While shooting “On Thin Ice, The Tai Babalonia story” I noticed that the producers were unhappy when I was happy, and happy when I was unhappy. It was a puzzle.
Then it hit me: They were making television. They were happy when the rushes looked like television whereas I was, yeah, okay, I guess so. Looks okay. Looks like standard television.
I was trying to make something that transcended television, something that went beyond what you would expect of television. When we achieved that I would be over the moon, whereas the producers were uh…yeah…I guess. That’s amazing. But is it what we want?
They were making television. I was making, and I can’t think of a less pretentious way to say it, art.
He played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies. He was also a guest star on an episode of Danger Bay which I directed. As a courtesy, I met him when he arrived at the Vancouver airport. He made it very clear that we were not going to be friends. He wasn’t happy to be doing a guest appearance in “Danger Bay” and I remember him saying something about only doing it to get a new television set.
I escorted Mr. Weathers to the registration desk of the Bayshore Inn and asked the desk clerk if she had a room for him. “It’s a suite, isn’t it,” he said, in a tone that implied it bloody well better be a suite.
“Is it a suite?” I asked, and was relieved to learn that it was.
The next morning on set, I watched him put a gold ring in his nose. This is not something that made me happy, and, as the director, I suppose I could have told him that this wasn’t in the style of the show. But I knew what he was doing. He was making a distinction between his character in this guest appearance and his character as the helicopter pilot in Magnum PI. And who was I to tell a black man what his culture was about. Also, this was still in the days when Donnelly Rhodes was doing what he called “Breaking in a new director.” I couldn’t make a decision without Donnelly raising an objection and suggesting an alternative, to the point where I was convinced he was trying to see if he could get me mad enough to hit him. He would have liked that. Nothing Donnelly liked better than a fight. He and Weathers we getting along gang busters, laughing and joking like old frat mates. I was intimidated and felt out gunned.
Thinking back on this I now realize that Carl Weathers gave me a gift. Until this happened I taken the role of director on episodic television with the same attitude I took to directing a feature, the assumption that the director is the authority on set and gets to call the shots when it comes to the everything the audience is going to see. I was comfortable with that. I expected my decisions to carry the authority of the director, and was happy to stand alone in that position. But this doesn’t work on episodic TV. I should have been on the phone to the line producer and requested his presence on set. I needed backup, but didn’t know it. So I ignored the ring in the nose and we shot the scenes.
When the brass saw the dailies, the shit really hit the fan. Every black father or mother in America was going to call the network to complain that their kid wants a ring in his nose like Carl Weathers has. Who is this Canadian director? What kind of idiot is he?
I had a three show contract on “Danger Bay”. The Disney brass wanted to cancel my next two shows. I’m pretty sure the only reason they didn’t was that the show had a tight budget and they didn’t want to pay me not to direct.
In the final scene of that episode, Donnelly Rhodes says goodbye to Carl Weathers and sends him back to his job in Africa, trying to control the trade in endangered species hides. I suggested that they should hug. That was too gay for Mr. Weathers. We settled on a manly handshake.
Carl Weathers and I did not become friends, but I do appreciate the contribution he made to my education as an episodic television director. It took a couple more hard lessons before I took this one to heart. Some might say I’m a slow learner and never did internalize this lesson until now, looking back at my career from the safety of retirement.
To any aspiring TV directors that might be reading this I will add this: Pay attention to the power and the money. Form relationships with the people who can give you work. Just being a good director isn’t enough.
But what a legacy he leaves behind. Norman directed a lot of fluff and schlock, starting with his breakthrough journeyman work on Pillow Talk with Rock Hudson and Doris Day as he moved from directing Canadian television to Hollywood in 1959. By the time I met him in 1982 he had a filmography full of important classics – “Fiddler on the Roof”, “Jesus Christ Super Star”, “Moon struck” and “In the Heat of the Night” to name just a few. His eclectic list of movie titles, with romantic comedy scattered in to social commentary, received 46 Academy Award nominations and won 12 Oscars.
A very much younger Zale Dalen with Norman on the set of “Best Friends”, staring Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn, romantic comedy fluff at its finest. In this photograph he’s showing me the difference between planning a television shoot and planning a feature film. According to Norman, what I was doing was television – laying out camera positions and blocking for the actors. A feature film director works in images, story boards, and planned transitions. I’m afraid I could never catch on to this approach. The images were in my head and the planning went from my head straight into the viewfinder thence into the camera. But sometimes I would adopt a combination derived from Norman’s kind lesson, but usually my planning involved camera positions and blocking, with sometimes lens notations thrown in.
Norman was very kind to me. I don’t think he was please when I told him I was leaving before his shoot was finished. I had to get back to Toronto to direct an episode of “For the Record” an anthology drama series for CBC television, an opportunity I wasn’t about to pass up, not even to sit at the feet of the master.
Walking the beach at Malabu, just outside Norman’s home there, he told me about his deal with the major for “Jesus Christ Superstar”. He’d seen the stage version in London and purchased the rights to make the movie, but he wanted a gross deal. That would mean that he got a percentage of the returns from first dollar, before the studio subtracted their expenses and worked their accountant magic on the returns, famously charging every production for every pencil the studio used. A net returns deal meant that the director and the backers wouldn’t see a penny, even if the film made millions at the box office. But there was no way the studio would agree to a gross deal for above the line participants. It just wasn’t going to happen. At that time, however, the studio considered returns from record sales to be small change, not worth fighting over. So they compromised by giving Norman Jewison a gross deal on the record sales. I had that album. So did many of my friends. A gross deal on the sale of “Jesus Christ Superstar” had to be worth millions. That alone made Norman a happy, and very wealthy, man.
