If You Can't Afford the Smell of Roasted Cameras, You'd Better Stop Burning Down the House!

EVERYTHING was on fire, the gun was missing, nobody was sure what had happened to The Girl, and somebody said that a camera assistant was missing - possibly trapped inside the hellish inferno that had been our set just 20 seconds earlier. You know, the set that was currently melting our motion picture cameras into a clump.

But forgive me; I’ve started in the middle (again).

By the mid-1990s the Fox Broadcasting Company was deep in the process of becoming a legitimate competitor to the traditional ‘Big Three’ networks and in the spring of 1996 we found ourselves working on a pilot for an action-adventure series called “Lawless”, starring Daniel Baldwin.

Danny was hired to play John Lawless, a rough and tumble private eye, or maybe he was a cop trying to prove that he’d been framed, or maybe he was a secret agent on the lam. It really didn’t matter what the premise was as long as it had car chases, gunfights, explosions, and boobs. You know, the usual.

It was the last day of shooting and our set was a small single-story house in the middle of the woods somewhere up in Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta. The long and winding dirt drive leading up to the house seemed comprised entirely of old muddy ruts, and on my way up I noticed a fire truck parked off to the side. I had forgotten that we would be doing a fire effect on set that night.

The scene was pretty typical, something you’ve undoubtedly seen before: the good guy is pinned down behind a bar hiding from a bad guy wielding an automatic weapon and holding a girl hostage. Realizing that he is surrounded by bottles of alcohol, our hero stands up and throws a bottle of vodka toward the fireplace. When the bottle breaks the atomized vodka ignites, creating a huge fireball, which is just enough of a distraction to allow the good guy to get the upper hand.

I don’t know if they’ve ever tried to replicate this scenario on Mythbusters, but if they do it won’t work because vodka isn’t high proof enough to catch fire and burn. The Hollywood trick is to set up some propane tanks behind the fireplace and to have them blow out a controlled release of propane on cue, using a solenoid valve. It was our understanding that this was exactly the sort of setup that the LA effects crew was using.

While the effects guys were getting their rig set up the grips were outside, tenting in the house. This meant that they were sealing up all the doors and windows with a heavy black cloth known as Duvateen™ to make it look like night outside. Inside, across from the fireplace, the camera guys were staking out their camera positions and Roger Sherer was making the cameras extra-safe by putting a piece of very clear Plexiglas in front of the lenses to protect them from the initial burst of fire from the fireplace. Meanwhile, it turned out that the stunt team didn’t have a double for the actress being held captive so production convinced the actress’ stand-in to work the stunt.

What the heck, it was the last day of the show — what could possibly go wrong?

Video village had been stationed about 15 feet away from the entrance to the little house and when we finally started rolling into the stunt I joined the knot of crew mashed in at the monitor. Inside, the Director called “action”. From off-camera someone threw a breakaway bottle of “vodka” against the fireplace and on cue the fireplace belched out a giant poof of flame, which seemed to stretch across the room toward the cameras. The initial blast was really shocking because for a split second the increase of air pressure in the house made the flap of Duvateen™ hanging over the doorway shoot straight out at an angle.

The fire itself looked AWESOME… but it didn’t stop.

Flames just kept coming and coming and coming. We later learned that the solenoid had stuck in the open position, effectively turning the special effects setup into a really terrific flamethrower. Those cameras didn’t stand a chance, and the crew? Well, we know that the director ran down the hallway and jumped out a side window just behind video village, where we were watching the Plexiglas beginning to curl and bubble and sag under the relentless furnace blast. (For many years following this incident you could go to a local prop house to see the molten sheet of Plexi in person.)

There was SO much shouting and panic! I’m not sure why, but I followed the propmaster, Joe Connolly, around to the other side of the house just in time to hear somebody shout, “I think Bruce (Robinson) is still inside the house!!” and “Where is the girl??”

