last – mercifully -- we came to the final pre-shoot of the day, an extended dialog scene between one of our principals and this week’s guest star. Everybody behind the lights and cameras was tired, but ready for one more push to finish our day. The rehearsal was way over the top, as the guest star caught us all by surprise with her extremely dynamic performance. After plodding through so much rote blocking since morning, this unexpected burst of comedic energy abruptly reversed the tide of a long, enervating day. The entire crew perked up, on our toes now, wide awake.

The first take wasn’t great -- the principal flubbed a line while the guest star dialed it down a bit too much. The second take was much better, the timing crisp, the line readings spot-on. The third take was pure magic, all the elements blending together in a fusion that sparkled like good champagne. When done right, comedy can be very funny stuff, and even though we’d heard the same jokes three times already, the entire crew was laughing hard – real laughter from the gut, not the polite, white-gloved variety typical of blocking day. The producers and director beamed as the AD called a wrap, and our day was finally done. After being pissed off to one degree or another for the better part of 12 hours, I dropped my tool belt in the set lighting room, grabbed my bike, and pedaled back to the parking structure feeling great.

Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t – but when it does, all the hassles and frustrating complications melt away like snow under the hot sun. The pain is suddenly forgotten, replaced by the warm glow that comes when you finally get something just right. Not only did the good vibe carry over into the following day's audience shoot, but it helped send us into the weekend feeling a lot better about everything.

And maybe -- just maybe -- we're a step closer to getting our groove back on.



* This rarely happens on multi-camera shows, where -- as a rule -- producers don’t like to see the crew out there in front of the audience climbing ladders and making adjustments on show night. During the show, the gaffer and dimmer operator are busy (and quietly) making sure the lighting cues are right for each scene, while the juicers stand by in case something critical goes wrong – like a key light burning out a globe. We had just such an emergency when a big studio 5K melted down during a recent shoot night. It was the heaviest and most difficult lamp to reach on the entire stage, naturally, but with the juicers and grips working together like the Marines on Mt. Suribachi, we got the bad head down and a new one up (and burning) in a matter of minutes.

As always, the show must go on...

Amazing Story of the Week

Sometimes those dreams really do come true -- and then they don't...


Suppose for a moment that you’re a screenwriter with a brand new episodic drama on a major network’s Fall lineup. You’d have every right to feel pretty good, right? And further suppose that you’ve also written (and sold) a screenplay that was subsequently made into a thirty million dollar feature film starring an actor who has been one of the bigger names in Hollywood over the past three decades – and the film is now edited, polished, and ready for release.

With such a lovely pair of Tinsel Town Dreams come true, you’d have to be deliriously happy, right?

But what if that television show was such a horrendous bomb that it was canceled after only two broadcasts? That’d be one serious bummer. And what if the big Hollywood name had, after appearing in your movie, proceeded to torch his reputation beyond all redemption in an extremely public manner -- which is to say, that human supernova happened to be one Melvin "Sugar-Tits" Gibson?

In that case, your life might come to resemble one of those grim, life-is-hopeless Eastern European cartoon so popular across the pond during the Cold War era.*

If that happened to me, I might be drinking heavily while fumbling for the number of one of those suicide prevention lines right about now. But Kyle Killen – who had the Hollywood world by the tail before this ginormous bucket of shit was dumped directly on his head – seems to be okay with it.

Hard to believe? Yeah, I know, but don’t take my word for it – do yourself a favor and tune in to the KCRW podcast of Kim Master’s illuminating interview with Kyle Killen on this week’s “The Business.”

Would that we could all be so sanguine and enjoy such a balanced sense of perspective in the face of disaster as young Mr. Killen. Something tells me he'll do very well in life.


* Very few of you are likely to have any idea what I'm talking about here, but trust me, those "cartoons" were depressing as hell...

Writing, Writers, and No Respect

“Screenwriters? Schmucks with Underwoods.”
Jack Warner

While listening to NPR a couple of weeks ago, I heard an interview with several veteran novelists who – due to the vicissitudes of their own complicated lives -- got a late start on the craft that would eventually define them as writers. It was an interesting discussion which finally turned to the basic nuts-and-bolts question every successful writer is asked: How do you get started every day? Each had their own solution to the problem of firing up the creative engine on a daily basis. Two such tactics resonated with me -- leave a sentence or passage unfinished at the end of a writing session to provide some momentum-building traction when sitting down at the keyboard the following day, and my favorite: “Write the truth for a while, then start lying.”

That pretty much sums up the process for me.

Not that I do any lying here, of course – such mendacity is reserved for my occasional (and remarkably ineffectual) stabs at fiction – but this space can’t tell all the truth, all the time. When I refer to something that happened “last week on my show,” that might be the literal truth, or it could be an event that took place more than a month ago. Such time-shifting is occasionally necessary to cover my tracks in case one of the show’s producers should happen to stumble across this blog. I don’t delude myself as to the size of BST’s audience – it’s only a small (although I prefer the term “select”) handful – but if the Wrong Person were to read the Wrong Thing and reach the Wrong Conclusion, what’s left of my tattered, wheezing career could spiral right down the toilet.

With my name on the masthead, I do have to be careful.

As Jack Warner’s famous quote demonstrates, writers have never been accorded much respect in Hollywood. Occasionally a certain writer rises above the herd for a while to become a sought-after “name” – a Joe Eszterhas, Shane Black, or Charlie Kaufman – but for the most part, Hollywood writers (along with most novelists beneath the money-making stature of Steven King, John Grisham, Scott Turow – and lately, Cormack McCarthy) are doomed to labor in relative obscurity.