For this Canadian boy who had never seen an A list director with an A list cast and crew at work, the shear luxury of the production was astonishing. I’d seen well stocked craft services snack tables, and eaten from gourmet quality craft services food trucks, but this was a whole different level. For example: one morning Norman announced to everybody, “Hey folks, we were all out late last night and we’re not really firing on all cylinders this morning. Let’s call it a day and come back refreshed tomorrow.” For me that was a shock. Any production I had ever worked was managed people schooled in Frank Taylor style time and motion efficiency expectations. Getting the shots in the can was everything. The schedule was always squeaky tight and taking a break that wasn’t absolutely necessary just didn’t fit in the shooting board. This was pure luxury. And then there was the private nurse Burt Reynolds requested. She was bored stiff and spent her time handing out vitamins and supplements, but she was there at a good salary just because Burt, or somebody else, might need medical attention Again, pure luxury. It was another way of doing business at the top of the food chain.
I was also impressed by the efficiency with which Norman worked. He only shot what he needed to make the film, working calmly and smiling with quiet dignity even when tested by the oversized egos of his stars. I immediately lost any desire to hang out with those stars, or be their friend. I had arranged a special screening of “The Hounds of Notre Dame”, my second feature, for Burt Reynolds because I’d been told that he had his own distribution company. The day after the screening I asked him what he thought. “We’ll talk.” he said. I learned that in Hollywood “We’ll talk” means “We won’t talk.” I had already learned that “Trust me.” in Hollywood means “Fuck you.”
Goldie Hawn bit my head off, figuratively speaking, when I tried to introduce myself. I suppose I had chosen a bad time to approach her, but still… Not my kind of people.
Dead at 97, Norman Jewison had a good run. Still, he died too young.
Somebody named Gordon Cressy sent me an email message. The name meant nothing to me until he followed it up with a message and attachment of his book, entitled “Gordon Cressy tells Great Stories”
Gordon wrote: The book is available on line at Amazon, Indigo etc. But too expensive. (I think it’s typical of Gordon to not ask me to spend any money to read his book. – ZD) Here is the book as it went to print. The movie idea is mentioned in the preface. In the first chapter you are mentioned by name. Hope you enjoy the stories. Warm wishes, Gordon
I have taken the liberty of carving out a relevant excerpt from that book and present it here:
Selling Christmas Trees in Trinidad
Now that I was the general secretary (Of the YMCA in Trinidad when Gordon was just twenty years old -ZD) , I had to learn many new things, like balancing a budget. I learned very fast when it became clear that we were spending more money than we were bringing in. It certainly was not my salary, which was TT$10 per week. We could not raise the room rate or meal cost. It was suggested that we try to raise some money. Although I have spent a good part of the last thirty years in fundraising, back then I knew precious little.
I tried to remember what had worked growing up in Toronto. I remembered that our local church, St. Leonard’s, used to raise money selling Christmas trees. I went to the steering committee and suggested if we sold Christmas trees there would be no competition. One member asked if I had developed a business plan. Heck, I did not even know what a business plan was!
I have learned over the years that bold and exciting ideas excite. Several steering committee members had visited Canada at Christmastime and thought the idea just might work.
I got the go-ahead and contacted the YMCA in St. John, New Brunswick, which sourced 1,500 Scotch pine trees for us and put them on a cargo ship. The ship operators told us the trees would arrive on December 15, nice and fresh. Our boys at the Y went out and presold 1,200 trees. This story was gaining traction. There was a little article in the newspaper — my name was in it. I sent it home to my mom and dad. My mom shared it with her bridge club group!
Everything was going very smoothly until our trees did not arrive as promised on December 15. We did not make many long-distance calls in those days, but I sure did that day. I called the Y folks who said there had been a “small” fire on the ship. The trees had been put on another ship and were scheduled to arrive December 22. I remember saying, “Wow, that’s really close to Christmas.” They suggested we call the port authority in Bermuda and find out how the ship was progressing. We learned, to our horror, that there was a dockworkers’ strike in Bermuda, and now the trees would arrive in Barbados on December 22, but would not get to Trinidad until after Christmas! Things were going quickly from bad to worse, and the enthusiasm and support for this young Canadian volunteer was diminishing at a rapid rate.
My suggestion of changing the date of Christmas did not go down very well, especially with the clergy! One of the steering committee members, Steve Hanuman, knew the head of British West Indian Airways (now Caribbean Airlines) quite well. The next morning off we went to BWIA and suggested to them an innovative marketing opportunity in which they would give the YMCA a cargo plane. We would fly over to Grantley Adams Airport in Barbados, go down to the docks, take the trees off the ship, load them onto some trucks, drive out to the airport, and stuff those trees on the plane. We would then fly back to Piarco Airport in Trinidad, take the trees off the plane, load them on the trucks, drive down to the YMCA, and sell those trees. Lo and behold, they agreed! There was a headline in a Trinidad newspaper: “Christmas Tree Airlift to Raise Funds for YMCA!”
On December 22, steering committee members James Dube and Frank Mohan, my friend Bing Mandbodh and I, a couple of flight attendants, and the pilot, plus a few bottles of Old Oak Rum (a very fine Trinidadian rum), flew out in the early morning for Barbados. We got down to the dockside to discover that, it being a Sunday, the dockworkers were not working — but a few of the workers were hanging around. A few bottles of Trinidadian rum later they were working, and together we loaded the trees onto the trucks, drove to the airport, and stuffed those trees into every nook and cranny on the plane. Mr. Bal Soochit, a YMCA volunteer in Trinidad, donated the trucks both in Barbados and Trinidad.
