The Humble Nailbanger

I was poking around iSquint and discovered that they “sponsor” a flickr lighting group called “iSquint.net Friday Lighting Porn,” where you can post whatever great lighting project/production you’re working on. There’s some really nice work in there.

I was poking around in the Apple App Store today, and found Pocket LD, which: “is a photometric database and calculation tool for theatrical and TV/Film lighting professionals.  Simply enter your throw distance, than select manufacturer, fixture and a lamp to calculate beam/field diameter and fc/lux.”  Checking out the website for the source, I came upon LightingiPhoneApps.  Pretty groovy…they have the LD app as well as a bunch of other apps relevant to LDs, stagehands and other assorted techs.

Funnily enough, tho this blog is called “The Humble Nailbanger,” your humble narrator probably tends to work as an electrician more than as a carpenter, and so was pretty happy to find these links:

iSquint is “an entertainment lighting technology blog that covers new products, services and trends within the industry.”

The Lighting Archive “is developing a collection of actual plots, focus charts, cue sheets from real shows. We will place an emphasis on historical productions and designers who have made important contributions to our field.”

The Theatrical Lighting Database – Modern theatrical lighting is a uniquely American art form, which until now has been exceedingly difficult to study due to limited access to original lighting documents. This collection contains actual plots, focus charts, cue sheets and much more from four landmark productions digitized from the collections of the New York Public Library.

The database seems to be drawn from the Lighting Archive, at least based on my cursory exploration.

Jim on Light-Jim, talking about many things concerning lighting.  I found this last night, and got completely lost in the first two posts, following links and finding all sorts of cool things.  I’m looking forward to exploring much more here.

Much more to come.

…well, things happen.  In the world of the stagehand, there is very little security.  When one manages to find some, one sometimes tends to live it up, to sit back, take a look around with thumbs hooked under imaginary suspenders, and reflect on all the time one spent hustling to get right where they’re sitting, at that moment.

It’s a powerful feeling, friends, and one that your humble narrator has been enjoying for quite some time.  The lack of wandering throughout the various theaters and studios of the city has made me soft, and shut me up, for the most part.  Sure, there was plenty of everyday grousing and talking about how perhaps we might do this or that better, but nothing that really hit me so hard that I could overcome the inertia that was my not posting here.

All that has changed, tho, as I am once again “back on the bounce.”  The free time between gigs has me feeling the itch once again, so hopefully they’ll be more stuff hereabouts for the time being.

I had a thought today about the proposed bailout of the US auto makers.  Now, I’ve got a position which I won’t get to in this space.  But this right-wing meme about how it’s the unions that are responsible for this problem?  It reminds me a lot of hearing during the strike about how the failure rate of stinkers on Broadway are somehow the fault of labor costs for stagehands.

Neither are grounded in reality.

I used to run a fairly successful political blog, which no longer exists.  When out of work, I have several hobbies, the biggest of which is politics.  You have no idea how difficult it has been to avoid the topic here….several of the big lulls were at least partly because all I could think about was this country, the state we’re in, where we’re at as a people…and I went back and forth with myself many times about whether I should write about it.  There are a million political blogs (at least), and I don’t know that I really have much that’s productive to add to the conversation.

That being said, I’m really, truly jarred and happy with last night’s election result.  I think that my cynicism about this country and my fellow countrymen had reached such a nadir that I didn’t think that our leaders and representatives who – seeing that the plane was headed into the side of a mountain – just couldn’t bring themselves to do what was necessary to pull us up and out of the impending disaster.  I’m still skeptical, but at least I have the slightest echo of hope.

Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of satisfied and hopeful USAians today….

There’s a great tradition in the world of the stagehand, where everyone mercilessly mocks the hell out of everyone else in the crew, understanding that it will all come back to them in spades.

Sure, there are serious moments.  But mostly, we all love to laugh.  It’s rarely mean, mostly just affectionate in the vein of Oscar Wilde, who said “the only thing that’s worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”  In some ways, it’s when they stop making fun of you that you have to worry.

