Keeper of the Oscar script
THE script for the Academy Awards telecast runs about 250 pages. With another 250 pages of ancillary lists -- of phone numbers, nominees, presenters, orchestra breakdowns and schedules -- it weighs, with its official three-ring binder, almost 8 pounds. By the night of the show, it will look something like a rainbow -- every change requires a new color, and changes are made up until the show begins.
Two hundred and forty people get Oscar scripts -- most variety shows average 40 -- and some need to get the new pages the moment any cue shift or dialogue tweak is made.
For three weeks, there are sound and lighting visions and revisions, the writers write and rewrite, the show board is re-ordered, minutes are shaved or added. The producer prods, but still the host may hang on to his material until the last possible minute.
One person is in charge of making sure that every change, down to the correct pronunciation of each nominee’s name, has been made, that everyone has the revisions when they need them and that there are absolutely, positively no inconsistencies or glitches. At all.
That person is the script supervisor, and her name is Jenny Stanley.
“It is important to stay calm,” she says with a small laugh. “And to be detail oriented. It’s very easy to get frazzled if you take any of what happens personally. You just can’t. You have to be totally focused on the show.”
Stanley, who moves quickly and speaks softly, describes the six-member department, which is headed by production supervisor Victoria Zika, as the communications center of the show. It is their job to gather all the necessary information from the academy, the network, producers, director, writers, stage managers and talent and seating departments, incorporate that information into the rundown, schedule, script and lists, and distribute it, Stanley says, “in a timely fashion.”
As in, yesterday.
Few people understand all the various parts of a show as well as the script supervisor, and that was why Stanley took the job four years ago. Because, she thought, if you can learn the Oscars, you can pretty much handle anything.
At 32, she’s already been in the business for 17 years -- she answered fan mail for “The Tonight Show” when she was still in high school. Over the next 10 years, she worked her way up to casting. During a card game, she heard an assistant director mention that they were looking for a script supervisor for “The Martin Short Show.”
“The stage manager on ‘The Tonight Show’ told me that if I wanted to learn how a show works, I should be a script supervisor,” she says. Stanley interviewed on Friday and started on Monday.
She started working with Louis J. Horvitz five years ago on the 2001 Emmys, which were rescheduled several times because of Sept. 11. When Horvitz asked if she wanted to do the Oscars with him, she jumped at the chance.
“Graphics, credits, pronunciation, anything you see or hear, we do,” Stanley says.
Horvitz, she says, is an efficient and fastidious director, scrupulously marking his script almost a month before the show. “Lou is very script oriented,” she says. “Some directors barely look at the script, but he plans out every shot, marks every shot.”
Which doesn’t mean the shots won’t change. As anyone involved in the show will tell you, there are always surprises, up to and throughout the actual broadcast, reactions and spontaneous moments -- Jack Palance doing his one-armed push-ups, Roberto Benigni climbing over audience members to get to the stage -- that can’t be foreseen. But, as Stanley points out, a well-marked script allows the show to make the most of those moments without derailing it.
A month before Oscar Sunday, every major portion of the show has been decided on and locked. The actual words or dance moves or music might not be finished, but the pieces are basically timed and set in place.
The production staff moves into the Kodak Theatre a week and a half before show time, and as the days tick down, Stanley and the script department tend to be the first ones in and the last ones out.
“Probably the hardest days are when the presenters come in for rehearsal,” Stanley says. “We’re lucky. We have a person from the academy who tapes the pronunciations [of the nominees’ names] for us, so we don’t usually find out we’re saying someone’s name wrong, but still you’re running everywhere making changes.”
The last days before the show are especially frantic, and Stanley’s best friend becomes the company that does her copying, even though its methods are a bit, well, unorthodox.
“At night we send a runner to drop all the changes off,” says Stanley. “They can never believe it when I tell them they have to leave the pages in a shed in a back alley off Laurel Canyon. But that’s how it works. And a runner picks them up there the next morning.”
The copier knows, among other things, not to use really obnoxious neon colors and to make one set of changes on white -- Horvitz keeps a white script because, Stanley says, it’s easier to read in the dim light of the production trailer.
“We get in about an hour before ESU,” she says, explaining that ESU stands for “everyone else shows up,” and “we’re there at least an hour after rehearsal ends at 11. So sleep is rare.”
On the day of the show, they come in for the morning rehearsal and then circulate what will probably be the last revisions; changes are made during the show, but there’s no time for new pages. Stanley just phones them into the production truck.
“The show itself is actually pretty easy for us,” she says. “Though there are always things to do.”
Stanley has worked on other big shows, including the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Memorial Day Concert. Although her career plan seems to be working -- for the last few years, she has moved up to production supervisor on a number of shows -- she comes back to the Oscars because, well, they’re the Oscars.
“The show has so much history and respect,” she says. “And everyone is a real team. You don’t see that too often, a team like this.”
