Film Production and Taxi Driving from Author Ben Bryant

Civilians, people not in show biz –

film production,

theater, TV commercial production or the associated crafts – tend to think that actors are the only ones who need to take “shit jobs” to pay the rent. Not so. We are mostly freelance and whether you’re a producer, a camera operator or a grip there can be lean times when other, temporary, employment becomes imperative.

Here’s a short excerpt from Circumstances Beyond My Control (1974–1975)

“I think I did some sort of industrial shoot with Bob Kaylor when we got home [from an AT&T shoot in San Francisco] but pretty soon I was back driving a cab. This went on sporadically through the winter and early in ‘75 I met a guy of some substance, Rich Reid. His father was Don Reid, who had been the producer of GE College Bowl that ran on CBS TV from 1959 to 1963 and moved to NBC from 1963 to 1970. Rich and Don were running a high school version of the show not on TV but in school tournaments throughout the country. This was, as you well know, over twenty years before the internet so all the researching of the questions and answers was done using encyclopedias. They hired me as a researcher. It wasn’t exactly film production work but it was sure as hell better than driving a cab.

“In addition to sending out packages of questions for the High School Bowl Don Reid Productions was also trying to get another quiz show on TV. During that period, Jeopardy was the only hard quiz on television. Except for that show informational or knowledge quiz shows were out of favor. So we were trying to develop a more comedic and sexy type of show. The Newlywed Game had ended its run in December and Don wanted to do a show on the same premise and called it, I forget but something like The Honeymoon Game. Instead of actual questions about the spouse or partner our questions were multiple choice and extremely silly. For example: To the wife, ‘In the morning is your husband more like Towering Inferno, Raging Bull or Mister Limpet?’ Stuff like that.

“Every afternoon when the ‘grown-ups’ were gone Rich and I would fire up a doobie and write questions for a couple of hours. We laughed our asses off and occasionally wrote some pretty funny stuff.

“Once we had enough material for a show we would assemble some people, friends, unemployed actors and such and do a trial run in the office for Don. He was a tough audience. Often when we were finished with a run and the contestants had left, Rich and Don would be in Don’s office with the door closed and there would be shouting. Not an atmosphere that fostered creativity. But we soldiered on.

“Occasionally we’d have a test run Don liked and he’d arrange for us to do it for a network executive but we never sold a show. I worked there for five or six months and then film production work picked up.”

Rich Reid and I have remained friends to this day and occasionally reminisce about those silly days of futile, smoke-filled creativity.

Click here to get more fun tales of film production in Circumstances Beyond My Control

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