|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jeff Balis - Oven Grinders
Boy does it feel good to be out from under the scrutinizing eye of the TV show. Unfortunately, the fact that I come into the clear means that Jones and Biagi move into the hot seat-all in the name of entertainment. As the series winds down, my hope was that the TV show would begin to depict some of our triumphs as it endlessly parades our mistakes. Am I crazy for thinking that it's interesting to watch people succeeding every once in awhile? I guess so.
Since there is no relief in this episode, I want to highlight one "triumph" that I think is worthy of note. It concerns a guy named Pete Jones, and it regards a little conflict between myself and co-worker Pat Peach. For whatever reason, Pat and I were stepping on each others' toes for the first few week of shooting. I was getting into his business and it was driving him crazy, and visa versa. Our interference was not helping the film (though it wasn't a conflict of cataclysmic proportions either). We were just being pains in the ass, and it was disrupting Pete's ability to direct the film.
Sensing the problem and taking the initiative to intercede, Pete called a dinner between Pat and I at Oven Grinders in Lincoln Park to sort this shit out. Things with Pat and I weren't great, but they were unspoken, and there is always a danger in bringing silent tensions to a head. Since our lines of "power" were so unclear, I was nervous that this meal could make things worse. I had gotten to know Pete pretty well by this point and thought he was a sharp, talented guy. But it wasn't until after this dinner that I knew just how good Pete was. Pete sat Pat and me down and told us how we weren't working for him, that our bickering was getting in his way, and that we needed to resolve this immediately. With expert negotiation skills, Pete helped us settle our differences. I learned how I was pissing off Pat and where he wanted me to take a step back. He learned the same about me. Pat didn't want me breathing over his neck on production issues, and I wanted more freedom to deal with Pete on the creative issues. I was surprised how ready we both were to agree. And though you may never see Pete directing actors on the show, know at least that he is a wonderful diplomat and statesman. He is a great director too (as you'll see from the film).
In case you are wondering why this dinner didn't make the show, it's because there wasn't a camera there. I can't remember if we overtly tried to avoid the camera for the dinner or not (my suspicion is we did), but this dinner never would have worked with the cameras there. Our conversation required a level of honesty by all participants that never would have been possible with a camera. The cameras tend to encourage one to guard ones vulnerabilities, and that wouldn't work for a conversation as personal as this. Completely to Pete's credit, he guided us to put down our defenses and solve our problems for the good of the film. That is exactly what we did, and I am the first to admit that Pat's and my conflict disappeared the very next day.
To go a bit further, I'd like to bring something up that the audience doesn't see, and something for which I was chastised for trying to bring to light. Through months of heavy camera coverage , I have learned quite a bit about how the documentary process affects us "subjects" and how we do our jobs-i.e. the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As the person on the film who worked for LivePlanet-one of the companies making the TV show as well as the film- part of my job was to make sure that the TV cameras had the access they wanted, within reason. This was all fine and well, until I came to a certain realization on set. People weren't telling me the truth with the cameras around. I would ask a crewmembers how things were going, and if there was a camera around, they would answer me cheerfully (and as I later learned) falsely. Then they would walk up to me later with the real story (obviously this wasn't true in all instances, but in a significant minority of them). I soon realized that if I was going to have an accurate knowledge of how the set was running (which is a large part of my job), I couldn't have all of my conversations on camera. As much as I would get reprimanded if I avoided the cameras, I was more afraid of some giant crew mutiny arising, and my only answer to Chris being "everything seemed fine; I thought things were okay." As I'm sure you can tell if you've been watching the show, that response would not have been received well.
Since this is a business ruled by fear, I made the decision early on to do as much of my job as I could open to the cameras, but I made sure that I occasionally checked under the hood sans camera to see what was really brewing. In truth, this became the hardest part of my job. I felt like I was betraying the TV show to a certain extent, but frankly I didn't see any other choice. My allegiance was 100% to the movie, and I'd rather take bullets for having conversations off camera than for botching the film.
I would like to apologize to the viewer, therefore, for the moments of this experience that you don't see-not because the editors don't show you, but because they couldn't show you even if they wanted to. I just didn't see any other way around it. And when there are moments when you scream to yourself, "why the hell didn't he do that!"- I probably did, just off camera.
On an unrelated note, I'd like to add my perspective to a scene in Episode 10 where we don't "make the day" when shooting a scene with the two kids. The show makes it look like we fumbled this scene, and as I recall, Chris Moore really came down on us (me) for not finishing what we had scheduled.
As I wrote in an earlier byline, scenes between the two kids were very difficult to shoot; they just don't have the same experience, memory, and concentration that adult actors have. As a result, the kids needed to be covered in easily edited singles, and often times Pete would have the kids go over each line until they got it right. This is not to slight our child actors at all-they were truly fantastic and add an electricity to the film that older actors just don't have.
After the day under the El, we knew that we needed to budget a lot of extra time for any dialogue scenes with just the two kids, and this scene in the bedroom was the next one up. Despite our plans, though, we still found ourselves behind and running out of time. Bruce came up to us and said, "we need to move on to the next scene if we are going to make the day." We technically might have had enough coverage to make the scene passable, but Pete felt that we really didn't have the scene yet. Pat and I felt that we needed to get this scene, and if we could possibly postpone what was scheduled for the rest of the day, we should. We looked at the schedule, saw that we could move a scene with Adi and Aidan to another day (though we'd have to shoot it on the front porch instead of in the bedroom), and decided to keep shooting the scene we were on.
Although the show makes it look like we botched the day, and Chris came down on me pretty hard for our decision to fall behind, at the time and to this day, I disagree completely. We engaged in a bit of triage, and I think we made the right decision. We made sure that the scene we were bumping could be picked up on another day. We determined that the scene we were shooting was of such significance that it was worth disrupting the already tight future schedule. And we told Pete to block out thoughts of the schedule and nail the scene.
In my opinion, this turned out to be one of the best scenes in the movie. Featherman (the editor) and Pete had to edit the hell out of the scene to make it work from a million different takes, but as far as I'm concerned, it works brilliantly. The energy of the kids in the scene is fantastic, and it really shows the consequences of Aidan's character on the relationship between the two boys. These are the kinds of decisions that need to be made on the fly, but don't necessarily stand up well to second-guessing. I think we made the right call. Did this make a future day in the schedule even more difficult? Yes. Was it worth it? Completely. Do I ask myself a lot of questions and then answer them? Yes. Am I happy about this? Not really.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
