I had very few offers for work in 1994. My phone had just stopped ringing. After a decade of steady freelance work, now months went by between jobs. I wondered what I was doing wrong. While I was home waiting for the phone to ring, I got an offer for a five-week job as the first assistant director on a 16mm shoot for a new computer game called, The Last Express, being produced by Smoking Car Productions in San Francisco. I was wholly unfamiliar with computer games. I had never played one. Although the job paid less than half my usual rate, aspects of this project intrigued me. After years spent making thirty-second TV commercials, this was a very different assignment. The Last Express was the brainchild on a fellow named Jordan Mechner. He’d made his name in computer games by filming his brother and rotoscoping the images to produce Continue Reading

Once upon a time I found myself on a shoot for the southern Californian restaurant chain, the Hamburger Hamlet. The commercial featured four very successful corporate executives, each of whom had two or three sentences that they had to deliver in front of the camera. One of the executives – a man of about fifty in an Italian tailored suit, was a vice-president at the Disney Corporation. He was, no doubt, a successful and accomplished corporate jet-setter – clearly at home in the executive board room. But on the soundstage, he was a fish out of water. He could not, for the life of him, deliver one useable take. The pressure of being before the cameras, under the bright lights, surrounded by bored grips and electricians dressed in t-shirts, Levi’s and work boots, put him out of his comfort zone. He could neither read the teleprompter nor remember his lines. Continue Reading

It’s hard to walk away from your dreams. I haven’t worked in the film industry for decades. It wasn’t easy leaving it all behind. In an effort to get on with my life, I deleted the names and phone numbers of hundreds of beloved crew members from my rolodex. Ironically, I still remember quite a few of them. Ultimately, I burned the many call sheets I had carefully preserved to document my work experience – saved for the day when I would apply for membership in the Director’s Guild of America. That day never came. Thanks to so-called social media, I’ve reunited with a bunch of beloved former co-workers and crew members, many of whom I haven’t seen in ages. I had the pleasure of working in the industry back when we still served the crew an excellent hot lunch on china plates with cloth napkins. We paid people their union Continue Reading

When I worked for James Productions in San Francisco, many of the advertisers for whom we made TV commercials were based in the Midwest. It was an ongoing chore, job after job, driving around in Boyd’s white Jeep Cherokee, searching the San Francisco Bay Area for filming locations that could pass for being in the Midwest. But Boyd hated long drives and sitting in traffic – so much so that he developed a remarkable knack for only selecting locations north of the Golden Gate Bridge, close to his home in San Rafael. A day of scouting locations with Boyd was so routine that several of location scouts who worked with us, told me stories that corroborated my own personal experiences. The day would invariably go something like this: They’d spend the morning driving around, checking out prospective locations, with Boyd finding insurmountable problems with every site they visited. Around one Continue Reading

Table-top cinematography is a specialized genre of TV commercials – a kind of food pornography – featuring up-close and intimate, ultra-glamour shots that make you want to eat what you see. “I make my living basically taking food and painting a reality with it,” Michael Somoroff, a tabletop director with MacGuffins Films in New York, told the New York Times. “And if I succeed in a given moment, you’re going to go buy that dish because you’re going to identify with the experience we’ve created. To do that with something as banal as food is the challenge. I mean, it’s easy to go out and shoot a beautiful sunset or a beautiful girl. They’re beautiful, O.K.?” For many of these advertisers, the tv commercials are so essential to their corporate survival, that they can’t stay in business without them. “If you come off television, when your sales dip, it takes Continue Reading

In the 1960s, one of the guys who worked for Bill Maley’s Film Producers Services in San Rafael, California, was a young Midwesterner named James Theodore Mansen. Bill Maley was ten years older than Jim. Jim was Bill’s protege, then his producer, and later his soundman. If truth be told, Bill Maley had acquired a reputation for being a somewhat unscrupulous businessman. I’d heard reports that Bill’s insurance was often substandard, or that he was uninsured – or that he sometimes didn’t report his jobs to local 16, so he could pocket the pension and welfare contribution. One crew member described Bill Maley’s business habits as “screwy” and “suspect.” Others confided that he “didn’t pay his bills.” When people were hired to work on a job and they learned that Bill Maley was handling the payroll, they sometimes asked to be paid in advance. His reputation preceded him. “You never Continue Reading

In November of 1987, I worked as an assistant to the tv commercial art director, Barry Gelber, on a spot for the Caesar’s Palace casino in Las Vegas. The concept for the commercial involved an ancient Egyptian costume drama in which Cleopatra floats a freshly cut lotus flower onto the surface of a pond. Then – without an edit – the same flower is lifted out of the water by a 20th-century Las Vegas showgirl, as the camera pulls back to reveal the interior of the Caesar’s Palace casino. For the film crew, this was a location, not a vacation. There was little time for drinking, gambling, or floor shows. We stayed in the fancy hotel rooms on the top floors of the casino. When we finished our workday, we dined in the hotel restaurant in the casino downstairs. On my way to bed, passing through the casino to the Continue Reading

In the 1980s, before cellular telephones became commonplace, at the end of the shoot day, I would take tomorrow’s call sheet and half a dozen rolls of quarters, and park myself for several hours in a chair in front of a pay phone in the hotel lobby. I would proceed to call each crew member and inform them of their call time for the next day. And often, when I finished my fifty phone calls, the first assistant director would walk down to the lobby and hand me a revised call sheet with different call times. And I’d make the fifty calls again. My father was a first-generation American and career labor lawyer. He had a remarkable memory which served him well as an attorney. I inherited his gift for memorization and recollection. In that time before the internet and computers, my ability to quickly memorize and recall, proved to Continue Reading

I had the pleasure of working with Bill Maley late in his career, after he had been in the film business for more than three decades. I started hiring him as a gaffer in the late 1980s, when he was approaching the age of sixty. With a twinkle in his eye and a cigarette between his thin lips, Bill Maley was a veritable leprechaun of a man – of almost stereotypical Irish American extraction, and practically a caricature of himself. At this time, Bill wasn’t getting called for as many jobs as he had in the old days. A younger generation of gaffers (including his own son, Mike) were getting those calls now – largely because Bill Maley was, simply put, a “high-maintenance” crew member. “Bill Maley was as hard as friggin’ nails,” one local freelance cameraman admitted. “He had a real edge to him. And he was simply vicious Continue Reading

Stewart Barbee’s family moved from Portsmouth, Virginia, to Encino, California, north of Los Angeles, in the early 1950s. The San Fernando Valley was still considered “the country” in those days ­– wide open spaces, citrus orchards, and farmland. The Barbees lived in a classic ranch style house. Encino was a movie town populated by people who worked in the film business. Stewart and his two brothers found themselves the classmates of the sons and daughters of writers, directors, producers, and actor “My very first day of school and Encino grammar school, a young red-headed kid came up to me before they even the first bell rang for class, and he said, ‘My dad is Roy Rogers.'” Stewart didn’t believe him. “Oh yeah?” he said facetiously, “My daddy’s Hopalong Cassidy!’ And the boy said, “No he isn’t.” And Stewart said, “Yes, he is!” And the boys argued back and forth. “Then Continue Reading