We flew back to Trinidad in the late afternoon, took the trees off the plane, loaded them onto the trucks, and drove down to the YMCA in Port of Spain. There was a festive atmosphere when we arrived, with Christmas carols blasting on the radio. Trinidad’s TV station covered the arrival. We started selling right away. Families came by that night to buy trees, and for the next two days we sold trees nonstop. By Christmas Eve we had sold out! We were tired but very pleased. We turned a bad situation into a wonderful ending. People had their trees. The media loved the story, and we had raised about TT$7,000.
On Christmas Day, we were having lunch at the Y and I mentioned that it just would not be Christmas without a Christmas tree, to which one of our residents chimed in with the fact that Jesus was born under olive trees and not Christmas trees. On December 28, the Trinidad government banned the mass importation of trees, suggesting that people grow local trees.
That should have been the end of the story, but not quite. About thirty years ago, Douglas Bain, a middle-aged man from Trinidad, showed up at the University of Toronto, where I was working, and told me that I had taught him how to swim at the Y in Trinidad. Not only that, he mentioned that he helped sell those Christmas trees. He said he and his buddy had gotten tired of selling the trees and threw twenty of them over the back fence. Then they went down to the corner and sold them and made $200. Obviously, a little private entrepreneurial experience.
A decade ago, Stuart McLean of the popular Vinyl Café radio show on CBC, asked if he could tell the Christmas tree story on the radio. Not being one to shy away from publicity, I readily agreed. The story played across the country, and I got a few emails from old friends. On the following Monday, I got a long-distance call from a Zale Dalen in BC, who told me that he was a movie producer (A misunderstanding; I have never been a movie producer. Just a director. -ZD) and he thought this Christmas tree story would be a great feature film. Much like Cool Runnings about the Jamaican bobsled team — but in reverse. I was excited. I was already thinking of who would play the male lead. I rushed home to tell my wife, Joanne, about this upcoming blockbuster film. She looked at me a bit skeptically and said, “I am not sure this movie will ever be made.” Well, she was right, the movie never got made, but the story lingers on. #############################################################################
And of course with this the floodgates to my memory bank were opened and I clearly remember my interest in the story and my passionate effort to get it made into a movie.
I wrote back to Gordon thusly: Thank you so much for sending me this digital copy of your book, and for reminding me of my efforts to make the film about your Christmas tree fundraiser. I knew that your name rang a distant bell in my brain, but until I started reading your book I just couldn’t place you. Now you are firmly placed with a touch of sadness and very nearly tears.
I can’t remember why my wife and producer at the time, Laara Dalen, and I reluctantly decided to give up the Christmas tree story. No doubt it had to do with an inability to gain any interest from the powers that be in Canada, or find any money. We must have disappointed you, and for this I am very sorry. I shall ask Laara if she can remember any of the details, but she most likely can’t.
You should know that, in retrospect, it feels like my film making career consisted of finding something that I thought would make a great film, putting my head down and running into a wall until I staggered back, bloody and heartbroken and finally gave up the project. I went through that process too many times to count. There was my father’s oral history from which I generated two complete drafts of a film script without finding any support. There was the William Deverell novel, “Platinum Blues”, that I took to Los Angeles no fewer than three times, the first simply as his novel from which I learned that nobody in Hollywood would read a novel. I returned to Canada and generated two full drafts of a film script that nobody would support. Each project ate up years of my life. Your Christmas Tree airlift to Trinidad was no exception. If you were disappointed when the film didn’t happen, you can be sure that I was also disappointed. It’s still a great story.
I’m not complaining. I got to make one movie that was completely my own. I know other filmmakers who never managed to do even that, despite throwing as many years of passionate effort into the attempt as I did. I was lucky. I always managed to pay the mortgage and provide a Christmas for my children. For this I am very grateful.
Thank you again for mentioning me in your book, and for your kindness in sending me a copy that didn’t cost me. I find I have very limited discretionary cash these days, compared to my glory days as a film director. This time of year, money gets tight.
Have a great 2024.
Warmest regards
Zale
Now, permit me to tell you a story of my own. If you’ve been following my blog you know about the recent fundraiser screening of my first feature film, “Skip Tracer” at the Universalist Hall here in Nanaimo. If you haven’t seen it yet you can read all about it here: http://www.zaledalen.com/zaledalen/
That trip down memory lane and the resulting nostalgia aroused in me a desire to take one more kick at the cat and make one more movie. My first thought was to make a movie inspired by my son who now works as a paramedic. I have been thinking about a movie about paramedics ever since my son sent me a picture of himself in his paramedic uniform. I took that photograph and put together a mockup of a Christmas movie poster with the intention of seeing if I could find any interest among the producers and companies that make the Christmas movies every year.
Having found no interest in the Christmas Paramedic idea and following the screening of Skip Tracer for the Universalists, I thought I might forget the Christmas movie angle and just make a movie about paramedics. Accordingly I wrote to my son, Casey the following:
Hey Casey: I’ve decided to make one last movie before I give it all up completely. I want to make a movie about paramedics. So I need your help to come up with a script. Please start thinking about scenes, events, structure. If you can give me those, I will write the script and raise the money. Please think about it. Make notes. Thanks. This will save my life, if you want to do that.
To which Casey replied:
Dad: That’s awesome. Sure I can make some notes. I’ve generally inundated these days. Love ya lots.
