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.”