LEVERAGE: Production Day 3

Rollout -- 9:00 am

I have got to say, Chicago is one town not afraid to look the American Cardiologist Association in the eye and spit. At the Original Pancake House today, my western omelette was the size of a hubcap.

"I think," said Chris Downey, sawing through a palm-width slice of bacon, "that's actually a nine egg omelette." This was after three days where every craft service, order-in and restaraunt meal was beef or pork based. In Chicago, pasta is a vegetable.

First stop today, a scene in a store's personnnel office, overlooking the shop floor. The only problem -- the store in question doesn't actually have an office. Solution? Just build one in the corner:


This was a fairly simple scene between two men. A master, a couple overs, grab some singles and we're out. No explosions, sadly.

On to an abandoned floor in an office building, where one of our characters is doing surveillance. We're at the Chicago Federal Building, on an abandoned floor. Now, here's a question -- why does the Federal Building have an abandoned floor filled with old computer monitors?


My conspiracy junkie nerves are a-tingle.

This bit of business is cool. Tim Hutton is standing at the window, looking out at his target. We would like to shoot him from the outside, but inconveniently we are ten stories up. What the clever production humans do is build a false front of three windows that exactly match the exterior windows, but then place that false front just inside the real windows, with room for a camera in the gap. This way, when we shoot looking inside, we get a view of the room, properly lit. But when we remove the false windows and shoot from inside looking out through the real windows, all the perspectives still work and we don't have to change too much of the lighting.

However, when shooting looking in from that gap, we've dropped lights in to dramatically pick up Tim's face as he steps forward. How do we dupe that light -- meant to be read as street lights -- from the outside when we shoot looking out? With a conveniently placed Condor.
That crane is ten stories up, with some poor bastard sitting in the booth at the end of what appears to be a terrifyingly overbalanced crane arm. The wind kicks the hell out of him, too.

This scene is one side of a four-way conversation between characters in three different locations (those of you familiar with my previous work know I have a tendency toward such foolishness). Tim's running through his side of the five-page conversation, with an actor just offstage reading the rest of the parts. The pleasure here is shooting digitally with an actor who likes to take advantage of it. Tim knows there's no way to blow another actor's cue -- he's alone. So he'll be performing his lines, and suddenly stop and then rapid-fire deliver five great variant readings, like a musician running through a phrase of music again and again but transposing key and rhythm on the fly.

There was a moment, too, when I came into Video Village ... all right. for this shot, we're loose, with Tim prowling around a twenty square foot area, the camera in one position but picking him up dirty as he crosses in and out of the various bits of light and dark, all agasint a very intricate background wall pattern. Getting good shots in this process is damn near random, but it gives you a very cool energy. So as we're setting up, I saw him idly watching the display, while the camera crew pulled focus on his stand-in. On the next take, in the middle of five pages of dialogue, he delivered a line as he stepped forward -- then stopped without warning. He took two steps back to reset just that line among dozens, and said it again on the move. But this time, he shifted about eight inches to the right and on the step-in landed not just perfectly into a glorious foreground light, but with slightly better framing of the intricate background for the complete shot composition.

He'd been watching his stand-in to memorize the light layout and composition from camera view, and then used it to map out his moves within inches to give us the best shots. All while slamming the performance home.

That is, to be blunt, pretty goddam sick. That's how the grown-ups do it, kids. Next time you rush off the set as soon as the director calls "cut" so you can text your agent on your Razor, keep that in mind.

We're wrapped in that location. Tomorrow our last performer -- who just arrived hours ago -- will get fitted for wardrobe, while we shoot a nice simple four-hander in a penthouse apartment. At least this time they're all in one room. Which may or may not be easier.

Roll-in -- 11:30 pm

LEVERAGE: Production Days 1&2

DAY 1

Rollout -- 6:00 am

You know, the whole point of my stand-up career was to avoid getting a day job. Yet here I am in scenic Chicago strolling down Michigan Ave at 5:45 goddam am to catch a ride on the van picking up Dean Devlin at his hotel.

Here's the short of it. Last spring Chris Downey and I wrote a pilot for Dean Devlin's company and TNT called LEVERAGE. In it, a crew of high-tech thieves decide to rip off bad guys in entertaining and surpising ways. TNT saw fit to order us to pilot this fall. Even more insanely, Dean has seen fit to make this his directing debut. After a somewhat truncated pre-production prep, we're now shooting the pilot episode (for you virgins, the first, example episode meant to sell the show) in Chicago. Hell of a city, by the way.

