| According to authors Scott Albert and John McFetridge, working on a movie set is a lot like "summer camp for adults."
For the six weeks a typical production runs, the crew will work long hours, sleep little and have no real life outside the film. Tired of hearing how a movie set is a workplace like any other, McFetridge and Albert have set out to show just how different it really is, and they’ve chosen to do it in the form of a novel.
Below the Line (Signature Editions) is set in Toronto, where big-budget American productions are filmed on the cheap with Canadian crews. The action centres around the shooting of a B-grade film entitled Life and Death in Little Italy. This fictional production is bad enough to be funny, but realistic enough to be believable. In Calgary to promote the novel – their first – McFetridge and Albert joke that they have yet to receive any interest in Life and Death in Little Italy as a project, but it wouldn’t surprise them if they did.
Every movie, according to the authors, follows a certain progression. Initially, there is a wildly optimistic phase, full of high-sounding talk about "pushing the boundaries." But this type of chatter soon subsides and by day two, they’re back on track. Artistic integrity is the first thing sacrificed, as directors, writers and producers scramble to keep the production running.
There is, however, a certain purity to creation of a B movie, argues McFetridge. "The producer will say (to a screenwriter), ‘On the next draft we need more sex.’ He doesn’t hint about it and it isn’t justified in any contextual way."
"They really don’t care how you do it," adds Albert.
Every production shot in Canada almost inevitably begins with a rousing speech on the quality of Canadian crews by the director. This sort of thing works only once, says McFetridge – but it’s enough to get wide-eyed beginners passionate about mediocre films.
As shooting progresses, however, any given project will seem doomed to those working on it – but this is illusory. Once shooting begins, McFetridge says, "it always works out."
McFetridge believes that a film set is a world with a mix of people found nowhere else. "There are carpenters and electricians… makeup people and wardrobe people." On any movie set, the homophobic and the exceedingly homosexual coexist peacefully. It is an incestuous environment in which ephemeral and unlikely pairings are formed and severed breathlessly. Above all, the vicissitudes of daily life on set are as involved as, and frequently more dramatic than, any script.
Both Albert and McFetridge have extensive experience in film, having done, in McFetridge’s words, "anything in the credits with the word ‘assistant.’" Below the Line is the product of this experience – a unique fusion of the well-traversed world of stars and directors, with the more obscure world of grips and paid duty officers.
In writing the book, McFetridge and Albert were interested in accurately portraying and drawing attention to this lesser-known world. As McFetridge points out, "The experience of the camera trainee, after all, is going to be a very different film-set experience from that of the set dressers."
The dynamic of Canadian and American relations on a film set is one of the main themes of Below the Line. Beneath a veneer of cordiality, McFetridge and Albert see a lurking assumption on the part of many Americans that their Canadian crews are little better than cheap labour. The Canadian film industry, says McFetridge, is "a branch-plant industry." And like any other branch-plant industry in this country, the finished product is American. In the economics of film production in North America, Canada supplies the raw materials – location, crew – and America supplies the talent.
And despite the assurances of American directors, it is not the innate brilliance of Canadian movie people that draws Americans here. As anyone working in the Canadian film industry knows, when the greenback drops, the shooting stops. |
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