The Humble Nailbanger

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.

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….

A friend and I had been joking around about “supporting your local ne’er do well” by hiring him/her on for a call or two.  Or for life, you know.  Because stagehands tend to have reputations, no matter what we do, as ne’er do wells.

And honestly, I kind of enjoyed the whole back-and-forth until I looked it up.  I had been operating under the assumption that a “ne’er do well” was a sort of shiftless soul, happily and with a good-natured grin trucking his way through life, one day at a time.  Maybe, as the Urban Dictionary slants it, with a hooligan streak (I disavow the “shitty fucker” quality in that definition, however).  Going where the wind blows, and all that.  Turns out it’s decidedly different….dictionary definitions are peppered with words like “useless,” “lazy,” “irresponsible,” and my personal favorite: “slugabed.”

So, perhaps it’s not too appropo.  I mean, sure…we do some good, hard sitting around at times.  Lazy?  Some stagehands, sure, just like in every other industry.  But mostly?  Try this experiment: take you and a gang of your non-theatrical buddies.  Meet up with 10-15 trailersful of stage equipment, band gear, video equipment, etc.  Turn it into a working stage full of gear and throw a concert 16 hours later.

Oh, and then take it right back down and pack it aaaaall back up again and send it on to the next band of brigands.

Sound hard?  Yes?  Well then who’s the ne’er do well now?

That’s my everlasting gripe about my choice of profession and my brothers and sisters in the biz.  We can bloody and exhaust ourselves, working 60 hours in three days and consistently pull off seemingly impossible tasks flawlessly.  Yet we’re pretty much universally viewed as worthless, mostly because we are really good at relaxing our tired bones when we’re not needed at that moment.  People see that, shake their heads and say that we have “a license to steal,” or whatever shit they can come up with.

OneNYCStagehand put up a brilliant post about the massive disconnect today between “book learnin” and real-world, hands-on knowledge. Hopefully he won’t mind if I quote liberally:

In my mind, the set I’ve just loaded-in is representative of the disconnect between the so-called information society and the rest of us. Framed out of tubular steel, it produces the illusion of being very slender while still being very strong. It’s also been designed with a CAD program that is a marvel of functionality. It allows for 3D views, cut lists, cost estimates and multiple color combinations that the client can approve of without every leaving their office. It is also usually “drafted” by someone who is much more familiar with a hard drive than a drill press, with the language of software than the language of truck drivers. And when the lack of familiarity with the shop process collides with the computer process, it’s the language of truck drivers that is heard the loudest when bolts holes don’t line up. When the inexperienced don’t account for the build up of welds when making joints, things can get loud and profane. It’s the workman’s skill that makes the real the symmetry of the beautiful drawing on the dirty, sagging floor of the studio.

Yes. YES! It dovetails neatly with this piece I just wrote a week or so ago…there are people in the business, particularly designers in this case, who are working with a limited range of knowledge, and that limit is a large part of what makes the business dangerous and frustrating. They look at a set of plans for a studio and see that, for example, something is 30 feet wide, so it must really be thirty feet wide. There’s no understanding of how a studio operates, what’s required of the studio space beyond the scenery, because they’ve never actually done any of this. They’ve read about it, if we’re lucky. They went to school, got their degree, yet only spent a minimal amount of time with their feet on a stage, and they just don’t get it. They go back to their computers and design things that are too heavy, too wide, to tall…pick a dimension or quality about scenery or the demands of a studio, and they’ve missed on some crucial element.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not running down people who learn things in school. I have a college degree. It’s in no way related to what I’m doing, sure, but what it does allow me to do is see the problem with the cloistered set…those who go to school and enter the world with no practical knowledge, no calluses, no dirt on them. What it does is pretty much set them up to hurt people. It also, to put things into a perspective that suits and ties might understand, costs lots of money to fuck things up in ways that only ignorant designers can.

I worked a loading this past summer where design flaws easily added three or four days to the process. Scenery needed to be hacked to fit into the space, and to fit to itself. Surfaces didn’t look right together because the designer had never done it, he’d picked them off a menu and they looked pretty on the screen. The end result? We spent days and days futzing and grunting and cramming and sawing and made it work. But it cost the company thousands of dollars in manpower and overtime. And not just in stagehand labor costs….while we were doing that, there were crews behind us waiting to start what they needed to do…adding audio, computers, cameras, whatever. All on the clock, all standing around.

Mind you, I’m not complaining…I worked more hours in three weeks than most people work in two months, but I also made some decent money. The bottom line is that this designer was hired by the same gang of suits who will then turn around and badmouth stagehands when contract negotiation time comes around, and blame us for making loadins and loadouts last so long. Those very same guys in ties, however, will get big fat bonuses at the end of the year, because whatever happened and however spectacularly over budget the loadin may have been, the set was built and the show’s on the air. The guys who actually built it and got it on the air? Most of them aren’t even working there anymore. They’ve been forced to move on, and that was five jobs ago. Besides, they’ll say, “we got you pizza that one day.” Two pies for 15 guys.