As we came back around to the front of the house they had pulled the water truck up near the door and somebody tossed me the nozzle to a water hose and rolled a coil of flat hose down the hill toward us. I bent down and grabbed the end of the hose and screwed the nozzle on just as the pressure hit the line. Joe helped me adjust the nozzle then said “come on”, and turned to go inside the house. We were quickly forced to drop to a duck walk because the thick black smoke boiling out of the door was impenetrable. Within 20 seconds my pullover was wet, but that was good because I was able to breathe through it like a filter as I followed Joe deeper into the building looking for injured crew.

Not long after we’d started into the house I noticed that one of the local effects guys who was working for the LA effects guys had followed us in. He offered Joe a funny looking wrench – which seemed to be a really weird thing to be doing in the middle of a rescue mission. However, I had never participated in a rescue mission before so I just kept spraying water into the black smoke. A few seconds later Joe pulled a lifeless white shape toward us from out of the acrid black fog – but it wasn’t Bruce; it was a propane tank. That wrench suddenly made a lot more sense. In short order Joe had the tank unhooked and turned to hand it to the effects man, who heaved it out the door behind us. Our rescue mission had somehow turned into a “defusing the bomb” mission, something I was entirely unprepared to tackle.

I WAS OFFICIALLY POOPING KITTENS!

Before we backed our way out of the burning house Joe had unhooked another tank or two. And as we stood outside sucking in the clean, cool night air I spotted Bruce, safe and sound. After the initial panic had subsided it was determined that everybody had made it out safely. The only scary moment was hearing that the stand-in who’d been turned into a stunt girl had frozen when things went wrong, and the stunt man playing the bad guy had to throw his gun down and help her run for an exit.

We learned that the fire truck had been stuck in the muddy lane at the bottom of the hill, but they finally made it up to set and began extinguishing the remaining hot spots. I still laugh when I think about the love seat that they dragged outside and left near video village; for the rest of that long night it would unexpectedly erupt in flames again.

But the most memorable post-fire image was the sight of three blackened Arriflex cameras sitting on the lift gate of the camera truck, looking for all the world like steamed clams. Astonishingly, the film had not been damaged!

Behind the scenes our Producer, the late John Ashley, called back to the office to tell Production Coordinator Katie Troebs that we’d had a bit of a fire, and to get us some fresh cameras. Imagine the shock of the folks at the camera rental house when she phoned them up in the middle of the night to tell them that we’d cooked all of the cameras they’d given us, and could we please have some more?

While the crew waited for new cameras to arrive, some ladies from the wardrobe department took us back to their trailer to get us toweled off and into some dry clothes. By the time the fresh camera equipment arrived we had calmed down from the adrenaline rush of our “rescue” drama and had returned to set. I was even able to laugh at the regular flare-ups from that self-igniting love seat. One of the last scenes on our schedule involved a bomb detonator that Joe and I had cobbled together back during prep. The Director had seen and approved the prop several weeks before, but I think he must have been pretty rattled by his recent escape from certain death and had decided to concentrate all of his critical reasoning on this gizmo so he could stop thinking about the wall of flames.

I remember being incensed by his request that we “add more switches”, and while I don’t remember my exact reply to the man I do remember Joe stepping over to give me some very practical advice that I will now impart to all you , “Drew, we don’t yell at the Director.”

Not unless he ‘s on fire.
——

The Race To The Bottom

Before the rise of the Internet and cell phones smaller than a pork roast, before email and eBay, prepping a movie was an entirely different affair because you didn’t have the world at your fingertips. Well, actually you did, but those fingertips had to do some walking through an enormous alphabetized list of businesses that had been printed on yellow newsprint and left on your doorstep when you weren’t at home.  We called this thing “The Yellow Pages” and everybody in the world used it whenever they needed to find a plumber, or a florist, or just about anything else because Google DID NOT EXIST!!! srsly.

That great big yellow book was invaluable and was one of the very first items distributed when a production office was being set up. I still remember PAs walking through offices, flinging brand new telephone books onto our desks and in just a few weeks those books would be dog-eared, covered in doodles and filled with bookmarks. Decorators and propmasters would take their telephone books with them while they were out shopping, and more than a few Yellow Pages would disappear from payphone booths. Remember kids: this is the way things worked before the iPhone™. And you know what? It worked! We found the stuff we were looking for, and movies got made.

