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.
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.
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.
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.
You might wonder how powerful people get away with doing disgusting things, particularly things like sexually harassing less powerful people. Why don’t more people who know about their actions blow the whistle on them?
Harvey Weinstein, currently in prison until at least November 9, 2039. One of the few living with the consequences of sexual misconduct. Why is it so hard to nail these guys?
There’s an easy answer. Nobody wants to get involved. It’s an ugly, murky business, often characterized by only he said/she said evidence. And powerful people are powerful for a reason. They control who gets to work, earns a living, and has a career.
Shortly before the end of the last century I directed a couple of episodic TV shows on the west coast. Like most episodic shows, the budget was squeaky tight and the shooting schedule meant that the director’s shot list had to be scraped to the bone. Bringing the show in on time and on budget was the usual struggle against time and circumstances. This particular series helped the directors out by providing a second unit camera crew to pick up shots the director simply didn’t have time to set up. In this case the second unit camera was operated by a very attractive young woman. She was doing great work, and I was grateful for it.
“You’re saving my life here,” I told her. “I don’t know how I could get this show in the can without you.”
And then she was fired.
I heard that the producer said she was incompetent. That didn’t make any sense to me, but maybe there was something she shot that the producer didn’t like, or decided was a waste of money. Producers can be hard to please.
I heard from the camera crew that the producer had hit on her. She had turned him down flat. And then she was fired. That would explain a lot.
Some weeks later I got a phone call from the producer. She had gone to the union and lodged a complaint against him. “She’s saying that the great Zale Dalen told her that her work was saving his life,” he told me, his voice an audible sneer when he said my name.
The implication, of course, was that he wanted me to deny telling her that her work was valuable. A lot of emotions were running through my body and tightening my breathing at this point. Chief among them was that I didn’t like this guy. Possibly there was a bit of pride in his sarcastic suggestion that my name carried weight in the industry. Also there was a slight annoyance at the woman for dragging me into this situation. By this point in my career I had learn that pissing off a producer, even a low level West Coast episodic producer, could be career suicide.
Case in point: I went to an interview with a PBS producer in Seattle. He told me: “I hear you are hard to work with.” and I knew exactly where that had come from – a producer I worked with in Toronto, almost on the other side of the continent. The movie industry is a small club. Producer talk, and don’t mind exercising their power and influence by killing a job prospect for a director.
I remember sitting in a sushi bar with George Lazenby. He told me that Albert R. (Cubby) Broccoli wanted him to do another James Bond movie after starring in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and he had refused because “the producer made me feel mindless”. Cubby Broccoli told him he would never make another movie, and pretty much made it stick. “After the Bond argument nobody would touch me,” George told me. “Harry Saltzman had always said, ‘If you don’t do another Bond you’ll wind up doing spaghetti westerns in Italy. But I couldn’t even get one of those. My agent couldn’t believe it. But the word was out – I was ‘difficult’.”
Being difficult is the kiss of death for a director, unless you direct a huge money maker. Then being difficult is not only expected, it’s essential. A director is expected to have a vision and fight for it. But even so, one must be aware of power and influence. Phil Borsos had a good run after making “The Grey Fox”, but his career did a steep dive into the toilet after he pissed off the producer of “The Mean Season”, David Foster, a man with a list of major credits as long as your leg and an entrenched member of the Hollywood industry elite.
So, what could I do? I certainly wasn’t going to deny that I said what I said. I told the producer, listen, this isn’t my business. I don’t know what went on and I wasn’t there. But what I saw of her work looked good. If anybody asks me, I’ll say so.
I later heard that the young camera person settled, i.e. was bought off. And, predictably, she became known as “difficult”. Though I managed to hire her for one small project, I don’t think she got a lot of work after that. Another reason why I don’t like the film business. It’s full of assholes who trash careers out of spite.
Strangely enough, I also didn’t get any work from that producer after that.
It’s really encouraging that the “casting couch” has been sent to the landfill and abusers like Harvey Weinstein are getting what they deserve. But it’s still an industry that lives on gossip, word of mouth, and reputation. Becoming known as difficult is the kiss of death, and that will never change.
What will also never change is that there will always be ambitious young women, and men, willing to not “be difficult” when a career advance is dangled in front of them. So that confuses the situation. And such compliance is fraught with danger and disappointment. “Did you hear about the Polish actress?” a disgusting Hollywood joke that manages to be both sexist and racist (plus a reflection of the bitterness writers often feel as their work is butchered by producers and directors). “She fucked the writer.”
