Architect of the Oscars

Tad Scripter has a job that no one can explain. Not even himself, or at least not easily.

According to his all-access backstage Academy Awards credentials, he is the Engineer in Charge. This means, as near as anyone can figure it, that he is responsible for ensuring that all the people and equipment needed to make the show happen, from a technical standpoint at least, are present and working.

“In a live television event,” he says, “there is always someone who ties together the television and audio hardware with the director and producer. In this case, that would be me.”

Or, as he adds more succinctly, “everyone shows up, the circus wagons arrive and I’m in charge of the stuff that comes out of the circus wagons.”

Sit in his tiny office deep within the guts of the Kodak Theatre for a few minutes and things become a little clearer. About his job and also the disparate forces working to put the show together. First, a computer tech guy comes by with an answer and then a few questions about how the electronic scrolls that are part of the set will work (via computer, from the screens trailer, which is where the images you see on the set are generated).

The head of the communications department is looking for the plan of who’s going to be where so he can set up his communication hardware -- at any given time during the Oscars, there are 15 to 20 crucial conversations taking place, Scripter says. “Without them,” he says, “no show. So he needs to know where the announcer is going to be, the conductor, the audio mixers, the prompter operator, the back timer ... “

The back timer?

“There is a gentleman who is a television director who takes the rundowns of the show and anticipated time differences,” he explains. “So if, say, the host was timed for a six-minute opening and he goes eight minutes, the back timer lets us know we’re two minutes behind time.”

Next, the head of sound for the Kodak presents a strip of metal and the bolt that seems to be having a hard time making it through the pre-drilled holes. “I’m going to have to take the threads off,” he says. “Or punch out the paint. Is that OK?”

There is a decision made about the wires that will hook up director Louis J. Horvitz’s DVD player and then Scripter is caught up in a mostly unintelligible techie conversation with one of the senior production managers. This, when translated, boils down to plans for dealing with the rainstorm predicted for early this week.

“There are pipes that drain into the loading dock behind the theater,” Scripter says. The loading dock is where the production trucks will be placed, where the scenery is stored, so rain is a problem. “We have to put in a diversion so the water goes somewhere else.”

This isn’t to say that Scripter spends his days troubleshooting. That morning, he had a meeting with the senior vice president in charge of broadcasting, operations and engineering at ABC to discuss changes in the budget from last year to this.

“We have a staff of 200 in the engineering department,” he says. “We rent a lot of expensive equipment and part of my job is to figure out how we’re going to pay for all that efficiently. Who and what needs to be brought in when, so no one, and nothing, is just sitting there.”

With his mustache, round spectacles and quiet voice, Scripter seems like he would be very at home in a classroom, a professor of natural sciences or, more likely, engineering.

Part of this is because Scripter is, as he admits, still learning. The Oscars has only been in the Kodak for five years, after all.

Scripter, on the other hand, joined the Oscar team about 15 years ago when he worked for the company that provided television hardware; he literally showed up with the trucks.

Since then, he has become a standard fixture in the small team of people that does live entertainment event television -- over the course of a year, he will do at least five big shows out of the Kodak alone.

Which explains how he came to have the theater custom-made to suit the engineering department’s needs. For three years, he worked with architects to create an infrastructure that would make the Oscars and other big shows work efficiently.

The ceiling of the hallway outside his office, for example, is hung with two sets of cable trays -- platforms on which the miles and miles of cable the Academy Awards show requires can rest, out of everyone’s way.

“Typically, an architect would design them in a way that makes it impossible to actually run cable while you walk,” he says. “But we hung it from the center so we save manpower and money.”

Even as he speaks, utility workers, balanced like stocky gymnasts on rolling carts, are doing just that -- working their way down the hall, hoisting the cable in the air.

There is also a tunnel cut under Hollywood Boulevard for the express purpose of running cable to the international and domestic production trucks that transmit during the show from lots on Hawthorne Alley.

“At the Shrine it was a mess,” he says. “Like broadcasting from the middle of a Kansas wheat field. There were cables and cable bridges everywhere.”

But the Kodak has its own challenges. “From an engineering standpoint, the show takes place over two square blocks,” he says, unscrolling a blueprint of the theater and its environments. “I mean, we’re doing the show from a shopping mall, essentially. You’ve got the press room in the Renaissance [Hollywood Hotel] and the international and domestic down here but I have to make it all seem like it’s adjacent.”

In addition to the two production trucks, there is a playback trailer, a screen trailer, a technical power distribution system center, a Teleco transmission facility, a prompter trailer, an orchestra audio mixing truck, and a truck that generates all the graphic content -- the words or images that appear on the screen during the show.

All of which must fit in the motor court off Orange Drive or in the loading dock. And all of which Scripter loosely oversees.

“The truck drivers hate me,” he says with no small amount of pride. “Because I will say to them, ‘No, I need you to move it over an inch.’ ”

He points to a strip of space between the side of one trailer and a post on the motor court that is perhaps the width of a butterfly’s wing.

“Couldn’t get any closer than that,” he says.

For Scripter, the Oscar broadcast is an exercise in engineering ingenuity, about systems and equipment that work and when they don’t, about the backup that does. And when the last award has been handed out and much of the production staff either heads out to parties or home, Scripter is far from done. “The responsibility doesn’t end. First there’s load out,” he says, referring to the removal of engineering hardware, or at least that which isn’t going to be reconfigured for the show he will work on next. “Oprah shoots here at 10 in the morning and her crew arrives at midnight.”

Like many of the production crew, Scripter takes a room at the Renaissance, so when Oprah’s post-Oscar broadcast is over, he doesn’t head home. Though only half an hour away, home is too far when you’ve been awake that long. He goes to the hotel, and then he goes to sleep.