Most of you will know me from previous blogs on this site, and most of the time those blogs tend towards contentious subject matter. If this is your first time reading me, welcome. My name is Tennyson E. Stead and I’m a writer and director who has worked in disciplines ranging from film finance to gaffing and grip.

As a screenwriter, script doctor, and ghostwriter, I’ve written more than 50 screenplays and I’ve been paid for a sizable percentage of those. My directing and editing have won awards, and I take great pride in the strength of my craft and the strength of my community. Both are the result of monumental labor, a good deal of which was invested under extraordinary circumstances.

My own story is summarized more comprehensively in previous Stage 32 blogs than it will be in this article. For the sake of this conversation, it’s enough to say that I was crippled for the better part of a decade, often losing the use of my arms, legs, voice, and senses, because volunteering on a set that was trying to shoot war scenes on a microbudget got me hit in the head with a sword. In 2021, I even heard news about two separate productions, spearheaded by people I once referred to as trusted friends and colleagues, where the strength of our community was knowingly and willfully put in danger.

Today’s article is about cutting corners with the safety and well-being of our cast and crew, in exchange for production value above and beyond the constraints of our budget.

IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME

When a person has power over other people, rationalizing the abuse of those people is the easiest thing in the world to do. When we’re producing or directing a film, or when we’re running a department, any effort we make to push the crew for extra production value is backed by centuries of showbusiness work ethic. Asking a little more of our people, and then a little more after that, is viewed as both necessary and honorable. Most of the time, people will volunteer themselves for extra work and extra risk, in order to prove their devotion to the production and the industry.

At the same time, nothing earns a filmmaker more immediate acclaim and attention than defying the technical expectations of their budget. When we see stunts and effects that we know a film didn’t have the budget to pull off, let alone pull off with the appropriate safety measures, our first impulse is to tell everyone involved what an amazing job they did. We assume that nobody got hurt, or killed. If someone did get hurt or killed, people wouldn’t want to know.

While we have gotten very good at passing judgment on those few cases of on-set injury or death where enough information gets public to catch the interest of the press or social media, we studiously ignore the systemic roots of these injuries. As filmmakers, we don’t want anything to interfere with our innocent, hopeful plans to put something on the screen that draws attention to our capabilities and potential. Until something tragic happens, we’ll keep telling ourselves that the purity of our creative intentions separates us from those vile, notorious sets where someone did get hurt or killed for the sake of someone else’s ego. If we should wind up killing someone on our own set, I can tell you from experience that we will use that same creative purity as a rallying cry while we urge people to keep quiet about what happened, how, and why.

When an accident happens like the one on Alec Baldwin’s Rust, or like what happened to Brandon Lee on The Crow, we point fingers specifically to deflect from a systemic failure to care for one another in which we are, ourselves, complicit. What if I told you that there are A-List directors that average at least one fatality on every film they shoot? What if I told you that experienced stunt people know to avoid those sets… and that these directors solve that problem by hiring less experienced stunt people and creating an even greater risk?

This is normal! We just never talk about it.

THE HUMAN COST

From schlock cinema to the biggest budgets in Hollywood, we have grown comfortable and loose with the human cost of creating literal “bang for our buck.” In the aftermath of my own accident, the biggest problem the production company faced wasn’t my healthcare cost, or dealing with the safety oversights that made the accident likely, or the legal ramifications of pretending that someone was a stunt coordinator when they weren’t, or not having an EMT on set, or any of that. Even with their total lack of preparation, the show’s producers had no trouble passing those liabilities down to me.

No. When it came to the consequences faced by the people responsible for my injury, the biggest problem was the inconvenience I caused by surviving the accident in the first place. Why did nobody take me to the emergency room? Simply put, everyone was scared. Nobody had the emotional, legal, or medical tools to deal with what had just happened. More than anything, people were just hoping the problem would go away. If I had died of a stroke at any point in that process, and I probably should have, the production would have taken a moment of silence and gone unfazed about its business.

My stubborn insistence on living, and on getting help, was holding the production back. They knew it. I knew it. That awkwardness hangs in every conversation I have with those people.

After all, they were only trying to make something amazing. Nobody should have to live with another person’s tragic story hanging around their neck, just because an accident got out of control. Right?

Bear in mind, please, that I’m not saying these are bad people! What I am saying is that this is what it takes to rationalize the things that need to be said and done, in order to cover up an accident for the sake of a production. When someone gets hurt on a set, we stop thinking of that person as human being in order to protect the people who are still working.

Emotionally and ethically, this makes it very easy for producers and directors to take big risks. If the victims and survivors of these accidents stop being “real people” the moment they get hurt, then on some unconscious level, nobody ever has to pay the price for the fact that the money and resources weren’t there to do things in the right way.

