CATERING
I don't remember if it was Napoleon who said that an army
marches on its stomach, but it should be emphasized that a well-fed
crew is a happy crew!
No matter how low your budget, even if you have no budget, you've got
to provide something for breakfast. Bagels and cream cheese, tea and
coffee have to be on the set first thing in the morning; otherwise your
DP and the First Assistant will drive to the local donut store and buy
everyone donuts and coffee!
So you're laughing, "It happened to him!"
But you don't take it seriously, right? You say, "Great, let
the DP buy the donuts and coffee every morning for all I care!" But,
it's not that simple. Then they take one hour to enjoy the coffee and
donuts! You wanna wait that long to get started every day?
On my first feature film, the first one I financed and shot,
I used to never schedule a production day unless I had $20 for food. I
managed to complete that picture without a budget!
If you have a budget, wonderful, hire a catering company which provides
a package deal. A package deal should be negotiated with a certain
number of cast and crew in mind, the number of meals per day, etc.
There are some great catering companies and some horrible ones. It all
depends on what your people like.
Some people are vegetarians, some eat only kosher food, some like
Chinese food, some Mexican, some are happy to eat pizza every day, but
nobody wants chicken every day! So don't make an advertising deal with
a new fast food chicken company. One of my friends did and he told me,
"Vic, we ate so much chicken, we almost turned into chickens!"
One way to save money on food is to break for the day at 6
PM. If you work past 6 PM, you've got to provide another meal. This may
be necessary sometimes, especially if you have some night scenes to
shoot. Although you should schedule your night scenes together and have
a late call (start work late in the evening,) in which case you'll
still have the same number of meals even if you shoot eight or ten
hours into the night and early morning.
Whatever you do, don't shoot more than twelve hours per day!
With very rare exceptions, you'll make a lousy movie. First of all,
I've never heard anyone tell me that they finished such a movie! The
story always goes something like this, "We shot for seventy-two hours
without sleep, we worked until we were about to drop -- it was a great
experience, it was sort of fun ...." Nobody ever told me what the movie
was called. I usually hear such stories when I'm interviewing crew and
somebody wants to impress me about how hard they'll work.
You can imagine the quality of work when people are overworked like
that! The money you save on catering is enough to buy a few extra weeks
of production time!
On some productions I've had the pleasant experience when we
had a cook on the production. Also if you buy your food and cook it on
the set, not only you save money but you also create a family
atmosphere. It's very conducive to getting good performances from
everyone on certain types of productions that are shot on locations,
such as westerns or outdoor pictures.