The Boy Scout motto 'Be Prepared' can be applied to anything in life, but it is nowhere more required or more often forgotten, than by young filmmakers, this one included!
Sometimes it happens because too few people are saddled with too many responsibilities (a common plight for young filmmakers with more vision than money to get their ideas up on the screen). Other times (and for this there is NO EXCUSE) a person responsible for a task or a group of tasks either fails to prepare a detailed checklist of what has to be done or they make the list and then don't check it and double check it and triple check it to make sure every item on the list is done and done properly!
Two experiences as a young director taught me this lesson well...
After college, I became staff television director for a big Chicago ad agency, working out of their Hollywood office. Their most important client was hosting a New Year's Eve national television special. I would direct. The agency owner's son, a guy named Ted, was producer. Talent schedules meant the show would have to be pre-taped in London. Arrangements were made with a London producer with whom the Agency had worked in the past. He would arrange the studio, equipment, crew, set construction, everything. The Agency brass, my boss Ted (the producer), and myself would just jaunt across the pond a day before the shoot, rest up, do the shoot the next day, take in a day of holiday shopping, then fly home. Simple, right? (Hint...Don't answer that yet!)
It's early December. We arrive in Merry Ole' England, decked out for Christmas, covered in a blanket of fresh snow (a page out of a Dickens novel (okay I tend to romanticize a tad). We check into the VERY romantic Savoy Hotel (the most famous, if not also most expensive hotel in London). The agency knows how to do things first class! After a sumptuos dinner we take in a play at the equally famous Savoy Theater next door. Before the play begins we stand and sing "God Save The Queen" to the refrain of the American patriotic song "My Country Tis of Thee". A little wierd. Very British! I like it! The next morning dawns cold and snowy. I'm grateful we have nothing planned but to rest up for the shoot tomorrow. Later I plan to check out the legendary English pubs I've heard so much about, sit by a roaring fire, maybe listen to some Shakespear over an English pint! Scrap that! After breakfast my producer Ted casually mentions he's going to go see the studio where they're getting ready for our shoot the next day. He invites me to come along. I reply 'Sure'! (I have a choice?!)
We take a cab, one of those boxy black numbers for which London was famous, to the address where the big set for tomorrow's taping is to be set up this afternoon. The cabby stops. Ted looks around. There is nothing that looks remotely like a TV studio in any direction. Ted double checks the address with the cabby, who assures us this IS the address we gave him. We get out, perplexed. Just then one of us notices a small sign at the top of an alley with the numerals of the address we're looking for. The alley descends for a couple hundred yards to a small door over which a non-descript sign bears the name of the studio where we are supposed to be. I can tell from his expression that this is NOT what Ted expected.
We go inside to find a small stage barely large enough for a low budget commercial. Several dozen dancers, musicians, and costumed extras are in the middle of shooting a rock band music video. Cigarette smoke and atmospheric fog mix in the air, adding to the clostrophobia. Ted looks at me and says, "We're in trouble!"
In less than 24 hours, the Agency's leading client will be arriving to shoot a prime-time television special for global broadcast and the best facilities we can muster is a back alley music video garage studio?!! Whether or not our client would have been upset by the obviously inferior condition of the studio and blamed it on the Agency's incompetence is inmaterial. Ted is convinced that disaster looms in the client relations department. People lose their jobs over stuff like this!
This is pre-cell phone London. We rush back to the hotel. Ted takes an empty phone booth in the lobby and
calls upstairs to inform the Agency brass of the situation. He fumes about the London producer they hired to make the arrangements. But at the moment the priority is tomorrow. Ted is informed in no uncertain terms that He has to do whatever he has to and correct the situation. Cost is not a consideration. Ted hangs up to find that the man he has just verbally excoriated is in the next phone booth, having overheard Ted's rant on the phone. The exchange that follows is not pleasant. But then comes the real challenge. This is London, already noon on the day before we have to shoot. Where can we find a major studio that can be booked on short notice, assemble a crew, move the set across town, set it up, light it and prep the show in less than 24 hours and make it all seem to anyone walking in tomorrow that this was the plan all along?!
It's amazing what can happen when those five words are spoken "cost is not a consideration"! A chunk of heaven and earth can, and in this case, DOES get moved...moved across town and into the most prestigious television studio complex in London. On their backlot is a complete Shakespearean London set that includes a full-scale Globe Theater. The stage we are assigned is one of the biggest television studios in London, the same stage where Julie Andrews holiday music specials have been filmed. They even call it The Julie Andrews Studio. The set is assembled over night, propped, lit and reset by morning. The British Director's Guild grants me a special dispensation so I can direct a London union studio crew. I learn the British term 'vision mixer', what they call our TD (the Technical Director who switches cameras in the booth). I learn that British crews take Tea Time seriously and so does their union. The next morning, the talent arrives, never suspecting this wasn't the studio booked for the shoot all along. We change the talent call time by two hours, but no one suspects the reason. For me, the whole thing is a great experience working in a famous studio with a crew of professionals who all talk with the same accent as my darling wife Gloria (who's also British). Unlike some American crews, no one here seems to look down on a very young director (I'm 27 and still look 18 at the time). The shoot goes well. Everyone goes home happy. The Agency prestige is still intact. Everyone keeps their job (being the owner's son saves Ted). All that is left behind in London is a boatload of cash that didn't have to be spent had someone planned more carefully, had anyone checked and double checked details, had those in charge not waited until the last minute to discover disaster loomed because of someone's incompetence! My excuse was that I was still a wet-behind-the-ears kid who didn't know any better. But I was learning fast...!
