Film School (24 page)

A production assistant approaches and tells Pete and Sutherland they're wanted in a meeting. They disappear. I walk onto the set and find the director, James Frawley, and ask him if I can observe. He motions to an empty chair next to him. “Sit there. You can watch all you want.” Frawley is a gentle bear. He's extremely clock-conscious but relaxed. He's been directing television shows since he got his start helming THE MONKEES back in the 1960s. He's been working in the business for more than forty years! I watched reruns of THE MONKEES when I was a little kid.

We're joined by the script supervisor, and the three of us sit in front of the video monitors as Frawley directs Baldwin and an actress in the exterior night limo scene (even though everything is staged inside the soundstage).

Baldwin flubs a line. He apologizes, then gets it right. The scene wraps. I'm surprised to find the “video village,” the spot where Frawley is, isn't within eyesight of the set. Frawley communicates by intercom to the actors. I was expecting the director to be hovering close to the action, but time is money, and the soundstage has several sets, and moving the video village would obviously take time.

After my extended conversation with Sutherland, I'm stoked. And I'm finding Frawley is a gentleman. He says he sometimes teaches at USC, and he offers me some pointers on camera placement. He also talks about the importance of keeping the energy up on the scene and not wasting time. I'm taken aback because here's a guy who's been on the job for forty years, and if he's faking his enthusiasm for teaching me, he's a good actor.

I'm also enjoying this entry into the real world. My chief complaint with film school students is the interminable delays in decisionmaking. No such problem with Frawley. He's wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. The only people he doesn't rush are the actors.

The next scene is set in DIRTY SEXY MONEY's office set—a gorgeous sprawling office that “overlooks” New York City, thanks to a large hanging scrim of the Manhattan skyline. It's a long scene with Sutherland and Pete. Sutherland plays the patriarch of a wealthy New York family. Pete plays an earnest young lawyer who is hired to mind the family's business. Frawley rehearses the two for a few minutes. The scene revolves around Sutherland hiding information. When the rehearsal is done, the crew rushes in and marks locations and readies the lighting. The entire crew works like honeybees for a few moments, then the set is ready. It's already approaching 7
P.M.
on a Friday night. Pete and Sutherland take their places. Frawley says “action,” and through the monitors I'm watching a wide shot of my pal engage in a long dialogue with the great Donald Sutherland. Sutherland seems flat in the first wide shot, and the second. There's a technical issue—a microphone boom drops into the shot. Frawley sets up reverses to be used in editing. Then Frawley goes in for close-ups of each. These are the money shots for both actors. Pete is Mr. Steady, and his performances are intense. Sutherland looks tired and somewhat irritable. Then Frawley focuses on Sutherland. Frawley shoots several takes, none of them memorable. The shooting started later than scheduled because of the rewrite and now Sutherland makes it known that he would like to be done for the day. There's a sense of nervousness on the set. Pete looks fresh and isn't fading at all. Another take is stymied because the sound boom drops into the shot again. Frawley quietly asks Sutherland for another go. Sutherland agrees and rather theatrically announces that this will be his last take. Then as we film, Sutherland lets loose. His flatness disappears. He's suddenly—just like that!—commanding the scene. His blindingly white teeth grin and snap like a wolf's fangs. He circles and looks ready to pounce. There's so much more energy in this take. I sense Pete upping his game, too. The scene is one of conflict barely disguised, and I can feel the energy behind the video monitors. The quality of the take is head and shoulders above any of the others. It's as if Sutherland is showing off:
This is how it's done, boys and girls.
When Frawley yells “Cut!” there's excitement on the set. But Frawley and the script supervisor quickly confer. They're worried. Did the boom drop into the shot again? They look at me. I'd been watching the upper frame of the monitors like a hawk, just waiting for that boom to edge into the frame. “No boom,” I say confidently. Frawley smiles. “Check the gate,” he tells the camera operator. When he reports back that the camera gate is clean of debris, Frawley yells out: “Moving on!” The scene is done. The crew applauds. Sutherland heads for the exit.

