Business screen magazine (1946)

PARADOX continued one of the film producers swore by a lab located 1500 miles away. They may be an excellent lab for all I know, but it takes six days to get anything from them by mail, and you know what this business is like . . . you almost never have the luxury of lead time at the end of a production. The time spent in the mails traveling back and forth erased the margin-for-error time we had allowed for correction of mistakes. Fortunately, the second answer print was fine and we could roll into quantity production. But if it hadn't been fine ... we would have missed the client's deadline and sacrificed their confidence in us. This crisis of confidence came to the surface in another situation. 1 divide all cameramen into two groups, the "NEGATIVES", and the "FALSE POSITIVES". You know the "Negatives". Whatever you ask them to shoot, they shake their heads and say "You can't do that." Or, if it's late in the day and they're tired of fighting you, they'll say, "You can shoot it that way, but it won't be any good." The "False Positives" have a different answer for any request. They always say, "No problem." Now, don't be fooled by this. This doesn't mean "No problem, we can do it." The real translation is, "No problem, because although I will humor you for the sake of peace and quiet. I will shoot this scene the way I want to do it, no matter what you may say." This attitude can really hurt you, as it did in this case. One of our productions had this kind of cameraman ... a "False Positive". We shot the exteriors and interiors, and had all the studio shooting-completed except for one tabletop shot. He kept saying "No problem", and delaying the shot, and delaying it, until he finally shot it seven weeks after everything else was already in place in the rough -assembly. The first time we saw the shot was at the interlock, and by then we no longer had the time to reshoot and change the original if we were still going to meet our convention shipping deadlines. It is a flaw in the film, and it will always be there. One of our important speakers had absolutely no voice at all at the dress rehearsal. It was a combina tion of a cold, exhaustion, and nervous tension. We had someone else read his part, and we also had a ringer for him in case he didn't regain his voice by showtime. Of course, we had no way of knowing whether he had his voice back or not, because the doctor's instructions were not to use his voice for any reason. He was from the Cherokee territory, and was awfully good at sign language, so he did pretty well without his voice up until showtime. Then, miraculously, with his stand-by sitting at the table beside him in case he faltered, he came through with a deep, sincere, slightly hoarse and husky bass vibrato voice which stayed with him until the last word of the last sentence of the last paragraph of his last time at the podium, and then disappeared, perhaps until next year's sales meeting ... or perhaps forever for all we know. One of the labs lost the original of one of the films. What's that you say, you don't believe a lab can lose an original? Neither did I. Neither did they. They insisted that they have a foolproof, fail-safe system so that no original can possibly be lost. In fact, they still kept telling us that right in the same conversations where they informed us that they couldn't find the original. There is, in laboratory language, some mysterious difference between the phrases "We can't find the original", and "We have lost the original". They pronounce the former defiantly, almost proudly, but reject the latter contemptuously. And when you threaten to sue them, they modestly reply, "Go ahead, but that won't solve your print problem by show-time", which is absolutely true. How did we solve this problem? The client looked at the answer print during rehearsal and decided the picture was unrelated to the theme of the meeting, and ought to be eliminated. Another close shave. We had an audio tape that was put into the show for comedy relief. It was sent airmail special from Rochester, N.Y. Wednesday afternoon. It is now Saturday afternoon, and it has still not arrived. Or at least, the hotel insists it has stilt not arrived. It takes an average of three days to get a telephone message from the desk clerk if you happen not be in your room when the phone rings, so the tape may very well be here in some mysterious unknown cubbyhole in the bowels of the system. In any case, when some of our presentations began to run long, the client decided that this particular tape could be eliminated without ever being missed. Another squeaker. Do you notice anything all these close shaves have in common? Well, the answer is that none of them even remotely affects the completed show. In every case, the bloopers we made were made on our time, the mistakes took place during rehearsals, the last-minute changes allowed for other last-minute corrections, and everything that went wrong, went wrong during preparation for the meeting rather than at the meeting itself. That's what precision pre-planning will do for you. It lets you make mistakes on your time, rather than on the client's. Each of the four shows we put on was absolutely flawless as far as the audience was concerned. And that is exactly the way it should be. A sales conference should be like an iceberg . . . the 10% that shows should be smooth, attractive, pristine, sailing along beautifully and majestically. All the rough cutting edges and dangerous, ungainly, ominous bulk should be below the surface, where the passengers on the cruise ship never get close enough to see it. Perhaps the most traumatic unexpected incident was the total relocation of the entire sales meeting. Almost a year ago, a group of us convened in the Plaza Hotel, about a mile north of here on the strip. We made all the necessary arrangements, inspections, deals, and introductions of personnel in order to have everything go smoothly at the actual meeting. But three months ago the Plaza Hotel was bought by Playboy, and there we were, less than ninety days from the convention without a place to hold it. In this case, the client himself stepped into the emergency, dropped everything to look for a substitute meeting place, and quickly re-arranged all the hundreds of details involved in moving that manymen from that many places to a new meeting location. Now you've got to admit that it's a little un 20 BUSINESS SCREEN