Well...maybe not THAT fast. Fast forward a couple of years. I'm shooting a Revolutionary War musical drama at historic Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. The producer is a nice enough guy, runs the west coast office of the agency where I'm a director, but way over his head on a big period drama.
We have been shooting scenes for several days in historic locations in the area. But the most important scenes are set inside the Fort itself. One problem (okay, call it a challenge!). Fort Ticonderoga is one of upstate New York's most popular tourist attrations. The curators will only shut down the fort from tourists for ONE DAY! I scout the Fort several times, prepare storyboards of every scene, map out a detailed schedule that will get everything shot in one very long shoot day and night. We can do this! We have meetings with the department heads. Nothing is left to chance...or so I think as I get up at 3:00am on the morning of the Fort shoot.
I ride with the DP and camera crew out to the site. It's pitch black in the dense forests that surround the national park where the Fort silently looms over the landscape.
At 4:00 am, a caravan of production trucks pulls into the parking lot, just beyond the gates of the empty Fort. There's no one around, not even a night guard. The grip crew set up a bank of floodlights, powered by a portable generator, illuminating a small army of technicians and workers who begin unloading equipment, setting up tents for makeup, wardrobe, props and catering. By 5:00 am another caravan of buses and cars has delivered the cast and 200 extras for makeup and wardrobe. We're on schedule. A few minues later, the executive producers ('the money suits', I call them) arrive to watch us work. We're spending their money. I understand.
About this time, the Director of Photography comes up to me and asks, "Who has the key to the Fort?" I have a crew of 100 and a cast of 200 all expecting to walk through those gates any minute, not to mention the frugal minded cost-conscious money suits who have arrived 'to watch'. This is not a question I want to hear! I respond in as calm a voice as I can, "I don't know. I'll find out." I hurry off to find my producer who suddenly realizes nobody, certainly not he, bothered to make sure the gatekeeper would show up at 5:00 in the morning to let us in. It never occured to him! We don't even have a name or an after hours phone number for ANYONE from the Fort. Now I AM in a panic. If the money dudes discover our incompetence while the clock is ticking on THEIR money, let's just say 'it will not go well'!
I instruct my department heads to do some of the work here in the parking lot that they were planning on doing after they got inside the fort - to stall for time. (That plan will only work for so long though and not for all departments. It's rather hard to focus lights without being in the room where you want to put them!). But I'll do anything to keep from having everyone crowd around the locked gates just waiting! I figure as long as the exec producers see everyone doing 'stuff' they won't suspect anything and therefore won't ask any questions, either. I also start praying!
Drawing on my mid-western logic, I conclude that the gatekeeper likely lives in one of the houses we passed along the road leading to the fort. This is not a big town! We send one of the assistant directors to knock on doors. It's still dark, just past 5:30 in the morning! When was the last time someone pounded on YOUR door at 5:30 in the morning?! We consider breaking the lock, but decide doing that might set off alarms and summon the local police who would arrest us all (or maybe just me!) for tresspasing! How would that go down?! We keep stalling instead. Maybe we'll get lucky and find the gatekeeper at home.
About six o'clock a minor miracle occurs. I take that back...For me it is a BIG miracle! The gatekeeper just shows up on his own. Apparently he woke up, wondered why no one from the film company had asked for the gate key, and just decided to come on down and make sure everything was okay! Was he a sight for sore eyes!!! There IS a God!
Disaser was averted. The executive producers never suspected our incompetence. My DP DID extract a small pint of blood for losing an hour of his lighting set up time. But all in all, the rest of the day was a success...just barely!!!
Lessons? Don't stretch yourself too far. Have enough people on whatever you're doing so each one can do their job well. Don't put someone in a job they aren't qualified to do. If they happen to be the nephew of the boss or a big investor, then give them an assistant who knows what needs to be done and can discreetly make sure it gets done without having to take credit though they did the real work! Think through every step of every aspect of a shoot or an event or a stage performance. Plan for things to go wrong. They will. They ALWAYS will. But if you plan well, if you build redundancy (backup) into your procedures and your people, you'll minimize the potential for disaster when bad things happen. You'll also make life a lot easier for you and everyone else. You might even end up having fun! Look at it this way, 'The devil's only in the details unless you get there first!"
