1. Can you briefly define your job to me?
Not actively freelancing at the moment, that’s been the case on and off since 1982. Savannah is a small enough market that you have to do more than one thing in order to make a living. In bigger markets (he lived in LA) you can be more specialized. I’ve been a producer, production manager, and assistant director. My favorite is producing because you get to decide what your working on, it’s the most involved they are usually 4-5 year projects, we take a year or two to get it written by the time its written and sold 5 years go by. So in the scheme of things I don’t get to do many.
2. How did you get started in this business?
I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1882. There a used to make a lot of my own independent films on 8mm and 16mm and I was really involved in theater. Just by chance, I saw an add in the paper for a guy who was looking to put a crew together, the guy wanted to make a feature, and at the time, the home video market was taking everything. So he decided to put together a ½ million dollars and shoot the 35mm feature. So I started helping this guy raise money, and he was really good at it. A lot of people don’t know how to raise money, or never get there, but this guys was great. We raised all of it, shot the film, and then he raised another 200 thousand and put the film in theaters we cut dvds, it was great. He went on to move to LA, but I was the guy in the Detroit area who knew how to make a feature film, so people would call me when they wanted to make one.
3. How do you tell someone over you that you couldn’t accomplish an assigned task?
Sure, a lot of these people that I worked with were people who were younger and less experienced than myself, but they didn’t know what they were doing as far as directing, and beyond. These jobs like directing and producing contain a lot, and a lot of people struggle with this. It’s a lot to bring in some of these shots, and some people can’t get it done. It’s a bit of dance you don’t want to step on any toes. In LA I was working as an assistant director, and I pushed some of the guys to hard, I was trying to finish in 2 days, because that’s how much time I thought we had left, and the director became really unhappy with they way the shots came out and blamed me. I was one of those times I made a mistake and I payed for it. I should have just let things go and created a better piece, that my boss was happier with.
4. Do you have any advice for a media student who is just starting out?
In savannah I’ve noticed that because of SCAD the students coming out of that program want to be hired as shooter as a assistant director, these huge positions, but your not going to get hired as that. Your not going to transition into something like that. You have to start out as a pa, and your going to get to position faster if you would sell yourself as a pa, telling the producer your willing to do what the producer wants to do. It’s amazing no one can find a good pa in savannah because they all expect to do big things right of the start.
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