Eric Roberts III: And Away We Go!
We started shooting The Shopkeeper, a pretentious piece of over-acted tripe, in an cavernous old warehouse in a scary part of South Central Los Angeles. Typical of a student movie workday (18 hours give or take) we arrived in pre-dawn gloom and left after dark. While we were there we were warned not step outside the somewhat safer confines of the building (which was an illusion since we had no security and a lot of fabulous stuff to steal) so I'm not even sure where it actually was.
My job was to be in charge of Craft Service. An odd name for a job that basically means loading up a picnic table with a lot of sodas and junk food (and some fruit in there somewhere) for the crew to snack on all day. Oh, and sweeping up the bits of cheezies and assorted crap that falls out of people's mouths as they stand around the table chowing down between takes. Yes, I was in charge all right. In charge of the broom. Me and my broom.
The craft service table is one of those strange perks film people enjoy and probably contributes to the large bellies of many of the guys who drive the trucks, sling cable and hang lights, because there are a lot of them. I should mention here that Craft Service is not a glamorous job, in fact it's pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to career choices in the industry. But at that point I wasn't hip to the way of things and was blissfully enjoying my autonomy as the snack queen, nay master of the food world and all that came with it.
In many ways I was still in a major denial about the viability of a career in the film business because I was the only intern in Hollywood who was still taking the bus. I didn't have a driver's license, certainly no car, and since location shoots can be all over the map my career would have been over before it started if I hadn't managed to find someone on the crew who lived nearby to pick me up and take me home every day (how nice was that guy!).
The student director, Bill Duke (a character actor who's big role to date had been opposite Richard Gere in American Gigolo) insisted on things like miles of dolly track, a crane, and a steadicam which sent us over budget almost immediately. We'd been shooting for less than a week when the money I'd been given to cover all the food purchases, including the catered lunch, ran out. I literally shook the little brown envelope with our lunch money in it and nothing fell out. The caterer, a Greek restaurant up the street from the warehouse, cut me off without so much as a backward glance.
"What do I do now?" I asked the harried producer who was in crisis mode about everything, including lack of funds for film stock and camera rentals. He handed me $200.00 in twenty dollar bills. "This is all the money you have left to feed the crew, " he said and I was left to figure out how to keep from being eaten alive by ravenous men with steel-toed boots and utility knives.
On the upside, I had just been promoted to Movie Caterer. With wheels and a driver to boss around.
$200.00 seemed like a fair amount of money at the time but we had two weeks left of shooting and the entire crew was working for meals and precious little else. A crew of forty hardy men and women, to be exact. It may have been a no-budget film but the number of people working on this thing had pretentions of grander proportions. So I took the truck and driver downtown to the Latino farmer's market and purchased as many bags of rice and beans as I could, with a few wilted vegetables thrown in for good measure.
Where to cook? At my apartment, of course. The kitchen was the size of your average apartment bathroom and the tiny gas stove had two working burners. I scrounged around for some giant aluminum lasagne pans (the kind you use once and throw away) which I cleaned and reused and set about cooking lunch and dinner for 40. I had no help and since I was determined not to be isolated from the film set I would dutifuly show up every morning for first call, hand out bannanas or an apple per person (strictly regulated) and then leave mid-morning with the production truck (and driver) to spend the next two hours trying to stretch a loaf of bread and one herring into a meal that would keep the troops from mutinying.
It was no easy job. I felt like a prison cook, doling out measured gobs of macaroni and cheese, beans and franks (light on the franks) and green salad with jaundiced precision. This is where I learned how to cook for large dinner parties because I got very, very good at figuring out down to the grain of rice, just how much food would make the requisite number of exact proportions, delivered hot and ready to go at the exact time they broke for lunch. The crew, a bunch of big, burly gaffers, grips, dolly pushers, camera assistants and the like grumbled and growled at the strict rations but I held my own. Eventually they learned not to cross me or try to steal an extra slice of bread. This was also in part due to the fact that after the first few days I started getting creative with my food staples and soon they were treated to the occasional gourmet surprise - perhaps a stuffed cornish hen or mushroom and chicken crepes.
Even though I was busy for some periods of the day I was able to spend a lot of time hanging around the set and watching how things worked. Thus I was well into my free film-school education and over the next year I was to make the most of it. Although I remember a lot of open mouths and bristly moustaches covered in food bits, I don't remember most of the people who worked on this film and often wondered what became of them. But some were standouts. One in particular, a young, introspective camera assistant stood out because of his thick silvery-grey hair. He was always shyly polite but I could never get him to engage in any kind of meaningful conversation but he always seemed to be lost in profound thought and I suppose that made him all the more mysterious. Bob Richardson has gone on to become a top director of photography, shooting many of Oliver Stone's early films, and winning an Oscar in 2005 for Aviator. If you remember him at all from his acceptance speech he still had the grey hair but now it's longer and as wildly eccentric as he evidently has become (although married with several kids the only person he thanked was his mother).
The other person whom I gravitated to wasn't even on the film. She was still in her first year at AFI but she was friends with the director (evidently feathering her career nest early) and since she had no actual job we found ourselves on side-by-side apple boxes more than once. Lydia Woodword was older than most of the other film students (somewhere around 30, I think) and she chain-smoked.
Another factor was soon to bring us closer together: Shortly after Shopkeeper wrapped I moved to Santa Monica, out of the apartment I shared with Lance, to strike out on my own. Lydia lived a block away from my new place so when she got her own film to produce in her senior year she asked me to come work as the production coordinator. I still didn't drive or have a car so she offered to take me to the set every day. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.