I wrote back:
Thanks Casey. Notes is all I need. Just notice things that happen and things that feel like they belong in a movie. Eventually we’ll get to talk about it. I’m sure your dance card is full, so don’t stress it. But think about the elements we get with a movie about paramedics. Attractive people in uniforms dealing with constant drama. There are a shit ton of movies about cops and doctors. I’ve never seen a movie about paramedics. Closest I can think of is “Rescue 8”, a series back in the sixties. But they were saving people from being trapped in caves and such. Not paramedics. Just seems like a concept lying in the street waiting for someone to pick it up. Drama up the yingyang. Love you tons.
And Casey immediately sent me this trailer for a recent Scorsese film I didn’t know existed.
To Casey: That was a disappointment. There I am again. A day late and a dollar short. Just proves that I’m on to something. You’ve already given me one scene for comic relief. Your golden Chinese buddha has to fit in the script someplace.
That Scorsese movie is exactly what I don’t want to make. So predictable. So Hollywood, right down to starring Nicholas Cage.
If I watch movies like that I’ll start imitating them and become derivative. The thing that keeps people watching Skip Tracer 47 years after all the other Canadian movies made at the same time have been forgotten is that it wasn’t imitating anything from Hollywood. It came out of interviewing people who were doing that work. But maybe I’m out to lunch again.
Maybe I should just forget it and stop pestering you. Who needs another movie?
From Casey: Love it dad. Definitely meditate on that and see what comes to you! Go with your intuition ️
And my reply: Good thinking. What comes to me is this: Even if I manage to make my own, completely original and non derivative movie, everyone will assume I was inspired by Scorsese’s movie and compare me to it and I’ll come up short because I won’t have had his budget and resources. So thanks by finding that for me, Casey. You saved me from making a fool of myself. I’m retired. The world is telling me to accept it. Love you kiddo.
And some final words from Casey: This is a lot of words. (Translation by his father: Dad, I’m so busy. Please stop bothering me.) Love you dad. Sorry to be so distant. I’ve got a lot happening.
So, Gordon, that’s the backstory about where I was at when your book and my mention in it landed in my inbox. The paramedic movie is dead and I’m looking for a project.
It occurs to me that there is a whole new genre of movies now: streaming video films designed for Christmas. Maybe, just maybe, I can go back to the Christmas tree airlift story. It’s still a great story. I don’t know why we had to abandon it way back in the day, but if I could find a producer and that producer could find the funds… Times have changed. With streaming video projects designed for the Christmas season, there may now be money out there to make your tree airlift story. Unfortunately I’m not the man to find the money. But with your fundraising experience… If taking a crack at being a film producer intrigues you, you might think about a retirement project. Just for tun. If so, I know a retired director who loved that wonderful, inspiring story, and would be very interested in directing for you. It’s still a great story. Think about it, eh.
There’s a lot to miss about my career as a journeyman film director. Chief among them is the comradery of the crew members.
A recent post by Moira Carlson in her sketch a day series told me that skunk cabbage are also known as bog lantern. That’s fascinating. I love the smell of skunk cabbage and don’t find it at all objectionable. But then I like the smell of durian, and I’ve known people who became nauseous to the point of throwing up when confined with one.
On one of our location shoots I had the crew van stop in Chinatown in Vancouver so that I could buy a durian. When the camera crew discovered its smell, they decided to hide one in the grip truck as a prank. (an expensive prank, given the price of the darn things, and a waste of a great fruit). That caused complaints to travel up the chain of command, and reprimands to quickly slide back down. Film crews can be so much fun, eh. I do miss that.
Here’s the second of the three scary incidents that occurred during the shooting of Terminal City Ricochet. During a prison break to liberate our heroes, a huge guard in riot gear jumps up and orders them to halt. A second guard, in true trigger happy Terminal City Ricochet fashion, appears on a catwalk some distance above and behind the first guard and, supposedly aiming at our escaping heroes, shoots him in the back.
The squib in the down filled vest didn’t give me the spectacular image I was hoping for. But I wouldn’t have pushed that button. Twice.
The special FX contingent of the crew came to me with the idea. If the first guard could be dressed in a down filled vest, the front of which was packed with explosive squibs, we could backlight the performer and have a beautiful shot of feathers and shrapnel and rain hanging in the air. I was assured that this would be a spectacular image.
Since I’d be covering the scene in a wide shot, the guard with the exploding vest would have to push his own button to trigger the charge.
It happened that the night we shot this scene was blessed with a heavy Vancouver rain. That made everybody miserable, but with the water on the ground and in the air, glistening in the lights, the look was beautiful. We did one rehearsal with no exploding vest, then re-set for the real deal. The first guard stepped into the shot. “Halt.” Cue the second guard appearing behind him. We see the muzzle flash of his shotgun as he fires the blank. We hear a muffled thump as the squibs in the vest are triggered and the down filled vest bulges out a bit. But no flurry of feathers. No shrapnel and feathers and rain gloriously backlit by film lights powerful enough to give us all headaches. Our first guard falls down and our heroes rush out of the shot. Ho hum.
“Cut”
So what happened? My first thought was that the squibs had been placed in the vest to blow inward instead of out into the lights. That would mean my actor took a full shot of explosives right over his heart. My god, we’ve killed the guy.
Fortunately that isn’t what had happened. Close, but not quite.