Somewhere along the way we hired -- and these actors have all been announced publicly -- Tim Hutton, Chris Kane, Aldis Hodge and Beth Xxxxxx (NOTE: she'll be making a formal announcement, so I've dropped the name for now until it's cleared.) They are all very charming and ridiculously talented. Nothing like having Tim Hutton read my words to help me realize I should have written a much better script.

On Day 1, we're shooting a scene in an abandoned warehouse, where our teams arrived to hash out the details of a crime. Assembled up in another section of the same warehouse is the interior of a 40th story office building. This is not uncommon. The most time-consuming part of shooting is moving the company, and setting up lights in order to film. By constructing sets near one another, you save time. Sometimes you can even break off a spare camera and crew -- called the "second unit" -- to shoot some footage even while the first unit is working.

So the idea is we shoot the four-hander, then move over to the high-wire break-in through the window of the fortieth floor office. Oh, and somewhere along the line we'll blow up that very warehouse we're all standing in.

That surely seemed like a better plan at the time.

Filming in the morning spins into gear like a jet engine. As always, I'm amazed on the first day to be reminded of just how many goddam people we need lifting, welding and carrying heavy shit in order to make television. The crew here is sharp as hell, and we do just fine. Six odd hours of filming with the new spiffy Panavision Genesis cameras flies by. Setup, rehearsal, shoot, "once again", shoot, "once again" as necessary, "moving on", "check the gate". Repeat.

At noon, we haul everyone outside. There are a ridiculous number of safety talks, and then we're moved behind the fire line. Chicago's finest stand by just in case the crazy Hollywood people set fire to more than we're officially allowed. The "blow", as is called, goes off in two steps. I believe I promised you coverage, so by further crappy treo powers --



If you squint you can see wee stunt people running just ahead of the explosion. Our actors -- particularly Kane, who's quite the shitkicker - feel cheated that we're not letting them run in the explosion. Not wanting to deprive them of all the fun, we then put them in front of a real fireball, shoot them with a long lens (someone in comments will explain why) and get footage of them escaping from the inferno. Nothing like a little heat blast and that OOOMPH of the air compression wave to help them appreciate the value of the fine stunt community.

We close out the day by returning inside the smoldering warehouse -- to be fair, only bits of it are smoldering -- and shooting some exciting fleeing/running footage. Beth gamely hangs upside-down while cutting through the glass of the faux office. That's pretty damn tough, actually, but she never hesitates to work in a rig even the stunt people are having a tough time controlling. I try to ignore the possibility of one of our leading actors throwing a brain clot and focus on the playback screens.

Roll home -- 8:00 pm

Day 2 Rollout -- 7:00 am

The location for the next set of scenes is a hospital. A suburban hospital's offered us a closed wing to work in. We drive out for an hour in the transport vans. This would ordinarily allow a bit of extra sleep, but there are phone calls to make and schedules to re-examine ...

... screw it, I nap.

... when we arrive, Dean starts outside and works in. We bang out a parking-lot scene, then move indoors. Forty odd crew -- at least -- cram into the narrow hospital corridors around an abandoned nurse's station. We shoot in two adjacent hospital rooms. Now, there's traditionally one set of playback monitors set up for the director to use when composing shots and watching the filming in progress. The monitors are on a wheeled dolly which is constantly relocated for convenience. This assembly's known as Video Village. After the first rehearsal, I seek out where Video Village will be living for today.



That's ... encouraging.

We shoot the morning out in one of the two hospital rooms. Dean's job here is to both do some creative shooting and also get coverage -- enough footage so that the editor is never stranded when putting together an episode sequence. Every director has his own system, but for you newbies you can't go wrong with the Master Shot Method. Start with a wide shot - a "master" -- that establishes the geography of the room for the audience. A "moving master" is considered standard now. That's a master shot combined with some simple but interesting camera movement to engage the eye.

Then move into coverage. Doubles and singles of the each off the actors as they run the scene multiple times. Put all this footage together, and you'll never lack for a shot when editing. Now, this method's out of vogue right now because of extensive storyboarding. When you storyboard a script, anticipating how you're going to cut, it's tempting to just shoot the bits you know you're going to use. In my limited experience though the time you save is often bought back threefold in the editing room, when you realize you don't quite have what you want int he close-up, or you need to re-establish the dynamic of the shot, but you don't have anything to cut away to. Also, sometimes actors find nice moments in shots that theoretically aren't focused on them.