Sometimes a person would misplace their own telephone book so they would “borrow” one from someone else’s desk in the production office. My friend and propmaster Joe Connolly took to writing “STOLEN FROM PROPS” with a big giant marker all over his newest set of Yellow Pages (yes, they sometimes came in sets). And Joe meant “stolen”, because those books were valuable tools. If you worked on a show in another part of the country you’d take that city’s Yellow Pages home at the end of the show because it increased your “database” of contacts.

Joe had a saying that, “If you can’t find it within 6 phone calls it doesn’t exist,” and in those days that was pretty much the case.

One of the few things you knew you wouldn’t find locally were places that specialized in making fake newspapers and fake money, because there’s not a lot of demand for the former, and the latter will get you 10 to 20 in Federal prison. No, for those things you had to turn back to the mothership: Los Angeles.

When I first began working in the motion picture industry, back in 1991, a large majority of propmasters and set decorators in the United States used a company called Earl Hays Press. Known simply as ‘Earl Hays’, this company was a good source for most any printed item you might need on set. From fake magazines and newspapers, to adhesive-backed labels (called “wraps”) for making fake liquor and beer bottles, to paper wraps for fake cigarette packs, Earl Hays had you covered. The only downside of ordering from Earl Hays was that some of their material looked as if it had been designed in the 1940s, which was quite possible because the company had been in business since 1915!

We appreciated the convenience of Earl Hays products but we dreamed of being able to create our own labels. The problem was that the techniques for creating labels were still laughably rudimentary in the 1990s, partly because we still thought in terms of using photocopiers and dry-transfer rub-on lettering – a technique left over from the 1960s. More importantly, we were supposed to be prepping a movie, not designing labels.

Things have changed significantly over the last 20 years. Earl Hays is no longer the only supplier for product labels in Los Angeles, and may even now be considered a 2nd tier source for prop graphics. More significant has been the rise of the embedded graphic designer on productions, and that’s what I really wanted to talk about for this issue of the Creative Index: What does it take to make a living as a graphic designer in the motion picture industry?

To be a “normal” graphic designer you have to have artistic talent, you have to understand composition, you have to be able to work to a deadline, you have to be able to work with people with extreme personalities, you have to know how to measure things, you must possess an understanding of the history of graphic design, you should probably check to make sure you’re not colorblind and that you’re a fairly decent speller, and most importantly you have to own (and preferably know how to use) the goshdarn software!

To be a good Motion Picture graphic designer you also have to understand how to design pieces “for camera”. If you’re working independently, not embedded with a show, you have to operate with the mentality of a doctor, in that you’re always on call, because there are always last-minute emergencies. And you’d better be a wizard at shipping, too, because it’s a bad day if your magazine cover doesn’t arrive on set in time for a scene.

Be sure to find a reliable output house and develop a collaborative relationship with their output team because those are the people who will help you solve all the seemingly impossible problems that will get thrown your way by a crazy director or a wildly impossible location.  Chet Long, a senior account manager with Meteor LLC Atlanta, recently explained how he’d once “fired” a graphic designer because they consistently provided poorly crafted files with incorrect measurements and then had the audacity to berate him on his prices. His company was so busy producing material for other film projects that he was able to encourage that designer to seek another vendor.

Don’t let this happen to you!

By 2001 there was a convergence of affordable illustration software with a rapidly growing “library” of seemingly free photographic material on the Internet. The same studio system that had so jealously guarded its own products through the years suddenly found itself facing copyright-infringement lawsuits due to a widespread ignorance of copyright law among the design community hired to make graphics for films and television programs.

As result of those missteps, legal clearances for fonts and images are now a regular part of the paperwork chain that motion picture graphic designers must deal with and the requirements are only becoming more stringent. I once had a shouting match (uncharacteristic for me) with a lawyer for a studio for which I’d created a website to be used on-camera. Their writers never provided me with the promised copy to be used on the website and they ended up shooting the scene using my placeholder text. Not only did I not receive additional compensation for my original text, they also wanted me to indemnify their studio against any legal claims pertaining to that text, which I refused to do because that wasn’t our original deal. In the end I forced them to re-write the agreement. Studios expect their designers to be more prepared than they ever were in the past, and that’s not a bad thing: it’s just business.

My friend Lisa Yeiser has a booming business as a graphic designer for television shows and feature films, with clients all around the country. Several years ago she had a similarly frustrating experience regarding “broadcast friendly” fonts, and it became expeditious for her to purchase an expensive studio-approved font package so that she could stop dealing with legal departments and get back to the business of design.

A few studios provide graphic designers with access to a stock photography library, but that hasn’t been the trend with projects shooting in Atlanta and as a result Lisa also finds herself organizing impromptu photo shoots for the pieces she produces. It’s a lot of work and while she’s good at it, she can’t charge the clients additional fees for her photography.

Perhaps the biggest challenge Lisa has faced is how much she can charge for her expertise, because many Unit Production Managers harbor an insultingly parochial view of the abilities of anyone who isn’t from Los Angeles, especially the South. Faced with the list of respected Designers and Art Directors who recommend her, UPMs often still press her to take a lower rate. 

I recently had a similar experience on a television pilot and when it became clear that I wasn’t going to take less than the industry standard rate we were able to strike a deal. My negotiation tactic was that I honestly didn’t really want the job in the first place, which is hardly typical.

More often you find people who are hungry for work, looking to build a resume, or simply ignorant of the rates that they should be charging. I’m aware of several instances (just this year) in which movies hired talented people for a surprisingly low rate, and those people were given minimal compensation for the rental of their expensive equipment and software. I’ve recently learned of one person who worked prep for free, simply to add a high-profile movie to their resume.

This devaluation of the services doesn’t only apply to graphic designers and it’s not limited to Atlanta. It’s happening across the country and includes illustrators, storyboard artists, set designers, art directors and other art-generating crafts that fall under the auspices of the Art Department. Unless you belong to the Art Director’s Guild (IATSE 800) and are an Art Director, the studios have no contractual minimum rate that they are bound to honor, meaning that local unions are helpless to assist these people in their negotiations with producers, and a smart UPM will take advantage of hunger and insecurity every time.

So what’s the fair solution? Well, the first thing is to stop accepting low rates, and if you don’t know what a fair rate is, ask somebody (but probably not a UPM). Stop thinking of other artists as rivals and start thinking of them as colleagues. Talk to each other on a regular basis and find out how to negotiate a fair rate for yourselves because right now all you’re doing is competing with each other in a race to the bottom.


The Time That Drew Lost Reese Witherspoon's Wedding Ring

Did I ever tell you about the time on “Sweet Home Alabama” when I lost Reese Witherspoon’s $4,000 custom-made wedding ring from Tiffany’s? About how I had visions of ending my film career by being stomped to a pulp by Disney’s studio goons and Tiffany’s prissy New York jewelers? I didn’t? Well obviously it all worked out for the best, and it’s hardly as exciting as it sounds, but I figure the statute of limitations has run out and it’s safe to tell the whole story…

It was the first day of almost a month of shooting that we were scheduled to do in the small town of Crawfordville, the seat of government for Taliaferro county (pronounced locally as “Tall-uh-fur”), which was reputed to be the poorest and least populated of Georgia’s 159 counties. Our crew was just coming off of a four-day Thanksgiving vacation and one quick day of shooting south of Atlanta at Starr’s Mill, so we were fairly rested and ready to settle into a long stay at the closest approximation to a backlot available in Atlanta back in 2002. Before our brief holiday vacation we had spent more than two weeks filming the movie’s wedding scene up in Rome at Martha Berry’s grand historic home, just down the road from Berry College. While there, we met a lot of neat people, saw some beautiful scenery and managed to shut down the town’s only sushi restaurant. One benefit of shooting in small towns is that the locals treat film crews like rock stars.
Compared to Rome, Crawfordville was a giant step backwards through forty or fifty years in time. And I don’t mean that in a snobby way, it’s true. While it actually is a one-light town, Crawfordville has buildings and shops that indicate that it was once occupied by businesses and must have been bustling at some point in its past, probably before the state ran an interstate two miles south of main street. About the biggest thing Crawfordville had going for it in those days was the fact that it was the historic hometown of the Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens.