What had happened was that the rain had soaked the down filled vest, so that the filling became a solid mass instead of a nice fluffy bunch of feathers. The exploding squib had hit this mass of solidified feathers and bounced back onto the chest of the actor. He described it as being akin to the famous Bruce Lee three inch hard punch to his chest. Such a punch well might have killed our actor, but fortunately he was a sturdy gentleman with a good padding of flesh over his ribs. So it didn’t kill him. It just hurt the way you might expect a very hard punch to the chest to hurt.
It never ceases to amaze me, the courage and dedication of aspiring actors, especially the stunt performers in SBE (Special Business Extra) categories. For that matter, it never ceases to amaze me, the shear gall of my own a commitment as a director. I seem to turn into a psychopath. “Are you ready to give me take two?” He was, and he did, of course after we reset with a dry vest and made sure he wouldn’t get punched again. Now that was a guy with cajones. It still must have taken something to push that button.
Once again, I would welcome a comment. You can make one by clicking on the link that is the last in the categories list at the bottom of this page, or on the link to comments in the shape of a statement bubble at the top right. And if you happen to be the brave soul who gave me take two, please check in and say hello to your fans. I’m definitely one of them.
We had a couple of incidents shooting Terminal City Ricochet. The first one I’ll tell you about was my fault, and I hope I learned my lesson from it.
I guess I’m proud of this movie, in retrospect. It was strangely prescient, and even more valid today.
The scene called for our heroes to run security in a big old pimpmobile of a car. A guard with a pistol grip shotgun was to stand in front of the vehicle and fire at the windshield, which, being bullet proof, would only sustain a skid mark as damage.
I’ve had a lot of experience with wax bullets from back in my days playing with my Ruger Super Blackhawk 44 magnum with the fast draw club. I would hand load the wax bullets. They were easy enough to make. All it took was loading in a primer and black powder, then pressing the shell casing into nearly molten sealing wax. The result was a non-lethal projectile that would let me see how accurate my shot had been. So here’s my bright idea: I’ll just make a few 12 gauge wax bullets that can be fired at the car windshield, leaving the desired skid mark without penetrating the glass.
Of course we tested this concept on the prop car, and I was really satisfied with the result.
To do the actual shooting I wanted somebody I could trust with a shotgun. So I enlisted my brother, Ed (Bear) Scott, to play the part of the guard. Ed’s day job was as a prison guard. He carried a pistol grip shotgun most days when he was working in the yard. I knew I could trust him to land a shot on the windshield and get out of the way before he got run over.
Comes the day. Everything is all set. The shot goes off perfectly. No problem, until Ed comes on the walky-talky. “You might want to call for an ambulance,” he says calmly. “That bullet went right through.”
Well, holy shit. That doesn’t sound good. We all race for the car, where we find the actors laughing and pointing at the very obvious hole in the windshield. They were splattered with shards of glass, but fortunately nobody was hurt. They certainly could have been. They weren’t even wearing eye protection.
This was the beginning of my aversion to having a real gun on a movie set. It’s not necessary, as I demonstrated quite well using nothing but Final Cut Pro when shooting “Passion”. It’s now a trivial matter to add CGI flame and smoke to the muzzle of a gun that can only go click, completely incapable of sending out a projectile. The result is one hundred percent believable. Actually even better than what you might get with a real gun because you can adjust the look and level of the flash and smoke. But Terminal City Ricochet was shot in the pre-digital days, when adding CGI would have been completely beyond our squeaky tight budget. No longer, and no more. Never again.
That was one of three incidents I can think of where we had a safety issue on Terminal City Ricochet. At one point, my safety officer wrote a letter to his union complaining that I was ignoring safety concerns. That gave me no choice but to fire the man. This was about the time that a helicopter crash killed performers on the set of Twilight Zone the Movie, resulting in criminal charges against the director, John Landis. It was obvious that I, the director, would be in line to take any blame, and with a letter like the one from my safety officer on file, I would have no defense at all. Thinking back on this now, firing the safety officer did nothing to mitigate my legal exposure, but I think firing him for egregious stupidity was certainly justified. I replaced that safety officer with the head of the stunt man’s union, telling him that he had complete control of the set and that nothing would happen without his approval. He was to sign off on any scene involving a firearm, explosion, or anything else that could be dangerous. None of this would have protected me in the event of another incident, but at least it would give me an argument to make if something else went wrong.
Please stay tuned for two more safety issues on Terminal City Ricochet. It was a scary shoot.
And please, put your thoughts and comments into a comments thread for this post. You can find the link to post a comment at the top right of this page, or at the bottom as the last item on the category list. Comments really help to motivate me to continue writing this kind of material, and ease the feeling that I am screaming into the void. So please, do comment.
I once paid quite a bit of money to attend a workshop on how to be a successful director. I don’t remember what credentials the presenter held, but he managed to turn me off within five minutes of starting his presentation. His first piece of advice was that a director needs to establish dominance by firing somebody. It didn’t matter whom or why, just pick somebody more or less at random and fire them.
No, it wasn’t a program put on by this film school. But similar, I think. A friend convinced me that I needed to attend.
This is the dominance theory of film directing and it’s not for me. I’m ashamed to say I tried it out once on a CBC production in Toronto. I like a quiet, focused set. My hope was that, while the crew would not shape up to make me happy, they would shape up to keep the first AD safe from criticism. So I growled loudly at my first AD: “If you can’t get me quiet on this set, I’m going to get somebody in here who can.” Doing my best to sound angry and nasty.
And then I felt so bad about myself that I never tried being dominant again,
All I can say about this theory of directing is: Don’t be this guy, eh.