So when I found myself a while back struggling during a turnaround in front of a decent-sized audience, working with a focusing pole to try to dress back a tieline and finding that the pole was just a little bit too short, it was no big deal.  We all work under pressure in front of crowds who have little to do but watch the changeover. I’ve been in this position a hundred times…suddenly you find yourself rushing and making do in the blink of an eye.  So far, every crew I’ve worked on has been successful.  I’ve never been in a quick turnaround that didn’t make time.

I really was fine, working away, until one of the heads leaned over and said “C’mon, hurry up!  Everybody’s watching!” I didn’t have to look over to tell he was smiling.

“Aw, give me a break, shut the hell up,” I said, still trying.

He leaned in closer, right in my ear.  “They’re all looking at you, and here you are fucking it up in front of them all….”  I started to turn red.

“Get the fuck away from me!” I said, supressing a laugh.

“C’mon, hurry!  Hurry!”

Then I turned REALLY red.  I started to feel like if I blushed any harder, I would burst into flame.  I was laughing, he was laughing, the crew was laughing, the audience was vocally reacting to each move I made, “awwwww”-ing when I missed, and finally bursting into applause when I got it.  It was hilarious, and I was as embarassed as I’ve ever been at work.

Just another day on the job.

I’ve been walking around with this post sort of slowly coming together in my head, formed from a few different elements I’ve picked up from here and there.  Basically it’s about the ups and downs of stagehand life as a whole, how we’re viewed by the rest of the crew and the world, and how we see ourselves.

First, I noticed that I had been linked (once again) by Backstage at backstagejobs.com.  Thanks very much for that.  So I was poking around that site, and I came across this little piece of annoyance, where English-Test.net explains what a stagehand is:

A stage hand is someone who does small jobs in the theater – helping with the scenery, making tea for the cast and cleaning the place. Hand in this sense represents the person – an employee doing manual work.

OK?  That’s completely understates the scope of the job, except for making tea for the cast (?!) and (in some cases) cleaning the place, which stagehands rarely (really rarely, as in “if ever”) do.

Then, OneNYCStagehand returned after a bit of a hiatus (and I’ll cop to being one of the “folks with too much time on their hands” who was wondering where he went) and clued his readers in one where he has/had been:

I think many of us like to think that we primarily make our living in the arts or at least on the periphery of it. But even in New York City it sometimes difficult to survive on just a diet of culture. As we get further and further from the hot sun of the fine arts, away from the nourishing atmosphere of Broadway we’ll work in the cold outer planets of “television” and “industrial.” Even these can be satisfying when the technological gee-whiz factor is high enough. A lot of product rollouts and events have a lot of bright, new shiny toys.

So where am I? Out in the cold outer reaches of our universe, there is a distant planet called “Cable.” It can support life but it’s a hardscrabble existence. Orbiting that planet is a lifeless, gray moon called the “Business News Channel“.

Yikes.  Well, we’ve all been there in some way or another.  Not there there, necessarily, but in that same “universe.”  He sums it up pretty well at the end:

There’s more, so much more and yet so very little. There will come a time when I’ll get off this little moon. As the saying goes, “when the money runs out, so do we”. The Client can hire my body for a couple of hours or days but the money always runs out and that’s my ticket back to sunshine.

Where have I been? I prefer to think about where I’m going, thank you very much.

What does it all mean?  Well, there’s a great saying that I’ve often heard within the business:

Theater is life.
Film is art.
Television is furniture.

As little as some of us who work in the business want to think about it, for the most part it’s very true.  Television is furniture.  What we are doing is basically building and executing content that is just barely attractive enough to justify all the commercials shown during the broadcast.  And more and more often, the content is the commercial.

But it’s not only what happens in our business but how it happens as well that can be frustrating.  I’ve said here in this space that things are generally feast or famine, stop and go.  And that pertains to work and it’s availability as well as the level of satisfaction that that work might provide.