One of Rob Long’s recent (and decidedly wry) “Martini Shot” commentaries dealt with the process of writing for television – it’s definitely worth your three and a half minutes of attention -- while the Anonymous Production Assistant periodically tackles the subject of the writer’s lowly status in the Industry. (Like here, and here)

It’s bad enough to be held in such low regard by the powers that be above-the-line, but the cruelest blow came from a lowly paparazzo in an LA Times piece describing a recent feeding frenzy of celebrity photographers at LAX. And just to be clear where I stand on this – paparazzi are people too, and just trying to make a living, but I consider them as close to the dregs of humanity as you can get without being a serial murderer, charter member of NAMBLA, or a bought-and-paid-for political scumbag like James Inhofe. It’s impossible to respect those who hound celebrities to fuel the empty, soul-dead fantasies of Tabloid America.* Yes, they’re only filling a “need” – but so are those who make and sell crystal meth, snuff films, and kiddie porn. Just because paparazzi are a reality of modern life doesn’t mean I have to like them or accept what they do.**

So imagine how it would feel to be a struggling screenwriter in Hollywood who picks up the morning paper and reads the following passage describing the disappointment of a veteran LAX paparazzo when his sweaty hunt for a photo-worthy celebrity came up empty:

"Out stepped a portly bald man with glasses. Vera's shoulders slumped. 'That's nobody. Maybe a writer or something. Nobody,' he said, crestfallen."

Wow. It's one thing to be dissed by Jack Warner, but to receive such dismissive contempt from a lowly paparazzo -- a human parasite feeding on the emanations of our society's collective cultural sphincter -- now that's rough...


* Paparazzi remind me of Oscar Wild's famous quote about the English sport of fox hunting: "The uspeakable in pursuit of the inedible."

** While doing a day on "Melrose Place" last year, we fired up a big 18,000 watt lamp and aimed it directly down the beach at a group of paparazzi who'd been hovering around all day like a cloud of sand-flies. The idea was to flare their long lenses, and thus ruin their attempts to photograph our actors.

That felt really good...

Wednesday Potpourri

At the studio commissary for lunch recently, I noticed two tall, elegant Indian women walk in, look around, then get in line. Both wore their native garb of ankle-length brightly colored saris. More followed, and before long, there were at least thirty waiting to order their lunch, including several men dressed in what appeared to be police or military uniforms. For a moment I thought they must be a group of Indian film executives taking a tour of the studio – but then I remembered my day on the rigging crew installing dimmers on a sound stage where the new television comedy “Outsourced” was scheduled to be shot.

There’s been some controversy in the press concerning “Outsourced” – accusations of cultural insensitivity, borderline racism, and taking a point-and-laugh stance towards anybody not born here in America. There’s also been speculation that a comedy riding the premise of American jobs going overseas might not find a receptive home audience in such economically stressed times. There may be some meat on the bones of both arguments, but not having seen the show (nor do I work on it – installing those dimmers was a one-day job), I can’t address the first objection. As to whether an American audience will tune in: if a show is genuinely funny, people will watch. If not, they won’t. Time will tell on both counts.

My first thought upon walking on that stage was that the network is spending a ton of money on the show, which features huge and elaborate sets lit from a vast network of green beds hung overhead. Green beds! I haven’t seen that many green beds in a couple of years. God, would I love to work on a show smart enough to use green beds rather than relying on the clumsy pipe grid system my own show uses. Green beds cost more to install, but they save time and money in the long run, making the job of lighting a show so much easier and faster.

My second thought – upon seeing all those Indians in the commissary – was that this show could be a serious economic bonanza for a lot of Indian actors here in LA who otherwise might be scrambling to find work.

"It's an ill wind," they say, "that blows no good."

I heard a fascinating interview on KCRW’s “The Business” with Ken Kwapis, showrunner of “Outsourced” and a man with a lot of experience directing pilots. I’d never really thought about the difference between directing a pilot vs. an episode of an already established show, but Ken talks about that and other things (including what he learned while directing the pilot of "The Office") in this very interesting half hour.

The interview also has a link to a clip from the pilot of “Outsourced,” which portrays the show in a much better light than I’d expected after reading of the various controversies swirling around. If I had no life at all and nothing to do but stare wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and drooling at the Toob while drinking myself to sleep every night, I might even tune in.

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The LA Times ran an interesting piece in the Sunday paper on the genesis, evolution, and eventual success of “Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” FX’s little show that could. Starting with a pilot shot and edited for a hundred bucks – according to the LA Times, at least – the show is now cruising into it’s sixth season with a per-episode budget of $1.5 million. How such an unlikely turn of events came about is a fascinating story well told by the Time’s Meg James, and should be an inspiration for anybody trying to get their own little show off the launch pad. While I’m not so sure that “Sunny” charts a path others can follow (or that, in the words of FX general manager John Landgraf, “We’ve actually kind of invented... a new business model”), it does point to the value of trying new approaches rather than butting one’s head bloody against the brick walls of the Hollywood’s status quo. There is no one way to get things done anymore – it’s all up for grabs. Anybody who doubts that really should read the article.

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On a completely different note, here’s an interesting video of the late, great Johnny Cash singing the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt.” Johnny Cash and Trent Reznor wouldn’t seem to be a workable combination, but I like this one a lot.

I found the link on a “Fresh Air” interview with Mark Romanek, director of the features “Never Let Me Go,” and “One Hour Photo,” and veteran music video director who made the “Hurt” video with Johnny Cash. The interview offers yet another interesting perspective for any young wannabe directors out there.

Check it out.