Rig to Wrap

“They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad…”
The late, great T-Bone Walker

(Note: this is another reworked missive from the archives)

Monday was one of those ugly first days of the week that comes wrapped in barbed wire, when each apparently straightforward task veers off into a bloody barefoot slog across a minefield of broken glass.

It’s been a while since I worked a pilot from start-to-finish — long enough to forget just how arduous the process really is. Although I recently day-played on another pilot, those six days were a breeze compared to this. Still, wading through deep sand comes with the turf of pilot season, where the script pages morph their way through the Hollywood rainbow from white, blue, pink, yellow, green, buff, salmon, and cherry ... and sometimes beyond. The process is one of constant, relentless change — and although it’s simple enough for writers to cut, add, or re-write a scene, those script changes often mean more hard, physical work for the lighting crew. Such is the nature of the job, and although there’s a satisfaction in solving the many problems that crop up along the way, this wasn’t one of those a whistle-while-you-work Mondays.

Far from it.

My personal bete noir turned out to be a ninety-foot length of two-inch diameter steel pipe the grips had rigged over the audience grandstand. Hanging from that pipe were several big flat-screen monitors that will allow our live studio audience to see what the cameras record — and since this is a sketch-comedy/variety show pilot rather than a standard sitcom, we added a dozen 1000 watt par cans and six 2000 watt soft-lights: the former to splash pools of color on the actors and dancers, and the latter to illuminate the audience, who would now be part of the show.

Making the audience part of the show sounded like an idiotic idea to me, but that didn’t matter: I’m paid to do the heavy lifting, not agree with the Giant Brains who dream up these things.

I hung the pars and soft-lights on Friday before being called away to do something else, so one of my fellow juicers ran the power cables … then Monday brought the inevitable changes. To “spice up the show,” a decision was made to shoot the audience from a camera mounted on a Techno-Jib, which meant that a thirty foot center section of the pipe — where two big monitors, all twelve of those par lamps, and a pair of soft lights hung — would have to be six feet higher. Two grips were already up high in the perms waiting to raise the pipe, so I hurriedly unplugged all the power cables, then stood back as they took it up. Re-patching all those lamps would have been relatively straightforward except for another edict from on high, which rolled the storm clouds into this otherwise ordinary Monday. The pars had been gelled with three separate colors circuited to flash on and off in a particular order, but the powers-that-be now wanted just two colors with a different flashing pattern, which meant re-gelling and re-circuiting each lamp … and since the juicer who’d run all those cables was busy elsewhere, the task fell to me. The job wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been allowed to concentrate on it, but I kept being pulled away to deal with more-pressing issues. Every time I got back to that cursed pipe — twenty minutes to an hour later — I’d have to spend the next five minutes remembering where the hell I was in the process, then I’d get called off again.

So it went, all day long.

Two other factors turned this into such a bitch. The par cans and power cables were tied very securely to the pipe — the kind of rig we’d do when starting a nine month season of twenty-plus episodes — but this is a one-and-done pilot to be shot in three days, after which it’ll all be torn down. We had a lot to do and not much time to do it, which is why the pilot season mantra is “rig to wrap”: hanging and powering our lamps in manner to accomodate the inevitable changes that will come, then be faster to wrap once we’re done. With his obsessively meticulous ways, my fellow juicer had rigged this to survive a 9.0 earthquake … so first I had to undo most of his work and start all over again.

“Rig to wrap” doesn’t mean “quick and dirty” — we make sure the rig is safe for everyone involved — but doing just enough rather than going for rigging overkill makes a measurable difference during the course of a pilot.

The second issue was the seating area below the elevated section of pipe, which had been expanded to make the most of the idiotic Techno-Jib audience shots. The safest way to change the gels and re-rig those power cables was to use a scissor lift with the “porch” fully extended to put me up and over all the added seating. The porch wasn’t quite long enough, though, so I had to lean out as far as humanly possible, at which point I could barely reach the pipe, lights, and cables. Not only was this difficult, painful — my lower back did not appreciate it at all — and somewhat dangerous (it’s not hard to fall out of a lift under such circumstances), but it made for a slow, tedious process.

Not a happy camper

Thus did a series of seemingly innocent decisions from the Brain Trust conspire to turn a relatively simple task into an all-day ordeal. The constant interruptions precluded me from finishing the job by the time we wrapped for the day, which meant I was right back at it first thing Tuesday morning, with my lower back stiff, sore, and barking loud from the previous day’s isometric exertions.

The grips had already commandeered the scissor lift, so I had to finish the job atop an eight step ladder in the grandstands, which meant placing it very carefully amid the audience seats — with the front two legs on apple boxes — then moving the ladder and boxes back and forth between the seats as I ran, connected, and re-labeled the remaining power cables.

I managed get it done — finally — without falling off the ladder, then was immediately handed another task, because that’s the nature of the pilot season beast: an all-work, all-the-time grind pushing the big rock up the steep hill. Once there, we’ll enjoy the view for a minute, then shoot the show and tear the whole thing down.

The labors of Sisyphus, indeed.