So we were kind of a big deal.

We spent our first day in town shooting a bunch of little street vignettes with various members of our ensemble cast. The first location was outside a little country store at an intersection just across the street from the courthouse. A few blocks west of us, beneath a water tower that had been imported from Texas (just to add character to the town), the grips were lashing speedrail to a Silver Saab convertible belonging to Reese Witherspoon’s character “Melanie”.

The remainder of our day was scheduled for driving shots of Reese zooming through the countryside talking on a cellphone, and I was the poor sucker nominated by my Propmaster (Dwight Benjamin-Creel) and my co-2nd (George Lee) to ride in the follow van, which is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you get to sit in a nice comfy seat for hours and hours while you ride around following the process trailer, occasionally getting out to wipe a few dead bugs off the windshield between the actors and camera, spending the remainder of your time napping or talking to the hair and makeup girls. On the other hand, it’s incredibly boring. Remember: this was in an age before Facebook, Twitter or sexting, and the only videogame on our Nintendo Gameboy was Tetris.

There’s a lot of departmental passive aggressiveness associated with follow vans… when you’re the poor sap stuck in a follow van, listening to makeup girls talk about crystal healing, prayer teas and hot pink chakras, you pray to heaven that your crewmates are working their butts off, just as they, in the extremely unlikely event they actually are burdened with hard work, hope that you’re stuck on a back road trying to scrape a bugs off the windshield of the hero car while the shooting crew tap their feet impatiently.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because the scene outside the country store was only just finishing up.  Our 1st AD Louis D’Esposito announced that that they were sending Reese from makeup over to the process rig, so we pulled all of the props that Reese’s character “Melanie” would need for the driving scene, stuffed them into a variety of resealable plastic bags which I began jamming into the wild assortment of pockets afforded by my signature cargo pants. I turned and hopped on our set bike and zoomed off to meet up with Reese over at the car.
It only took me half a minute to ride down to the process trailer, which was parked about 50 feet from our prop truck so I rolled over to the tailgate of our truck, set the kickstand on my bike and began pulling plastic bags out of what seemed to be dozens of pockets. Watch, cellphone, sunglasses, wedding ring… um, wait…. where was the wedding ring?

Another search of all those pockets: Nope. Again. Nope. Again. NOPE!!

It was the ugliest version of the Macarena you’ve ever seen and by the fifth time of patting myself down I was feeling sick. I gamely called up Dwight and George on the radio and told them that I couldn’t find the ring, that it was lost. Staying calm, we all went through the on-set tub where we normally kept the hero props… with no luck.

The ring was GONE!

Now this wasn’t just any ring. This was a special ring, a ring that Tiffany’s would NEVER want to get out into general circulation because the diamond, while very large and very juicy, was also VERY artificial. Tiffany’s was especially protective of these fake diamond rings, stating that they planned to destroy them at the completion of the film in order to prevent an official fake ring from Tiffany’s from ever making it out in the general circulation.

Fortunately, it turned out that I’d gone and lost the “day-to-day” version of the hero wedding ring, which we used for 99% of Reese’s shots - it was only worth about $4,000. Nothing like the $100,000 diamond Dwight had been saving for close-ups. Of course I knew none of this at the time, so I thought that I had lost the Mother Of All Diamond Rings and was pretty sure that the producers and studio heads wouldn’t be able to write off such a simple mistake — they’d think that your old pal Drew had stolen the darned thing.
As panic began to set in I saw my film career flashing before my eyes, which was kind of a bummer because it started off with me dropping Kevin Costner and bouncing a grenade off of Daniel Baldwin’s forehead.
While Dwight went to get a backup ring from the safe, he sent me to ride back over my path from the truck back to the intersection we’d been set up at all morning. Nobody else on the crew knew what I was doing, pedaling around in big lazy looping circles, head craned down to the ground. Townsfolk were walking up and down the same street and I couldn’t help wondering in terror if one of them had already found the ring, pocketed it, and kept on moving. At one point an older gentleman asked me what I was looking for so I told him that I’d dropped a pencil - I wasn’t about to take anyone into my confidence. If word got out about the missing ring everybody in the county would be downtown in minutes.

