Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Postus Interruptus: Film Is A Visual Medium. Your Work Will Be Obscured To The Fullest Extent Of Available Technology. Thank You For Playing. (Part Two)

I left you a few days ago half-way through talking about how each member of the crew on a movie has the heartfelt conviction that their part in making a movie is the mostest importantest, critical, necessary and worthy part in the process.  I alluded to the sad fact that most of those people are wrong; how could their contribution be the most important when obviously, my contribution is the one that really matters?*

Let's pick up where we left off; a bit more about instances where the location was clearly the star of the scene but the Director, the D.P., and the Editor didn't get the memo.

Interruption ::insert car screeching to a halt sfx::

So I got this far into writing this post and what happens?  My phone rings and it's one of the producers from a job I worked on a couple of weeks ago. And he's calling to say he forgot to thank me for my work; that the footage looks great and the buildings we chose cut perfectly with the interior scenes they shot on the stage.

Who the hell does that? Making people feel all appreciated and shit?  Hell, I'm usually satisfied to just get paid in a reasonable amount of time and this guy's got to act like a total mensch? Way to fuck up a perfectly good rant, Jeff.

Note:  I've got a long-standing policy of not naming names here and I'm half-way keeping to my own rule, but I don't think I'll upset the apple cart by outing someone for being one of the good guys. In fact,  everyone connected with this show is over-the-top, unexpectedly, unnecessarily, stupendously NICE.   Yup, same show; same group of people.


If you pay attention (in a couple of months), I'll be pimping a new network series and you'll be able to put two and two together and figure out exactly who I'm talking about. And, not only are the people making the show really terrific to work for; the show's actually really funny.  You should watch it.  I'll give you a heads up when it starts to air.

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*On a semi-serious note, I remember when Vanilla Sky was released and the BIG thing they all talked about in the publicity was the scene where Tom Cruise finds himself alone in a completely deserted Times Square.  It's a spectacular sequence and a jaw dropping bit of imagery.  And every time it got talked about it was about how this person or that person (Director, Star, Producer, Film Commissioner, etc.) pulled off a miracle to make it happen. And while I don't doubt that each of those people was directly involved to an unusual degree, it might have been nice if anyone acknowledged that the movie even had a Location Manager. The credits list more than one NY Location Manager and I honestly don't remember who did what on that show, but suffice it to say, pulling that off took an impressively HUGE amount of work for the Locations Dept.  Excellent work, guys!

2 comments:

vince said...

Being paid is good, but being paid when working with great people is awesome.

Unknown said...

I gotta change jobs! ::sigh::