It really makes you love working with a good designer that much more…some of the designers have been around forever, and have seen it all. They know to visit the shops, they understand everyone’s roles and their respective requirements, they buy lunch at the loadin because they understand you’re there for 16 hours a day and don’t feel like walking anywhere, they know where the jacks go and where the cameras hide at the end of the day. They very rarely fuck anything up. They’ve worked the hours and have earned their stripes, and it’s a relief when they walk onto the floor while you’re shoving and begging and massaging and cursing at something that’s not right. And most of all, they know the magic words when something just isn’t working, for whatever reason: “Just make it work, honey. Cut it, lose it, I don’t care how you do it. You know what you’re doing and I trust you. We’ll bill ‘em for everything.”

I’ll leave you with a brilliant one from my last loadin, concerning scenery that was not designed to take into account the building it was being loaded into. We had multiple pieces that couldn’t be wedged into the freight elevator, no matter how hard we tried. We even tested opening up the emergency hatch and removing the lighting fixtures. No go. So, what’s the answer then? Yup. Carry it up the stairs. Five floors, ten flights of ten steps each.

Now, you think to yourself “ok fine, so you carry it up the stairs.” And I could forgive you for that. But think about how a stairwell is built in a building where most people are expected to use elevators. Solid handrails, waist high. Lots of concrete, kinda narrow….only as wide as codes require. These pieces had to be flipped, spun, held overhead, passed from man to man, wrestled over those damned handrails again and again by a group of men who had already worked 3 or 4 sixteen hour days. And they weren’t light…have I mentioned that yet?

We finally get it to the floor we need, barely fit it through the door, and walk it out onto the floor of the studio. We knew where it went, but we were interested in the reaction of the designer, a young kid just out of college who had obviously fucked up. We plopped it down right in front of him, and he took in the sight of 5 sweaty, exhausted men into whose lives he had just contributed no small measure of misery.

“Where do you want this?”

“What happened to you?” he asked, and I’m not lying or stereotyping for effect here, he pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose.

“Well, these didn’t fit into the elevator, so we had to walk them up the stairs from the loading dock.”

“Wow, really? They didn’t fit?” He then ran his hand over the surface of one of the pieces, seemingly inspecting it for dents and dings. “They go over on stage left. Thanks.”

I recently worked a loadin that was a pretty big deal, if the population of men with ties standing around having worthless, conflicting opinions can be used as a measure. Actually, that’s not really fair. I know for a fact it was a huge deal. The fact that there was an endless parade of management in addition to the usual producers, directors, designers, advertising people and everyone else just made it more ridiculous. I could never truly comprehend how many assholes in suits one could actually sandwich into each square foot of a studio before, I think because I needed to actually see it…mere visualization wouldn’t suffice. Turns out it’s a whole hell of a lot, and some of them are actually so soulless and vapid that they can occupy the same space at the same time. Einstein was wrong. Management defies physics.

The best (read: worst) part of this scenario is that they all have the power to tell you to change something. This is made further infuriating by the fact that none of them agree, none of them consult on what they want, and all of them can be overruled by someone who thinks that their opinion trumps all, and isn’t afraid to tell you to make huge changes to anything.

A loadin is a crazy thing. There are a huge number of plans…the basic plan for the studio and where all the scenery will land, to within an inch or less. These may or may not be relevant depending on whether the designer knows how to use the measuring tape usually stuck to his belt. (This is a purely random factor, if within the definition of random you include “two chances: slim and none”). Then there’s lighting plans, plans for monitors, audio gear, wireless setups, computers to run projectors, the network plans for the computers…it’s endless. Literally endless.

But all of that is beneath a man in a suit. He will walk in the room, cast his sharp management eye about the studio and everything else be damned: he wants it moved, and he wants it to be moved now. No matter that cables have been run, or we’re hampered by inconvenient elements of the building we’re all standing in…..why isn’t it moved yet??!

“Why isn’t it moved,” he’ll ask, and then repeat himself to you like you’re a moron. This is to show you that he has all the power in this particular conversation, and to infuriate you as much as possible. It’s a good thing, and he knows it…for he, as a manager has been trained to impart fury to the working man, as it allows him to channel this fury and thus accomplish bigger tasks with fewer people. It’s all about the bottom line, after all.

“I just wanted it moved. I asked for it to be moved. They said it would be moved. ‘It’ll get moved,’ they said. ‘It’s no problem to move it sir,’ they told me. ‘We’ll move it right away,’ they said. But it’s still not moved. Is this such a difficult thing to move?”

Never mind that the piece is 800-900 pounds, top-heavy, cables have been run through it that must be disconnected and laid aside (causing some other tie to chime in “why was that unplugged????”), other still more massive pieces are in the way, and that the guys must be pulled off a bunch of other “absolutely imperative” jobs assigned by other men in suits. Oh, and it must be slid across a floor that we have been sternly warned not to mar in any way, because it was just painted.

