Wrangling chaos

LAUREN BACALL gave Garry Hood some of the best advice of his career. Twenty-odd years ago, as she prepared to take the stage as a presenter at the Oscars, Hood was standing with her in the wings. She asked him if she would be walking down a staircase. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Then she asked how many steps the staircase had. And Hood had to admit he didn’t know.

“Then she let me know, politely, but very clearly, that I hadn’t done my job,” Hood says. “That it was important for an actress to know how many steps she was going to have to walk down so she could keep her head up and count as she walked.”

Now, he says, whenever he sees a staircase rise from the set of the Oscars, the first thing he does is count every step. (This year, there are no steps on the stage.) Because that’s the sort of detail that his job demands.

Hood has worked as stage manager for 23 Oscar ceremonies. He has watched producers and directors come and go, seen the musical numbers go from the over-the-top dance numbers of the ‘70s and ‘80s to the more sedate performances they are now. He has worked the Shrine, the Dorothy Chandler and now the Kodak. He remembers when there were only six stage managers and he was the green one, in charge of the musical numbers.

Since then, he has moved up the ever-expanding hierarchy until now, as head stage manager, he monitors the dozen other people with the stage manager title.

“This year, I’ll be in charge of the host,” says Hood, “which is not as heavy a job. So I can oversee everything else.”

Stage managers make sure that everything that is supposed to happen during the show actually happens, from the seating of the stars to scenery changes to hitting the lighting cues. Beginning hours before showtime, Hood and his staff move around backstage and through the house to ensure that whatever the director wants, the director gets.

“I am the main communicator between the director and producer and the cast and crew,” he says. “The stage managers are in charge of everything you see, and a lot you don’t, from the entrance of an artist to a piece of scenery flying.”

So when Hood joined the staff three weeks before showtime, he first met with director Louis J. Horvitz to learn his vision and go over the script. Then he met with the art department and went through the script cue to cue.

“We need to know everything [designer] Roy [Christopher] wants the set to do,” Hood says. “Then I combine both of those things and communicate it to the crew.”

Which includes?

Hood laughs, draws a breath before launching into the list of people he works with: “Audio, lighting, stagehands, carpenters, props, seating department ... you name it.”

Hood also deals with the movement of the talent.

“During the pre-show,” Hood says, “we’re trying to shut the red carpet down and get everyone in. If it were up to us,” he adds, “everyone would be in the theater like an hour before the show starts. But that’s not reasonable, so we’re on our headsets asking, ‘Where are they? Are they here? Are they in their seats?’ When a winner goes to the pressroom, we need to make sure he’s back in a timely fashion because if Lou is asking where a person is,” he adds, referring to director Horvitz, “I need to know.”

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Keeping the watch list

OVER the years, Hood has become a pretty good judge of celebrity character. “Oh we know the ones who wander and the ones you can count on. I can look at the list and say ‘Here are the ones we have to watch.’ ”

At the Oscars, the stars in their seats are almost as important to the show as the stars on stage, especially if the host is planning to riff on certain people during his or her monologue.

“With Billy [Crystal], he needs specific people on camera as he hits them in the audience,” Hood says. “If they’re not there, the joke won’t work. So sometimes I’d have to say, ‘We don’t have them in yet,’ and he would change the joke. Or I’d say, ‘Yeah, we got her, she’s seated, keep the joke.’ ”

And if a presenter, nominee or a key celebrity is MIA midshow, Hood hears about it first.

“Oh I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard, ‘Where is he, where is she?’ ” he says. Even as the music swells and the camera cuts to a presenter’s entrance mark.

Sometimes, Hood says, the star is just standing there, in the wings, taking a last deep breath before walking out. Which is why either Hood or one of the other stage managers is usually standing there too, in case a little last-minute support is required.

“It’s very daunting,” Hood says. “A lot of these actors aren’t used to being on the stage, and here’s this huge show that everyone is watching. They get nervous, just like anyone. Part of our job is to make them comfortable. And most of us have worked these shows before, so they know us, which helps.”

Occasionally, though, a star will have second thoughts and refuse to come out of the dressing room, or simply disappear. “If we get to the announcement [of a star’s appearance] and the people aren’t there

But that doesn’t happen often at the Oscars, he says. “People know how important it is, and they’re all on their best behavior. Usually,” he adds with a wry smile.

It’s hard to imagine an anxiety attack Hood could not calm. Tall and soft-spoken, he may be, as he says, almost obsessively organized, but he also radiates plain, honest friendliness. It’s probably the accent, which, though mellowed by frequent trips to the West Coast, is still pure Nashville. That’s where he lives, and where Oscar “discovered” him. As a young man, he dreamed of becoming a Washington correspondent, but he soon figured out that he could make a lot more money being a cameraman, or even working cue cards.

This was back in the “Urban Cowboy” days when the Nashville music scene was bursting at the seams and suddenly every director and producer was coming through, looking for a way to tap into the country’s love affair with country. Hood, who had been working regularly on “Hee Haw” and for other TV variety shows, including “Dolly,” did an Alabama concert special. After it was done, the director, Marty Pasetta, asked if he wanted to come to L.A. and do another show with him.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” Hood says. “All I knew was I had a plane ticket to L.A.”

What he was doing was the Oscars, the five production numbers to be precise. That was back in 1980, when the show employed hundreds of dancers to perform in highly choreographed, special-effects-laden magnificence, days that Hood admits he misses.

“Variety television was still alive then,” he says, “so there were a lot of production dance numbers, there was a context. Now variety television is event television.”

Despite his worst fears, Hood did not bring that Oscars to a screeching halt, and with the exception of a few years here and there, he has worked every show since.

It’s not an easy job, he says, but even after all this time, he loves it, not just because it’s the Oscars but because it is, at its heart, the biggest variety show in the world.

“They’ve taken technology and embraced it,” Hood says. “They have the vision and the budget to do it, the time to rehearse it properly.”

The Oscars was, for example, the first live show he worked on to be transmitted in high definition. “And that was a great learning curve. We found out that the camera is nowhere near as forgiving in HD,” he says. “That you can’t just hang a black cloth over something anymore.

“You get to do things here,” he adds, “that you just never get to do on any other show.”