Damn but it’s an ugly business. Makes me sincerely glad my phone stopped ringing years ago.
This is a question that is very hard to evaluate. I seem to have quite a few fans out there, both in the industry and in the greater audience. But I know there are many people who think my work sucks, and at least one Youtube troll who was very happy to tell me so.
On one metric I’m terribly deficient. A good movie director is a person who directs movies. I haven’t been on an industry film set for over twenty years. So maybe I was once a good director, but now I’m, at best, a has-been. A washed out old man reveling in past glories and successes while still tortured by the many moments that didn’t work out as I might wish.
So, in developing an evaluation, let me start with my deficiencies. I am a political idiot. I have never paid attention to power or money, or the people who control power and money, to the people who can give me work, or have influence with others to get me work. This is complemented by amazing arrogance. Just one example: On the day before our first shooting day on my second made for TV movie, “On Thin Ice, the Tai Babalonia Story”, the producer, Janet Faust, a highly experienced and quite brilliant woman, said, “I’ll ride to the set with you in the morning.” To which I said, “No you won’t. I ride to the set with my first AD. (Assistant Director, my main support on set.)” Can you imagine anything more stupid than that. Is my firsts AD ever going to give me a job? Hell no. I have worked with some truly supportive Assistant Directors, many of whom went on to have directing careers themselves. Including David Warrysmith, my AD on that picture. And that alone should tell you something. If any of them ever put my name up for a directing position, I didn’t hear about it.
Kenny Wahl in “Wiseguy – Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. Not happy with his director.
Another painful example. On the last day of shooting my episode of “Wise Guy”, the star woke up to the fact that it wasn’t his scene. Maybe he finally got around to reading the script. It was a wedding banquet scene which culminated in Ray Sharkey garotting an enemy while the undercover cop, surrounded by twenty or thirty armed goombas, looks on helplessly. Kenny Wahl came to me just before we started shooting the scene to complain that his character was a cop. He had to do something. I explained that the whole point of the scene was that he couldn’t do anything. “You’re surrounded by armed goons, Ken. Anything you do is going to blow your cover and get you killed.” Kenny was insistent. Telling him I’d been prepping the show for two weeks and would really like it if he let me just follow the script made no impression on him. So I called Ray Sharky over and said, “Ken says he has to do something in this scene. What do you think.” Ray asked Kenny, “What do you want to do?” a good logical question. Ken said, “I have to at least stand up.” I said, “Ray, Ken wants to stand up. What would you do?” Ray said, “I’d push him back down.” I said, “Ken, you’re going to look like an idiot. Please just let us go with the script as written.” Stephen Canal, owner of the studio, happened to be visiting the set for that scene. Kenny went to him and complained, and Stephen came to me and, very respectfully, asked, “Zale, can you shoot it two ways.” Now, a director with half a political brain, would have said something like, “He’s got a good point, Stephen. I’ll shoot it his way.” Because Kenny Wall is going to be back as the star of the show for however many shows the series runs. I’m just the director du jour, canon fodder, and they don’t need me to come back ever. So, what did I do? I wasted the expensive crew time and shot it two ways, pissing off the crew who just wanted to get the scene shot and go home for the day. Which version did came out of post production? Kenny’s version of course. It looked fine. I never directed another episode of “Wiseguy”. I’m an idiot.
One final example. I was the startup director on “The Edison Twins” at Nelvana in Toronto. The crew, actors, and I had all been breaking our hearts to turn out a good show. We were all proud of our work. But the producers had been showing us our rushes in the studio basement on a double system Siemens projector. The DOP (Director of Photography) had been complaining that the forty foot throw was washing out the images and his work looked terrible. The soundman had been complaining that the projector was adding wow and flutter as well as drowning out the sound. Then we were told that the executives from Disney were coming up to Toronto to see what we’d done. The producers were planning on showing our work on that crappy makeshift projection system. Both the camera crew and sound crew came to me and begged me to do something. Both said they weren’t going to come to the screening. So I told the producers that I wasn’t coming to the screening unless they held it in a proper screening room at the lab. I presented this as an ultimatum, rather than a polite request and suggestion. Idiot. Maybe this explains why, at a job interview for PBS in Seattle, I was told “I hear you are hard to work with.” Ya think?
