My Hollywood internship on The Untitled Ted Griffin Project lasted only 10 weeks, but crazily enough I managed to stay at Warner Brothers longer than the guy who hired me: Ted Griffin.
Griffin, the screenwriter of Matchstick Men and Ocean's Eleven, was directing his first motion picture, a takeoff on The Graduate starring Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner. Ted's midsummer firing—and the rapid shift in allegiance that took place when Rob Reiner was hired as the movie's new director—highlighted what I learned about the film industry: it resembles a feudal society, replete with oversize egos, big aspirations and its fair share of treachery. Here's what I saw at the fiefdom.
On my first day of work, Ted's assistant gave me a whirlwind tour of the walled studio lot. The movie sets we drive by were mingled with and almost indistinguishable from the buildings where people do actual work. We passed sets I knew from the screen—Gotham's city hall! The lake from Jurassic Park! Construction workers carried pieces into stages that have been used to shoot nearly every Warner movie and TV show: 70 years' worth of material, set all around the world, covering all imaginable variations on a theme, filmed in a single, albeit large, city block.
Ted's screenplay for the project seemed to be the only original screenplay Warner Brothers was producing at that time. By the summer of 2004, he'd spent two years writing the script and shepherding the film through preproduction. In his intricate story, an engaged woman named Sarah (played by Jennifer Aniston) learns that her mother may have inspired The Graduate by dithering between two suitors. One was Beau Burroughs, now a Silicon Valley billionaire, who seems to have been the model for Dustin Hoffman's character. Beau had an affair with Sarah's grand-mother (the Mrs. Robinson role, played by Shirley MacLaine). Sarah tracks down Beau (played by Kevin Costner) and is seduced by him. The next morning she meets his attractive son.
I spent most of my time in the production office, located on the former set of the classic Western spoof Blazing Saddles. The production office—the logistical center of a movie, coordinating among the various departments and the Warner brass—is a hectic place, especially for the interns, who do all the odd jobs that no one else wants. One of us had to sit by the unit production manager's door at all times because he would call out instructions. They were directed at no one in particular, but if he said, "Get me the location manager," and you happened to be within earshot, you had better get on the phone and call everyone and then call everyone's mother to look for him.
I was told not to make any decisions—not even how many boxes of staples to order—without asking someone first. There is a chain of command in the office, and you sometimes end up asking five people until you find someone who can answer your question. The line producer is at the very top of the chain, and one of the first things I realized is that I could never do his complicated budgeting job. He not only has to make sure that enough expensive equipment is deployed to film locations, but also has to approve whether Jennifer Aniston can charge a $5,000 haircut in Beverly Hills to the production.
Production assistants are at the bottom of the command chain. They work 16-hour days for little pay, answering phones and running errands around the Warner lot and throughout Hollywood. Everything they do is done with a smile. A typical PA job? Driving across town to make sure Shirley MacLaine isn't turned away from an appointment at Universal Studios because she doesn't have a pass for her dog.
The highlight of my internship was the day I drove Jennifer Aniston and Ted Griffin around in a golf cart. Jen (what we—her friends—call her) was chatty and very nice. By the time she got out of the golf cart, I was smitten. "It was nice meeting you," she said. "I'll see you on set!"
At the time I was not yet allowed to go on set.
Some weeks later, I did get to see one day of filming: a wedding scene shot at a church. Ted and the director of photography were the only people who seemed to be busy. Everyone else had a specific job to do, but there was a lot of standing around. Yet when I looked at the video playback machine, what I saw looked nothing like the scene before my eyes. With the right lighting, a bunch of guys standing around can be transformed into a movie.
The footage that Ted shot was thrown out the window when Rob Reiner took over as director. A production accountant estimated that the switch must have cost Warner in the ballpark of $15 million in contract buyouts, rebuilt sets, location rentals and a new contract for Reiner. Warner had not fired a director during production since 1980. The reason was never made public, but rumors were rampant.
One trade magazine published a rumor that Jen and the studio didn't find the dailies funny. Another had Kevin Costner screaming at Ted that he wasn't being lit well. The idea that Costner would have lighting suggestions seems pretty far-fetched, especially considering that he had yet to spend a single day on set. Perhaps any complaint registered with producer Steven Soderbergh, who allegedly was already angry at Ted for refusing to write Ocean's Twelve or more than one rewrite of The Untitled Ted Griffin Project. Tony Bill, an Oscar-winning producer and director who had a small role in the film, explained Ted's firing afterward by saying only that in the film industry, the biggest dog always wins.
Back in the production office, people were crossing their fingers that they would ride out the storm. People respected and liked Ted, but after Reiner took over, Ted's name only came up in whispers. Anything with Untitled Ted Griffin Project on it was destroyed or covered up. I helped apply 2,500 stickers to purchase orders that then read Otherwise Engaged, the new title. The title since has changed again; Rumor Has It is now scheduled to open in theaters at Christmastime.
The production coordinator told us, out of the side of his mouth, to pretend the past three months never happened. "Like when they use that thing in Men in Black to erase your memory" another intern asked.
"Exactly."
The way the studio treated Ted made me ponder my ambition to direct movies. In the course of my Hollywood summer, four different industry veterans told me I would be crazy to choose their line of work and said I would be better served going to law school. I have no idea why the law has such cachet at Warner Brothers, but my studio experience gave me a hint.
Still, I'm working on a script. I want to try to make my movie for a few thousand dollars, shooting on digital video instead of film. I would need one person to light, one to do makeup and hair, one to do sound, and I would be set.
Then again, maybe I should think about law. Or plastics.
SEAN HOWELL, '07, is an English major.