Next: Lydia gets a lot of mileage from her star-studded student film and Eric Roberts comes into our lives.
My job was to be in charge of Craft Service. An odd name for a job that basically means loading up a picnic table with a lot of sodas and junk food (and some fruit in there somewhere) for the crew to snack on all day. Oh, and sweeping up the bits of cheezies and assorted crap that falls out of people's mouths as they stand around the table chowing down between takes. Yes, I was in charge all right. In charge of the broom. Me and my broom.
The craft service table is one of those strange perks film people enjoy and probably contributes to the large bellies of many of the guys who drive the trucks, sling cable and hang lights, because there are a lot of them. I should mention here that Craft Service is not a glamorous job, in fact it's pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to career choices in the industry. But at that point I wasn't hip to the way of things and was blissfully enjoying my autonomy as the snack queen, nay master of the food world and all that came with it.
In many ways I was still in a major denial about the viability of a career in the film business because I was the only intern in Hollywood who was still taking the bus. I didn't have a driver's license, certainly no car, and since location shoots can be all over the map my career would have been over before it started if I hadn't managed to find someone on the crew who lived nearby to pick me up and take me home every day (how nice was that guy!).
The student director, Bill Duke (a character actor who's big role to date had been opposite Richard Gere in American Gigolo) insisted on things like miles of dolly track, a crane, and a steadicam which sent us over budget almost immediately. We'd been shooting for less than a week when the money I'd been given to cover all the food purchases, including the catered lunch, ran out. I literally shook the little brown envelope with our lunch money in it and nothing fell out. The caterer, a Greek restaurant up the street from the warehouse, cut me off without so much as a backward glance.
"What do I do now?" I asked the harried producer who was in crisis mode about everything, including lack of funds for film stock and camera rentals. He handed me $200.00 in twenty dollar bills. "This is all the money you have left to feed the crew, " he said and I was left to figure out how to keep from being eaten alive by ravenous men with steel-toed boots and utility knives.
On the upside, I had just been promoted to Movie Caterer. With wheels and a driver to boss around.
$200.00 seemed like a fair amount of money at the time but we had two weeks left of shooting and the entire crew was working for meals and precious little else. A crew of forty hardy men and women, to be exact. It may have been a no-budget film but the number of people working on this thing had pretentions of grander proportions. So I took the truck and driver downtown to the Latino farmer's market and purchased as many bags of rice and beans as I could, with a few wilted vegetables thrown in for good measure.
Where to cook? At my apartment, of course. The kitchen was the size of your average apartment bathroom and the tiny gas stove had two working burners. I scrounged around for some giant aluminum lasagne pans (the kind you use once and throw away) which I cleaned and reused and set about cooking lunch and dinner for 40. I had no help and since I was determined not to be isolated from the film set I would dutifuly show up every morning for first call, hand out bannanas or an apple per person (strictly regulated) and then leave mid-morning with the production truck (and driver) to spend the next two hours trying to stretch a loaf of bread and one herring into a meal that would keep the troops from mutinying.
It was no easy job. I felt like a prison cook, doling out measured gobs of macaroni and cheese, beans and franks (light on the franks) and green salad with jaundiced precision. This is where I learned how to cook for large dinner parties because I got very, very good at figuring out down to the grain of rice, just how much food would make the requisite number of exact proportions, delivered hot and ready to go at the exact time they broke for lunch. The crew, a bunch of big, burly gaffers, grips, dolly pushers, camera assistants and the like grumbled and growled at the strict rations but I held my own. Eventually they learned not to cross me or try to steal an extra slice of bread. This was also in part due to the fact that after the first few days I started getting creative with my food staples and soon they were treated to the occasional gourmet surprise - perhaps a stuffed cornish hen or mushroom and chicken crepes.
Even though I was busy for some periods of the day I was able to spend a lot of time hanging around the set and watching how things worked. Thus I was well into my free film-school education and over the next year I was to make the most of it. Although I remember a lot of open mouths and bristly moustaches covered in food bits, I don't remember most of the people who worked on this film and often wondered what became of them. But some were standouts. One in particular, a young, introspective camera assistant stood out because of his thick silvery-grey hair. He was always shyly polite but I could never get him to engage in any kind of meaningful conversation but he always seemed to be lost in profound thought and I suppose that made him all the more mysterious. Bob Richardson has gone on to become a top director of photography, shooting many of Oliver Stone's early films, and winning an Oscar in 2005 for Aviator. If you remember him at all from his acceptance speech he still had the grey hair but now it's longer and as wildly eccentric as he evidently has become (although married with several kids the only person he thanked was his mother).
The other person whom I gravitated to wasn't even on the film. She was still in her first year at AFI but she was friends with the director (evidently feathering her career nest early) and since she had no actual job we found ourselves on side-by-side apple boxes more than once. Lydia Woodword was older than most of the other film students (somewhere around 30, I think) and she chain-smoked.
Another factor was soon to bring us closer together: Shortly after Shopkeeper wrapped I moved to Santa Monica, out of the apartment I shared with Lance, to strike out on my own. Lydia lived a block away from my new place so when she got her own film to produce in her senior year she asked me to come work as the production coordinator. I still didn't drive or have a car so she offered to take me to the set every day. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.
Next: Lydia gets a lot of mileage from her star-studded student film and Eric Roberts comes into our lives.
posted by vallie at 1:36 PM
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