Soon enough this kind of behavior was thinning down my work assignments. I was starting to get hungry. When the school district in Gibsons, after some lobbying by a parents group, APEC (Association for the Preservation of English in Canada, as if English was a threatened language in Gibsons, B.C.) voted to end early French Immersion in the public school system and bring in late French immersion, for grade threes, we French immersion parents decided to send our kids to Quebec for a few months in a French language school. This would qualify us for something called Program Cadre, which by law meant that they would get French immersion anywhere in Canada. We organized a fund raiser, a silent auction, to help cover this expense. One of the items donated for the auction was an hour of personal counseling by a friend of ours, a professional counselor. I knew her regular rate was $60 per hour, and nobody was bidding. So I bid $30 and won the hour. I had asked her previously what kind of a counselor she was, whether a Freudian or a Jungian or whatever. She told me she didn’t follow any particular style. She simply listened to her clients and told them what they had told her, to help them get a different perspective on their problems. This sounded good to me. So when I went for my hour of counseling, I gave her a “core dump” on my life and career. When I was finished she said, “So…you have told me that your failure to get as much work as you would like is a result of failing to form relationships with people who could give you work.” Well, duh. That was damned obvious. I know that….. Of course… I know that. The thing is, I came at directing from the film workshop at Simon Fraser University. My friends there were film makers, cameramen, editors, soundmen, all of us funding our own projects and working on each other’s little films. They are my kind of people, and I love working with actors, especially amateur actors. And none of these people could ever give me work. I do not relate well to producers, suits, clients, or money people. Truth is, I have authority issues. Those people intimidate me, and I tend to avoid them when I can. I decided right then that I can be friends with anybody, and without becoming a sycophant or compromising my personality, if I pay attention. I read “How to Make Friends and Influence People” as a teenager. I know how to do it. But by then it was a little late to get started. My reputation was well established.
So this is my biggest failure as a director, my failure to direct. Does this mean I’m a bad director? Not at all.
I have moments in my body of work, going all the way back to my very earliest films, that stand up favorably against the giants of the field. I have directed scenes that look as good as anything the big names of the A list have done. There’s a lot of stuff in my filmography that I’m very proud of.
But this is enough for one post. Maybe next time I will talk about those moments of triumph, the times when I organized chaos into something emotionally powerful, the moments when I made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. That’s much more fun to talk about than this has been.
I got an email from my wife today with “Are You Ears Burning” in the subject line, directing me to this post by Kenneth George Godwin.
I tried to post a comment in response, but there’s a glitch in his site. There was no sign of a captcha, but an error message said I hadn’t filled it out correctly. So I sent him this in a email instead:
Hi Kenneth George Godwin:
I tried to post the following comment on your post, but got an error message saying I did not enter the correct captcha. Couldn’t find a captcha anywhere. Anyway, here’s what I tried to post in the comments:
Don’t know who it is at the editing bench, identified as Dale Zalen, but they bear no resemblance to me, Zale Dalen. Not an uncommon mistake. (This has been corrected, and the picture replaced with one I provided.)
Aside from that, this was a very fair and generous article. For a time I was the West Coast advisor to the Canadian Film Development Corporation, and spent many meetings pleading with them to expand on the special investment program, under which “Skip Tracer” was made, and fighting off the industry types championing big budget American style production. I was also pleading with them not to go into supporting television production, a move they made because they couldn’t justify the money they were losing supporting feature films. The name change to Telefilm Canada marked the final defeat of that battle. I wrote a post some time ago on why I believe “Passion” is an underappreciated and historically important film, but that post seems to have disappeared from https://www.artisanmovies.com/ pages. I guess I’ll have to write it again. My main pitch is that it was the first prosumer digital production made completely outside of the movie industry that made no excuses for the technology and actually managed to look like a movie. (the fact that you reviewed it as just a movie kind of makes this point.) Plus I just like its social statements. Check into http://www.zaledalen.com/zaledalen/ in a week or so and I should have it up there. Thanks for the ink and attention.
Unless you were born into Hollywood royalty, like one of the Carradines or Coppolas, getting a foot into the film industry is a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, especially from a socially remote location in Canada. Back in 1969, the only path I could see was to do anything that would put me in contact with movie people, like working as a sound man or an assistant editor, and then doing anything else that I could call making a movie. That last part is far easier today, when an ambitious kid can make a short movie on his phone and edit it on his computer. But when I got started, making anything cost a ship load of money.
