Making Movies and Moving On

In June 1993, screenwriter Graham Yost was watching television in his living room in Pacific Palisades, having just finished the script for what would soon become his first hit film, “Speed.”

Reports of flooding in the Midwest were filling the screen with pictures of small towns submerged save for an occasional church steeple or tree. Taken with nature’sunfolding drama, Yost had an idea: a movie in the spirit of an old-fashioned stagecoach heist, set against the backdrop of a present day deluge.

This weekend, the idea arrived on movie screens when Paramount Pictures opened the $75-million “Hard Rain,” which in its opening weekend took in an estimated $7.2 million at the box office in about 2,100 theaters nationwide. To get the 93-minute film to the screen, it took nearly five years and something akin to a temporary corporation of roughly 500 people who came together for nearly a year, made one large item--the movie--and have long since disbanded to move on to other jobs.

“They are gypsies,” said the film’s director, Mikael Salomon.

As audiences for “Hard Rain” filed out of theaters this weekend, the names of people like Tony Whitman, Bob Collins, Terry Scott, Lee Orloff, Jonas Matz and Mary Anne Seward rolled across the screen for three minutes and 38 seconds. Each got eight seconds of glory in the credits.

Next to the names were titles such as sound mixer, first aid, script supervisor, construction coordinator and first company grip, job descriptions that are all but meaningless to anyone outside of Hollywood.

A closer look at a dozen of the names and lives behind the credits of “Hard Rain” paints a picture of the wide cross-section of workers at the heart of an unprecedented, global-driven expansion in Southern California’s entertainment industry.

Among them: the son of an Oscar-nominated actor who works behind the cameras because that’s what interested him when visiting his father on the set as a boy. A script supervisor whose first taste of Hollywood came when Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant visited her South Dakota hometown to film scenes from “North By Northwest.” A Canadian writer who a little more than a decade ago was writing copy for encyclopedias and profiles for Soap Opera Digest.

A System of Personal Connections

They are part of a mobile, free agent-like work force unique to Southern California’s entertainment industry. They operate within a well-oiled system of personal connections that enables thousands of workers to move from temporary project to temporary project. Once a handful of large studios employed everyone from glamorous stars to the carpenters who hammer sets. Today’s Hollywood work force is a loose collection of independent contractors with no allegiances to a particular studio.

“It’s kind of like camp when you’re a kid,” said actor Michael Goorjian, a co-star in the film. “You have your camp friends, and hang out with the guys for a few weeks. Then you don’t see them again.”

The process of making a major film is roughly like establishing a manufacturing plant that moves from location to location and is staffed by hundreds of people in jobs that include visual effects, art direction, stunts, sound, production assistants, payroll auditors, props, painters, musicians, sound effects experts and cooks--one named “Bubba” fed the “Hard Rain” crew.

Workers often travel from film to film in loose confederations, with more senior workers taking along their handpicked crews as a condition of being hired, in much the same way a building subcontractor might insist on the same work crews for each housing project.

Oscar-winning sound mixer Lee Orloff’s job on “Hard Rain” was to capture the natural sounds and dialogue taking place when scenes are filmed, and to supply communications equipment used on the set. It’s a well-paying job, with the basic pay scale at $45 an hour, plus time-and-a-half after nine hours and double that amount after 12 hours in a day. Sound mixers sometimes can make additional money by renting their recording equipment to a production at a rate of about $1,800 a week.

When productions hire Orloff, he brings along two colleagues, one who holds a lengthy boom microphone and the other who wires the set for sound. Whenever they work on a film, they are constantly on the lookout for their next assignments.

“Basically I’m a lifer,” Orloff said. “I’ve been mixing sound for a long time. I intend to be mixing sound for a long time. And I’m not here on the way to being a producer. I have to keep at work. I have to keep moving from one show to the next.”

