Stuff that I Have Noticed #44: Experience

One often sees headlines on entertainment pages such as: Director George Genius shocks MGM with 300 Million dollar budget. Or: Indy director makes award winning movie for less than three million bucks.

There are some independent, low budget movies being made but the term “low budget” has a different meaning now than in the 1970s when a low budget was under a million. Today it’s under five or six million.

When it was made in 1975 Waterworld, with a reported budget of $200 million, was the most expensive movie ever produced. Titanic broke that record two decades later by a tad. A new record came in 2011 when Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, cost $422 million to make (adjusted for inflation) – a budget that hasn’t been surpassed since its release in 2011.

(Notice any commonality here? In case you didn’t it is water. Everything is harder and takes longer when a lot of water is involved.)

But I digress.

Some of these numbers look as though they’re cost estimates for a new smart bomb. Where do these numbers come from and what do they mean?

Here’s a clue: The top ten grossing movies made between 1994 and 2013 (latest stats I found) employed an average of 2,647 people! And no one but the neophyte Production Assistants work for subsistence wages. On these big movies the crew alone is almost four million dollars a week. And the crews are not even close to the biggest tickets in the budget. Stars and well known featured players make big bucks as do directors, cinematographers, designers, composers and editors. Then there are special effects, stunt players, visual effects and the list goes on and on.

I’ve served either as line producer, production manager or first assistant director (the guy who schedules the shoot, runs the set and works with the producer and PM on the budget) on over a thousand TV spots, several features, TV and sponsored movies. But even on a much smaller scale than those huge movie projects the “nuts and bolts” are pretty much the same.

When Bob Santos, Gary Young and I formed a production company in 1974 Bob began teaching me the art of writing budgets. The first one I worked on was a sponsored film for D-Con Rat poison; The Short Happy Life of a Middle-Class Rat.

Author Ben Bryant w RAT on set

It was similar in many ways to a low-budget feature. (Elizabeth played the leading role, the suburban lady with a rat problem.)

Robert Kaylor & Elizabeth Hepburn on set

To write a budget, the first thing one needs to figure out is how long it’s gonna take to shoot and finish (edit) the project. There are many steps required; first among them is to “break down” the script into discrete scenes. I’m not writing a textbook here so I won’t go into detail about what that means or how it’s done but once you have all these segments laid out you can begin to calculate how many days, weeks or months will be needed to shoot them. There are several intermediate scheduling steps and when they are all done you can begin doing the numbers.

In 1988 Cameraman John Beymer called me about a guy he knew who was going to create some spots for the Democratic National Committee. He needed a producer/AD and JB had told him about me.

Carl Casselman was a senior creative director at BBDO Worldwide at the time and took a leave to make these commercials. I met with Carl and we were comfortable with each other. He described two of the spots he was planning which he thought would be shot in some industrial area that had been hard hit by the recession and asked me what I thought it would cost to shoot them.

I sensed a test of my acumen. (Get ready for some bragging.)

Having neither a calculator nor even a budget form, I picked up an envelope from his desk and began asking questions and making notes. After a few minutes I added up my numbers and told him that my guesstimate was around $95,000 to get both of the spots “in the can” (not including editing). I also mentioned that this was a rough idea and given the number of unknowns it could go ten to fifteen percent over or under.

He hired me. We shot those two spots and six more over the next several weeks. Then we were done (and it turned out that Michael Dukakis was too).

Here’s one of the two spots we shot in Texas.

The last day we were in the office Carl came to my desk and asked if I had the actualized budget for Texas. I handed it to him and he turned to the last page and read for a moment. He then reached into his pocket and removed a somewhat tattered piece of paper. He looked at it then handed me both. The tattered piece of paper was the envelope on which I’d scratched out a budget in our first meeting. I can no longer recall the exact numbers but what I’d written on the envelope was less than a thousand dollars different than the final actual cost of the job.

I looked at the numbers then at Carl. He grinned, we shook hands and he said something terse like, “You’re good” and walked out.

There is no teacher better than experience.

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