After what seemed like 6 hours of searching I had finally looped my way back up to the area where the crew equipment had been staged all morning. All the carts had long since been rolled away, leaving a big empty gravel parking lot. I stared at the ground in utter despair.

And there it was: a little plastic bag with a pretty diamond ring nestled inside. I must have missed a pocket when I was putting all those other plastic bags into my cargo pants.

In that wonderful moment of discovery I experienced a glimmer of the magic that diamond rings must bring to women when their boyfriends propose to them.  If there had been a preacher nearby I would have married that gravel parking lot in a heartbeat.

According to the notes in my timesheet journal, that frantic search only lasted ten minutes but it felt like an eternity… by the time it was over I was all too ready for a long comfortable van ride. I don’t think Reese was ever aware that her old pal Drew had misplaced her prop ring or that in all the excitement he’d forgotten to pull the cellphone headset from her character drawer. Luckily, I used the same Nokia headset her character did in the movie so I let her use my headset for those shots. And no, I won’t sell you that old headset with her earwax in it.

I’m pretty sure that I lost it  :(

Never Mess with Whit

You never forget your first real film set; the directors chairs, the big lights, the fancy cameras, all the people named “JJ” - it can be pretty overwhelming when you realize that you’re standing smack dab in the middle of an actual movie set and someone is yelling at you. LOUDLY.

Get out of the %*$#ing shot!!!

As a PA, you spend a lot of time trying not to stare at the crew as they do their job – it’s terribly fascinating but not the sort of thing you can learn in one day. The most you can hope for is to stay out of the way of the people who do know what they’re doing and to pick up a few bits of knowledge along the way. Some people aren’t cut out for the fast pace and pressure of a film set, but the ones who do have that special quality that I like to call “getting it.” That is to say, they have an instant and inherent comprehension of the processes of a shooting set.

My friend Day Permuy was one of those people who “got it.” I knew the first time that I met her as a fresh-faced PA on the set of a spec shoot for a horror movie that she would have a solid career in the film business. If you’d told me that 15 years later she’d be one of Atlanta’s busiest production coordinators, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Recently, I dropped by the production office of the DeNiro/Travolta show “Killing Season” to spend a few minutes with Permuy to find out the most important lesson she’d learned during her days as a PA. The answer was surprising: “Never mess with Whit.”

She was speaking of Whit Norris, a sound mixer who taught her the classic C-47 game. For those who don’t know, “C-47” is a mock technical specification for clothespins, unique to the motion picture industry – specifically the electric department. Look it up, it’s on Wikipedia.

Electricians will always have a few C-47s clipped to their person because at some point the gaffer will growl into his walkie-talkie, “put some Loving Amber on it.” That’s not a sly dating maneuver; it’s an instruction to attach a sheet of reddish-orange gelatin to the frame in front of a light in order to warm up the skin tones of the actors standing under the lights … and clothespins are cheap and easy clamps for getting that done.

The C-47 game is simple: just slip up behind someone and surreptitiously clip a clothespin to their shirt, or their hat – someplace really, really obvious to everyone else but them. It’s the film set equivalent of a “kick me” sign, and it’s especially fun when you take turns clipping C-47s to the ones already hanging off of an unsuspecting mark. It isn’t uncommon to see a long tail of clothespins hanging off a slow-moving 1st AD.
   
You more often see PAs playing this game and Permuy confesses that she had become rather addicted and had “possibly” developed a reputation as the “clothespin girl” around set. Her only mistake was when she decided that “the student had become the master,” and she tagged Norris with a clothespin. When he discovered the clothespin clipped to his shirt he knew that Permuy was ready for her next level of training.