How much money? Well, for starters you needed a camera that cost thousands of dollars, but you could rent, and sound equipment costing slightly less which you could also rent but I had saved up to own. Close to three thousand bucks for a Nagra IV with crystal synch and a Sennheiser 804 microphone with wind cage and carrying handle – the basis of a documentary sound kit. Then you needed film to run through the camera. You couldn’t edit that film without expensive equipment, unless you had the dedication of Jack Darcus and were willing to shoot black and white reversal and edit the original with a magnifying glass and a pair of scissors.
Even at that, the film and processing was going to set you back hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. To give you some idea of the expense: Film stock, processing, and a work print would cost approximately one dollar per foot. Sixteen millimeter film had forty frames in a foot, running through the camera at 24 frames/second. So every couple of seconds of shooting, another dollar was going into the movie. You could count on, conservatively, a ten to one shooting ration though on a complicated documentary that might go up to a hundred to one or more. A ten to one ration meant each ten feet you ran through the camera and work printed, would result in one foot of finished film. This caused a great temptation to try to edit in the camera, which was a false economy and severely restricted the choices in editing.
For example, if you have a performer entering the scene through a door from another room, it gives the editor choices if you film them going from that room, opening the door, entering the other room, and closing the door behind them. Similarly, you want to overlap the action in the other room, starting with the door closed and having the performer enter and close the door behind them. That way the editor can chose where to cut to make the action flow smoothly.
This principle of overlapping should extend to every action. If somebody stands up from the table in the master shot, it might make sense to start with them sitting down, thinking about rising, then standing up. Your cut to a close shot might call for the actor starting sitting and then rising into the frame. It’s vitally important to give the editor choices of cutting points, and that inflates the shooting ratio.
Then, of course, there are the flubbed takes and pick ups on takes. Both of which call for overlapping action and dialogue.
And that’s just the shooting. After that you have the cost of post production, the sound transfer from quarter inch magnetic to sprocketted sixteen millimeter magnetic film stock that can be synchronized with the work print. You’ve all seen the clapper boards with the film name and scene number and take number on them. Those served a purpose. They allowed the film to be synchronized by matching the frame where the clapper board closed with the click of the “sticks.”
The sequence for starting a shot was for the Assistant Director the AD, to call “roll sound”. The soundman would then say “speed” when the tape had stopped bouncing the guide rollers. Then the cameraman would say “slate” or “mark it” and the camera assistant would waste no time announcing the scene and take number before loudly closing the clapper board. Of course that footage, that dollar or more of shooting, would be thrown away, which is why the slate was in position and ready to close by the time the cameraman said “mark it”. Nobody wasted any time when the camera was rolling, which could be quite disconcerting for the actors. It was why I always gave a second or two for things to settle before calling “action”. Some waste was necessary.
I don’t think I need to go any further into the process. You get the idea. Making any kind of a movie cost money. When I was working as an office junior at CBC in Toronto, Brian R.R. Hebb, another office junior, and I teamed up to make a “filler” in hopes of selling it to the CBC. Brian wanted to be a cameraman. I wanted to be a director, or at least make movies. So we kicked in our own money to buy a few 100 foot rolls of Kodak reversal stock, rented a camera, and set about making a little film to celebrate the vanishing streetcar. We shot some of the streetcars still operating in Toronto, shot a day at a streetcar museum close to town, added in some stolen stock footage of streetcars in the early days of Toronto, laid on some cleared music from the CBC’s music library, and I cut our little film after-hours in one of the CBC editing rooms on CBC editing equipment. I don’t remember how all the numbers worked out, but when we sold “The Short Train” to CBC we turned enough to pay our costs and pocket maybe a hundred dollars each. Since we were both earning $50/week at that time, that felt pretty good.
Cue Digression Cam: Years later I was hired to direct an MOW, a Movie of the Week, about Tai Babalonia and Randy Gardner, a figure skating pair who were headed to the Olympics when Randy pulled a groin muscle and they were out of contention. To my surprise and delight, the producers wanted to use Brian Hebb as the Director of Photography. He’d worked his way up to a cameraman position at CBC, an amazing achievement in it’s own right, after I’d left the mother corporation. Then he also left the CBC and was making a name for himself as a freelancer. So there we were, some twenty years after making our little filler. Me the director and Brian the Director of Photography. Both of us where we’d wanted to be way back when. There was a scene in “On Thin Ice” that called for a television to be playing in the background in a hotel room. I managed to get CBC archives to find our little film, and that’s what’s playing back on the TV in that scene. Full circle, eh.
