Memo to Executives: Put a Lid on It : Directors Guild Seeks to Stem Tide of Production Notes on Film, TV Projects

In January 1992, a Fox Broadcasting executive reading the football-themed script for the “In Living Color” Super Bowl halftime special dashed off a set of changes he wanted implemented in the show.

”. . . David [Alan Grier] must avoid any erotic fanny motions when he bends over,” the executive wrote, “and the centering must be done as in the shotgun formation, i.e., with several feet’s distance between Damon [Wayans] and David.

“We will not accept any movements that push this basic football position into a suggestion of sexual activity,” he added. Fox eventually allowed some of the material to make it on the air.

Production notes.

They can be the bane--or salvation--of every motion picture or television series.

Directors get them from producers. Producers get them from studios. Studios get them from networks. Actors, screenwriters and mid-level studio executives with MBAs give them, too. Indeed, anyone with a financial stake in a production can weigh in with a creative opinion.

There are even times a director will be handed a set of notes with no names attached--a consensus emanating from somewhere deep inside a corporate monolith.

Now, the Directors Guild of America, with the concurrence of Hollywood’s major film and TV producers, is attempting to bring order to the process.

The guild is formulating a nonbinding “code of preferred practices” that would, among other things, limit the number of executives giving creative notes to a director.

The code would be used during the three-year life of the new guild contract, which is being mailed to 10,500 guild members for ratification. Plans also call for a creative rights committee to meet three times a year about features and twice about TV to address issues that are of concern to directors. It would be empowered to add to the code as necessary.

“We’ve had a lot of complaints from our members,” said John Frankenheimer, co-chairman of the guild’s creative rights committee. “They just get assaulted by groups of producers, especially in television, but also in movies.”

On some TV sitcoms, Frankenheimer said, the result can be a cacophony of discordant viewpoints. “It can become a very debilitating and demoralizing process [for directors],” added Frankenheimer, whose credits include the films “The Manchurian Candidate” and the upcoming “Island of Dr. Moreau.”

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“We’re not going to say, ‘We’re egomaniacs and our point of view is the only one worth listening to,’ ” he said. “But we want a consistent point of view.”

Whether on the mark, off base or unintentionally humorous, production notes are used to suggest changing a scene, altering a line of dialogue, reworking a joke or simply revamping an actor’s hairstyle or clothing.

When they work, the creative spark they inspire can make a TV program or feature film soar. But a blizzard of conflicting opinions can serve to frustrate directors, confuse actors and, ultimately, turn off audiences.

The situation has become especially acute in television comedy, in which shows rely on teams of “writer-producers” who are constantly rewriting material up to and including the final taping.

Martha Coolidge, co-chair of the guild’s creative rights committee and director of such films as “Rambling Rose” and “Lost in Yonkers,” said the proliferation of producers can result in a “quagmire of differing opinions.”

“You can get anywhere up to 12 people giving you notes disagreeing with each other,” Coolidge said. “If you have a bunch of producers who don’t agree, they won’t agree through the whole movie.”

Jack Shea, whose directing credits include “The Jeffersons” and “The Waltons,” said directors usually welcome notes but can “throw up their hands” if the notes are filled with conflicting opinions.

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“Most of the time, notes can be tremendously helpful,” Shea said. “The only time they become troublesome is when you are inundated by them and [they] come from so many directions they make you feel like a top spinning around.”

John Rich, who directed such hit programs as “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “All in the Family” and “Barney Miller,” said Carl Reiner and Norman Lear were masterful “show runners” who always were careful about the notes they gave directors.

“I’ve always said, let one person speak for the network, one person speak for the studio and one show runner speak for the writing staff,” Rich said, adding that if actors are given advice outside of the director’s presence, it can harm their performances.

“An actor can freeze as if he’s a deer caught in the headlights,” Rich said. “He’s not thinking about his character, he’s thinking about that new line of dialogue they gave him.”

In movies, where directors are hired to provide a singular vision, many films are financed by multiple companies. As a result, directors can end a long day of principal photography and find their phones ringing off the hook at night from people giving advice.

Director James L. Brooks (“Broadcast News,” “Terms of Endearment”) said he believes films should have a “distinctive voice,” but that doesn’t mean he won’t welcome other viewpoints if they help the film.

“I think all notes are great,” Brooks said. The problem, he said, is when the director is given orders that he doesn’t believe in his heart are correct. “That’s a terrible situation,” he said.

Directors are not alone in feeling besieged by notes.

“We get inundated, too,” said Marvin Worth, who recently produced the Sharon Stone film “Diabolique.”

“There used to be, at one time, one person giving you notes,” Worth said. “There weren’t 800 production executives. Now, you get committee notes. You get them constantly.”

Worth said the advent of computerized editing machines means that changes can be made “boom-boom-boom.”

“I’ve been in places where you have to give them a cut every night and you get notes back every day on them,” he said.

Tamara Rawitt, the co-creator and producer of the Fox series “In Living Color” and a producer of the movie “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka,” said that when a director and producer see eye to eye, the result can be “perfect artistic alchemy.”

“If you are fortunate enough to have a filmmaker who is in sync with you and embellishes the universe of what you are trying to create, you are incredibly lucky,” she said. “That is something I had with Keenen Ivory Wayans in ‘I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.’ ”

Rawitt, who worked with the late producer Don Simpson in the early development of the story “Beverly Hills Cop II,” said one of Simpson’s strengths was a story sense so finely tuned he could imbue a writer with the ability to see the movie before he started writing.

“Don took a kernel of an idea and was able to weave it and macrame it into a perfectly thought-out three-part structure which had a total payoff on several levels,” Rawitt said. “It was like a Rubik’s Cube when all the panels matched up.”