When I drive out of the Paramount lot, I'm riding high. The professionalism and speed were exhilarating. I got to watch one of the all-time great American actors engage in a verbal battle with my friend, another great American actor, and ride shotgun with a director who has four decades of experience on a set.

For the whole day I forgot about worrying about anything. I didn't search for words or have any doubts about my mental acuity. I didn't doubt my brain. At one point, Sutherland came and spoke to Frawley and invited him and his wife to brunch. After Sutherland walked away, Frawley beamed and said to the script supervisor and me, “Not bad! I just got invited to brunch with Donald Sutherland!” I paused a moment, then noted patronizingly, “Yeah, well, he already asked me, but I couldn't make it.”

It was obviously an insubordinate comment coming from a mere grad student, but the timing and cheekiness appealed to Frawley greatly. He roared with laughter.

It was one week since I checked into UCLA. I felt blessed.

D
an is still wrestling with his script. His ideas change by the day. His stories involve a whiskey-drinking young man wooing a young woman, and (often) an overbearing asshole father. The story changes dramatically from day to day. Dan keeps reassuring me everything will be fine. He has to have a script ready to start shooting in two weeks, which means finding actors, a location, props, etc. We're both producing the film, but with no idea of what our film is, there's no producing to do. Most of the other partnerships are already casting actors and scouting locations and preparing shooting sites.

We meet with Pablo in the second week. Pablo is concerned we are falling behind. He urges Dan to finalize his script. After the meeting, I sit with Dan on a park bench on one of the shady lawns near the film school and ask him to “talk the story out.” I offer to transcribe it if that will help. He doesn't accept the offer.

Dan doesn't share what he's thinking. Every day we're another day further behind. Dan keeps saying, “Don't worry, it will all be fine.”

The saving grace of the week is that we get our cameras. They're well-worn sixteen-millimeter German-made Arriflex cameras. When the equipment is handed out, everyone in class is excited, and we're all a bit intimidated. I've never used a film motion picture camera. It's a throwback to the prevideo age. We learn how to thread film through the camera, how to make certain there is just enough slack in the film loop so as not to bind in the internal mechanism. I enjoy taking apart our camera. The Arriflex dates back decades—it's older than I am—and it still keeps working, albeit not without constant tinkering by an elderly Russian repairman USC keeps on staff, who cusses and bemoans our general lack of any common sense.

We are strictly limited in the amount of film we can shoot. Our sixteen-millimeter cameras use one hundred-foot rolls, which gives us about two-and-a-half minutes of shooting per roll.

For each film in 508, we are allowed eleven rolls of film, or eleven hundred feet of film. That's only about thirty minutes. We have three weekends to shoot. The maximum length of the finished film is 5:40.

This is the genius of 508. Because we're no longer shooting video and we're allocated a limited amount of film, we can no longer use the camera like we're spraying water from a hose. We have a roughly five-to-one ratio of rough footage to finished product. This means we must budget our shooting time. The 507 days of shooting a scene over and over and over are long gone. Now we must plan carefully and shoot carefully.

Many of my classmates are worried about the restriction. I like it, knowing it will keep us on a budget. Everyone, including me, is worried about getting an image back on film. Using film requires a leap of faith. Unlike video, there's no way to check quickly if a shot worked. With film, we shoot it, then send it to a developer and get the dailies back a few days later. If anything is amiss—if the exposure is off, if the film wasn't loaded properly, if there's a hair or dirt in the camera, if the film got exposed to daylight while loading it, if the focus is off, if the framing is off, if the camera gets jostled, if there's something in the background that's distracting, if the actor has a booger in his nose—it all gets discovered days after the filming is done.

And our cameras don't cover for us. There's nothing automatic with them. Everything must be measured before pushing the trigger. To shoot film, we need to determine the amount of light on a set using a light meter. Dan and I bought a good light meter for about $300, and we'll find out how adept we are at using it. We must set the film speed, the f-stop, the focus manually.

