Week Two

Hell Week

“We don’t have time to rehearse – just shoot it!”

Part Two of a short series exhumed from the archives that began with Piece of Cake

Once again standing at the corner of Sunset and Bronson waiting for the light to change — this time reporting for a late afternoon lighting day — I watched a long-haired woman ride by on her horse with two more saddled-but-riderless horses trailing in her wake. It was entirely unclear who she was, where she was headed, or what she was doing out there. Strange sights are the norm in Hollywood, but you don’t see a solitary rider and three horses clip-clopping down a car-choked Sunset Boulevard every day.

If nothing else, this brought a welcome touch of levity to what had turned into Hell Week on the new show. If Week One was a cool breeze, Week Two brought a heat wave from Beelzebub's Lair in the form of a big nightclub swing set. Given the musical theme of this show, every episode includes a performance number: in essence, a music video. They're cheap-ass music videos to be sure, but made from the same basic elements as the real thing: a large crowd of extras, lots of “flash and trash” lighting, and the relentless hammering of a sonic assault that eventually causes everyone on set to loathe the song being filmed.

These are all the things I came to hate back in the day doing music videos for Sting, The Police, Jefferson Starship, The Pointer Sisters, Neil Diamond, Michael Jackson, Prince, Randy Newman, Michael Bolton, Huey Louis, and countless other bands eager to cash in the marketing opportunities then offered by MTV. Yes, there was money to be made doing music videos, but it was always long-hour blood money, with the figurative blood dripping out my ears by the time wrap was finally called.

Thanks to exceedingly slow equipment deliveries, a constantly morphing script, and the toxic trickle-down of confusion from above-the-line that gummed up the machinery every damned day, it took us forever to get that big nightclub set ready for the cameras.* We were running against the clock from start to finish, barely getting the lamps — three aerial truss rigs jammed with 1000 watt Par Cans, a dozen dichroic Double-Fays, and two tall vertical rows of blindingly bright LED Color Blasters — properly rigged and circuited before the actors and extras took the stage.
At one point, nearly apoplectic with frustration, our over-caffeinated and under-talented director screamed “We don’t have time to rehearse — just shoot it!”

Okay, then.

Still, we got the show done, and it actually looked pretty good — "better than they deserved," as the gaffer quipped. Everybody seemed happy as the crew walked away from that twelve hour block-and-shoot day ... except the juicers and grips. We had another two hours of work wrapping the swing set and part of one of the huge main sets which was due to be replaced by a completely different — and even bigger — set for the final episode. The result was a very long Thursday that eventually strayed into the Disney No-Go Zone of double-time, followed by an equally long Friday night. It was close to midnight by the time we headed for the parking lot after the audience shoot and another long wrap, leaving the stage ready for the construction crew to tear out the old sets and build new ones over the weekend.

And that’s how we ended up doing two consecutive 14-hour-plus days on a multi-camera show, an ordeal more reminiscent of the Bad Old Days doing low-budget features than anything I’d yet experienced in more than a decade of working on sitcoms.

So much for “bring a book — you’ll need it.”

Still, a grind like this makes me appreciate working with a good crew led by a gaffer and DP who know how turn water into wine in delivering lighting miracles at a bargain rate. Pushed hard like that, I forget my dead legs, sore back, and tired arms, ignoring the heavy accumulation of fatigue as I catch a third wind that carries me until the work is done. It was only after we’d completed the wrap that I realized just how exhausted I really was — and then I stumbled home to a stiff drink and went face down on the bed.

As usual, I was much too buzzed from the residual adrenaline high, and couldn't get to sleep for a couple of hours. After two long days of being jerked around by yet another loud, preening director without a clue — who was doubtless sound asleep as I tossed and turned — this might have been the cruelest twist of all.

But such is life in Hollywood, where the horses — and more than a few above-the-line horse’s asses — still walk the streets and studio sound stages.


* This ancient studio doesn’t have anything resembling a lamp dock, so most of the lighting gear has to be ordered from a rental house out in the San Fernando Valley, which typically means a next-day delivery. In a business where change is constant and the ability to react to those changes in a timely manner is crucial, this is hopelessly lame.