The Humble Nailbanger

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?”

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity – and I thank all four of you – knows that some stagehands have early calls. It’s not unusual for us to be up at 3 or even 2 am to go to (or be at) work.

When you have to get up that early, you tend to do some things the previous night to buy yourself another few moments of precious sleep. One thing I do is lay out my clothes the night before so I can quickly get dressed in the morning.

It’s complicated by the fact that I lay them out in the bedroom, where Mrs Nailbanger is sleeping. I suppose I could lay them out in another room, but I don’t. What I do, as a result, is get dressed in the dark, either by feel or the light of my phone.

Occasionally something doesn’t feel right, and I have to strip back down to reverse something.

Never before, however, have I done what I did the other day, which was make it all the way to work and halfway through the day before realizing that I was wearing a button-down shirt inside out. The collar was up the way it should have been, but the buttons were on the inside, tags hanging out, the whole gigantic embarassing bit.

I finally figured it out when my hand hit a tag on the side of the shirt. While I was crossing the street on a coffee break. Five hours into the day.

As a testament to how tired and busy we all are, an entire studio full of stagehands – who are so observant they’ll pick up the slightest thing to bust your balls over and then milk it for DAYS, and with whom I was working in close proximity for the whole time – entirely failed to notice. Thankfully.

Stagehands see a ton of celebrities.  I’ve been an arms length away from the biggest names in show business, politics, you name it.  It’s just like any other part of my job.  Sure, it was thrilling the first few times, but after a couple days, it’s just like anything else.

And to prove it, I’ll offer you an anecdote:  5 healthy, average working men.  One beautiful starlet in the very prime of her career and the height of her beauty.  She’s outside the proproom where the 5 healthy, average working men are waiting for their next cue.  She’s primping, adjusting herself in her dress, making those mirror faces that all people make when they’re performing that last check to ensure they don’t have last night’s parsley in their teeth.

What are the 5 healthy, average working men doing?  They’re paying absolutely no attention to her.  Instead, they are cheering on one of the guys, who is busily trying to see how much dijon mustard he can eat in one minute.

Being a stagehand working on daytime television results in some really improbable situations.  I lived out one sparkling example a while back.

Now, the location of the studio where the show is taped is no secret, and just about every day finds a few people sitting outside trying to get an autograph or a photo with someone on the show.  And even if you happen to see no one directly outside the studio, you might find yourself behind someone at the local supermarket buying a sandwich to eat while they’re waiting for their favorite actor or actress to leave the building.

Anyway, a bunch of us went out to lunch at a local restaurant in the middle of a long day. There were six stagehands in all, mostly big, burly guys, all wearing black, mostly covered in tattoos.  Basically, we look like bikers.  We’re all friendly and quick to laugh and joke around, but just seeing us on the street?  People tend to curve around us as we’re walking down the block.

We go into the restaurant, a local place that we all go to pretty often.  We seated ourselves, moving together two tables in the back and squeaking our chairs across the wood floors.  Three older women were seated to one side of us, talking somewhat loudly as they waited for their lunch.

Sitting there for a moment, it quickly became obvious that they had been sitting outside the studio and were now taking a break for lunch.  My friend, an older guy who is always looking to start a little trouble, was sitting directly across the table from me.  We were sitting closest to the ladies, and could clearly hear what they were saying.  I kicked him under the table and, catching his eye, motioned with my head for him to shut up and listen to what they were talking about, which was the show.

I should say at this point that we spend 15 hours a day sitting watching soaps.  And I don’t mean that we park ourselves in front of soapnet.  I’m saying that stagehands know the soap(s) they work on inside and out….who uses what phone, what their sheets look like, what order the contents of their closets should be in, and who sleeps on what side of the bed.  They know the plot, too, much to all of our eternal chagrin.  We’re not necessarily interested, but it’s our business to know.

So when we overheard the women at the next table talking and getting one woman’s name wrong, my mischevious, tattooed, bearded friend couldn’t resist.  He leaned over, waiting until one of them noticed him and literally jumped in her chair.

“Ma’am?”

“Um…..yes?”

“I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“You what?”

“I couldn’t help but overhear what you were saying, and I just wanted to remind you that it’s not Rebecca who’s with Jason, it’s Racquel.  It was Rebecca who was cheating on Racquel with Roberto.”

She looked utterly shocked.  What the hell was this Hell’s Angel lookin character talking about?

“Wa-wa-what?”

“I just wanted to make sure that you were waiting for the right actor,” he said.  “You had the plot mixed up a little, and if you were waiting for the actress who plays Rebecca, she’s not taping today.”

Clearly she wasn’t prepared for this.  Is anyone?  When you go to see the Little Mermaid on Broadway, do you expect the main lavender seashell to be moved around by a 250 lb badass?

Of course not.  But more often than not, that’s who we are.

One of the amazing things about being a stagehand for a daily live show is seeing up close and personal the amount of work that can go into staging something, only to have the guest(s) cancel at the last minute. I was recently able to experience this first hand.