I walked out of that expensive workshop after a mere five minutes of listening to the jerk strut and preen his way around the stage. I demanded my money back with the excuse that my back was giving me trouble and I couldn’t stand to remain in the seat. I suppose I could have just told the organizers the truth, but there would have been consequences for that friend of mine who talked me into buying the ticket. Truth can be a dangerous thing to use indiscriminately.
I got my brother, Ed “Bear” Scott, to work with me on Terminal City Ricochet, despite my feelings about nepotism. Mostly I wanted him on set because his day job was as a prison guard. He handled a pistol grip shotgun every working day, and knew how to do so safely. Ed knows me. He knows that I’m a pussycat by nature. And this is what he told me about the crew: “They are terrified of you, you know.” Shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re kidding,” I told him. “No I’m not. They are totally terrified of you.” “What have I ever done to make them afraid of me,” I asked him. “That’s what I can’t figure out,” he said. “But they are.” “Must be just the title,” I said.
We had a lot of real guns on that set. Ed told me about a conversation he had with the props master. “You’re going to have an accidental discharge if you do that,” he told the guy. The response he got roughly translates as “Fuck off. I know what I’m doing.” And then five minutes later, KABOOOM. One of the pistol grip shotguns went off, to everybody’s surprise, especially the surprise of the props master who was holding it, fortunately pointed straight up in the air. Ed gave him a look, but didn’t say anything. He’d been in that position himself.
Terminal City Ricochet had a couple of incidents on set that resulted in me having to fire the safety officer, out of self defense, and replace him with the head of the stunt man’s association. More on that in my next post.
Paraphrasing here. As Stanly Motts, the producer character in Wag the Dog, said sadly,: Just as you are starting to understand how to make a movie and how the industry works they lower the curtain on your career.
I am a movie director, damn it. Specifically a low budget movie director. Give me Bowfinger’s budget and I will give you a movie. That’s what I have done during my long career. Obviously not as much as I wish I had done, but that’s it. I put the money on the screen.
Anybody can make a big budget movie. That’s a snap. That’s easy. It’s making a movie with no money that’s the trick.
I don’t know how I became a low budget movie director. It’s a lot more fun to hose the screen with millions of dollars from people who don’t know dick about making movies, but to be a director I respect you’ve got to be Bowfinger.
Something I heard through my entire directing career went like this: He’s never made a big budget picture. Do you think he can handle this much money? Handle it? Fuck, I’ll roll in the dirt with it and deliver far more than anybody has any right to expect, dance with whatever devil I have to dance with, and put the money on the screen.
I came into directing up the rat lines. I came into directing after serving an apprenticeship as a writer, soundman, editor’s assistant, sound editor, editor, cameraman, production manager, and… fucking creator. A creator. The author of the picture, whatever the picture might happen to be.
Most people have no idea what a director is, or what he does. Take them on a film set and they might think the assistant director, the AD, the guy giving directions, is the director. Not even close. Peter Coyote was not the director, micro-managing the scene with impossible instructions to performers. Not even close. Or the guy telling the actor to pick up the salt shaker on such and such a line. The guy, now as frequently the woman, giving directions. Isn’t that person the director? Not even close.
The only real depiction of a real director I ever saw was Peter O’Toole in “The Stuntman”. The guy desperately trying to find his movie amid the clatter and noise on set, and in his head. Now, that was a director. That was Francis Copolla trying to find it, to figure it out while he went way over budget in the Philippine jungle with the suits back in the studio screaming at him and throwing scripts at the wall. A guy, increasingly a woman, who can see the big picture, who is so close to the big picture he can almost taste it while the chitchats climb on his ceiling and fall into his tea cups.
And who was it on set when the suit’s representative came to tell him that he was twenty pages behind or fifty pages behind who tore that number of pages out of his script and threw them in the trashcan, announcing, “There. Now I’m on budget.” Money? Fuck your money. I’m making a movie.
I was hired by Canal to get “Wiseguy” under control after the prima donna director of the pilot went so far over budget that they couldn’t do turn around. Zale, Alex Beaton said to me, you are going to bring in the same quality without going a penny over budget or a minute into overtime. And I said, “Sure, Alex. Whatever you say.”
We were shooting outside St. Paul’s hospital on Thurlow Street when a grip went charging past me, a hundred pounds of cable on his shoulder. I gave him an encouraging slap on the back and the sweat sprayed off his t-shirt. I watched him run with it. Run with it, not saunter along. The guy was charging. For me. Because I told him what I expected of the crew and they were all set on delivering.
I think Rob Young was the soundman. Or maybe it was Larry Sutton. No matter. I asked him, “Larry, this is not a slacking crew. This crew is humping it. So what the hell went wrong with the pilot?”
“They set up the camera three times and lit the set four times before they shot an inch of film,” Larry said, almost apologetically.
Well, you can’t do that on episodic television. Not unless you are the precious prima donna director in a sinecure of a position. Then you can do it. Then the studio will eat the overtime and you can keep working while you piss millions down the drain. But that’s not me. I come in on schedule and on budget.
Larry, or was it Rob, explained it to me while he quietly moved my coffee in the styrofoam cup away from his Nagra IV. (Yes, they were still recording on Nagra IV’s in those days.) I said the camera goes here on a fifty, and if I didn’t like the shot we’d shoot it anyway and I’d have to eat it in the editing room. I set a pace. We got the shot and we moved on.
