When I tell people I’m a TV producer, I get one of three reactions. Those who know the business shake their heads and give me a look of sympathy, those who are trying to get a TV job, try to score my business card and become Facebook friends, and those who have nothing to do with the industry, want to hear about the celebrities I’ve met, worked or partied with.
In this blog, I’ll do my best to satisfy all three types of readers and give you a first hand behind-the-scenes account of the shoots I produce. Keep it mind these will be my accounts with all of my personal biases, judgments and color commentary which means that my POV will often be very different from the talent’s. In fact, if I do my job well, I will shield them from any unpleasantness and their accounts will always be about the glamorous side of things while mine will be about what ‘really happened’.
That said let me start by dispelling any illusions you might have about “the biz”. Working in the television industry is not glamorous. It is hard work and most often means long hours of thankless toiling. All right. I exaggerate a little. It’s really not that bad. In fact, most days it’s really pretty great and I love it. I even love the months of long hours, hotel rooms and bad coffee punctuated by slow periods of short days and long lunches. Plus, as most writers will tell you, nice and uneventful is boring. Conflict is what turns a nice story into a great one. The same can be said about perfect jobs. If working in TV Land meant steady hours and a regular paycheck no one would be interested in hearing about it. I mean, come on. If your boss is a great guy, your coworkers are all normal, you work regular hours and you're gloriously happy in your job, I don't want to hear about it. I'd much rather find out about the freak in accounting, that twit who talks to herself during meetings or the teen star who threw up in the dressing room.
So, I thought I start by telling you about the worst shoot I've even been on. It was, I'm sorry to say, a shoot I produced, so I have no one to blame but myself on that one. In fact, just thinking about it gives me hives. This is the shoot I lovingly refer to as my "What Do You Do With A Dead Horse?" promo shoot.
A few years ago I was hired to produce a series of network promo spots (those thirty second bumpers TV stations run before and after everything so you never forget which network you're watching) for Scream, Canada's thriller-horror station.
The channel was new and we wanted the promos to be nothing short of amazing. The artistic director, whose talent is only surpassed by his insanity, came up with about half a dozen bunch of wickedly cool horror-movie themed promo spots - each one more complicated to achieve than the next. Big budget effects on a shoestring. TV sets bursting from the ground, a killer’s morphing into a cadaver, nightmarish images - you get the picture.
One of the spots featured three men shoveling out a grave, in a sinister cemetery on a dark, rainy night. After calling around and pricing various options - funny how most cemeteries do NOT want you to bring around forty people to stand around in the rain while three actors dig a grave - we decided it would be cheaper and easier to build our own cemetery. We found a farm just outside of Toronto where the owners were willing to have us come in, build a cemetery, dig holes in the ground, bring a water cistern, lighting strikes, a crane, trailers and a full crew - a feat in itself.
The night before the shoot, after we'd spent all the money to build, dig and light our cemetery, I got a frantic call from the farmer's wife. One of her horses was dying and it was ‘all our fault’. Someone from my crew had apparently left one of the gates open and her favorite horse had gotten into the chicken feed. Chicken feed, she explained, could kill a horse and would surely kill hers. The horse was dying, her husband (who, as it turns out was a mean drunk) was furious, we were going to have to pay the vet bills, get her a new horse, and there was no way they were letting us shoot anything on their property. They wanted us gone.
Did I mention she called at midnight on a Friday night? I managed to talk her down. I convinced her to let us stay. I told her we'd take care of the vet bills and of the horse if, God forbid, it didn't make it. I called a vet. I found out how much a new horse would cost, found someone who might actually be interested in buying a dead horse (yes, there are people out there who take care of that sort of thing) AND I found a back-up location in case the husband did decide to pull the plug.
The horse didn't die. We weren't the ones who'd left the gate open, the drunken farmer had. We shot our spot on schedule and as planned. It poured down rain the entire time and the water we had wanted to carefully control, got into everything. One of our lightning strikes blew, our crane sank a good two feet into the mud and the drunken farmer had to be escorted out of the shot at least half a dozen times. We also scratched a camera lens and the rain damaged over half the tombstones we had rented.
All that for 30 seconds.
Ten years later, I can almost laugh about that night…almost. I don’t do cemetery shoots anymore and I’ll probably never produce a shoot involving man-made rain again, but I still work with the crazy art director. In fact, he’s become one of my closest friends.
M
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