That little filler was about as much as I could do without more money, and getting more money meant finding government support. The Canadian Film Development Corporation, later rebranded as Telefilm Canada, was catching flack for not spending any money out west, so they threw B.C. a bone with a short film program. It called for submitting a script and budget, so I wrote a half hour based on one of my father’s stories of working for the railroad in Northern Saskatchewan. I think that gave my first wife, who had become my producer, $7,500, with which, being extremely frugal, we figured we could make a television half hour, twenty-two minutes of finished film. We lucked out with the weather. It started snowing on our first shooting day, stopped and turned to rain on our seventh, and by the time we wrapped the snow was gone. The end result was a short film that looked gorgeous. I managed to sell “Gandy Dance” to the CBC.
I also found a distributor for “Gandy Dance”. He was based in Toronto and mostly handled educational films. I don’t think he managed to get any revenue out of our film, beyond what we got from the CBC sale. I was looking for an economic base, a foot in the door as a film maker. So I asked him to lend me three of his top earning educational films. From a film making point of view they were not very impressive, downright ugly even, but they did fit the parameters of educational rentals – they were designed for art classes with titles like “Working with Papier Mache” or “Working with Crayons”. They were no longer than twelve minutes running time, which meant that a teacher could show them to a class and still have time to have the students do some work inspired by the film. They were extremely simple – just one camera angle, hands entering frame to do the artwork, no editing, and one sound track of non-descript music. No sound mix. Obviously they were very cheaply made.
I thought maybe we could have a winner if I made an educational film that had instructional value, but also had some mood, some heart and soul. And that made me think of my grandmother and her quilt making. Granny was eighty-seven years old at the time. She had been making quilts since she was sixteen, and her first quilt, a log cabin pattern, was still in the family. I managed to borrow it from my cousin Alice, and it truly is an amazing quilt. Look at it and think red, and a pattern of red rectangles emerges. Think blue and a different pattern of blue rectangles comes out.
I gathered up maybe twenty other quilts from members of the family, hung them on the wall of our cabin, and shot clips of them. Crazy quilts. Dresden plate quilts. And the aforementioned Log Cabin Quilt, with Granny’s voice over comment “I guess I was ambitious in those days.” I had a wealth of visual material. Then I spent hours and hours interviewing Granny about how she made quilts.
A lot of what she told me hit the editing room floor. Granny had made thousands of quilts. A quilt a month in her final year. She had sent quilts to the starving Russians during the famine in the Stalin years. She made baby quilts for every child born in the family.
With the basis of a sound track in hand, I brought in Ron Orieux, the cameraman who had shot “Gandy Dance” for me and who would go on to shoot my first and second features, “Skip Tracer” and “The Hounds of Notre Dame”. That gave me almost everything I needed to make the movie, but I still brought in Gordon Fish, another freelance cameramen, for a few extra shots.
By this time I had purchased a 16mm/35mm sound transfer machine, so I could do my own transfers of the 1/4 inch magnetic to 16mm. sprocketted stock. I had also purchased a six gang synchronizer and a guillotine splicer, a viewer with a tiny screen, and a “squawk box” reader for the synchronizer. I put together an editing bench, with rewinds and split reels and bins to hold the film clips. It was all very expensive equipment, not the kinds of things you could buy at a garage sale. The guillotine splicer alone was hundreds of dollars. Big money in 1971.
I set about cutting the visuals and laying in Granny’s narration. I recorded my aunt Belle’s piano music to add to the sound track. Aunt Belle played ragtime, and old tunes like “Ke Ke Ke Katy”, Granny’s theme song. For transitions I recorded some “stingers” on our own piano, and transferred them at double speed because that seemed to make them sound better.
After a start at the painful process of editing picture and sound using the synchronizer and sqawk box, I found a well used Moviola editing machine I could afford. That completed my first editing room.
The Moviola editing machine. It had a tendency to eat the workprint, but at least it let me view the picture with one track of the sound. It was far superior to the squawk box and synchronizer. I ended up editing several tracks of sound, music and sound FX, and put out the money for a sound mix at the lab.
