A long time ago, when camera assistants frolicked carefree in a world mercifully bereft of large-format cameras, your narrator recruited a friendly focus puller for a two-day project. In the days before Netflix had booked all the world’s film crew in perpetuity, it was possible to hire day players without eBaying the kids, and it is again now, although the most expensive aspect of most film shoots is still the warm bodies. As such, it was slightly surprising when, mere days before the show, said focus puller attempted to sell the production on an extra member of crew – a young newcomer with minimal credit history but, we were assured, a great attitude.
In the context of an almost-complete preproduction, this felt like reaching the end of a long, disgruntled line for the register and being upsold on today’s special offers before being allowed to pay for a chocolate bar. The production was of very limited scope, and the extra pair of hands felt unnecessary and expensive. Possibly this person would be bored. Possibly someone had the wrong idea about the nature of the show. Most offputting of all was the first assistant’s insistence. Was it really his business to recruit additional people? Well, perhaps, but this was new. It was quite some time – an embarrassing amount of time, looking back – before the truth slammed, appropriately, into focus.
This is what a film industry apprenticeship looks like.
The self-interest of self-employment
We’ve discussed the bleak prospects of new entrant crew in the past, but fact that it’s even possible to make this sort of mistake should make us consider not only the currently-urgent need for new people, but also how they’re treated. People running regular businesses – rental houses, in this context – will be keenly aware that full-time juniors are thin on the ground, and the idea of overlooking any opportunity to take on reliable new people will seem foreign. On set, though, when filling slots is someone else’s problem and bringing in new people is a job of work nobody is formally required to do, inexperienced people can instinctively seem likely to get underfoot.
As long as recruitment is nobody’s problem, it’s everybody’s problem, but our thesis here is not that every production must take every opportunity to take on new people. One of the trickier aspects is the responsibility of the trainer to ensure that the experience offered is useful to the trainee, especially given low trainee pay. When there’s so little money, there must be something more than the money, especially given the beginner is likely to feel under pressure to accept any job. The whole situation can lead to inexperienced people being abused as underpaid baristas on jobs that might not teach anyone much.
Even with the best intentions, entry-level productions of the kind which provoked this situation often won’t be organised and run on the same basis as a full-scale convention of the white truck owners’ association. On the cheapest shows, the ability to pick up non-technical but nonetheless crucial bits of setiquette might be less than we’d hope. Everyone has to start somewhere, and practicality dictates that most people won’t start on a Nolan megashow, but making a quick comparison of someone’s level of experience and stated goals to the nature of the production is nothing more than due diligence.
A matter of conscience
All of this should hover in the conscience of anyone who’s recruited cheap, inexperienced labour at a rate that’s only justifiable if the experience is actually useful. Because of exactly that issue, creating certified apprenticeships is a regulated process in many parts of the world, and it’s often easier to just take someone on at the low end of conventional employment. The wages are barely higher, and workers are allowed to do more than apprentices, but the moral responsibility to make the experience worthwhile remains in either case.
Balance the need for crew training with the interests of both the production and the trainee, and it’s certainly possible to take on a youngster without being remembered as a villain. It doesn’t take long for the shine to wear off the gold-paved streets of tinseltown in the small hours of a night shoot as the frost settles on the magliners, especially once we discover that lunch might be a lukewarm Big Mac anyway.
It’s long been fashionable to lay all of this at the feet of producers, who have often faced criticism on the basis of their expectation that crew will perpetually be available without anyone actually putting any work into ensuring that’s the case. True as that is, the people with the contacts to actually bring new players to the game are often not the producers themselves, and we should not overlook hints dropped by people who might be making a good-faith effort to ensure that newcomers get a fair shot.