As the crew headed to lunch, the young PA Permuy was assigned to count the crew and call “last man through” the line. She noticed a group of grips headed down to the parking lot with some toolboxes and thought nothing of it until they returned grinning. As the guys went through the line one of them turned to Permuy and said, “You might want to take a look at your car.”

Permuy strolled down to crew parking expecting to find her car up on blocks, but when she got there it looked fine. She walked around it twice, looking for signs of tampering. Convinced all was well, she went back up to the set and informed the grips that she knew that they’d just been messing with her.

“You’d might better take a closer look,” was the reply she received.

She worriedly snuck back down to look again, but there was no visible tampering on the outside. She opened the car and sat down inside to look around. The radio was still there, the windows were in place, and the seats were fine, what was the big deal?? In frustration she went to rest her head on the steering wheel, and missed.

HOLY CRAP! The car had no steeringwheel!!

She beat a line back up to set to find out where her steering wheel had gone, but the grips weren’t talking. Since she was still fairly green, Permuy had been assigned different tasks near set, but not directly on set, and as a result, she could only look for her missing steering wheel in so many places.

As the day wore on, more and more people from other departments would walk past Permuy and give her a special knowing smile, and each time her panic would ratchet a little tighter … how in the heck was she going to get home without a steering wheel on her car? How did everybody but her know where it was?

Finally, she found an excuse to go directly up into the shooting set. Trying not to look frantic, she scoured the place for her missing steering wheel. Every cart got the once over. She looked to see if it had been raised way up on a stand or mixed into the camera department’s gear. Finally, near defeat, she paused to watch the scene being filmed when her stomach suddenly lurched sideways, for there, on the wall of the set, directly behind the actors, was Permuy’s steering wheel. It had been incorporated into the artwork hanging on the wall and it had been established in the shot! There was no way she could retrieve her steering wheel now because it would wreck the continuity of the scene if it went missing!

For the remaining days they shot at that location, Permuy had to drive to work and let the grips take the steering wheel off her car and hang it on the wall, proving the point: Never mess with Whit.


Mister Peepers School of Infectious Acting

A few weeks ago, I was visiting some friends on the crew of a Disney television movie about an aspiring musical artist. They were in the middle of a scene about the production of a music video, so a lot of the extras had been dressed as film crew. At one point, in the deep background of the scene, a couple of young men playing electricians sauntered over to a pair of coiled extension cords (referred to on a real film set as “stingers”). Unlike real-life movie electricians, these two extras examined the extension cords like cavemen trying to figure out how to eat a Lamborghini. One rubbed his chin in thoughtful contemplation while the other pulled out his iPhone and started typing something. He may have been tweeting about it… you know, because maybe that’s what real movie electricians do?

In their defense, it’s not easy being an extra. The AD team doesn’t always tell the extras what they should be doing during a scene and more often than not they spend more time telling them the things that they shouldn’t be doing (things like: “Get out of the Director’s chair!!” and “Don’t stare at the camera during the take!!” and “Don’t actually talk during this scene, you moron!”).

The next time you watch a scene in a restaurant, turn down the sound and pay attention to the people at tables near the main actors. If it looks like they’re actually having a conversation, they did a good job because in reality they were only pretending to talk; a lot of the time extras don’t even know what their table mates are pretending to say because extras aren’t even allowed to whisper during a scene. The sound mixer is only interested in one thing: recording the actors’ dialogue.

Of course some extras can take things to the other extreme.

Extras should be like ninjas.
They should never stand out and
they should never make noise.
They’re only included in a shot
to add movement and a sense of
normality to a public setting.

While my friends on the Disney crew were wracked with silent giggles at the inauthentic actions of their fake electricians, I was reminded of a similar situation that occurred back in 1999 during the filming of a very powerful scene starring Denzel Washington in the feature film “Remember the Titans”.

We were shooting a scene in which Washington’s character, Coach Herman Boone, is loading the school’s recently desegregated football team onto two school buses bound for football camp. In the story, the first time the teams load onto the buses all the black players got into one bus and all the white players got into the other bus. Realizing that this was a bad start toward building a unified football team, Coach Boone ordered all the players to exit the buses and right there in the parking lot, in front of their parents, he split the boys into their defensive and offensive units. Black boys and white boys, mixed together, then loaded back aboard the newly christened “defensive” and “offensive” buses.
   
