For many of Hollywood’s below-the-line pros, the price of success is the life of a nomad.
“I haven’t slept in my own bed making a motion picture since 2000,” said a steadily working unit production manager in his fifties, who has managed the production crews of top-level studio features and low-budget indies over a four-decade career.
That was an $18 million indie. If your project isn’t paired with Marvel comics, and you’re not working in the $200 million area, the picture isn’t made in Los Angeles -- and even many of those are not made in Los Angeles. They just made 'Green Lantern' in New Orleans."
The veteran unit production manager -- whose sensitive work on a guild committee prohibits him from being identified in this article -- no longer has kids in the house, but he happens to be fond of his wife, and Factor’s Deli on Pico, and having ready access to the seacoast. But to keep paying the bills, he won’t be getting that much quality time with those favorite things.
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Sure, he could dive into the more prosperous world of television and commercial shoots locally. But his first love is film, and he can’t stomach the compromise: “I did a lot of TV in my career, and I did a lot of commercials," he told TheWrap. "But there is no soul in selling a product, and there’s no soul in laugh tracks.
"When you love something that has magic to it, you want it to have meaning behind it.”
This comes, mind you, from someone whose trade has made him a supremely practical man. In a film production world made up of independent contractors -- sound men, stunt men, grips, gaffers, drivers and movie stars among them -- no one is poised more delicately between labor and management than a unit production manager, or UPM.
Along with a lot of planning and crisis management, UPM’s do the hiring and firing. Their contact list is stuffed with every sort of skilled worker in the industry.
Sadly, those lists, unless they have a sideline in TV or commercials production, are seeing less and less use.
While he doesn't want his name on the site, the UPM doesn’t hold back his opinions on the problems now facing the industry.
“From my perspective,” he says over breakfast at his favorite deli, “The effect of the down economy on the actual production of motion pictures is very different than the effect on other corporations and businesses. Everybody’s freelance. Almost everybody below the line on most crews is hired on a daily or a weekly.