Building the stage? Yup. Massive. Heavy, lots of hands. Lighting? Five hours plus, at a minimum (there was extra stuff involved beyond just the lighting call). Lots of band gear. Tons of line-testing for audio. Half the studio stuffed with branded crap shipped at extra expense like lives depended on it, then treated with kid gloves from the truck to the moment it was flown.

Strangely, seeing as how much time and effort I personally – along with all my fellow stagehands – put into the 6.5-or-so minutes of airtime, I’m really not bitter or frustrated. I learned some valuable things in the process. And, to be perfectly honest, the company I was working for shelled out for a bunch of overtime for us without seeing any returns in the form of commercial revenue. Having watched 10-20 jobs for stagehands with families recently dissolving with no notice whatsoever, I’m harboring a special dislike for the company I often work for at this particular point in time….

Perhaps it would be best to start this post with a few examples:A head of department, well into his 70s, still in possession of relatively good health (he is, after all, still able to make all those 4, 5 and 6 am calls), who has worked full-on “stagehand hours” (12, 14, 16 hours in the studio a day) for decades. And who, when asked why he doesn’t just pack it in, says “I don’t have anything else to do.”

A board op who came back from major surgery and who still has a pretty busted up body part (and will continue to have said busted up body part for many, many months to come, rehabilitation or no), who was eligible for long-term disability (and if I wrote about which body part, you’d say (with a wince) “whoa, he came back 1.5 weeks after that??!!”) yet was trying to come back to work one week later. What stopped him? Migraines from the pain medication.

I’m acquainted with another head of department, in a different local from the one I work in, who had a double knee replacement and labored to get back to work as soon as possible, despite his 70+ years, the commute, and the advice of his doctors.

There was a kindly old gent I last worked with 10 years ago. A lovely man, really, with a disposition that was unmatched in its sunniness. But even though he was working daily 3 or 4 am calls for electrics in his late 70s and early 80s (I worked with and around him for about 3 years), he was never really 100% cognizant of the entirety of what was going on around him…he often called me by my grandfather’s name, having worked with him 3 or 4 decades previous; or he might ask, during the morning focus for a soap, when “the contestants are showing up.” He loved manning the bottom of a genie, but he couldn’t hear even the simplest of directions, like “forward,” “back a bit,” or “please stop, you’re pushing me right into a red-hot 5k.”

What’s the connection here? Well, first and most obvious they’re all stagehands. They’re also people I’ve come to think of as “lifers,” and a life-form I’m struggling to fully understand.

What’s a lifer? To me, it’s someone who has become so fully immersed in the world of the stagehand – multiple calls during the day, often at different studios/theaters/a combination of both; the looooooong hours; never really seeing the family you’re killing yourself to provide for; the constant “busy-ness” that keeps you from developing a life outside of the business. I can’t really even quantify how many people I’ve worked with who sacrificed their lives (in terms of time, not actual mortality) for the finer things….big houses, cars, pools, boats.

Hell, the first week I was working in corporate, I was talking about how one can actually be comfortable working as a stagehand, with sniggers from all the suits around me. The next day or so? The cover of one of the New York rags talking about stagehands who made more than some of the highest ranking front-office guys at some theaters around the city.

Yeah, they can. But no one mentions the catch, which is that you never see your family, your home, or any of the other things you’re working all those hours to have.

And there are a lot of these guys in my universe now. I can never figure it out…one would think that you work these hours to make a ton of cash, then get out while you’re still healthy enough to enjoy it. But that’s not the case, a lot of the time.

So what is it? Is it some strange combination of the many somewhat unique aspects of life as a stagehand? Is it because we spend so much time together, that to some folks we become a family as real as our actual one? Or is it that there’s some element of what we do that’s excitement that’s tough to replace? Or is it that you can exist, as a head of department, as someone who can live in our world, normally filled with labor and effort, and just show up, give some direction, and that’s it?

I don’t know. It all seems totally crazy to me. I guess one thing I’m searching for is “why?” Were they predisposessed to it, just not having any interests in general, and work was something that helped them pass the time? Do these guys just need to have some books handed to them?

Sam commented on the stagehand primer link I recently posted, more specifically about the author, Mick Alderson. That started me thinking about a few things. Let me respond to and riff off of his thing. First:

I’ve worked with Mick for years now. He’s GREAT to work with. Also taught me a sizable chunk of my apprenticeship base knowledge on the job-site. And was one of the only Sr. hands willing give me an answer to the question “why?” in almost every instance. I want to mention this is appreciated coming from a once young lad who knew nothing about theater.

Kudos to Mick. He wrote a great primer, and now we’re discovering that he’s an all around good stagehand as well, as far as taking someone under his wing and having lotsa patience for the new guy(s).

I’m sure that this isn’t an isolated stagehand thing, but I think at some point or another, we’ve all been taken under someone’s wing at one point or another. It’s got to be a time-honored tradition, I imagine, the method by which common knowledge becomes common, and is passed down over the years.