What you may not have noticed in the background of this scene is that the extras portraying the parents of the players were placed beside their parked cars, and some of the white parents were instructed to express open surprise and disapproval of Coach Boone’s improvised integration of their children’s football team.
   
As the camera guys worked out a final rehearsal, I walked over and gave Washington his character’s prop wristwatch and then headed over to the craft service cart to grab a snack. As I rounded the back end of a stakebed truck parked behind video village, I noticed my friends Rhea and Darryl standing off to the side, in front of an unattended video monitor. They were laughing their heads off.
   
“What’s going on??” I asked, as I stepped over to look at the monitor.
   
“Watch this guy,” said Rhea, jabbing at the monitor to point out a balding man with glasses. The man was one of the extras playing the parent of a white kid and he was extremely animated. As more of our crew stepped up to watch the monitor someone absentmindedly referred to that extra as “Mister Peepers”.



Now there is, without a doubt, a caste system in film production and like it or not, film crews do derive a lot of entertainment from the more outlandish characters who show up to work as extras. This particular extra was a real doozy. Like my friends on the current day Disney show, we stood there, back in 1999, reeling with gales of silent laughter at his antics.

At one point this animated extra turned and said something to a couple
of nearby extras. They looked at him as if he’d grown two heads, and politely eased back toward their designated car, watching him from over their shoulders.

My curiosity got the better of me. I had to know what Mister Peepers was telling the other extras, so as soon as the 1st AD called “cut” I strolled to the back of the line of period 1970s cars, pretending to inspect our fake license plates along the way. The vehicles were turned sideways to camera, and the plates could have never been seen in the shot, but nobody was really paying attention to me anyway.

As I reached the next to last car I squatted down and pretended to adjust its license plate, but my real intent was of course to eavesdrop on my new favorite extra. I had to suppress a huge grin when I spotted Mister Peepers because he was coaching nearby extras on the finer points of expressing their outrage at Washington’s character.

“You’ve got to gesture… GESTURE!” he scolded, holding his hands in front of his face, palms turned skyward. Each time he said “gesture” his neck would sink down and his hands would push up. His physical expression of outrage looked more like a Monty Python skit about an inept recruiter for the Marcel Marceau Academy of Exaggerated Pantomime.

Concealed from the camera by the car, I stopped trying to hide my grin and stayed crouched down, watching the action unfold from up close as we rolled on the scene again. The initial misgivings of the other extras were apparently giving way to acceptance because one of the women nearest to Mr. Peepers began bobbing her head up and down like she had a chicken bone stuck in her throat, and an older man one lane over started scowling and waving a fist in the air in a figure 8 pattern… and I could have sworn that he was saying “Robble, Robble!!!” over and over again, like a crazed Hamburgler from a 1970s McDonald’s commercial.

Mister Peepers was proving to be quite an effective coach. His style of “acting” was catching on like the Bubonic Plague, and it was infecting the other extras.

We finally had to rat out our favorite extra to an assistant director, who checked with camera to make sure that this expressive extra was sufficiently buried in the background of the scene to prevent the editors from being forced to abandon any important footage featuring our main actors. Nobody likes to do a reshoot.

But don’t feel bad for Mister Peepers. He showed up again a few weeks later, this time as a photographer for a press conference scene at Grady High School. Waving his giant press camera around in the air, he began to extol the virtues of physical mannerisms to the other fake reporters gathered around him. When the second assistant director finally realized what was happening he instructed me to swap Mister Peeper’s big shiny camera for a small reporters notebook and a worn down pencil, then they quickly moved him to the back row.

Our time with Mister Peepers had been all too brief, but it was fun while it lasted. Over the years I’ve wanted to thank him for the entertainment he provided us on that very tough project, so I’d like to dedicate this article to him wherever he might be. Consider it my gesture of appreciation.

I’m doing it with my hands and my neck.