Right before lunch we drive out to an abandoned house and blow it up for a flashback sequence. Those of you interested in action may be heartened to hear so many "blowing up" references. I assure you, your desire for explosions and larceny shall not go unrewarded if you favor us with your attentions. There's also banter and some damn fine acting, buuuut .... you know. Explosions don't hurt.

Afternoon, we move to the other hospital room. We finish out the day and enjoy the rush hour traffic back to Chicago. This evening my co-writer Chris Downey flew into town. He'll be working with us for the next few days, aiding in the rewrite and polish process.

Roll home -- 9:30 pm

That's Day 1 & 2. as always, post questions in the comments, I'll try to get to them. Will do my best to pass on anything usefull to the tourists or Spec-Monkeys.

Post-Production: Day 14 through ... errr, 30-something

As mentioned, a fair bit of the last three weeks are simply off-limits. Agents and talent do not care to have their intrigues discussed, nor do I think it wise to reveal some of the unsavory mechanizations by which I have availed myself of fine acting humans. Also, unlike a show in active production, pilot pre-production's an odd bear -- the director does an enormous amount of feature-quality location scouting and storyboarding, while the script's already been polished within an inch of its life. In Chicago, Dean is insanely busy while in Los Angeles I am busy primarily arguing with people on the phone and then watching actors say lines. And yet still filling 12 hour days with this nonsense. For a better look at Prep of a show in production, go to Denis' blog here and backtrack.

That said, there are some interesting bits in the process. I had the usual thrill with clearances. The clearance process is when the legal department checks out your script and sees where it may cross with actionable coincidences in the real world. For example , in my script a children's toy named "Mr. Flopsy" is brandished by a drunk dad. Nothing more than a funny name. The Legal Department informs me, in all seriousness, that there is indeed a Mr. Flopsy-brand bunny rabbit doll, and we need to change the name.

They also check character names, according to some arcane ruleset that after ten years I still have no real grasp of. For example, in the Global Frequency pilot, I had to change the detective's name from "Sean Ronin" to "Sean Foley", because there were thousands of Sean Foleys in the US, there were only a few Sean Ronins in the San Francisco area where the show was based. Therefore, there was no chance a viewer could legitimately believe we were basing our Sean Foley on any one Sean Foley in the real world, but they could be misled by the rarity of the original name into believing we were specifically parodying or targetting a real-life Sean Ronin. The name "sean Ronin" was too rare. While my Deputy Phelps set in un-named state is plainly not meant to be any one Deputy Phelps, as soon as I mentioned the city "Chicago" casually in dialogue one could reasonably believe that we were referring to a Deputy Phelps of the Illinois State Police -- who is real and therefore ineligible as a character name.

Yes, it's as mind-numbing as it sounds. And there are paaaaages of it.

We also took actors to the network tests. These are the final auditions for actors, the pass before the executive humans at the network. After winnowing our choices down to three or four for each role, we arrange a network test session. At this audition, the actors go in one after another, bang out auditions to a half-dozen network execs sitting five feet away from them, totally unreactive. This sounds harmless and straightforward but for two issues. First, Network Tests are always tightly stackedtime-wise. So the actor is sitting in the lobby, waiting to be called in for the final audition which may mean millions of dollars, and they are staring at a lobby full of other actors who are essentially incrementally different versions of themselves. No, not unnerving at all.

Second -- before actors can go into the network test, they need to have signed test deals. These are the contracts setting terms of employment just in case they get selected to star in the show, and that show then gets put on the air. As a producer you want these deals in place before the actor reads, because if you're negotiating with an agent who already knows you want their client, you're fucked. At the same time, agents know they have you by the nuts on a test deal, as you want to hire their client, but you have no legal hold on the client until the test deal closes. They can't even audition for network until the contract's closed. If your actors don't sign their test deals, you are left with a bunch of network executives wondering why you scheduled a session with no actual actors auditioning. It's the sort of mutual blackmail lawyers love, and almost always you've wrestled on these terms right up until the actors are signing their contracts while sitting in the lobby waiting to go in and audition. Again, magnificently stress free.

All said and done, though, we have an excellent cast, I'm in Chicago now (flew in Monday night), and we should be able to jump in quickly tomorrow with actual production notes, documents, and maybe even the occasional crappy Treo video.

Again, feel free to ask any questions in the comments, and I'll see what I can do about answering them. As to what we've got planned for first day of shooting -- a preview via crappy Treo cam: