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by Frances Perkins
I had to break the bad news.
“There’s a blizzard. A state of emergency has been declared throughout New Jersey. So the make-up artist is stuck in New York.”
“So?” said the director, looking not at all worried.
“So, that means we can’t do the fight scene. We won’t have the fight make-up,” I warned.
“So, figure it out,” he said, flatly.
“Figure it out?” I said, incredulous.
“You’re the producer. We have to shoot that fight scene, with fight make-up. Figure it out.” He stood up, and walked away.
My classmate from NYU wasn’t trying to be a jerk; he was stating the obvious. I was the producer of his short film, a major setback had just occurred, and it was up to me to figure it out.
During a blizzard. On an island off the New Jersey coast. No access to the mainland. And it was my first time producing a film.
I was also the driver, the cook, the housekeeper, and now I was the make-up artist. In a film where a man was beaten to death. Yikes.
Photo credit: Benjamin Hollis, Flickr.
I was learning the hard way that, as the producer, the buck stops with you. You’d think the ultimate responsibility would lie with the director, that it’s his/her vision being articulated into the medium of film. But that’s not true. The producer is the one who has to say yes as often as possible, no as rarely as possible, and has to keep the production rolling forward at all costs, whether there is a blizzard or not.
Responsibility wasn’t the reason I was pursuing a career of film making. But it was what I was able to do. I was capable, organized, communicative and clear. That spells “producer,” and I was asked by three different classmates to produce short films over four months (including directing a short of my own). I remember asking the Chair of the film program if I should do it or not, and he replied, “How would I know what you can handle? Ask your mother.”
It was flattering to be asked – to be trusted – with the responsibility of others’ creative pursuits. I said yes, and that was it: my road to being a producer was underway without even knowing it. I continued to produce for classmates, even got my first paying production job as a Production Coordinator solely on the basis of my student producing experience. Production Coordinator, Production Manager, Line Producer…the road was clear and I followed it. “Frances is working a lot – call her, she might hire you,” was something I started to hear. Classmates who were developing feature films with known professionals still needed to pay their bills, and they’d gladly day play as a Production Assistant for me on a commercial, a broadcast promotion or other professional gig.
Getting paid and having a career straight out of school was a huge thing for me, and it came with a lot of responsibility. I wouldn’t sleep the night before a shoot, worrying about the 4 a.m. alarm clock, the 5 a.m. pick-up of vehicles, the constant running and lists and management of someone else’s money.
And I made plenty of mistakes. I learned the hard way about how to set up time in a post production facility (“Are you booking or buying?”); forgot to make calls that affected others (“He missed out on a great opportunity because of you!” said an irate mother of a child actor); bypassed the chain of command to tell an Executive something he didn’t need to know (“WHAT did you say to him?!?”); and the list goes on.
Responsibility is sometimes a scary word, one connected with fear or worry or weight that we don’t want to acknowledge. But it was a pivotal word for me, one that set me on a path, taught me to learn from mistakes, and even allowed me to save the day with my first ever fake bruises and Karo syrup blood.
Producer Frances Yount Perkins is a native of Southern California. She received her B.A. in Film Studies and Cultural Anthropology at the University of California-Santa Barbara. She received her M.F.A. in Film Production from New York University, where she also met her future husband and collaborator, Troy Perkins. She currently teaches as an Assistant Professor in Communication & Theatre Arts at University of Wisconsin Fox Valley, and teaches online Humanities courses for University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. As a freelancer, she has produced commercials, on-air promos and animated videos in New York. Frances served as a founding partner of Mindpool Productions in Milwaukee, and as a freelance writer/producer for WISN-TV, the Hearst-Argyle ABC affiliate station in Milwaukee. Recently, Frances produced award-winning short films for Troy, Tractor For Sale (2006), Brothers (2008), Birthday Girl (2010) and Billfold (2010). Frances wrote and directed the short films Summertime’s Calling Me (1998) Test Day (2009) and Take & Bake (2010). She is currently writing Let Go, her first feature screenplay.
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