I had a standard speech at the beginning of a shoot specifically for the script assistant. It went like this: Don’t talk to me about axis. I’m not going to discuss axis on my set. If you think I’ve got the axis wrong and the shots won’t cut together, you just make a note in your notes and we shoot the shot. If I’ve got the axis wrong, if we’re crossing the line and you think it will be a problem in the editing room, make a note on the script and keep it to yourself. I’m the director. I’m never wrong about the camera axis. But if you open up a discussion about eye lines or camera axis then the DOP is going to chime in with an opinion, and then the actors will have an opinion, and pretty soon I’ve got twenty minutes of my day and more down the rabbit hole of eye lines and camera axis, while not one of my crew members has ever cut one of my pictures. So they have no right to an opinion of camera axis. It’s my job as the director to choose the shots, cover the scenes, and make sure everything will cut together. Nobody is going to blame you if my shots don’t cut. Make the note and shut up about it. The whole thing about setting the pace is choosing the shots, lenses, eye lines, and then making sure the actors know where to look to match the action. Sometimes it may feel weird to them. That’s all between me and the actors. I’m not going to cover anything two ways, and we’re not coming back for a reshoot.
If you really think the editor is going to come back at you over eye line or axis issues, whisper to me that you’re putting “Shot under protest” on the script. Then get out of my way. We’re moving on.
A director is very vulnerable. His reputation is what gets him or her their next gig. All it takes is a dismissive sneer and comment at the wrap party of another show when their name comes up and it can cost them big time. Real money. I remember in the production office of “Danger Bay” listening to the production manager disparaging Phil Borsos as the director of “One Magic Christmas”. She had worked on “One Magic Christmas” and that gave her real authority when the producers of “Danger Bay” were listening to her. “Phil Borsos didn’t direct that picture,” she was saying. “Borsos was hiding in the production honey wagon shoveling coke up his nose. It was Frank Tidy, the DOP, who directed that picture.” And I had to intervene. “That’s not true,” I said.
“Were you there?” the production manager said.
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t there. And I don’t know what problems you had with Phil. No doubt he’s not an easy director for a production manager to work with. But if you look at his films, going back to Cooperage and Spar Tree and The Grey Fox, all the movies that preceded One Magic Christmas, you will see a visual connection through all the movies he made before he made that last picture. Phil was a visual stylist. I don’t care if he was snorting coke off a stripper’s belly while he was making “One Magic Christmas”. I don’t care if he never showed up on set. He made that picture. Don’t ask me how, but the proof is in the pictures. What’s more, while he was shooting that standard Hollywood action movie in Florida, and pissing off that Hollywood established producer, One Magic Christmas was dead. The powers of the industry had decided that Phil was too much trouble to work with. He was Hollywood Poison. His career was over. But Phil took the picture to Disney and performed CPR on it and showed his commitment to the movie that had been his dream for years, the movie he wanted to make so that he could join the ranks of directors like Frank Capra with It’s a Wonderful Life. Without Phil Borsos, One Magic Christmas would not exist. He brought it back from the dead through shear salesmanship and force of personality. So don’t tell people, especially a room full of producers, he didn’t direct it. It’s a Phil Borsos picture.
By the way, I was recently very gratified to hear one of the culture commenters on CBC radio this past Christmas talking about his admiration for One Magic Christmas. I know that movie had a lot of trouble finding its audience, but I personally loved it. It shows Phil Borsos maturing as a director with a real talent for working with actors. Such a tragedy that Phil died so young. He had more films to make, films I would really want to see. I always admired the man and felt that he should have had some of the attention that landed on me by default.
To say it again, a director is terribly vulnerable. All a director has is their reputation. That’s what gets them their next pay check. And their next chance to direct something significant, to practice their craft as a director.
I traveled to Seattle once, years ago, to take a meeting with a producer for PBS, the people who were making the very few television shows I’m interested in directing. At some point in the meeting, he said to me, “I hear you’re hard to work with.” and I knew exactly where that was coming from. It was coming from Nelvana in Toronto who were upset with me over giving them a hard time shooting The Edison Twins, of which I was one of the two startup directors. It had nothing to do with my directing. It had to do with them showing my work, and the work of my crew, to the Disney brass in the basement of their production offices because they wanted to save a few bucks by not renting a screening room at the lab. We had all been breaking our hearts trying to make a wonderful TV series and we were actually proud of our work, but they were going to screen it on a Siemens double system projector with too long a throw for the lens and wow and flutter on the sound track. The director of photography had come to me and begged me to do something about it, as had the sound man. Both said they wouldn’t attend the screening. I joined them in solidarity, and that cost me at least this one job that I knew about. The other startup director had more political sense than I ever had, and, I think, managed to keep the situation from costing him work and money.
I’m going to name names now. Well, one name at least. Because I’m dying and I’m never going to work again and I don’t give a fuck. Ken Jubenvill, that’s a name for you. Ken Jubenvill, you are an asshole. I thought you were a friend of mine. But an episodic director has no friends on an episodic set. It got back to me, you see. Of course it did. In a conversation with producers Ken said “Oh Zale. (dismissive shrug) Zale plays at being a director. ” What an asshole thing to say about me, Ken. And to producers yet. That may actually be the moment when the scales fell from my eyes and I started to admit to hating being a director in the fucking industry, while loving being a director in the real world. I shrugged my shoulders and smiled. Yeah, right, Ken. As Ron Orieux said about you, you tiny, perfect, director. I let it ride. The next time I saw Ken I smiled at him and asked how his family was doing. Was he any closer to making his tiny, perfect movie. Probably not. Give me a moment to check in to Almighty Voice on the IMDB. That should tell me. Did Ken ever get to make his little movie….
