The Rat Pack Photographer

They don’t make rat packs like they used to.

Just ask veteran photographer Sid Avery, who snapped a memorable image of Frank Sinatra and pals during the making of the original “Ocean’s Eleven” and was cajoled into coming out of retirement to shoot George Clooney et al for the film’s remake.

“It was considerably different,” says Avery, 83, with a chuckle. “That’s not even a stretch.”

Avery’s candid photographs of celebrities appeared in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life and Colliers’. So by the time he arrived on the set of “Ocean’s Eleven” in 1960, he had been working with most of the Rat Pack stars--Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop--for a long time. And he was familiar with all of their shenanigans

“With these guys there was always something going on that was nuts. They were throwing cherry bombs in each other’s dressing rooms

“They would have quick-draw contests and they had these mock fights that they would stage, which I would photograph--like Sammy Davis getting socked in the jaw by Dean Martin. The director, Lewis Milestone, had a very loose grasp, shall we say.”

Avery describes the Rat Pack, whose members were in their late 30s and 40s at the time of “Ocean’s Eleven,” as “fraternity kids.” And they made great subjects for photographs. “All of this activity was fun like crazy for me because I had been around it a lot and I had been with them in Vegas where they really [went] nuts. That is when, theoretically, they were out after all the shows at 2 a.m., chasing broads, so they say. Dean Martin didn’t do that. He would always go to bed [after their nightclub show] because he wanted to get up and play golf. [The others] would meet in the steam room and get rid of some of the booze, but they were a hell of a lot of fun to be with.”

Avery also shot photographs of the Rat Pack members working on their other movies, including “Sergeants 3.” “The studio gave me a lot of room because they knew every time I was [on the set] they were going to get some very important space in the magazines and a lot of readership,” says Avery, who is founder and director of the Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive.

After his career as a photographer, Avery segued into directing TV commercials. He’s been retired since 1988.

His involvement with the current “Ocean’s Eleven” began when one of the film’s stars, Julia Roberts, saw a print of Avery’s original cast shot at the Soho Triad Gallery in New York City.

“She saw the picture knowing she was about to be cast,” Avery says. “She bought a copy and then said, ‘Give me another copy, and I’ll give it to [director Steven] Soderbergh. Then Clooney got word of it on the West Coast and bought one for [producer] Jerry Weintraub.”

Within a few weeks, a publicist from Warner Bros. called Avery about shooting the cast for the new version.

“I had been directing for 25 years so this was going to be a long reach,” says Avery. “I had given all my [camera] equipment to my son, and he had traded it in for something else. I turned it down.”

But Avery’s son, Ron, convinced him to take the assignment.

“He said, ‘Tell them you are going to do it. I’ll be production manager, and we’ll get three of the top photographers working on films today.’ They used to be my assistants. Most of the photographers [brought] their equipment and what we didn’t have we rented. When they were shooting in Palm Springs doing one of their first setups, we arrived en masse. So I tried to find a spot in this house which they were leasing for a few days, which was supposed to be the Las Vegas home of [the character played by] Elliott Gould. So I am running around the house looking for a place where I can set up my lights.”

After Avery found the perfect spot, members of the crew stood in for the stars. “We measured it and marked the floor for two different shots. One was vertical and one was horizontal.” And when the cast got a break, Avery got his shot.

The atmosphere on the new set, Avery reports, was very relaxed--though a far cry from the original. Soderbergh was running a tight ship and, at least for the two days Avery was on the set, Clooney--a notorious prankster--and co-star Brad Pitt were content with regaling everyone with a lot of in-jokes.

“Weintraub is a barrel of laughs,” Avery says. “Carl Reiner is one of the comic geniuses. It was a thrill to be shooting it.”

Still, what could possibly compare with being on the set with the Rat Pack, watching the director try to corral his charges.

“[Milestone] would always address Frank first, because that is who everybody else followed. He’d say, ‘Frank. We need another take.’ And [Sinatra would] say, ‘Print that one twice.’”

Posters of Avery’s cast shot of the original “Ocean’s Eleven” are available on the Web at www.store.yahoo.com/cityofhopecharity-store, with proceeds benefiting the City of Hope.