“Detail, detail, detail”was the mantra offered by the the chief of the Floor Managing Section to new entrants making a start in their latest discipline. And he was right as it turned out.
From recording the weather forecast to large scale live or recorded entertainment programmes the amount of detailed organised logistics had to be nailed down to the most miniscule of elements. Their is always a banana skin somewhere just waiting to knock you off your high horse.
David Flint was the mantra man and what a formidable boss he was. I can say easily that he was the best supervisor I have ever worked for simply because he was superbly good at what he did.
He had come up from Christchurch a couple of years before the shift to Avalon. His reputation for excellence preceded him but some Wellington noses were left disjointed. Someone in management had made a smart move. Our production output would soon be multiplied by a very large factor at Avalon and Flint was the man to tackle the job of overall studio and location management. He was very successful and by the time I started working for him he was the established supremo of studios etc.
Ok. That’s the panegyric safely stowed. I wont say very much more about Flint. He is/was? More than capable of telling his own story.
It does seem strange does it not that after rabbiting on about my ‘dream’ job I walked away from it? Rather contradictory? Well, so what. I’m with Henry Miller on that one. He said about himself, “So I contradict myself occasionally, So What? “ The camera section was just a construct of my mind. It relied on the myth I had created for myself about a group of people and the ethos which inspired their work. Without those people, for me, it was just another job. After Bruce left, others started to peel off and I guess the jolly old writing was on the proverbial wall.
No worries mate! Off I toddled to start my new duties.
To say I was confident in the studio would miss entirely the fact that I felt totally comfortable in the production environment. Having spent so much time there that it had become a home from home. (Oops, another confessional moment). I was still working in the same space the only difference being that I was standing a few feet away from the nearest camera and I did not have to do anything other than talk and tell others what to do. That’s sort of in a nutshell. No matter, on we go.
A bit jittery and hyperactive is how I would describe myself in my first few weeks on the job. Incessantly checking and re-checking every damned little detail and leaping around the studio like a chimp on speed. And that was only news bulletins in Studio 4! I did get a grip eventually and calmed down only when a former camera colleague said to me “for F’s sake Dan your doing ok, settle down.” and other remarks not designed as compliments. He too was soon to depart the camera fold. The Waring Taylor band of brothers was by now almost completely dispersed around the globe. Oh! The humanity.
Did I enjoy my time as a floor manager? Yes, I mostly did. It was often great fun and always interesting. After some time getting my bearings and so on I returned to my favourite stamping ground i.e. drama.
In between bouts of drama(as it were) I worked on current affairs shows. Another favourite of mine. It was always fascinating to be in the studio when interviews with current ‘powerbrokers’ took place. Two shows I liked were Dateline Monday and Prime Time which went out on Wednesdays. Ian Fraser appeared on both programmes. He was a terrific interviewer. Muldoon could not get away with his standover tactics with Ian. Muldoon bullied most journalists I’m sorry to say. But Ian was a tough person and quite fearless. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of a wide range of subjects and he flummoxed Muldoon. Muldoon ‘solved’ the problem by refusing eventually to be interviewed by Ian. A pathetic response from a Prime Minister I think you will agree.
To be in the studio with Ian on a regular basis was to recieve a liberal education. For an auto didact such as myself it was a gift. Ian could discourse freely on economics, art, politics,music and literature but never as a pedagogue, He wore his knowledge lightly. Those were great times for me. I was hungry for knowledge and madly in love with English lit.
After a few months of doing a variety of work I found that Flint entirely trusted me to do whatever had to be done and allowed me total autonomy on my working hours. ‘Swings and Roundabouts’ is how he described it. If a shift had to be filled in an emergency it was understood that you would put your hand up. A perfect arrangement.
But God help you if you failed to deliver the goods because of slack organisation. Swings and roundabouts.
I did a lot of ‘Close to Home’ work and during that time was attached to the production and worked out of the production office. A great opportunity to study the internal workings of the programme and the dynamics and interplay between various disciplines. Again I was taking mental notes. Reading scripts was something I really enjoyed. Along with the director’s assistant (not to be confused with the assistant director) we had to time the scripts for our episodes to ensure that they ran pretty exactly to a standard commercial half hour. Many scripts ran quite a bit over and the blue pencil was often wielded. We became very good at it and could time a script, with confidence, to within 5 seconds. A handy skill indeed. I enjoyed reading all the actor’s parts. Great fun.
