A few years ago, I was the producer on a Civil War-era film shoot. First step: Call up the local reenactors. They said, "I guess you want us to just loan you a bunch of gear, huh?"
My response: "What good would that do me? I barely know one end of a musket from the other. We need you guys there with it."
I assumed this would be a hard sell. I was wrong. They trooped out en masse to build and tear down two tent cities for us, stuck with us when the weather was miserable and we were begging them to play dead on the cold wet ground one more time, and even gave us permission to grab additional shots at one of their regular reenactments. I made warm friendships among them that continue to this day.
And after the shoot was over, they told me: "You know, it's a good thing you didn't try this five years ago, or we woulda told you to take a hike." Because -- that's right -- they loaned a bunch of valuable gear to some other movie outfit ten years before. And it got treated like dirt.
Hopefully you've noticed I'm in no humor to defend the perpetrators behind some of the filmmaking horror stories relayed in the other thread. In fact, I'd consider that thread to be a pretty good due-diligence checklist for any museum or organization dealing with the film industry. But I feel like I should speak up for a rarer form of filmmaking, one that might be summed up by this exchange between David Lean, maker of epics like "Lawrence of Arabia," and Ingmar Bergman, maker of tiny-but-acclaimed Swedish films:
Lean: "How big a crew do you use?"
Bergman: "I always work with 18 friends."
Lean: "That's funny. I work with 150 enemies."
A modern, big-budget movie crew has a lot more in common with Lean's unit than Bergman's. They tend to be a colossal clash of agendas that makes Washington, D.C. look like a model of comity. In that environment, somebody like the owner of a historic prop is an outsider who needs to be marginalized and separated from whatever asset he's providing as quickly as possible, before he becomes one more enemy everyone has to work around.
Does this sound a like healthy work environment? Or does this sound like utter madness? Yeah, I agree. Which is why I pretty much haven't worked on the big stuff in over ten years, and instead stuck to my tiny-budget niche.
I don't have the budget for a huge crew, so if I'm going to do something like a Civil War epic, I need to go straight to the people with both the gear and the expertise
and be very nice to them. As in, put them directly in charge of what they're good at and show respect for that. I couldn't pay them anything like what the big boys could, but we arrived at something everyone thought was fair. And while we're at it, it's amazing how much goodwill you can get with good chow and a heartfelt thank-you.
This approach does have its limits. Much as it's been a longtime dream of mine to be the director who returns "Eureka" to narrative film, my budgets make that unlikely (I'm guessing it costs five figures just to get "Eureka" out of Dan's driveway). But I do like going to set knowing the experts are in charge. I like treating newcomers as tangible assets rather than something to be aggressively neutralized. I like making movies with 18 friends rather than 150 enemies.
