Lose track of time? Not on his watch

If you think time is an unbroken, consistent continuum, then you have never sat in the production truck during the Academy Awards.

Here, time collapses and expands with alarming regularity. The winner of best documentary is a no-show, so what was timed out as a three-minute speech is cut down to one, making the show two minutes ahead of schedule. Or the recipient of the Thalberg gives a particularly moving, and extended, speech; now the show is three minutes behind time.

Although the Oscars doesn’t have the carved-in-stone off-air time of other award shows, it still has definite time constraints. Which is why the script is timed down to the second and one of the reasons associate director Jim Tanker spends pretty much the entire show talking.

Not a lot; he can’t talk a lot because many other people are talking too -- the lighting director, the production supervisor and especially the director. Louis J. Horvitz, with whom Tanker has worked for 10 years, calls the shots -- literally, clicking his fingers, eyes flicking from one screen to another, as he orders up each camera, each angle.

Beside him sits Tanker, watching the script, keeping track of the sound cues, the scenic cues, counting down the bars of music during a best song candidates performance, timing out the banter between presenters, the listing of the nominees.

“I watch the book so he doesn’t have to look at it,” Tanker says. “When you have major talent onstage, you can’t let up for a minute. You have to have erased any doubts about lights or scenery. Because you only get the one chance.”

Tanker, who did three turns as an assistant director even before Horvitz signed on 10 years ago, spends weeks going over the script with Horvitz and producer Gil Cates, going over every shot, coming up with every contingency -- whom will a winner hug when her name is announced? Where are they sitting? Will she stop to greet anyone on her way to the stage? Where should the camera be?

But no matter how fastidious or imaginative they are, something always happens that takes them, and the audience by surprise -- Adrien Brody deep-kisses Halle Berry or Robin Williams decides to be Robin Williams.

“Some people, like Robin or Jim Carrey, you can’t contain,” Tanker says. “So you just provide coverage. It’s fun, but hard on the production staff.”

The host is often one of those people. Although everything the host is planning to say is part of the script, there are inevitably deviations. “You can’t box in comics,” Tanker says. “You have to let them have latitude. And we keep a camera on the host, from head to toe, at all times. Just in case.”

Tanker has silver hair, bright blue eyes, and a tangible spring in his step. After working on shows as disparate as “The West Wing” and “The American Music Awards,” he can easily fix someone’s attention with a voice just slightly above a whisper.

During the years he’s worked with Horvitz, the two have developed a shorthand that makes life a little easier -- every director, Tanker says, has a different preference. “Some need a lot of information, some just need short bursts.”

Horvitz is one of the latter. Which is good. Because while Tanker’s softly ticking off the countdown and cues, he’s also keeping track of, well, pretty much everything. Who, for example, the cameras have picked up in the audience -- there are always certain stars Cates and Horvitz want on camera even if they are not nominated or involved in nominated films. “So I’ll be talking to Lou, saying ‘Did we get this one, did we get that one?’ ”

Or how each winner affects the rest of the script -- if an actor presents an award after he has won one himself, he will be introduced as an Academy Award winner as opposed to a nominee, and it’s up to Tanker to make sure those changes have been registered.

“We have conditions already written into the script,” he says, “but I have to make sure they get made. I spend a lot of time anticipating what will happen in the next few minutes.”

Sometimes, he says, stars will change seats, which they’re not supposed to do but hey, it happens. “The cameramen know that if they’re not sure who they’re looking at, they should ask.”

At times, he says with a quiet smile, he is watching the book “to make sure the stars are aligned.”

It’s a lot to keep straight in a small space with a bunch of tense people calling cues and clicking fingers for almost four hours.

“It can seem like a lot of confusion in there,” he says. “A lot of ranting and raving, but once you get used to it, it’s like a dance. Everyone knows what they’re doing, what they have to do to keep the show running smoothly.”

And the tension doesn’t ease during the commercials. No one in the truck except Cates can leave, even during the break. “Gil will sometimes run over to the green room to talk to the talent or visit with the host,” Tanker says. “He’s the kind of producer who knows how to make people feel better. But the rest of us go into the truck before the pre-show and don’t come out until it’s done. I joke with my wife,” he adds, “that I have to decrease my fluid intake a few days beforehand.”

So while the Kodak Theatre audience is stretching and hitting the bar and the home audience is heating up cheesy nachos, the folks in the production truck are getting ready for, say, a conversation between animated diva Edna Mode and a very sick Pierce Brosnan.

“Oh, he was so sick that night,” says Tanker of Brosnan’s appearance last year as co-presenter of best costume design. “But what a pro; he went on and you would have never known it.”

There is an assortment of sweets and savories, but no one wants to eat much or drink at all for the five or so hours in the truck.

No one wants to do anything except hit their marks and survive the show.

“There is an awful lot happening onstage at any given time,” Tanker says, “and you have to keep on top of every little thing.”

When he speaks of it, the tension, the insanity of the night, there is undeniable excitement in his voice. And he cops to it instantly.

“Oh yes, it’s a real high,” he says. “We all like this a lot. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do it. Because it is just so much work.”

And, he admits, that what makes him able to perform so well in the production truck, can make him a little hard to deal with out of it.

“I have no patience with other people being late or missing a deadline,” he says with a laugh. “If they tell me my car will be ready at a certain time and it isn’t, I get really mad. Because I don’t understand it. It’s just a question of being organized and keeping an eye on the time.”