Making Movies by Sidney Lumet

Author:Sidney Lumet [Lumet, Sidney]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-76366-2
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2010-08-31T20:00:00+00:00

“Stunts: O/C” in section 5 means no stunts, because stunts have been accounted for in section 3. Unlike the teamsters, stunt people don’t have to have their instructions repeated.

Because of the time pressure, that Sunday’s shooting involved a great many people. But all location work requires a huge crew. Even a small, low-budget picture like Running on Empty needed the following for one location day: one grip truck, one electric truck, one prop truck, one generator truck, one makeup and hair truck, and two campers. Campers are portable dressing rooms for the actors. Each contains three compartments, so three actors can share it. I get one of the compartments for my lunch-hour snooze. Every camper requires one union teamster to drive it, so you try to keep the campers to a minimum. Then add the three station wagons that brought the actors to the location. If extras are being used and the location’s outside the city, as Running on Empty was, a bus must transport them. Each bus has room for forty-nine extras. You must use up to one hundred twenty extras who are union members; if your crowd is larger, you can use local people. Then there’s the honey wagon, four portable toilets built into one truck. We’re now up to twelve trucks, which means not only twelve drivers but parking problems. So add a teamster captain and an assistant teamster captain. Add one or two additional ADs and three or four additional PAs. Add two station wagons to transport them. Add six security men, two per shift, three shifts if you’re on that location overnight. Add two to four local off-duty cops to control traffic if you’re using streets or need police barricades.

In addition, when on location, we also use a rigging crew. On a small picture, the rigging crew consists of two electricians and two grips. They work in advance of us, the shooting crew. Depending on how much lighting the location will need, they arrive one, two, sometimes three days ahead of us. They place all the major lamps in position. Every minute saved by prerigging means hours saved when the enormous shooting crew arrives.

On Prince of the City, we had 135 locations. We had a 52-day schedule. That meant we had to average a little over two locations per day! In addition to a rigging crew of four electricians and three grips, we had a clean-up crew. After we finished shooting, a crew of two electricians and two grips came in to take the lights down, since the rigging crew was already working on the next location. Furthermore, if a wall had been repainted, we had to restore it to the original color.

I haven’t mentioned the caterer. If we want to hold the lunch hour to an hour, it’s essential that food be ready when we break. The lunch hour doesn’t officially start until the last man in line on the crew has been served. If you take only a half-hour lunch break, the crew gets paid more.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.