Editing took months. I was running out of money. But I snagged a Canada Council grant to get some finishing money, to pay for the sound mix, neg matching and answer print and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think the Canada Council grant came in at $3,500. That was inspiring to me. To think that I could work for hundreds of hours at the wage available at that time, or sit down and write a grant proposal in a few hours and have that huge sum of money come into my mail box a few months later. Well… it made me think about money differently.
Artistically, my main problem was that I wanted the film to bounce along. But when I tried to use shorter cuts, it ended up looking like a badly made commercial. I finally realized that the film had to be paced to suit the subject matter. This was an old lady making a quilt. It was a mistake to try to make it exciting. it just had to flow, and finding that flow took me a lot of time. But finally it was finished. And here it is:
This was Granny Scott’s last quilt. Shortly after we finished shooting, she went in for cataract surgery and she never made another quilt.
Of course, making something to sell is only the first step. I took “Granny’s Quilts” to schools and was told that, much as they loved the film, they got all their movies for free from the National Film Board.
That was the beginning of my feud with the Board. If the government spent far more than any shoe maker would afford to spend to made shoes of exceptional quality and then gave them away for free, the shoe makers would be up in arms. But somehow, film makers were supposed to accept this situation and lavish praise on the National Film Board in hopes of getting a budget for the film subject du jour. It was discouraging. Obviously, my only hope lay south of the border.
I took a print of “Granny’s Quilts” down to a school in Seattle and immediately got a sale. I think in those days we were offering prints for a couple of hundred dollars, which gave us a slim profit margin. The really lucky break was that I learned about Landers Film Review, an American publication that went out to all the libraries and school districts in the country. After I submitted “Granny’s Quilts”, and got a glowing review, the requests for preview prints started coming in. We were soon getting two or three requests for preview prints a day, and for every three requests we made a sale. So my humble film about my granny kept us eating for a couple of years while I explored other possibilities. And that’s how a film career begins.
I can’t end this without acknowledging that, while I did the creative work and manual labor to make our films, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything without my wife and partner, Laara Dalen. On days when I wasn’t bringing in any money, she always was working some job or other. She kept the groceries coming and the lights on. Those were lean times. I would take my grandfather’s Silver Pidgeon Baretta shotgun down to the nearby dairy farm and blow off both barrels at the pigeons that were eating all the grain. Laara cooked up a mean pigeon-a-dobo. We supplemented that meat source with the rabbits we raised, or with oolichans we scooped from the nearby Fraser River.
And when money came in to make something, Laara was the best producer and production manager I ever worked with. So my best advice to anybody who wants to become a film maker, starting from zero, is find yourself a supportive partner. Best case scenario, marry them.
Recently I was contacted by Michael Rawley, a Toronto actor who received a kidney transplant in the year 2000. It was my good fortune to be able to document the lead up to the operation, and result.
I had pretty much forgotten this effort, but Michael’s request for a copy sent me on a search through dusty storage in subterranean caverns. I couldn’t find any of the original cassettes, or anything labeled as final version, but I did turn up a MiniDV cassette labeled “Transplant, rough mix”. Even more amazing, I dug out my now ancient Canon GL1 camera and found that it still works just fine, despite not being out of the case for at least ten years.
The next questions – do I still have the technology to capture video from a MiniDV cassette and turn it into a digital file? That took some time and effort to figure out. But in the end, success. Now my very first attempt at digital film making is up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.
“Wendy’s Michael’s Kidney” my first digital documentary. I was hooked.
The gear I had to produce this was primitive in the extreme, a tiny amateur level camera with very limited control over focus and lighting, a ridiculously shaky tripod, and only a clip-on lavaliere microphone to capture the sound. Yet I’m still impressed with the quality. Although I never made a penny from the considerable time I spent making this documentary, and could never get anybody to broadcast it, the result convinced me that I loved the new technology.
Only a few years before I made this, something equivalent would have cost thousands of dollars and required at least a two man team. Making it was a taste of things to come. The finished film still brings a tear to my eye. It was a first step toward my eventual bankruptcy and flight to China.
Funny how things get started, and how they work out.
One last thing for anybody reading this: Please, for the love of mercy, make a comment. I’m pretty sure a few people are reading my personal website now, but I hardly ever get a comment. Even if you just say hello, please please please say something. Please let me know I’m not alone. I feel so very alone.