A Changing Work Force

This mobile entertainment work force is becoming a significant part of the Southern California economy. It is vastly different from the generation of post-World War II workers who were more likely to have steady, predictable hours in aerospace plants in Long Beach, the San Fernando Valley or Pico Rivera or in a manufacturing plant in Hawthorne.

Moving from job to job creates a climate of constant insecurity. When workers land jobs, the pay is lucrative, but the hours can be as long as 18 hours a day and workers can be gone for months at a time on location. “Hard Rain” required four months of shooting in an aircraft hangar in Palmdale, on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

Under constant pressure to deliver on budget and on time, producers, directors and supervisors prefer to surround themselves with people whose work they know. Although that provides for dependable crews, it also makes it harder for outsiders to enter and inhibits diversity.

The kind of cost pressures running through productions these days is felt from top to bottom. As a script supervisor, Mary Anne Seward’s job is to keep track of all scenes shot and such details as who was standing where, what each was wearing, what they were holding and what kind of lens was used. Because movies aren’t shot in chronological order, that record is needed to maintain continuity so that actors entering a house on location in Minneapolis enter the door the same way when the interior scene is shot months later on a sound stage in Los Angeles.

“There’s a lot of pressure on this job,” she said. “It’s because they are always asking you questions. . . . ‘When was he holding it? Where was he looking? What lens were we using?’ You’re the only one with the answers, and you have to be right because it costs so much money to fix it if you’re wrong.”

The lethargic, $7.2-million opening of “Hard Rain” at the box office shows the downside of the pressure-cooked, roll-the-dice mentality that nearly always grips casts, crews, producers and studio executives the weekend a film hits theaters.

Although less so than directors, producers and stars, even crew members wait anxiously for a film to open to see what critics think and how audiences receive it. After months of work and late nights, a movie lives or dies these days on how it does on its opening weekend.

In the case of “Hard Rain,” critics largely panned the film. In one especially blistering review, critic Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post bemoaned “plot idiocies, the way people keep running into each other in the chaos of a major flood.” Hunter called the film “ ‘Titanic’ without lifeboats” and ended his review with the line: “ ‘Rain,’ ‘Rain,’ go away.”

“Hard Rain’s” returns were less than the $9 million to $11 million that had been hoped. As an action film with a popular star like Morgan Freeman, it stands a chance of doing better overseas. Nonetheless, it will be an uphill struggle to reap the $150 million or more internationally that is probably needed to break even.

Crew members obviously hope for a hit, in part because there’s a bit of good karma that rubs off when they are looking for the next job. “When people see a picture that made money, they want the people on that picture to work for them. I may not have had anything to do with it being successful,” construction coordinator Terry Scott said.

Hoping for a Break

People come from all over the world to Los Angeles to compete for the glamorous, high-paying jobs that are part of the entertainment business. Director Salomon was a successful Danish cameraman and director before moving to the United States.

Looking to make more money than his job as a mobile disc jockey was paying, Bobby Arredondo made more than two dozen calls before landing a job on “Hard Rain” as a $25-an-hour “hammer,” or grip, who moves and positions equipment used in filming.

“We’re the grunts of the industry,” he said.

The break Arredondo got enabled him to work the 30 days needed to become a union member, which in turn has led to a half-dozen subsequent jobs. Pay and overtime from workdays that sometimes ran 18 hours in length were so lucrative that Arredondo’s father, who had been urging him to join him in his catering truck business, didn’t believe how much money his son was making until shown his pay stub.

“I made a lot of friends, made money and got into the union. What more could I ask for?” Arredondo said.

Then there are the lucky ones like Bob Collins, who worked on “Hard Rain” as a stand-in for actor Freeman, with whom Collins bears a striking resemblance. Collins was a retired Navy veteran in Long Beach looking for something to keep him busy when a friend suggested that for fun he should try out to be a $40-a-day movie extra.

“It was boredom that talked me into it,” Collins said.

