Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies

Heavy Labor

The late Pauline Kael, thwacking Dr. Zhivago about the head and shoulders, wrote that "It's not art, it's heavy labor." You know what she meant, but like most critics and film historians, she was clueless about the heavy labor that goes into the making of any movie, let alone a big-budget epic. With the arrival of the voluminous additional materials on DVD's, we may be getting a better idea of the work involved, but there is still a feeling that in film art the director waves his magic wand, and it suddenly all works. Needless to say, directors love this version of how movies get made. Critics and historians, on the other hand, should be more skeptical.

To help those skeptics, Barbara Baker, who spent several years casting extras for Central Casting Ltd., London, has put together Let the Credits Roll, a collection of interviews with a delightfully odd selection of people who do the heavy labor. There have been books that tell us about some of the better-known specific crafts and the process of filmmaking, but Baker gets from her subjects a sense of not only their usual and often unusual jobs, but the lives that go with them. There are, among the 33 people Baker interviewed, a Special Effects Dental Technician, a Boom Operator, a Foley Artist, a Greensperson, and of course a Mouth/Beak Replacement Coordinator.

Chris Lyons is the Special Effects Dental Technician, who begins his comments with, "We find vampires boring. But we can make sexy vampires, or horrible ones." A boom operator has an apparently simple job: hold the boom with the microphone over the actors' heads and keep it out of the frame and out of the lights. Easy enough if the camera and the actors are not moving, but John Gutierrez describes what can only be called the dances he has to do in complicated shoots. Denise Greaves, the Foley Artist (she does sound effects, particularly footsteps), actually was a dancer, as were most of the other Foley artists she knows. A Greensperson handles the plants, leaves, flowers, etc., and Will Scheck tells you that all that fall foliage in Far From Heaven did not happen by accident or by nature. James Moore, the Mouth/Beak Replacement Coordinator on Aardman's Chicken Run, kept track of all the different beaks (one for each sound) for the clay chickens.

The interviewers make clear that movies are a collaborative medium. Production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski finds out from the director and cinematographer what film stocks will be used because, "I believe my work is merely light; it only exists on the celluloid, and how it is photographed is absolutely crucial to how you design it." Paul Wilson, who has done visual effects and miniature photography on many of the James Bond films, collaborates with the cameraman, the art director, the camera operators, the painters, the carpenters, and the riggers. Oscar-winning composer Stephen Warbeck (Shakespeare in Love) has constant discussions with the director, from the "spotting" session, when the earliest decisions about where to have music are made, through to the end: "So most likely you will be extending or altering cues a little bit even at the stage of recording." Meredith Tucker, a casting associate on The Truman Show, was fascinated by how Peter Weir worked: "You really felt that he was using the whole casting process to figure out how he wanted to do the movie."

Naturally directors get discussed and often in contradictory terms. One person loved working with Kubrick, another hated it. One loved Woody Allen, one hated him. Some of the comments tell us more about certain directors than most conventional critical analysis. Peter Hutchinson, on handling some special effects on Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menance, nails why Lucas has let the franchise...