Many of us bounce around.  What happens in that circumstance is that you might catch a loadin, which is generally exciting and challenging and, if you are in the right mindset, pretty fun as well.  The work is hard and satisfying.  You’re able to watch something take shape, often pretty quickly, from the line of trucks you walk past on your way in and an empty theater through to a fully staged show.  The motors, the lights, the rigging.  There’s so much going on, so many people working, and most of them stagehands.

I always feel an immense source of pride that I get to work among all these men and women who are so capable of doing things that leave crowds of people agog, leaving the theater every night saying “how the hell did they do that?”

The Mrs always reminds me that the hours don’t matter because I love what I do.  And she’s right, in the overarching sense.  Why “overarching?”  Because after the loadin, after all the problem-solving and making quick decisions on the fly, after filling the space with everything in the show and shoehorning it in so it all works together smoothly – and if you’re lucky – there’s the execution of the show.

This can be fun as well.  But in many cases, it’s very routine…pushing and pulling heavy dollies, flying scenery in and out, scene changes both complex and simple.

If you wind up on a show that’s pretty cut and dry (as it often is in television), it can get boring and repetitive fast.  The thrill of the initial weeks fades into the daily grind of everyday tasks.  I’ve done shows that really are mostly just emptying the garbages and sweeping.  We do it without complaint, because it’s great to have steady work and sometimes it’s nice to have some mindless downtime, whether because we’re exhausted, sore, hurt, or studying for a certification and we can put the time to good use.

But while we’re doing it, many of us are conflicted…aching to get back into the action and the culture, looking to do something besides work a pickup and make sure the trashcans don’t overflow, no longer hearing from camera ops and stage managers about how easy we have it when we can look around and know that we built and lit everything that the entire crew is working amongst.

The show is live.  News.  The times are somber, the day was dark, matters stormy and uncertain.  The national mood is dreary, everyone is in the doldrums.

The news is bad, the newsroom feels tense.  The stories are of everyday people having lost their jobs, their savings.  Unemployment is up.  The market is down, and then down more the next day.  Crime is rising.  No one trusts anyone else. Homelessness is increasing.  The news hasn’t been good for what seems like years.

One cameraman calls the stage manager over.  The rest of the crew looks up.  He is known never to be far from a bag of sunflower seeds, and that day was no different.  He eats them like some people chain-smoke. His face is absolutely covered with wet, chewed sunflower hulls.

“Hey, listen,” he asks the stage manager.  “Do I have anything on my face?”

Recently the Mrs and I travelled some distance to attend a friend’s wedding.  As if the long drive weren’t enough, she was sick and I was in the process of catching what she had.  Grumpiness abounded.

It bled into the next day as well.  An hour before the ceremony, as we were getting dressed, the button on my pants broke.  I know, I know.  I mean, I was forearm-deep in the waist of the pants in order to tuck in my shirt, but they were tight to begin with. Too many on-set breakfasts and lunches and not enough physical work, surely.

So there I was…my arms out at shoulder height, sort of mid-shrug.  “Great.  Just wonderful.  I broke the button on these pants, and they’re brand new. Naturally I don’t have a belt, and I can’t wear the other pants I brought with the jacket I have.”

The Mrs slumped.  We both stood there, frozen, trying to figure out what to do.  Then I jumped.  “Hey, I have some line in the car.  I’ll just tie them up.  I do it all the time.”

“Once a stagehand, always a stagehand,” she muttered to herself as I quickly put on the other pair of pants I had on hand and gathered room and car keys.

I ran down to the car, cut myself some line off the bundle I always keep in the trunk, and returned to the room, whereupon I shucked the old clothes, donned what I was wearing to the wedding, and tied them up with a big grin.  “Nice.  That’ll work just fine.”  I looked over at the Mrs, who was standing there all ready to go.

“Good thing I always have some rope and a knife, huh?”  I said with a smile, while feeling various pockets for the car keys.  “Hey, where are the damned car keys?”

A moderate wait for the tow truck and man with slim-jim later, we were at the ceremony, and only 15 minutes after it started….