And never mind that this is the like 4th assistant to some guy who is himself the man behind the man behind the man behind the man who actually met the man that they are all behind once. And that was just in passing, and the guy insulted him in front of his wife.

Inevitably, we move the piece, reconnect everything, and his boss walks in, looks at what we just changed, and says to the head carpenter “Who told you to move that? It’s all wrong. Move it back,” leaving the original guy (the prime mover?) looking sheepishly off into space, whistling quietly to himself.

There was another set of pieces they couldn’t stop shuffling about as well. They were not made to be moved as much as they were, and the base pretty much immediately started to fall off, scratching the floor and leaving two guys holding it in the air, grunting under a couple hundred pounds (full disclosure: I was one of those guys) as a quick solution was improvised.

As I was standing there shredding my fingers, I got to thinking back to the strike, when stagehands on Broadway were accused of “featherbedding,” basically padding out the crew so there would be less work to go around, and to give more guys room to “suck off the company teat.” Yet there I was, looking around at a room full of men in suits standing around for hours just watching us work and forming opinions. God save me from men in suits with opinions. They are forever wrong, and will make you do things just out of spite. They will also stand around doing their level best to radiate importance, yet all over the building and throughout the organization, these men’s desks were empty, their work presumably not being done.

How does the company continue to operate and grow without the stern hand of management that this particular crowd of dandies must surely provide? And how might we expect the organization to bloom in their absence, when they are assembled here, as a crowd, nervously shifting around trying to justify their existence(s)? More importantly, isn’t that a strategic error? What if something should happen, and the whole gang of them crowded together was somehow wiped out? What would become of our organization then?

Oh, those were dark and evil days there, my friends. Too much management in such a confined area having thoughts about things is never good.

Anyway, then they cut the crew. “There are too many guys standing around here, what the hell are all these guys doing?” Never mind most of them were footing ladders…safety’s besides the point when the bottom line is in play. So, they cut the crew in half. I made the cut, so I got to see what went on the next day:

“I need that piece moved.” Yes, the same piece, again.

“We can’t move it. It’s too heavy.”

“What do you mean it’s too heavy? I want it moved.”

“You cut my crew down yesterday. We don’t have enough men to move it.”

“What do you mean not enough men. There’s guys all over the place around here. I want it moved.”

“Look. There are three of us here. That piece weighs 1000 pounds. Three men cannot move it the way you want it moved. The forces of nature dictate it. I’m sorry. I’d like to move it for you, but it simply can’t be done with three of us.”

A blank stare. The piece must be moved, for this, surely, is the whole show. “OK, fine. Bring in the rest of the guys.”

Guys who have all, pretty much, found other work. The men who come in instead are all tired because they worked the night before, or have no idea what’s going on, etc. This is another phenomenon with stagehands….we go where the money is.  Call us off a call?  Thank you very much, we’ll go find other work, hopefully within an hour.

Anyway, the piece got moved.

And you know what? After all that, we still got in trouble for scratching the floor.

Much has been written of loadins and loadouts because of the strike. Producers think they take too long, and groan at members of the crew waiting for their portion of the work to come around. Stagehands generally look to them as a good time, meaning that a long period of bouncing around may be over, and that some steady work and a little less stress might be in the offing. And maybe with a bit of dread, knowing that we’ll see much less of our families on 15-20 hour days.

From my perspective, though, loadins and loadouts can be a real blast. In the past I’ve talked about how the hours and lifestyle of stagehands makes us, in some respects, one big family. A big, rambunctious, dysfunctional family to be sure, but a family nonetheless. You just have to sit down and tease out the connections.

Invariably those connections reveal themselves during the first coffee break on the first day of the work. The crew is generally gathered together, sitting amidst the chaos and clutter. Sometimes it’s the middle of the night, or we’ve been working out in the cold or sweating in the heat. Always, though, it’s a gang of guys who know that there’s a period of very long days ahead, and that we’re about to work very closely together for a good percentage of the next weeks (or however long they think the thing will take) of our lives. Some of the guys will know each other. Just about everyone will know some of the same people. Some will have fathers who worked with the others, and so on.

It is at this time that the time of talking story comes along friends and co-workers catch up, reminiscing and reminding. All the funniest and saddest tales of Local One mythology will be dragged out. Remember that guy, who used to be thin and run around theaters? Well, he’s 500 pounds now. Or the 500 pound guy who’s now 200. Who broke whose back, who died two months after retirement, who is still, incredibly, working at age 78. Pranks that were pulled, the guy who retired and took out, to everyone’s total shock, almost $100,000 in cash out of their locker, accumulated over 30 years of work and hidden from his wife. Or who, you know, attacked a group of guys with a fireax…

This life brings stress and exhaustion and injury, but it is always interesting.