Sam was a Butcher, not a Producer

Posted on January 5, 2009

Your shoot is not a meat market. 

It’s a disservice to your project, product, reputation, and client to view it so.

I worked with a DP and a director whose sole purpose in production was to troll for companionship.

They would drool over the catalogs sent over from the agencies (this was before the catalogs were on the internet. So they were restricted from stalking the actresses Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, of websites in order to evaluate their status of age, proportions, age relationships. But, rest assured, that is exactly what they are doing now.) So, they would only cast actresses they were interested in dating.  they would get enraged when the actress didn’t match their headshot (that is, were a few years more mature.) They would chat them up for the first hour of the shoot until it was discovered that the women were in a relationship (had a life outside the shoot.) After that, there was no more small talk, no flirting. Furthermore, the closeups and featured scenes dried up, as well. They were demoted to extra.

The director was well over 40, much too old to be acting so desperate and immature. The DP was my age (just 30, a few years too old not to have a good excuse why he wasn’t married. He blamed his career, his art. But, we made industrials. Sure, that’s a profitable trade-off.) When the DP would see me speaking with an actress, he would immediately interfere and steer the conversation towards the status of my wife and kids. This was a show for the actress’s sake, it made him seem more family oriented (he never asked me about my family outside of these contexts.) He would feel so dis-confident that he felt the need to c***-block me (someone who was not a threat to his hunting haunts.) This actually would often present a problem for me. The actress would then seek me out to protect her from her pursuers.

I knew another director who pursued an actress for months after the shoot. It was all executed under the pretext of training her for a major role in the film. The staged publicity photo shoots and martial arts training sessions. It was nothing short of obvious and pathetic. The relationship quickly cooled outside the shoot (as it does with all inter-office romances, you really have nothing in common besides that one shared experience) when the following shoot never materialized.

So, if you’re successful in transitioning that working relationship into a physical one, you maybe ready to congratulate yourself. You’re ready to delude yourself into thinking that it’s an emotional connection with a possible future. But, hold off on that self-delivered pat on the back. If you’re capable of even the slightest bit of objective perspective, you may soon realize that you’re in a relationship with someone you’ve hired. And if, like all other professional relationships, the only thing you have in common is the work, that means she’s only with you because you’ve hired her, she’s your employee, she works for you. What does that make her? What does that make you?

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