First Time Director. Gil Bettman
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PART FIVE – POSTPRODUCTION
Chapter 9. To the Answer Print and Beyond
Collaborating with Your Editor
Reshoots
Inserts
Post Sound – An Overview
Spotting the Picture for Sound Effects and ADR
On the ADR Stage
Hiring a Composer
Working with the Composer
Sound Mixing or Rerecording
Promotion
To the Answer Print and the Sweet Hereafter
Signing with a Manager/Agent
Signing with a Publicist
Coping with Success or the Lack Thereof
Summary Points
FOREWORD
by Robert Zemeckis, Director, Cast Away; What Lies Beneath; Contact; Forrest Gump; Back to the Future I, II & III; Who Framed Roger Rabbit; Romancing the Stone
By writing First Time Director, Gil Bettman has done for directing what Lajos Egri did for screenwriting when he wrote The Art of Dramatic Writing—, put out the first book which explains how the craft is practiced professionally. Until I picked up First Time Director, I had never read anything that went right to the heart of what a director must do to succeed. Most texts on directing are filled with information about things that most directors never concern themselves with — not the case with Gil's book. He has lucidly set down the ABCs of directing so that dedicated students can learn exactly what will be required of them when they step onto a set.
Better yet, the book is tailored specifically for the director taking on his or her first professional assignment — the only logical approach for a textbook on directing. Success on the first assignment is crucial. Without it, it's effectively impossible to launch a career. Since no textbook can teach like on-the-job experience, especially in a three-dimensional medium like directing, you don't need a textbook after you have survived your first professional assignment. The fact that Gil Bettman has built this truth into the approach of his book is both brilliant and good common sense.
I always knew Gil could write and direct. I set up a deal for him to write and direct a film for Universal, and later on, one for Warner Bros. As is often the case, neither project made it onto the screen. But First Time Director proves that he has found a great way to put his talents as a writer and a director to good use. People who are as good as Gil is at writing and directing are usually too preoccupied making Hollywood movies. But in Gil's case, the film industry's loss has been the film student's gain. First Time Director reveals to those still on the outside what's going to be expected of them when they get on the inside, and it is spot-on accurate, because it has been written by somebody who has been there and done that. I wish somebody had handed me this book the day I got out of USC.
PREFACE
When I first started teaching directing, I read every “how to” book on the subject that I could find. I knew what I was looking for: a text that taught what I had learned during my 20-year career as a director in Hollywood. My plan was to draw on those lessons in order to provide my students with the information they wanted above all else. I had gone through the M.F.A. program at UCLA when I was an aspiring director. I could remember what I had wanted then, and I could not imagine it being any different today. I wanted my professors to teach me the directing skills that I needed to know to break through and start a career in Hollywood. Now, 25 years later, I knew that the particular nature of my industry experience made me especially qualified to teach them this. After all, I had broken into the business not once, but three times — first as an episodic television director, then as a rock video director, and finally as a director of low budget features. But as hard as I tried, I could not find a book that would serve as a companion text for the course I envisioned. Ironically, almost all the books I read contained a wealth of well-articulated, accurate information. But my experience had taught me that most of this information was useless to a first time director. Even those passages that were invaluable could not be learned from — because they were indistinguishably mixed in with those which were of no use. That was when I decided I had to write this book.
How can it be that the other books on directing do not contain these crucial lessons? As far as I can tell, it is because they were written by very intelligent, knowledgeable people who have never really broken into the business and maintained a viable directing career. These individuals may have had an ancillary role on some mainstream Hollywood projects, or done some directing on the periphery of the industry. But, unlike myself, they have never really once kicked down the door to direct a project which opened nationwide in theaters or was aired on primetime network television. Their knowledge of filmmaking was encyclopedic and academic, but due to their lack of practical experience, they burdened the first time director with superfluous information. What a first time director needs is a survival guide, not an encyclopedia. I intend this book to be that survival guide.
Unless you are an established Hollywood scriptwriter or cinematographer — someone like a Larry Kasdan or a Jan DeBont — it is highly unlikely that a major studio is going to put up the money for your first feature film. Inevitably, your big break is going to be a day late and a dollar short. You are going to have to endure that which Spike Lee, Kevin Smith, Doug Liman, Neil LaBute, the Wachowski brothers, and all of the hot young directors working in today's Hollywood endured when they started out: You are going to be charged with making a film in record time, on a minimal budget, with a shorthanded, inexperienced crew Even if the funds to make your breakthrough movie or TV show or rock video are ultimately coming from a big name studio, network, or record label with deep pockets, the fact remains that you are not yet bankable. And until you are, you can be sure that the bean counters at those big companies will be doling out those funds to you in nickels and dimes. No matter whether the money is coming from you or your Uncle Harry or MCA Inc., the budgetary restrictions are going to be equally constraining.
Under these circumstances, things are bound to go wrong on a regular basis. The atmosphere is going to be chaotic. The crew and the production support are going to be under stress. And yet, as first time director, you are going to have to rise to the occasion and do that which a director must do in order to make the film he wants to make. You are going to have to be so self-assured and so capable that you manage to allay everyone's fears and pull form out of the chaos. If you seem hesitant, or if your solutions are not up to the problems, those on whom you are depending for support — the assistant director, the cinematographer, or the producer — will not hesitate to supercede you and take control of the film, whether out of jealousy, fear, or necessity. In order to prevent this from happening, and to be certain that you get to make the film that you want to make, you are going to need a very specific kind of understanding of the director's craft — an understanding tailored to these unusual circumstances. That is what this book provides.
This book focuses on what a director must know to control the set, because this is the key to his success as a first time director. I am amazed at the amount of pages devoted to a director's responsibilities in preproduction and postproduction in the existing books on directing. As a director, I always looked forward to preproduction and especially postproduction because, when compared to the chaos of the production, they were utterly stress-free. If, during these phases in the making of a film, I ever found that I did not know something that was required of me, I simply told those who were expecting me to make a well-informed decision that I would “think it over and get back to them tomorrow” Then I would go home and call a friend who was an expert in