An Old Guy Named Peter

If, like me, you like old guys named Peter who enjoy a drink or three and are charming, witty and flirtatious then you will probably like the film Venus. Peter O'Toole basically plays Peter O'Toole, an actor nearing the end of his days, who develops a relationship with his best friend's grand-niece, a 20-something country girl. Think Pygmalion with a few fingers of whiskey and a nice little role for Vanessa Redgrave.

I have always liked Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris and those English/Irish actors who were steeped in the classics, yet can do broad comedy. To me American male movie stars are boring and one dimensional, but just look at O'Toole, add a cigarette and a cocktail and let him go. Does Tom Cruise compare?

Another reason to see Venus is that you just don't get many films about older people dealing (or not dealing) with their mortality. Wrestling Ernest Hemingway with Robert Duvall and Richard Harris is well worth seeing for just that reason. In that film Richard Harris basically plays Richard Harris who uses Robert Duvall as his foil. It's fun and features Sandra Bullock in one of her first film roles.

See both films and you won't be disappointed. Then imagine which American actor could play those roles and get back to me.

PeterH

Special Olympics

Four years ago today, June 21, 2003, I was with my family in Dublin, Ireland for the opening ceremonies of the 2003 International Special Olympic World Games. My sister, Mary Beth, was competing for the United States team as a bowler.

It was the first time the world games had been held outside of the United States. This year they will be in China. While there I made the film, what's two +three? about our experience growing up with Mary Beth. For those of you interested in knowing more about the film, click on the link on the right side of the page. This post is mostly here to share moments that didn't make news in the U.S.

The World Games brought together 5,000 athletes and 30,000 family members from around the world. It was the biggest conference ever held in Ireland. The opening ceremonies attended by 70,000 people was the highest rated TV show in Ireland ever. 10 days later the closing ceremonies became their second highest rated TV program. Each night on TV there was an hour long recap of the days events and you couldn't lift a pint of Guiness without running into Pierce Brosnan or Colin Farrell.

Across the country and into Northern Ireland (the U.S. team spent a week in Belfast prior to the opening ceremonies, and then had a parade at Disney World on their return) the Irish people reached out to athletes. Many times we would be in a restaurant and spontaneous cheering would erupt because a Special Olympian had entered. I remember wishing we could capture that spirit and bring it back to the states,where we were a few months into a war that continues.

Some personal highlights:

1) Bono, Nelson Mandela, my sister and Muhammed Ali being at the same place at the same time.

2) Realizing that as a country Ireland had to build a natatorium- a fancy word for a swimming pool- for the games as well as a bowling alley.

3) Listening to the massive ovation from 70,000 people when the 15 Iraqi Special Olympians entered the stadium during the opening ceremonies.

4) Watching Mary Beth win a silver medal in bowling and on the podium put her arm around the gold medalist and cheer her.

I just thought I would share.

PeterH

Quid Pro Quo

My filmmaking career is heavily indebted to the deposits I have made into the favor bank and the interest those favors have accrued. It's a pretty easy concept, you do something to help someone and they will help you in return. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but sometime, somehow. If they don't return the favor, shame on them. It is sort of like karma and the mafia rolled into one.

The favor bank was a lesson I learned in college and I try to teach it to my students beginning day one. When I was a junior in college I was loaned Chicago Studio City (now Oprah's Harpo Studios) for a weekend to shoot a music video. I had three stages (one of which held The Wild Kingdom set- I never saw Marlon Perkins or Jim Fowler) and all the toys that went along with those stages for the price of me stripping and waxing the Studio City lounge floor.

I have written here before about my work with Denny Dent. Denny worked for me for essentially a ride to the airport and copies of the finished work. He knew how the favor bank worked and was willing to spend an afternoon painting Mick Jagger for me on the hopes that it would turn out well and he could use it to further his career. It did- for both of us.

I am always amazed when students don't buy into this concept. Recently I hooked up a former student of mine on a three day documentary shoot. There was no pay, but he would have his travel and meals comped, and more importantly, be able to take a camera credit on a feature length documentary. He was shooting concert footage of rockabilly legend Sleepy LaBeef jamming with Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen and that's not a bad thing to have on your reel at age 25. If I had the time I probably could have found someone to pay ME for the opportunity to shoot this.