Today, he travels to wherever Freeman is shooting, and has worked with superstar actor Brad Pitt and director Steven Spielberg. Collins even has a small role in Spielberg’s “Amistad” in which he appears in a scene with Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins.

An Army of Titles

For the most part, a film company is an army of people with titles that to an outsider give little clue as to what they do. As the first company grip, sometimes called the “key grip,” Tony Whitman was in charge of 20 bulky workers whose jobs ranged from moving the dolly that the camera rests on when a scene is shot, to setting up and fine-tuning the lighting.

Whitman, the son of Stuart Whitman, nominated for an Oscar in 1961 for “The Mark,” is part of the vast cinematography hierarchy on a film under the movie’s director of photography. Pay can run $34 an hour for eight hours, time and a half until 12 hours are worked and double time after 12 hours.

“If I could say in one sentence what the grip does, it’s being in charge of everything possible that needs to be done for the camera and lighting. He’s the nuts and bolts that gets it done. Even though it is very technical, there’s a lot of creativity to it too because 10 different key grips can do it 10 different ways,” Whitman said.

“Hard Rain” had its bumps on the road to getting made. Formerly called “The Flood,” the movie underwent a name change so audiences wouldn’t think it was another Hollywood disaster film.

Originally scheduled for release last May, the film was postponed, partly because it had trouble meeting its deadline and also to avoid getting chewed up by such huge competitors as “The Lost World: Jurassic Park.” Even now, it is up against a hit in “Titanic,” released by the same studio, Paramount, that is releasing “Hard Rain.”

After test showings, the ending of the movie, which is about an armored car heist that goes awry amid a catastrophic flood, was changed and shot again. And it endured a publicity scandal when one of its stars and co-producer, Christian Slater, was arrested in a highly publicized run-in with police. Instead of being out promoting the film, after last week’s premier Slater reported to jail to serve a 90-day sentence.

Complicating matters were the extraordinary logistics of creating a town flood. In an abandoned aerospace hangar, a scale model of the town of Huntingburg, Ind., was created in a four-acre tank holding 5 million gallons of water. As an engineering feat, such a set had never been constructed. As a production, it required actors and crew to be in the water a good part of the time, sometimes a majority of the day.

That made for a higher risk of injury than usual. As the chief medic, Jonas Matz had to be around the set at all times, in part because safety regulations and unions required it.

Minor injuries were numerous, although none were more serious than some fractured ribs or a couple of fractured ankles, Matz said.

The son of composer Peter Matz, musical director for “The Carol Burnett Show,” Matz grew up around the business, but never expressed a desire to be in it. He trained as a medic in the Coast Guard and Army and only got into the industry when a friend mentioned there was a job opening on a TV show.

“We basically are paid to be there, to be aware and to hang out . . . to be available in case they need us,” Matz said. “It ranges from upset stomachs to seriousinjuries. To a very few production people, we are a necessary crew person. But I think if a lot of people in the industry had their way, they would get rid of us entirely because of the costs.”

Being on location for four months in the upper reaches of Los Angeles County took more than a physical toll on some members of the crew. Sound mixer Orloff, father of two young children, chose to commute, rather than stay in a motel, so he could see his children. But driving for more than an hour each way, Orloff often arrived home after 17-hour days when his children were asleep, only to dash off the next morning with little time to visit them.

“The money’s good, and everybody is aware of that,” Orloff said. “That’s one of the reasons that helps us justify the crazy hours we work, and the fact that our families have to go through tremendous compromises and can’t count on us to be available.”

Overseeing the logistics was Mutual Film Co., a year-old company formed by producers Mark Gordon and Gary Levinsohn, in tandem with another veteran producer, Ian Bryce.

Mutual represents the kind of production company that studios increasingly work with because the smaller firm can deliver financing from investors--often foreign media and entertainment companies--that allow a studio to reduce its financial risk. In the case of “Hard Rain,” money was rounded up from such foreign companies as Great Britain’s BBC, France’s UGC, Japan’s Toho-Towa and Germany’s Tele-Munchen.

