10/19/22
Newletter132
The Crack of Dawn
I spent a year working as a 2nd unit director. I thought of the job as “Director Lite.” 2nd unit doesn’t deal with actors, just actor’s doubles, stunt people, special effects, and props. What most viewers never suspect is that the second it cuts to a wide shot when you can’t really make out the actor’s faces, it’s 2nd unit with doubles. Anytime it cuts to a closer shot, excluding the face, where a character is doing anything with their hands, like loading a weapon or rolling a cigarette, or you just see their feet, running or tapping their toe, that’s 2nd unit. Anytime a character looks around and sees whatever they see: the countryside, the sunset, the swarm of attacking soldiers, that’s 2nd unit. Any shot of an animal is 2nd unit. The main unit crew consisted of 75-100 people; the 2nd unit crew was 16 people. Therefore, it’s much cheaper to shoot with a 2nd unit. Walt Disney took more advantage of this fact than anyone else, and did it creatively. A bravura use of 2nd unit was in one of my favorite movies as a little kid, The Incredible Journey (1963). A Canadian family moves 250 miles away and can’t take their pets: two dogs and a cat. The dogs, a Golden Retriever and a Bull Terrier, and the cat, all follow the family and we get to see the pets’ incredible journey. The highlight is when they fight a bear. The Golden Retriever barks, the Bull Terrier takes a nap, and the cat attacks. In any case, 99% of the movie is 2nd unit. I’d guess they had one day of shooting with speaking actors: the scene when the family leaves, and the scene when the animals show up. As my buddy who loves all kinds of Bull dogs pointed out to me, when the Bull Terrier – like the Target dog or Spuds McKenzie – comes running over the hill toward the 12-year-old boy at the end, you see that dog put its head down so that it’s coming full-speed in a head-butt position (Bull Terriers have thick skulls), and the expression on the kid’s face is pure fear. The dog head butts him in the gut and takes him down. The film was a hit (and was remade 30 years later), and I’m sure it made a lot of money because it couldn’t have cost shit, it was all 2nd unit.
I was the 2nd unit director on Hercules. Initially, Zeus’s wife, Hera, was only to be depicted by a peacock. Of course everybody on 2nd unit wondered why a female goddess would choose a male creature to represent her – females of the species are plain brown birds called peahens – but since I happened to know that this was a specific decision made by Sam Raimi, I knew that he didn’t know that peacocks were male. So, it says in the various Hercules scripts things like, “Hera the peacock steps into the scene, looks right, then left, shakes her head angrily, raises her tail feathers, then exits.” Well, a peacock is about as smart as a chicken. The idea of getting this bird to do anything – ANYTHING – was ridiculous. We tied fishing line to it and tried to pull it in or out of frame, but it wouldn’t go. And we humans don’t have a clue why peacocks raise their tail feathers: maybe it’s anger, maybe it’s a mating ritual, who knows? The animal wrangler, Horace (who mainly dealt with horses), thought if he glued peacock feathers to a remote control car and drove it right at the peacock it would get scared and raise its tail feathers. A peacock’s brain has to be the size of a BB; it didn’t even see the feather-covered car, let alone get angry. We finally had to get the FX department to build a rig where you pulled a handle and peacock tail feathers fanned up. We put the real peacock in front of the rig, pulled the handle, and I swear, this pea-brained bird glanced over its shoulder, saw the fake tail feathers come rising up and did a double-take. We worked with this goddamn peacock for three days and never got one decent shot. The executives back at Universal wanted to know what the problem was? We explained that it’s impossible to get a peacock to do anything – just watch any of the footage – and therefore Hera really shouldn’t be a peacock (which is dumb anyway). So, in that first film, Hera was visualized as an extreme close-up of a peacock feather with a voice-over. For all the rest of Hercules, Hera was played by an actress, which I’m certain was a better idea.
Good on y’all.