We rehearsed our episodes for three days before going to the studio and on the first rehearsal day started with a read through with all cast. Guest actors with small roles and not much dialogue did not attend rehearsal and that was an opportunity to read parts with the core cast. Of course I knew all the actors well from my camera days so we were quite relaxed with each other. I was getting closer to the heart of the matter and still soaking it all up. But it was in the film area where I started to learn the voodoo of film language and production. When shooting film inserts for the story the floor manager puts on another hat and becomes the ‘First Assistant Director’. A very different kettle of fish indeed. On location the first assistant is the undisputed boss on the set and is responsible, along with his own assistants, for ensuring that everything the director requires is on set and ready to go. The shoot runs to a schedule prepared by the first assist and some cracking of the whip is occasionally required. No prisoners are taken on set. Those who don’t pull their weight soon get sorted out. It’s a hard environment and no place for the faint hearted. Essentially though, everyone who worked on set wanted to be there. It was the best of all possible worlds, the culmination of their skills and experience. No one had to be harangued or bullied. It was a perfect example of ‘team work’. A collection of experts in their field doing what they most wanted to do. It was, quite simply, a pleasure to be there. For me it was always a great privilege to be involved in film making. I never took it for granted. I had already come a long way from my projectionist days. O lucky man indeed.
So for the next three years or so I plied the floor managing trade in all manner of productions. Sometimes the subject matter was mundane (think of lawn bowls. One could easily lose the will to live on a Sunday afternoon at a suburban club but the afternoon teas were rather good and I hasten to add that the people I met there were without exception lovely to work with) and other times exciting and satisfying. One stand out was The Pacific Song Contest and Song for the Pacific. Malcolm Kemp had asked me to be involved and I was happy to do so. So I became the Stage Manager for the show but also had to take on the role of Unit Manager which was not so exciting. Getting almost all of The Symphony Orchestra and their instruments down to Christchurch (Twice!) was a challenge to say the least. Plus booking accomodation for three crews and performers and hangers on from around the Pacific Rim. Doing the actual shows was a breeze in comparison. But it all went off splendidly to great general acclaim. Tick.
My next challenge was as First Assistant on a New Zealand ‘Cowboy’ movie which was planned for production in McKenzie Country down south. The film was rather unimaginatively titled ‘High Country’ and it was also something of a logistical nightmare. But eventually we all found ourselves in the High Country based in the Innes family stations at Haldon, Stony Creek, and Black Forest. It was mid winter and bloody freezing. We lived in the shearers quarters and ate in the communal kitchen at Haldon. I was at Haldon with the main cast and crew and the others were at the smaller properties. We had to start shooting each day at first light and my job every morning was to be up about 5.30 am. My god, going to those showers was a purgatorial experience. The ice cracking under your feet as you made your way across the iron hard ground. But the hot water was excellent and in great abundance. (I have to say that nobody showered too often it was too tough and I don’t think bacteria had a snowball’s chance in those conditions).Despite being at the end of a metal road fifty kilometres or so from the main highway, the property had a mains power supply which did help quite a bit. It was a huge spread. If you rode out to the edge of the station by horse you could not get back on that same day. They also ran motor bikes and helicopters so it wasn’t really the ‘wild’ west. We slept most nights with our clothes on and that included Swannies, beanies and huge thick socks. If you left your jeans out in the hut they would be rock hard frozen in the morning. We had electric blankets but even they did not cut it. I think we were there for about six to eight weeks.
But it was a great experience and we had a very successful shoot. We did have a serious, but not fatal, accident on the final day of shooting. Totally incident free up to that point and we did finish one day ahead of schedule.
I loved the High Country and the people who lived there. Most were descended from Scots and treated me as one of there own. Today I would probably be at odds with many of them because of their attitudes towards Jacinda and their general attacks on the Labour Goverment.
But was then and this is now.
I like country people generally speaking. Possibly because of my early days in Bulls Again, it was a privilege to be part of such a great adventure.
And we got paid too!
Sometime after we returned to Avalon I was told that I had been attached to a new major film drama which was to be shot in Blackball on the West Coast.