BACK TO THE POINT

Let’s talk about the two productions from 2021 that I’m writing about today. In both cases, these productions were managed with a disregard for COVID compliance, as well as for payroll transparency and follow-through. Maybe these don’t seem like dire issues, and certainly not when compared to my own story… but they stem from a similarly systemic lack of regard for one another’s safety and well-being.

On the first production, none of the budget that was promised for COVID compliance was provided. No COVID supplies were delivered on set. After a week of shooting, half the production was too sick to work. When they wrapped early, entire paychecks were withheld, with no explanation aside from “We don’t have it.” Reshoots and pickups for this disaster are already being planned!

Before you even ask, I can tell you with 100% confidence that SAG has reports on all of this.

In the case of the other production, COVID compliance was considered optional. Reaching out under the banner of friendship and asking for favors, this director personally put contracts in front of people without disclosing some extremely irregular payroll arrangements. Then, when people reached out for information about their paychecks, he held the contracts over their heads, explained that it was out of his hands, and told them that the executive producer wasn’t going to be distributing any production money for a few months.

A FEW MONTHS! People need to pay their rent! While this director correctly pointed out that the details of this unconventional payment structure were in those contracts, this man felt no pressure to mention the unique problems these contracts presented when he was begging his friends to help him out.

No. This is not how showpeople treat one another. How two completely separate productions, both helmed by people I love and used to trust, managed to parade these abuses before my eyes literally back-to-back is… certainly not a mystery. I know how it happened. I just told you how it happened.

Thanks to them, I’m mad enough to write about it.

THE BOTTOM LINE

There are two points I want to drive home, in this essay. First, when a person is in a position of leadership, we are accountable for the safety and well-being of the people working under us. Screwing with COVID compliance is an unacceptable breach of that trust. So is screwing with people’s paychecks. Both of these directors are lucky that nobody died, or lost their homes, as a result of their scramble for production money and production value. Even more importantly, both of these directors relied pretty much exclusively on luck to see them through that risk!

Secondly, both of these people know my story intimately. Up close and personal, these people have watched a worst-case scenario unfold when it comes to risk management in film. Having seen that, without even flinching, these friends of mine turned around and welcomed the very same catastrophes, ethical dilemmas, legal crisis and human cost into the lives of their casts and crews.

How dare they? How dare they.

SAFETY FIRST

In every respect, this business is about people. Our job, fundamentally, is to empower a cast of actors to perform for an audience. If something is bad for the people in that equation, then it’s bad for the production! Putting people’s lives in harm’s way is bad for the production! No production is worth a human life. Moreover, putting people’s paychecks and their livelihoods in jeopardy is bad for the production!

Always, the people who do these things are bad for the production. Taking advantage of people is not “being resourceful.” Putting people at risk, instead of finding the tools you actually need, is not “indie spirit.”

On the contrary, it’s a violation of the deepest, most sacred contract in showbusiness. In most of the cultures on this planet, for as long as history can remember, showpeople have been outcasts. All we have is each other!

If one of us is treating showpeople as expendable, they don’t care about the show. All they care about is how they look, and how the production reflects on them. What’s scariest about all this, and what we all need to be aware of, is the fact that from our biggest blockbuster sets to the indiest of indies, there are systems in place that help a person like that walk away from their accountability for the things they do and the people they hurt.

We need to stop glorifying these people. When you see these people, walk away. I don’t care what consequences there are for doing so, I don’t care how much power that person has, and I don’t care how much it seems like that particular production is likely to wrap without an accident or incident of some kind. Trust me when I tell you that it’s not worth the risk. Walk away!

Just as importantly, we need to remember that this industry has means of lulling us into a false sense of security. Stay disciplined, when it comes to the safety and well-being of those around you. Make it your job to take care of the people on your productions. If it happens to be someone else’s job to take care of them as well, so much the better!

PARTING WORDS

If you don’t have the money you need to pull off a given production, or a given shot, don’t solve that problem by taking chances with the well-being of your cast and crew. Make a smaller film, and make a better one while you’re at it. When people look at a production that achieved surprising visuals by overextending its budget, they call that filmmaker creative, innovative, and resourceful… but they’re wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Such spectacle gets achieved through an abuse of power that belittles our most sacred ethics. In an industry where people are willing to throw themselves in harm’s way for the sake of the project, it’s very easy to use that power to glorify ourselves and advertise our “creative vision.” There’s nothing “resourceful” or “innovative” about using people. Don’t do it. There is a cost, and that cost is one another.

In more than three thousand years of showbusiness history, the only sustainable reason for doing this work has been the people beside us and the people we play for. There is nothing else that matters. Don’t ever let yourself forget it.

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