In any event when he returned from the the trip he called to complain, explaining he felt he deserved at least something for the effort, plus (and I think this is what really got him upset) he had to be a boom operator for part of the trip and he didn't feel comfortable doing that. I told him I was sorry and to look at all the positives from the experience. I reminded him that he now had a deposit in his favor bank and at some point he can call it in.

I think he would have preferred a deposit into his regular bank, but for his sake I hope he learned a lesson about the ways of the business world.

PeterH

Faster, Faster

I recently saw a demo of this Sony XD Camera. It shoots HD and 24p. It is used by a lot of documentary camera crews as well as TV news programs. The 24p really looks like film and I was impressed. With all the bells and whistles the camera runs about $23,000.

An interesting thing about the camera is that it records media files to disk, not to tape. Very soon there will be no more tape. All of our footage will exist in a digital, file based
format. The Panasonic cameras can record to DV tape, but most people go directly to files with the P2 cards. This is the future- no tape.

Without real-time digitizing, (30 minutes of tape takes 30 minutes to get into your computer) everything moves much faster. However, at the demonstration I saw a guy in the audience still complained that the files took too long to load. I guess you can't please everyone all the time, but digitizing 30 minutes of footage took about a minute. That's fast enough for me.

More on this later, including some workflow terms I was unfamiliar with such as editing by proxy and meta-data.

PeterH

That's a Wrap

On any shoot when "Wrap," is called you want to finish and get out of there as soon as possible. When working on the road or on a longer project and it finally finishes, the urgency to be done is five-fold.

A few years ago we were shooting at Microsoft's England headquarters in Reading, England. We were there for several days, the work was good, but hard and we were staying in what was called a bed and breakfast, but more accurately was a boarding house. There was a glass shower in our rooms that was so narrow you could not wash the bottom of your feet. The bathroom was one big co-ed room with five or six individual stalls next to each other. It was a little awkward, but I guess we could encourage each other along after the mandatory heavy English breakfast we had each morning. Our reward for four days of this work was three nights in London at a nice hotel for some r&r.

When we wrapped we really beat it out of there. Reading is about 60 miles from London, it was rush hour and we had expensive gear we needed to return. Our vehicle was packed to the gills, with just enough room for Jim, me and our driver. As we were about to pull away, our client, who is also a friend and had made possible the London r&r, asked us a favor- could we take her friend and her son to London with us because they have theater tickets. Feeling guilty we re-packed the car and crammed mom and the kid into the car and headed off to London.

For the next two hours, the kid pointed out every, EVERY double decker bus we saw. He complained there was no air conditioning in the car. He sang show tunes (they were going to see Les Mis or some Andrew Lloyd Weber thing.) He felt the need to try to explain to every other car that they were driving on the wrong side of the road. And this is the edited list.

As we approached London and hundreds more double decker busses, "There's another one!" I can still hear him shout, the driver told us that the theater and the equipment rental house were on opposite sides of town and asked where should we go first. Before we could answer the mom spoke up, "We have a 7:30 curtain we can't miss." So we drove through central London to the West End, passing our hotel, so she and the kid could see their damn show. (More double decker buses, add your own sound FX here.)

We dropped them off, beat it back across London, passed our hotel again, and got to the rental house just as they were closing. We turned back around, crossed London once more and got to our hotel, where I crawled into a giant martini.

No lesson here except, when in London I never take the bus and always take the tube. Mind the gap.

PeterH

Characters-Not so Goodfellas

Yesterday I wrote about some of our favorite good guys we have met during our travels. Today I am going to share some of our favorite not so good guys.

Mr. Air Tran customer service representative. Jim and I were flying from Chicago to Atlanta. When we got to our gate we realized we could jump on an earlier flight. We approached the desk where the customer service man was training two young African-American men. Mr. Customer Service was regaling them with stories of the "good ol' days" of air travel- pre-911, pre-deregulation, bad weather delays, etc.... The trainees could care less. We asked him if we could get on the earlier flight. He sighed, tapped into his computer and said, "You know you are only going to get there about an hour earlier." He wasn't joking. I said,"Yeah, that's why we asked." He sighed again and reluctantly gave us boarding passes- like we were criminals for not wanting to sit around his boarding area for an extra hour. As he was printing the passes he began telling a joke to his two trainees. The joke was about ethnic stereotypes- particularly about African American men. About a third of the way into it Mr. Customer Service realized who he was talking to and made a quick switch, suddenly the character in his joke was a "Pollack." The joke was suddenly worse than before. His two trainees realized their new boss was both an idiot and a bigot.