Hiring Salomon as director was one of Mutual’s first decisions. Salomon had received Oscar nominations for his camera work on the water drama “The Abyss” and in visual effects for the firefighting drama “Backdraft.” That gave him the experience Mutual was looking for to handle the complicated logistics that would be involved with shooting in so much water.

A native of Denmark, whose mother barely escaped the Nazis in a fishing boat while she was pregnant with him, Salomon became enchanted with film as a boy when his father let him borrow his French home movie camera. After a successful European film career, Salomon moved to the United States, where he became a top commercial director, landing his first feature film with the movie “A Far Off Place” in 1993. “Hard Rain” is only his second feature film.

For actor Goorjian, 24, earning his way into the film as a co-star took place the old-fashioned way: thorough an audition at the suggestion of his agent.

For Goorjian, who plays a henchman of Freeman’s in the robbery, the film comes at a pivotal time in his Hollywood career. The son of a NASA scientist and a nurse, the Oakland native took up acting in junior high school mainly as a way to spend less time in class.

“Hard Rain” is his first significant role in a major studio picture, after an active stage career and television work that includes an Emmy for a TV movie and a recurring role on the hit Fox show “Party of Five.” He said he wanted to work on the film in part because he admires Freeman and because it gives him a chance to improvise.

“In action films, what’s on the page is less than 50% of what you actually do,” Goorjian said. “It’s not Chekhov.”

What You See, What You Get

Increasingly, Hollywood relies on a growing number of visual alchemists who can take miniature, realistic models and make them appear as breathtaking events on a screen. These people may never set foot on the set, or even work anywhere near it.

Visual effects producer Elaine Edford and her partners in 4Ward Productions have staged nuclear explosions for “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and dockside scenes for the current hit “Titanic.” For “Hard Rain,” they had to create in miniature a dam break that would look like millions of gallons spilling onto a town. For four months, they built a 35-foot-wide dam in an empty warehouse in Canoga Park and used swimming pool pumps to send 30,000 gallons of water repeatedly through the dam over the course of a month.

“It might only take 10 or 15 seconds to shoot it, but you spend all day just on the set,” Edford said.

Building the life-size sets fell to construction coordinator Scott, whose job is something like that of a general contractor in charge of taking wood, plaster and paint to create an Indiana town in an aircraft hangar.

“I have painters who can make a steel door look like anything you want it to look like,” he said. “Where else do you get to build a mountain, a train or a flood?”

Scott and his crew worked one step ahead of the film crew, building the sets that would be needed next while filming took place on the ones they had just finished. Like sound mixer Orloff, Scott and his crew had their feelers out as production began to wind down, looking for the next work that would come their way.

“I don’t want to be snobbish,” Scott said. “You pay me, I’ll work for you.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

What Do All These People Do?

The credits of a typical Hollywood movie these days can list hundreds of titles, most of which are a mystery to the average moviegoer as they scroll by at the end of a film.

Here are a few of the jobs and their responsibilities:

* Assistant to . . . : A personal assistant to actors, directors and producers who have enough clout to negotiate for one of these.

* Boom operator: A technician who holds a microphone attached to a long arm.

* Dolly grip: Worker who pushes the dolly that a camera rests on during filming.

* Gaffer: The main electrician in a film, maintaining the lights.

* Best boy: The gaffer’s assistant.

* Foley artist: A sound effects specialist, named after sound effects pioneer Jack Foley.

* Grip: The equivalent of stagehands, grips move and set up props, scenery, lights, cameras and other things needed in shooting.

* Key grip: The chief grip.

* Sound mixer: Captures all of the sounds during filming. Sounds may be used during the film or as a guide when looping, or the dubbing of dialogue.

Source: “Complete Film Dictionary” by Ira Konigsberg