Stuff That I Have Noticed #17 O. J. T.

When I was an “Airman” in 1959 the Air Force called it “OJT.”, On the Job Training.

Sgt. Wyatt, Airman Chief Bryant

Most of my life has been OJT.

I realized that recently while reading the fifth of my Hollywood High School colleague, Jess Waid’s novels. While I’d really enjoyed his first four books I was noticing that this one was better written. I don’t know if Jess is, like me, self taught as a writer or if he took courses in school. I suspect that he was mostly taught by that best of all Institutions-of-Higher-Learning, Life Itself. If you’ve got at least half a brain you get better at something the more you do it and writing is no exception. The third volume of my memoirs is better written than the first two. You learn as you go.

As I reflect on my life – as memoirists are wont to do – it hits me that nearly everything I’ve ever been good at I learned more or less by doing. Except for voice lessons as a teenager and hard-nosed coaching during my brief operatic period I had no other real training in theater arts. Sure, I took dance classes, as all musical theatre performers do, but was never a real dancer. I had a few theatre and music courses in college but all I truly learned there was to just do it. In an interview I read many years ago I recall Lord Olivier saying, “The way to learn how to act is to memorize your lines and get on with it.”

I know for a fact that certain techniques can be taught (and learned) in any discipline, artistic, business, manual or whatever but skill must be learned by doing and the ability to rise to (or near to) the top in any endeavor is developed on the job.

The first memory I have of OJT is becoming a diver at Whittier College. Excerpt from Three Stages:

After [water safety instructor] class one day I did a one-and-a-half off the diving board and he [the swim team coach Dr. Johnson] invited me to become the diver on the team. I told him that the one-and-a-half and a jackknife were my complete list. He laughed and said he’d never had a diver and maybe I could learn enough dives to be on the team. I signed right up. We had neither a gymnastics coach nor a trampoline so I learned the dives the hard way by reading about them in a book then, being no gutless wonder, flinging my body off the board and making a lot of very uncomfortable entries into the water.

Author Ben Bryant “Dives”

Wearing a sweat suit to prevent excessive pain upon hitting the water flat on either my back or belly, I started attempting to learn inward, twisting, reverse and back dives. It wasn’t pretty but it was often loud. The noise made by a 190 pound boy in a sweat suit hitting the water flat from a three meter springboard sounds something like an exploding hand grenade. But with some rather limited coaching from Dr. Johnson I finally managed to execute at least two from each category. I got all my real coaching from the other divers at the meets. Once they realized that I was no threat actually to win (This occurred during warm-ups.) they were very generous with tips such as “point your toes”.

This tendency to make it up as I went along came up again when I was transitioning from in front of to behind the camera.

In 1971 Elizabeth and I were in LA visiting my mom for Thanksgiving and I was hanging out with a friend who was exec producer at Group One Productions. All his colleagues were in Europe shooting Peggy Fleming: To Europe With Love for NBC. Jack got a call from Neil Diamond’s manager who asked if he could bring a crew to Oregon to shoot a concert.

Excerpt from Circumstances Beyond My Control:

When Jack got off the phone he asked me if I wanted to be the production manager and of course my answer was yes. [I had no idea what a production manager did.] My cinema studies had proceeded to the next level.

The first order of business was the crew. Jack gave me a list of names and phone numbers: cameramen, camera assistants, sound men, grips and gaffers. I at least knew what cameramen and sound men did but the rest was a mystery. But I got on the phone and in an hour or so we had a crew. … Jack rounded up the equipment (all Group One’s stuff was in Austria or France), made the plane reservations and such. … On Friday Morning we flew to Portland.

I didn’t meet any of the crew until we were at the airport. Including Jack, the staff P A and me there were about nine guys. The first thing I told all of them was that I was a total neophyte and knew nothing about production and would like them to teach me as we went along. They all accepted this and agreed, thanking me for my honesty.

We got to the venue, a very large auditorium, in the early afternoon. Jack, acting as director as well as a cameraman, set the three camera positions and the gaffer (electrician) rigged a slating system that I was to operate. I learned that whenever a new film roll was loaded into each camera it needed to be slated with proper identification (in which I was given a crash course) and a clap stick for sound synchronization. This was all done in the calm and quiet of an empty auditorium and seemed simple enough.

Neil came in for a sound and lighting check which took an hour or so and we practiced the slating technique, mainly for my benefit, and broke for dinner.

What a different scene it was when a raucous audience had filled the place and we were working in the dark. For me it was total confusion and chaos but somehow I got through the concert without screwing up. By the time it was over I was utterly exhausted. The nervous tension under which I’d been operating had drained my energy completely. … But I had survived my baptism of fire.

If you have read my books you know that I went from there to a successful twenty-plus year career as a production manager, producer and first assistant director. This involved continuing OJT on my part but I was able to figure it out as I went along and gradually get pretty good at the panoply of tasks involved in making movies.

In the early 1990s I started a video business, a publicity service for performers, and at first my work involved only shooting and directing which I’d learned by observation over the previous decades but a point was reached where I needed some editing. I had worked with a couple of editors on several video projects I’d directed but had zero hands-on experience.

Excerpt from Waiting for Elizabeth:

We needed a way to create edit masters and make dubs [tape copies]. … On advice from Denis [Robert, my editing guru] we bought a Sony EVO 9700 Hi-8 (cuts only) editing system … And I had to learn how to use the thing.

Sony EVO 9700

Just off the main area of [our] studio there was a small storage room with a desk in it. When the edit system was delivered I unpacked it and set it up on that desk. As I was doing this … one of our clients, asked what it was. When I told her she said, “Are you an editor?” To which I replied, “Ask me again in a week.”

I sat in that room for ten hours a day for the next several days until I could comfortably execute the basic tasks required for assembling our reels.

Thus began what eventually evolved into my main form of creative expression, video editing.

You might well ask: So what is the point of this essay?

As I write I’m rapidly approaching my eighty-fourth birthday and am in the process of teaching myself an essential new suite of video editing software. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s hard. But I am slowly getting it done.

The point of this essay is that it’s never too late for more OJT. So get off your ass and teach yourself something new!

My memoirs can be found here.

PS: Here’s a Vlog I did about diving with video of some world class divers.