Philadelphia to me means Ben Franklin, the Liberty Bell and Pukey. We were shooting in a housing project in Philly. A man who was obviously drunk was asking anyone around for money or if he could help. He was a bother, but not really trouble. Right in the middle of a shot we heard this loud retching noise followed by a splat. Pukey deposited his lunch about two feet from me. When he was done he reacted like it was no big deal, "That was as good coming up as it was going down." When we were watching dailies and that scene comes up you hear everything but don't see it. We ended using the shot, minus the natural sound FX, in the film.

Tyler. We get more mileage out of Tyler stories than anything else. We were shooting in Denver and wrapped after a long day at about 8:30. Our client recommended a nearby Italian restaurant so we called some friends and had them meet us there. We get to the nearly empty restaurant and the host, Tyler, greats us. We ask for a table for four and he tells us that it is policy that we cannot be seated until our entire party is there. I said,"Are you expecting a big 9pm Tuesday night rush? We promise if 18 other tables fill up before our friends get here we will move." Sorry, policy is policy. So we ask to sit at the bar. No bar, but he could bring us a bottle of wine. We said sure. He brings us an opened bottle. We sent it back- to his credit he knew he made a mistake. He returns, opens the new bottle and then asks for our credit card. I said, "Do you really think we are going to run off with an open bottle of wine before our friends get here?" Policy again. We give him the credit card. So Jim and I are standing, no seats, in the doorway of a small restaurant with our coats and an open bottle of wine on the floor as 16 tables are wide open. After about 20 minutes our friends join us and ask, "Why didn't you get a table?"

"Policy," we reply.

Tyler comes takes our order, gives us our dinner, it was surprisingly good. As we are nearing the end of the meal I ask for some more bread to sop up the pasta sauce. He looks at me, sighs and rolls his eyes. "About how much bread would you like?" he asks. I point to my plate, annoyed, "I don't know, that much? I promise I won't waste your bread." He comes back with about two inches from a baguette and asks me if it is enough. I was tired of fighting him, but I asked if the kitchen was suffering from a bread shortage.

He wasn't amused.

PeterH

Characters- Good Fellas

One of the best parts of this job is getting to travel and meet people. I have already reported about some of our encounters with celebrities, but today I want to talk about a few of our favorite regular people from our journeys.

Jim Richter is a long time client of ours. He is one of these people who is too smart for his own good. He is an inventor and tinkerer and a great person to hang out with. In a long car ride in a rainstorm from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia he told us about how he recently met Walter Cronkite. When asked how he met him, Richter (we always refer to him as Richter, probably because we already have a Jim) said he met Cronkite at the Broadway premier of The Producers. When asked why he was at the premier, he very modestly admitted he was an investor in the show. (There was a pretty good R.O.I. with The Producers.)

Jerry Weiss is a carwash operator in a major southwestern U.S. city. Jim and I made a film for the 50th Anniversary of the International Carwash Association and in the process met a lot of "old timers," in the carwash business. To a person they are just hardworking average guys- who happen to be millionaires. We were sitting around Jerry's office in a featureless strip mall. We hear a garage door open and Jerry ushers us into his money room. There a van pulled up and two men unloaded five-gallon buckets filled with quarters. This was their haul from a three-day weekend. They had so many quarters I asked how they counted them. Jerry said they don't, they weigh them. That day he brought in about $10,000 in quarters. (Note to self, start a carwash.)

Jack Janney was the president and founder of Wiss ,Janney Elstner and Associates an engineering and architecture firm. Jack was voted one of the 100 greatest engineers in history. He shares this honor with among others Leonardo Da Vinci and Gustave Eiffel. Jack died last October at the age of 80. We were interviewing him at his house outside of Denver a few years ago and were in a real hurry, but Jack made us sit, have a donut and coffee and take our time. When we were shooting we used a grip clip to raise a light in his living room. In our rush to get out of there and make our flight, we left the clip and the light raised. Jack and his wife Peg both had poor eyesight and Jim and I have always imagined that the light and clip are just where we left them and poor Jack and Peg couldn't figure out why their living room light is two feet higher than it used to be.

Tomorrow some of the not so good fellas.

PeterH