What’s funny, though, is that I re-examined many of my memories of the guys who – to varying extents – made sure I was not only learning what I needed to know, but also was exposed to the many tips and tricks and little details that might take you a ton of time to learn on your own. For the most part, I realized that many of them were really cantankerous bastards who had little to no patience for many of the other guys in the studio. How is it that they had time for the new guy?

One fine gentleman who taught me much of what I know about electrics was a really rude older guy with a gambling problem, a seemingly endless taste for massage parlors, visiting them so often it could be called a hobby. He refused to speak with 90% of all the various crews in the studio…and by “refused to speak” I mean totally refused to speak to them. If they asked him a question, he would simply turn his back. The other ten percent? He would do nothing but argue. The mental image I have of him is either with his mouth open really wide as he was yelling at any of the numerous people he had screaming matches with every day, or of him gesticulating wildly as he walked away from said numerous people. Yet he had endless time for me and my many really basic and stupid questions.

In fact, every morning, he would seek me out. We were working in the soaps, and he’d go over the lighting plan with me, set by set…telling me what all the symbols meant, letting me know what “hidden things” were going on…what the LD (lighting director…I don’t want to assume) wanted that he/she wasn’t saying on the plot. Why each light was where it was, and why it was focussed where it was focussed. How the day would go, and why.

So basically, this guy, who was in every other respect a totally irritable, nasty fuck (pardon my french, but it really does apply here) spent serious time showing me the ins and outs of the business. How does that happen? Was he looking for a friend? Was he hoping to have a member of the crew who did things his way? Was he just like that? I’ll never know. Either he’s dead, or working somewhere I’ll never get around to visiting.

But the whole idea really boggles my mind sometimes. There are guys who couldn’t spend ten minutes in a room with an inanimate object without starting some sort of fight, and many of them took me aside to impart some serious knowledge to me.

Maybe I’ll work on polling some of the guys I work with, and see what I can turn up. This can’t be an isolated thing. If you have had a similar experience, write or comment.

On to the question. Have you ever rigged with a guy that attracts “Murphy” in increased yet solvable amounts? This might sound a bit strange, but working with a guy who has so much stagecraft knowledge seems to attract challenges from the spirit of Murphy’s law. Have you ever noticed such phenomena? Not to say it was ever less safe, just a welcomed bombardment of challenges.

You know, it’s funny, but yes. I have. And so have many of my brothers in the business…I know because I’ve actually discussed it with them.

Back when I was working with databases in corporate hell, there were a few different classes of people: those who just merely worked with what I was running, with few to no problems; those who had endless problems because they were incompetent; and those who – for whatever reason – always seemed to run into the strangest situations, even though they were obviously knowledgeable. It’s the same way now, in the business…tv, theater.

I think that what happens is that X person’s knowledge eventually winds up overwhelming the problem…they don’t employ Occam’s razor, and then they get in really wierd trouble.  The biggest hurdle is that they tend to start with really complicated solutions to problems on whose simplicity they don’t pick up.   The “solutions” cause more trouble, which snowballs as each one is implemented.

Here’s an example that led me to this explanation: I was working with a really, really knowledgeable stagehand a few weeks back. We were cutting some batten for some crap we had to hang from the grid for an effect. It’s nothing crazy, just 1-by. As he’s cutting, the saw started to go haywire. His first reaction? Check the blade. He started to take off the housing, when I put that piece of batten to the side and told him to try another piece. The problem? There was a piece of metal embedded in the wood.  Checking the saw would’ve been a good thing to do maybe three steps down the road, after all the obvious stupid little things were eliminated.

If he had gone on to check the saw blade? What could have happened? He could have dinged something badly, stripped out hardware, lost that one nut you absolutely shouldn’t lose, or any other number of similar Murphy-esque situations, all of which would set a few guys off mumbling to themselves as they worked to solve the complications of the already overly complicated solution.  The solution which, obviously, hasn’t yet solved anything other than to keep a few members of the crew from growing bored.

I also work fairly regularly with another guy who gets into this sort of trouble all the time, but for a different reason – he’s pretty ignorant, has no idea how ignorant he is, and tends towards solutions that work with what little he knows.

For instance, the other day he hung a lamp that didn’t come on when he had the channel brought up. His solution? Take the unit back off the grid, and take apart the lamp (while standing in the Genie, naturally, without making it safe in any way/shape/form) to make sure everything was kosher. Then, he wanted to check into the raceway that housed the tail he had plugged it into.

Of course, it’s pure pig-ignorance on his part…anyone else would just plug it into another tail, then start eliminating potential causes from there. But the solution he knows relates to a problem he had that was the most memorable and complicated, and his brain hasn’t really worked out the shortest route to all the other potential solutions I know he’s been shown (mostly because I showed them to him). But just looking at where he went, you could see how Murphy could take over in just about endless ways.  To paraphrase the old saw, he knows just enough to get in trouble.

So what have I arrived at here? Yes Sam, the Murphy problem is depressingly common, I think. If you have some good stories, post them in the comments.

I was poking around doing something the other day and found this great Stagehand Primer by Mick Alderson from Local 470.