It was to be a six month shoot and the crew would be based in Blackball for the whole period.
A test of our mettle for sure.
The production was to have several Directors and I was attached to Tony Isaac’s episodes as First Assistant.
My biggest assignment so far but I was up for it, albeit a bit nervous.
As I have said elsewhere Tony was a director I admired and I was thrilled to be working for him.
But Tony did think on a Francis Ford Coppola scale (I always thought of him as New Zealand’s Coppola but with a fresh NZ approach.)
The first two things he asked for were TWO JClass locomotives to be brought over from Christchurch. The second request was for all the houses in Blackball to look occupied. (Blackball had a very sparse population then and we were recreating it as it had been in the 1940’s the period where the drama was set.)
For the opening shot of the first episode every empty house had to have smoke coming from the chimney and every back yard to have washing on the line. All of this was to be revealed from a panning shot starting on the locomotives as they steamed into town.
“ Sure Tony, No Worries.” “Anything else mate?”
Boy was I needing a nervous one.
The drama was adapted from Bill Pearson’s great novel ‘Coal Flat’ a beautifully written piece about the mining communities of that time.
Bill’s own life was a drama of it’s own. If you want the details look them up. I couldn’t do it justice.
I had been subscribing to ‘Landfall’ and later ‘Islands’ in the 60’s/70’s and had a reasonably good handle on NZ Literature. I was familiar with Bill Pearson’s essays etc but had not read his novel. I hurried off to buy a copy, at Vic Books I think. Not necessary as it turned out. The Producer, Peter Muxlow had arranged for members of the crew to be given a copy for their own enlightenment.
And so we started beavering away on pre-production at Avalon.
But wait! Some news from the political front.
First if all can I remind you of the furore caused by the announcement from God Knows Who about the cost of making our first big epic ‘The Governor’. One million dollars!! My god what an occasion for dog whistling and disinformation from PM Muldoon and his knuckle draggers. Scandal was rife. Someone had to be held to account. Television management got into a panic. “This must never happen again”.
Well, you can guess the rest. Those Poofters, communists and various fellow travellers at Avalon had to be brought into line. And Muldoon was your man.
I don’t know who pulled the plug on Coal Flat. Crew people were not privy to that level of information. Was it management? The Government? The Head of Drama? The Producer? No matter, pulled it was and everything gurgled down the pipes.
The above the line production Budget was somewhere in the order of $700,000. Modest I would have thought.
I do remember sitting at my desk and looking at my copy of Coal Flat sitting on my annotated copy of the script and feeling like crap.
So it was back to occasional News shifts, and bouts of Close To Home. We were being paid for sitting around doing nothing for most of the time and staring out of the window quite a lot. Often I just did not bother coming in to work at all. No one noticed.
But in this story as you have seen, something always happens and usually serendipitously.(big word).
Late one gloomy afternoon as I was sitting by said window a friend and fellow floor manager by the name of Jeff Browett dropped in with some news.
A director’s training course was go be held later in the year at Avalon and he had applied for a place on the course just that day which happened to be the last day for applications. 5pm was the deadline. I had never ever considered the possibility of me directing. In fact I did not have a great opinion of director’s generally with some honourable exceptions one of whom was Tony Hiles who would be running the course. Jeff said I could fax my application if I was interested.
Ok. Spur of the moment. I grabbed a form faxed it. And more or less forgot about it. A couple of weeks later some wag with the sensitivity of a calloused horse’s ass appeared on the spiral staircase in studio eight where I was working and yelled out “DAN! You have been selected for that course.” Holy shit. What had I done?
I was in a turmoil for the next week or so.
Ideas? I had none. Experience in directing? Not a clue.
What I did have was wide experience in how TV production worked. That experiencd included working on production courses in various capacities.
The first takeaway from those courses was……Do something complicated and ambitious for your ‘graduating’ final production excercise. Even if you fall on your face you will get huge kudos for backing yourself and having a go. Timidity is the kiss of death.
Choose an arcane subject that will make your examiners sit up and take notice. A famous writer for example who is generally considered to be obscure and difficult to understand. (But is nothing of the kind, as you will demonstrate).
Book the best current affairs presenter and narrator at Avalon to ‘front’ your production.