We're shooting sixteen-millimeter, a smaller and cheaper film stock than thirty-five-millimeter, which is used in most feature films. The sixteen-millimeter film is sixteen millimeters wide, thirty-five-millimeter film is thirty-five millimeters wide, or about one-and-three-eighths inches. All film is projected at twenty-four frames per second. Our sixteen-millimeter stock has forty frames per foot of film.

It costs about $110 to buy and develop a one hundred-foot roll of sixteen-millimeter film. For that, we get less than three minutes of images. No sound, of course. That we'll record later.

The cost of the film and processing is covered by our tuition. If we wanted to shoot our 508 films by ourselves, without the support of the school, each of our short films would cost more than a thousand bucks just in film and developing costs.

Sixteen-millimeter film is used in film schools because it's cheaper than thirty-five-millimeter and the cameras are much smaller and vastly more affordable. However, sixteen-millimeter picture quality isn't as good as thirty-five-millimeter. The image is much smaller, which means there's correspondingly less information projected onto a screen. That's why sixteen-millimeter is used primarily in television and in some documentaries—and in only a handful of feature films. The Oscar-winning film THE HURT LOCKER was shot on sixteen-millimeter to keep costs down. The filmmakers used multiple cameras for every shot and shot a whopping
million
feet of film for a 131-minute feature. Put another way, they shot more than seventy six hundred feet of film for every minute of screen time. We're allowed two hundred feet of film for a minute of screen time.

It shows just how carefully we have to plan our shooting. It feels like we're going on a survivalist's hiking trip and we have the bare minimum of supplies.

In 508, we'll each shoot over three weekends. The first weekend we'll shoot three hundred feet; the next two weekends we'll get four hundred feet each.

We get our equipment, and our camera comes with a heavy-duty tripod and a battery pack that looks like a scuba-diving weight belt. Dan and I also check out lights and electrical cables and flags (which block light) and filters and T-stands (which hold flags and filters). It's a lot of equipment. It's nice to have my Suburban. All the gear won't fit in Dan's smaller sedan.

While we're getting our camera, I spend a little time with the ogre-like Russian who works in the camera department. He's in his seventies and was a cameraman in the Soviet Union way back in the day, and his reputation is akin to the Hunchback of Notre Dame's. He scares many of the students because he often yells at them and mutters obscenities beneath his breath.

His favorite word is
bullshit
—it sounds like
bullsheet
. He smokes constantly, he complains about USC endlessly, he mocks students mercilessly.

When I meet him, I compliment him on some photos of radio-controlled boats he has hanging in his repair shop. He sizes me up and squints. He wants to know if I am
bullsheeting
him. They're his hobby, and he isn't about to be mocked. When he sees I'm not making fun of him, he warms up. He's pleased when I tell him I have three daughters.

Despite his gruff and un-PC exterior, I find him, like Quasimodo, to have a gentle heart. He takes me through his repair area and shows me his collection of film cameras. They're in display cases. It's a little museum. He's got cameras owned by old-timey Hollywood stars, and hand-cranked cameras used by American GIs. He explains to me that sixteen-millimeter film gained widespread usage in World War II because of its smaller size. He points out the technology-loving Americans equipped their fighter planes with sixteen-millimeter cameras that operated whenever the pilot fired the wing guns.

“The Russians didn't do that. Russian pilots come back and say ‘I shoot down five, six, seven planes.' That was
bullsheet
! You Americans couldn't do that. The film does not lie,” he explains in his heavily accented English. More important, he notes, the Americans studied the films and used what they learned to teach new pilots. “That's why the Americans were so good at shooting down other planes! They used film! They were smart! The Russians didn't do that! They thought it was
bullsheet!”

His job is to keep the dozens of film cameras at USC running. He's like a Havana mechanic working on 1950s Chevys. The Arriflexes are old. The digital future is coming, and he knows it. USC is planning to build a massive new film school with millions donated by Spielberg and Lucas. “I won't have job soon. They don't want me around. Soon it will be all deegital. It is
bullsheet
!”

I tell him I'll visit him again. He doesn't smile, but his shrug tells me I won't get yelled at.