thanks Ben

Randy I spent 6 years working on movies. I made some sizable money chunks over those years. I just got tired of working like a dog for many months, just to chop it up and fill a dumpster when it was over.

BTW My first great realization of where movie money goes, and why it costs so much to make movies, came while working on a terrible Mathew Broderick movie in the Santa Cruz mountains.

I was a standby carpenter on a soundstage for 2 days. One day me and 125 other technicians, producers, directors, gaffers, grips, set-decs, carps, teamsters, wardrobe, makeup, craft-services....

spent 4 hours watching Mathew Broderick answer a telephone, over and over and over and over ......

That was when I realized where the money goes, since I was one of the lowest paid guys on set at $26/hr.

Why would they have so many construction types standing around for that?

Lane

I am not a site guy very often but I was amazed at the relative speed of the process. We had ordered material on spec before the prints arrived. The prints had been made three days before and approved the day before we had them on the shop floor. Of course there were lots of errors in the prints and no one really cared about exact dimensions, The thing just had to go together and look good when the camera made a long shot down the catwalks. In the hurry to get the job done the cost must have doubled in labour alone. Some sections just would not work as drawn. In some cases we made it work and in others we left extra and guys like you Ernie made it fit on site then touched it up with the five gallons of paint we sent along. We have had a few little jobs for movie sets before but this one basically was cost plus. I guess with our cheap Canuck buck production costs are a lot cheaper than below the 49th. We did go into double time pay after somewhere around sixtie hours in the week. Was it either feast or famine when you did movie sets or could you rely on regular work? Randy

"Ernie Leimkuhler" wrote in message news:030120040235282303% snipped-for-privacy@stagesmith.com...

Seattle suffers from the "Vancouver Effect". It is exactly 10% cheaper to shoot a production in Vancouver than Seattle. A 20 million$ picture will save 2 million$ by hopping the border.

So when an art director says "Seattle", the accountants say "Oh you mean Vancouver".

Plus the Washington state government decided it didn't need a movie industry, so they stripped the state film office down to an answering machine.

More than half the Seattle film local moved to LA over the last 10 years.

There are maybe 3 features here a year, and that is just not enough to make a living at.

The last feature I worked on was The Postman. After that I walked away.

In theory I could reinstate my movie card by paying back dues, but it just isn't worth it.

That answers my questions Ernie. Thanks. I got to stand feet from the cameras while shots of Catwoman were being done last year. Watching the "atmosphere" and human dynamics going on between people on the crew was unnerving. I got the feeling that there was a lot of back stabbing going on in terms of who worked and who got bypassed. I'd much rather have an ironworker or boilermaker look me in the face and dress me down with a few choice words than what I saw. I guess everyone chooses their work environment whether it is inside a nice clean office or down in the bilge of a freighter. I have to admit the movie industry does seed a lot of money around when they come to town. The steady money locally was Smalltown and now the last season of Stargate. Randy

In the movie trade, who you know gets you the job. What you know lets you keep the job. The job pool is so dynamic that personal politics becomes a major energy draw. I got a guy fired off a TV show after he rigged a massive overhead fresnel light on 1/8" cable with no safeties.

2 days later he was back as a painter.

The simple rule is that nobody really cares about anything except keeping the producer happy.

I once spent 15 hour on a soundstage waiting for shooting to stop so I could quickly finish fabricating some overhead steel supports for an operating room set. Around 11 PM the producer turns to me and asks very curtly, "And what do you do here?". I said I was the welder. She responded "Do we need a welder on set?. Why are you here now?" I told her point blank that I was waiting for her and everybody else to get the hell off the set so I could finish welding and go home. I think she wanted to fire me on the spot, but couldn't risk it.

2 days later she was fired and replaced with a really scary quiet guy from FoxTV. Man he gave me the chills.

People who work on movies don't really give a rats ass about whether or not a movie is any good. All we cared about was if the Leads were sane and the food was any good. The only show I ever worked on that I was proud of was the first show I ever worked on. One episode of the TV show Midnight Caller. Everything after that was crap.

I would have loved to work on Stargate. The behind the scenes stuff I have seen shows a really good attitude amongst the whole crew, starting at the top.

I will be a happy man in my grave if I never work for Warner Brothers ever again. Every show I worked on for them was a living hell. Lorimar was cool, Fox was OK, Universal was OK, ABC was OK, Paramount was tough but fair. WB was just plane abusive.