My First “Real” Film Job And An AF Rant

I graduated USC’s Film School in 1982. Yeah, that was a long time ago…

My first real job out of film school was not exactly glamourous.

Now some of us would pick up “free lance” work while we were still in school and use the school’s equipment at night to do these commercial jobs. As students we always needed money. I mixed a short film or two and maybe a commercial using the schools mix room at night.

This was back when the film school was housed in a former stable and at night there were rats running around, but I digress.

The mix and machine room were old, as was the equipment, This was all analogue and we couldn’t run the dubbers backwards, we could only go forward. If you were mixing you’d have to run through the entire film each time as a complete pass. If you needed to make fixes you ran the entire film over from the beginning. You had to record everything in a single pass. You couldn’t punch into your recording and fix a certain spot, you had to re-record the entire mix each time. If you made a mistake you started all over again.

At one point I was so close to finishing this free lance job, but I made a couple of small mistakes and we were tired, so we decided, “fuck this, let’s jut run the machines backwards, attempt to punch in, and get this done!” We did that for an hour or so, just when we felt like we had a good mix, the machines crapped out. Nothing was working. Yikes!

We pulled everything off the machines, gave the student his mix for the client and then proceeded to make it look like we had never been in there. My roommate who was a Sound Teaching Assistant came in early and was turning all the machines on when one of the sound faculty arrived.

“Hey Dan, something is wrong, the machines aren’t working?” I’m not sure how he kept a straight face when he said this. Of course Dan figured out the problem and fixed everything. You could tell he knew exactly what we had been doing, and never said a word. He was always one of my favorite teachers there.

Anyway, back to that first “real job”.

I was hired by one of my fellow graduates to edit a 16mm documentary, on a Venereal Disease. I don’t remember exactly which disease it was, and even if I did I probably couldn’t spell it anyway.

The film was produced and directed by Stan Jacobs. I hope he’s still out there doing well. He was a great guy. We weren’t close in film school but we knew each other.

I was being paid the huge sum of $75 per day and was told to keep my days to 8 hours. At the same time my former roommate, and so many others I knew from school were working as assistants and making like $300/week and working 12-14 hours a day, six days a week on all sorts of low-budget films. Roger Corman, AIP, and so many other small companies were cranking out cheap films.

I remember being so happy, of all the people from film school, Stan hired me to edit his film. I soon found out I was not his first choice. Others had turned him down mostly because they wanted to work on dramatic features. At the time USC wasn’t exactly cranking out documentary filmmakers. There were some, not a lot. USC was set up to send it’s graduates into the studio system back then.

It did not matter. I was working as an editor straight out of school. Even though I was editing on an old upright Moviola, I was working in a building in Hollywood. I had arrived!

I had a tough time with some aspects of the film. The thing I remember most was watching a birth that Stan shot that was to open the film. Real blood and operations made me squeamish. I watched that segment over and over until I could actually watch the entire birth without closing my eyes. I finally felt comfortable enough to edit it.

One day after picking up some recent footage Stan had shot. I was in the elevator going up to my editing room. Some LA looking film guy got on the elevator, took one look at me holding the 16mm reels and said in a condescending manner, “I remember when I used to work in 16mm. Such a long time ago…”

The guy had attitude. And it didn’t bother me at all. I don’t believe he could have said anything that would have affected my mood. I was thrilled to be working. It didn’t matter to me what kind of film or what it was being shot on. It was a movie!

Stan and I had a great time. He wasn’t in the editing room every day, but when he was we had great conversations. Stan taught me about working independently, billing for my time, and coordinating the stuff needed to make a film. A lot of the things he was teaching me were things we didn’t learn in school. It was a real education. And Stan had no problem “working in 16mm”. He was more concerned about making a good film and making the client/investor happy with the work.

Stan got comedian, actor, and songwriter, Steve Allen to narrate the film. He went up to Steve’s house in Beverly Hills, where he had his own small recording studio set up. He did a lot of voice overs and narration in his home studio. And this was back in the day when equipment wasn’t all that cheap, light, or small.

When I got the narration tape it was great. Steve didn’t do a lot of takes because he nailed them on the first take every time. If Stan wanted a different read, Steve knocked it out of the park on the next take. He was a total pro. Stan told me how amazing he was to work with. Very friendly and even though this was a small project compared to what he was used to, I believe our entire budget might have been around #25,000, he took it seriously. He wanted to do a great job.

I was sure my career was taking off now. My career in sound design was still off in the future.

It wasn’t long after I completed the film that certain health issues popped up. I had become an asthmatic. Which is what lead me to make the decision to move to Portland. More on that decision another time.

In Portland I eventually got a three week assistant editing job at Will Vinton Productions. The three weeks ended up lasting two years on The Adventures Of Mark Twain, Will’s Claymation feature film. My first real taste of working on a feature.

I am very lucky, forty-five plus years later, I still love what I do...

Which is good, because I’ve worked for myself all these years and retirement is not an option.

The Angry Filmmaker Rants

Social Security is not an entitlement! I paid into Social Security all of these decades, and have earned the money I’m finally receiving. Because I worked for myself, in the arts, and paid taxes on my income, my Social Security isn’t very much. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for that check that arrives every month. It’s just not a lot.

What I hate is all of these politicians and their followers talking about how we need to raise the retirement age, and limit Social Security in other ways. Most of them have obviously never worked “real jobs”. They haven’t done manual labor, or other jobs that are hard on your body. They don’t know what it’s like to live pay check to pay check. They have fully covered health insurance and generous pensions, that we pay for!.

Don’t forget, they “borrowed” from Social Security in the 1980’s and never paid the money back.

It’s up to us to keep the heat on our so called “representatives”, to not only fully fund Social Security but to increase retirement benefits for those who have spent their lives working and paying into it.

And while we’re at it, we need to fully fund the Veterans Administration and take care of the people who risked their lives for this country. All veterans should have great healthcare, and shouldn’t be homeless.

Okay, I’ll stop for this week.

Remember, if you don’t like what I’m writing these days then unsubscribe. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

To the rest of you, thank you for reading, subscribing, and supporting me and my writing and filmmaking.

Here is a link to to me reading an excerpt from my story, Incident At Arrah Wanna. About the time I got busted at church camp for smoking pot. I was fourteen and not much of a role model, even back then. It’s only 3 minutes. Please check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLEjFvSeh_A

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