Tying In

If you can't do it right, don't do it

Note: I’ve decided to dispense with the disclaimers that posts here will or won’t be in the book. When it’s finally in print, you can see for yourselves … or not. That’ll be your call.

Movie and television productions burn a lot of electricity. Although day exteriors can often be lit using sunlight, interiors and night scenes require artificial lighting, as does every show filmed on a soundstage. Back in the day, studios supplied all of their stages with DC power from big generators operated on the lot by Local 40 electricians, but the transition to AC enabled them to use electricity from local utilities.¹ When a show requires more electricity than a stage can provide, power cables can be run from another stage, or a mobile generator brought in. Location shoots routinely use generators to supply electricity, but if that’s not practical — as when filming on the upper floors of a skyscraper — the lighting crew will draw power from the building’s electric mains after the production company has paid for a permit and hired a licensed electrician to “tie in” to a convenient panel.

Things were different in the good old/bad old days of low-budget, non-union productions where I got my start. Back then, if a generator was unavailable for whatever reason, the set lighting best boy did the tie-in. Some cheap-ass production companies refused to pay for permits and relied on “stealing” location shots, in which case parking a big diesel-belching generator on the street with heavy cables running across a sidewalk to the set would be a dead giveaway, so they kept a low profile by tying-in to the house or building’s power.

I've done more tie-ins than I care to remember, and hated every damned one. The last was for a job I took during the 2008 Writers Guild strike, which shut down the television industry and forced me back to the grim underworld of low-budget, non-union commercials. On one of those jobs, the production company refused to pay the gaffer to scout the location, so the DP — a nice guy who took a disturbingly casual approach to the technical side of lighting — did the scout, which is why neither the gaffer nor I knew that a tie-in would be necessary until we arrived on location at 6:45 in the morning. This was an unwelcome surprise, but with no other option, it was on me to get it done.

The basic procedure is straightforward: open the electric panel to identify the hot, neutral, and ground legs with a voltage tester, then determine if it’s possible to attach the tie-in clamps below the fuses for a measure of safety should things go sideways. With fuses between our lights and the municipal power supply, an accidental dead-short would be limited to a blown fuse, but if there wasn’t enough room inside the panel, I’d have to tie in above the fuses, which is a spooky proposition. A mistake there has the potential to unleash an arc flash: a blast of electric fire and molten copper shrapnel that will inflict catastrophic injuries on the poor bastard attempting the tie-in.

This box had plenty of space below the fuses, so I was able to attach tie-in clamps to the ground and neutral first, then to the hot bars. Once the connections were tight, I tied the cables to a conduit above the panel with a rope to isolate the clamps, which — hopefully — would prevent them from being ripped loose if some idiot buddy of the producer tripped over our cables while trying to sweet-talk the makeup girl as she hurried to set.

This all sounds simple enough, but the nasty thing about electricity is that you can’t see or smell it … and by the time you feel it, it’s way too late.

With everything secure, I taped the hell out of that open electric panel to keep idle hands out, and clipped a piece of showcard with “DANGER!” scrawled in red sharpie to the front, then went to the bathroom to wash the sweat off my face.

A tie-in isn’t particularly difficult under ideal circumstances, but not much about the low-budget world was “ideal” back in the day, and shit would occasionally happen. While working on a cheap non-union horror film, we made a location move late one dank, misty night to shoot a scene at a suburban San Fernando Valley home. I worked as a grip on that show, but since the best boy electric was a friend (and the sole juicer on his crew had very little experience), I went along for moral support. He’d planned to climb on the roof and use his knife to scrape insulation from the two hot wires and neutral running from the power pole to the house, then fasten tie-in clamps to the freshly-bared copper. This should be safe so long as he didn’t touch more than one wire or anything connected to the ground at the same time, but all that conductive mist in the air made me nervous, so I suggested that we look at the main electric panel on the side of the house. When we pulled the cover off, there wasn’t room to attach the tie-in clamps — there was, however, just enough space to jam three screwdrivers into the connections of the appropriate bars. We could then fasten the clamps to the metal shaft of each screwdriver and be in business. I’d done this in the past, and knew it would work.

The best boy looked at the box, nodding slowly. He didn't really want to go up on that roof either, but seemed reluctant to try the screwdriver method. I offered to do it, but he shook his head — he knew it was his responsibility — so I held a flashlight while he carefully jammed the first screwdriver (his) in place, then the second (mine), and finally shoved in the third, a shiny new screwdriver borrowed from his young juicer. The rig looked solid, but he hesitated before attaching the tie-in clamps.

“Lemme check one thing,” he said, leaning in to give that last screwdriver a push ... and all hell broke loose. The metal tip of the screwdriver contacted the back of the panel's metal housing, creating a short that unleashed a big blinding flash, instantly rendering both of us unable to see. As the panel spewed fire, the key grip ran in with a two-by-four and swung at the screwdrivers until he’d knocked them loose, breaking the circuit. Once the arcing stopped, somebody emptied a fire extinguisher into the panel until the flames were doused.

The excitement over — and having caused enough trouble at that point — I morphed back into a grip and left the electricians alone. The last thing I recall about that night was the young juicer staring at the remains of his brand-new screwdriver, which looked like a drooping, melted sculpture from the studio of Salvador Dali.

Although that was the most spectacular tie-in I was involved with, it wasn’t the most dangerous. That came during a driving rainstorm on a run-and-gun location shoot in a little strip mall somewhere south of San Clemente. With very little time to get the lights burning, I tapped into a small electric panel behind a retail shop that served as our location. The panel was outside, so I had to work with wet gloves while standing on a wet half-apple box as the rain poured down. All that water turned me into an excellent conductor, so I kept getting zapped with intermittent hits of 120 volt AC while doing the tie-in. I must have gotten bit half a dozen times before those clamps were firmly attached. Looking back now, it's hard to believe I could be that stupid, but I’d gotten caught up in the “Now we take Mt. Suribachi!” spirit of the moment, figuring dumb luck would pull me through. It did — barely — but thinking about that day now gives me the willies.

I’ve heard of worse tie-in mishaps. One crew of a television comedy I occasionally day-played on managed to short out the power mains of an upscale West LA hotel while tying in, cutting power to the kitchen’s refrigeration units long enough to render the food unusable, which made for a rather awkward and expensive start to three long days of filming. A veteran gaffer I know from the old days — a man with some very impressive feature credits on his resume — got knocked off a power pole in Chicago by a massive jolt of electricity while attempting a tie-in during the early 1980s, but somehow lived to tell the tale.

Refusing to perform an illegal tie-in back in the day could negatively impact a best boy’s future employment prospects, but it's a different world now. If you’re the BB on a job where the producer claims the budget can’t afford a generator, tell him or her to pay for a permit and a professional tie-in. Producers always have more money than they’re willing to admit … but if they still insist that you take the risk of doing the tie-in, just walk away. A producer who can't afford a genny or a permitted tie-in isn’t likely to handle your hospital bills — or pay for your funeral — if something goes wrong, and you don't want to work for a clown like that.

When it comes to tying in, do it right or not at all.

1. DC = direct current, AC = alternating current