Problem at the Airport from Author Ben Bryant’s Film Production Book
- Posted on 28th July 2015
- in Entertainment, entertainment books, Film Production, Hollywood books, Hollywood memoirs
- by Ben
My
film production
book is titled Circumstances Beyond My Control. Here’s a film production story that illustrates the point of the title.
“In the fall [1976] Bob Kaylor got a job for Cotton Inc. We shot it at their headquarters near Raleigh, NC. Our four man crew consisted of Bob (Director/Cameraman), Wolfgang Zipfel (AC), John Dildine (Sound) and me (Production Manager/AD).
Kaylor as sound recordist on the Rat Movie with “Betsy”
the only pic of him I can find
“We spent a couple of days at several mills shooting cotton weaving, coloring, cutting and packaging machinery. It was actually very interesting to see how they did all this stuff and the people operating the machines were all pretty interesting characters.
“The primary on-camera talent was the (then) CEO of the organization, Dukes Wooters. If you were casting a Captain-of-Industry, Dukes would have been perfect. Tall, lean and rawboned he looked like an infantry Colonel and had the personality to match, a real no-nonsense type. When we were getting ready to shoot an interview with Dukes at the airport just before he boarded a plane the camera went down. We were setup and ready and when Bob tried to roll the camera it went dead.
“Enter Wolfie, the complete German camera mechanic. (For you film people it was an Arri 16 BL.) He whipped out his Swiss Army knife and in a couple of minutes had the guts of the camera exposed. He was swearing in German and we held our collective breaths and watched. It was less than five minutes – though it seemed like an hour – when the camera was once again functional. We got the shots and Dukes made his plane.
“That was our last night in Raleigh and, having wrapped early due to Dukes’ departure time, we decided to go to the best restaurant in town for a major dinner. I don’t remember the name of the place but it was a complicated trip from the hotel. Considering that and the fact that by the time we’d driven for five minutes we were all stoned out of our gourds, it was a miracle that we even found it. But find it we did and it was quite something.
“A stately old house had been converted into a French chateau-like dining establishment. The wait staff seemed to be college students who were imitating their idea of French waiters and the result was extremely pretentious and hilarious. The wine list was the size of a phone book and the menu was in French.
“Wolfie asked what beers they had and the waiter came back in a couple of minutes carrying a tray with three bottles of beer on it. Wolf carefully inspected each bottle then, with a completely straight face, said, “Vas April a good month for Vurtsburger?” We all burst out laughing and amidst the guffaws I felt sorry for the poor waiter kid. However we had a splendid meal and left a generous tip.
“In our stoned and inebriated state we got lost several times on the way back to the hotel. More accurately, we were lost the whole time but we finally made it after a couple of hours.
“A note about pot smoking: I don’t intend to suggest that driving while stoned is a good idea. It’s not. I’m neither saying that ingesting cannabis is ever a good idea nor am I against it in general. I think it should be legal but that’s another subject altogether. I’m just telling my story as honestly and accurately as I can and these are the things that I, as well as a lot of my pals and colleagues did. Smoking dope was a fairly regular part of my life from around 1968 until the mid ‘80s. I was never a true “pot-head”. I never smoked all day every day as some of my friends did. I don’t condemn them for it. It was their choice. And no one in my personal circle ever had a serious problem with it. It was simply part of our lives for a long time.”
This is but one of many film production stories you’ll read when you click here to get Circumstances Beyond My Control
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