And there you have it. A shipload of TV movies. An equal number of episodic shows. One hell of an impressive director’s show reel. Looks like you had one hell of a lot of fun, Ken. I could almost envy a show real like that one. But no. I don’t see your movie on the list. You never got to make it.
And now I feel shitty, because revealing this about Ken makes me as big an asshole as he is. But of course I knew this already. There’s something about the movie industry, the industry, not making movies, that brings out the asshole in anybody.
But I will tell you who I hate. (Whom I hate?) I hate those who punch down. I hate the First AD on Kung Fu the Legend Continues who called a certain woman “The set bicycle.” Thinking it would make me think less of her when all it did was make me think less of him.
And even he is not the biggest asshole to infest the television movie industry. To see that asshole, all I need is a mirror.
I did my first editing on my first short film, Porn Maker to the World, at Simon Fraser University film workshop in about 1967, and got my first hint about how to approach it from a fellow student, Peter Bryant, who introduced me to cutting for the action. Editing is where the visual story is created. Editing actually makes the movie, and is as important, if not more important, than the writing and acting and even directing.
Some of the most famous directors, like David Lean [Lawrence of Arabia], came from editing. But there is a flip side to this. We used to talk disparagingly about an “editor’s film”. An editor working someplace like the National Film Board or on a series would beg and plead to be given their chance to direct. The result was, all too often, a finished product that flowed like melted butter, with every cut perfect, sliding unnoticed past the viewer. Very impressive. Sadly boring.
A good editor can make a good film out of next to nothing. At the same time, an insensitive editor can destroy the best directing, acting, and story. I’ve seen it happen. I remember being a crew member on one film in particular. We were all really impressed with the dailies, the raw film straight from the camera. Man alive, this is going to be a great movie. But by the time the editor got done with it we all looked at each other and asked, what happened to the story?
Have you heard about Eisenstein. He was a famous Russian film maker in the very beginning days of silent movies, back when most movies were shot like a play and nobody even knew about close ups. Eisenstein took a shot of an actor’s face, then intercut it with evocative images- a mother holding a baby, a man pointing a gun at the camera. The actor’s face never changed, because it was all one shot. Yet critics raved about the subtlety of his performance. That is the power of editing. The audience reads in emotions they expect to see. That’s a great lesson for directors, and for actors.
When I was getting started, editing was labour intensive, even painful. That first film, Porn Maker to the World, was shot on black and white reversal stock, processed at the university, and hung to dry under the theater stairs. I cut the original film by scraping off the emulsion on one side and gluing it together with a hot splicer. No workprint. I lost a frame any time I decided a cut needed to be changed and tried to put it back together.
Cranking a workprint, once I started working with workprints, with five tracks of perforated magnetic sound through a synchronizer was heavy work, especially when you made the big leap from working in sixteen millimeter to working in thirty five. That was always seen as getting into the big time.
A bigger problem was in judging how long a credit needed to be on the screen when all I had to go by was a grease pencil line on the workprint. But I’ve already talked about the difficulties with editing in the old days, back when I did the post about getting started and making “Granny’s Quilts”. The point is, I’m past that now. Now I’m in love with digital editing.
It’s probably obvious to my readers, but digital editing changed everything. Suddenly you could experiment as an editor. You can make fast cuts, save a version of what you’ve done. Go back to the previous version, and without taking the tape off the work print and reassembling it. The old rule of measuring by the nose went out the window.
Okay, that probably needs an explanation. One of the first master editors I worked with, as an assistant, was a man called Luke Bennett. Luke had started out airbrushing the sound cuts in the days when sound was recorded on optical stock and the cuts needed to be air brushed to stop them from popping. He told me that one of his mentors would pontificate about editing: “If it’s not a great shot but I need it to tell the story, I use a piece from the end of my nose to the tip of my baby finger. If it’s a good shot, I use a piece from the tip of my nose to my elbow. And if it’s a great shot, I use a piece as long as my arm. That’s what editing is, my boy, it’s measured by the nose.”
I loved editing back when we used actual film. But I love it even more now that we use computers and digital video. I cut our feature length romcom, “Passion“, on Final Cut Pro, an Apple product. And I loved it. The things I could do with that editing program, the ease of making mats and superimpossitions and laying on animated titles in colour… It was like handing me the keys to daddy’s Ferrari*, freedom from constraints, and freedom from the manual labour. I could be creative.
But I haven’t had Final Cut Pro since I burned out my Mac by running it on 240v in China without flipping the switch. And I’m not a major fan of Apple computers, so I’m not buying a Mac.
The last video editing I did was on an ancient laptop with Windows7 running Adobe Premier Pro, and I hated it. It seemed totally lacking in the intuitive controls that Final Cut Pro gave me, the ability to quickly and easily change the size of the frame for example. It’s possible that I just never learned to use it, but…. I managed to muddle through. It’s no wonder that FCP set the standard for computer editing, to the point where a program that can edit on a PC is marketed as a Final Cut Pro emulator.
Here’s the thing: Ruth bought me a new computer for Christmas. Now that I have it, with a great graphics card, 16 gigs of RAM and terabytes of storage, I’ve been investigating those Final Cut Pro emulators for Window and I think I’ve found a winner in Wondershare Filmora 11. And the good news is that I could buy a perpetual license, instead of a monthly or yearly subscription.
Now all I need is a project to edit. I have a head full of ideas. Stay tuned.
-30-
*No, my father didn’t have a Ferrari. He would have been embarrassed to be seen driving one. He was a Chevy guy. Driving a solidly middle class car was essential to his image.
️ 
