“I did,” Perkins said. “He said they were both excellent.”
“Well then,” I said. My orange juice came, and coffee. I sipped the coffee. “Why do you ask?”
“Because of this,” Perkins said, and passed a xeroxed sheet of paper across to me.
It was titled “STUDIO CAMERA REPORT,” dated Tuesday, September 14. I had seen such sheets before. Each day of shooting, the camera assistant and the script supervisor send in a camera report to the camera department at the studio. The report lists things like total footage shot, total footage to be printed, total number of setups, and total page count for the day.
Every movie studio has an office full of pale accountant types who are called estimators, and these camera reports are mostly for them. The estimators have one function in life: to figure out the daily ETC—the estimate to complete—for every picture shooting at the studio. They need to have the ETCs on Greenblatt’s desk every morning at nine.
What they do is they take the original budget, the original shooting schedule, and the original script, and then they compare progress against it. And each day, they come up with some figure likeBloodrock, twenty-two and five-eighths pages of script shot, $940,000 spent, six and seven-eighths pages behind schedule, four and a half days behind schedule, estimate to complete five days over schedule and $87,000 over budget.
The actual figures are more detailed, but that gives you the idea. That’s what Greenblatt reads every morning, for each of the half-dozen pictures his studio is shooting at any particular time.
The estimators are supposed to be superefficient clairvoyants, but actually they’re not much good. To protect their jobs, they have to be conservative, so they always say a picture is to hell and gone, when in fact it may be ahead of schedule. Greenblatt knows they’re conservative, so he doesn’t pay any attention to the reports—he’d never cancel a picture, for example, on the basis of the ETCs. What he does do is pick up the phone and yell at somebody about how far behind the picture is on the basis of the ETCs. Then the other person says the ETCs are wrong, and there is an argument, but the point is made and pressure is exerted. That’s how it works.
I couldn’t imagine why Perkins was interested in the camera report form. It seemed like such a trivial thing. I said so.
“Trivial?” His eyebrows went up. “Everything is trivial until its significance is understood. People watched apples fall out of trees for centuries before anybody saw the significance of gravity.”
And a good morning to you too, I thought, but all I said was, “What do you expect to learn from this form?”
“I have already learned something,” he said. He tapped the form.
The sheet looked like this:
[1] Setup 1
[2] Sc. 287
[3] p. 47–48
[4] Med. 2 shot D. and L., D. crosses L/R, dialogue. Takes 1–9, print 2,6.
[1] Setup 2
[2] Sc. 287A
[3] p. 47–48
[4] CUD. as above. Takes 1–4, print 3, hold 4.
[1] Setup 3
[2] Sc. 287B
[3] p. 47–48
[4] CUL. as above. Takes 1–2, print 1 only.
And it went on like this for sixteen different camera setups—giving the script scene number, the page of the script, and a description of the shot, including the number of takes and which were printed or held. (A held shot is a notation that if the printed take is unsatisfactory, the lab should print the shot marked “hold.” That’s sometimes necessary because when you see dailies screened, you notice something that nobody caught at the time, like a car zipping by in the far background when it’s supposed to be an 1880 Western. Or a jet trail in the sky.)
Well, I didn’t notice anything odd about the sheet, and I said so.
“The seventh setup,” Perkins said.
I looked again.
[1] Setup 7