And one I made up for myself.
Before the course starts research your subject and write your script. Type it up in the format that is universally understood by production crews. Gather all the materials the script calls for i.e. photographs, music tracks, quotations from various publications. Find a friendly Sound Recordist to tape your music and spoken quotations(In this instance the late and great Graham Ridding, god bless him).
Go into the empty studio the evening before your final excercise and arrange on caption boards all captions, graphics and photographs you will be inserting into your work during recording next day( a live non stop documentary recording of about 20 minutes duration). This last action will save you heaps of time during the three hours of studio time you are allotted for making your opus. The tjme you save will be like gold and allow you more rehearsal time with the crew on the day. I had about 90 photographs and captions so it was a considerable amount of time saved.
And lastly. Be prepared to put a paper bag over your head and kiss your sweet ass goodbye.
Ready when you are Mr. De Mille.
And so it came to pass that I went on the course. Thoroughly enjoyed it and learned what was on offer. I told no one about my script or plans.
When the moment came at the end for us to go away and prepare our final excercises I quietly gave my typed script to the Director’s Assistant assigned to my work. She took it away told no one but retyped it to clean up any bits I may have missed and stowed it away.
Did I have an unfair advantage over the others on the course?
Only if you think that spending more than ten years of my life learning my craft was unfair. I had invested and this was the payoff.
You need luck in show biz and I had been lucky in the people I trained with and learned from. You never do anything alone. You are surrounded by experts and they will make it for you if you let them get on with it.
So we went into the studio on the day of reckoning.
We had three hours from 9am until noon.
We went over everything several times during rehearsals until everyone was pitch perfect and ready to roll.
At 1130 we rolled tapes and it was on.
Was I nervous? Only enough to get the adrenaline to fire me up.
Just before 12 noon it was in the can. It went like a dream. Almost flawless and fit to be put on air. Just a tiny word stumble from Ian during a voice over. It could be easily fixed with a tiny bit of sound editing.
I have never felt so much passion and exhileration as I felt during those 22 minutes in he control toom. For me nothing comes anywhere near it for excitement and job satisfaction.
When I spoke to Tony Hiles and Mike Steadman shortly afterwards in the post match briefing, they both confessed that when they read my script their opinion was that I would never pull it off.
Remember David Flint’s mantra?
Detail, detail, detail.
Thanks mate.
Thanks to Ian Fraser, Jeffrey Thomas, Graham Ridding, Jacqui Kensington, Mike Neal, Allan Rattee, Peter(Fred)Williams, Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma (The Grand Viziers Tea Party), the people who’s fifty essays on Franz Kafka were hugely inspiring and many others whose names I cannot recall. It was about 45 years ago.
If you are interested in reading Kafka, if you haven’t already done so, try locating Milan Kundera’s ‘Testaments Betrayed’ which is largely about Kafka and dispels all those cretinous and idiotic urban myths about his writings. Kundera is of course a fellow Czech and a wonderful writer himself as I am sure many of you already know. (Hint. Kafka was a satirist and joker).
“The Emperor, so the story goes, has sent a message to you, the lone individual. The shadow which has fled before the Imperial Sun until it is microscopic in the remotest distance……” ( The opening line of an excerpt from ‘The Great Wall of China’).
I never saw the little doco again after that day when I watched it with Hiles and Steadman post match. I had put it to bed and that was that.
The title of the programme was ‘Franz Kafka: The Dreamer of Prague” which I lifted from one of the many essays I read during my research.
My premise was built around the notion that Kafka had presciently foresaw the rise of The Nazis and the appearance of 20th century totalitarianism. He died in 1924. Two of his sisters died in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in 1934.
Their was however much more to Franz than his putative prescience.
Some time after my little success, Bill Earle asked me to join his Deparment at Avalon it was called ‘The General and Special Interest Department’ and produced all the programmes which all the other Depts. did not cover. Country Calendar, Dig This(Gardening), Fair Go, The Arts Programme(Kaleidoscope), The Motoring Show, Church Broadcasts and Religious Programes, A Dog’s Show, etc etc.
I Served time on most of those and polished up my directing skills over the next two years.
Join me next time if you want to know more.
I do want to know more. I remember many of those programs, never thought how they came to be made. Just seemed like magic!