A few weeks ago I got a phone call from my friend Ethan at about 3am on a Saturday night / Sunday morning. He was finishing a production job in the city and one of the guys on the crew was frantically looking around for someone to run the audio for an event that was taking place on Monday (i.e., the next day).
Evidently, this guy realized he was in over his head and was freaking out. I have no idea why this epiphany happened only 30 hours before showtime.
I didn’t know what the event was, only that it was in the Bronx (that’s New York for the uninformed), we had to set up Sunday and the event started Monday at 9am. Naturally, I said sure. Oh, and the event was outside, in a park. And it was supposed to rain Monday.
So Sunday morning we start to negotiate price. Not with the guy Ethan was working with on Saturday night but with the guys who were actually producing (and I use the term liberally as you will discover below) the Bronx event. But the negotiations went through the Saturday night guy – i.e., Ethan would talk to him. Hang up. He would then call the producers. Hang up. Call Ethan Back. Hang up….you get the drift.
These guys completely tried to low ball us in their effort to ruin our entire Sunday (my alternative was to spend the day lounging with my girlfriend) and Monday to lug an enormous amount of expensive gear around the city. The kicker was that the guy we were talking to wanted a cut from us for “introducing” us to the job. His price…$1,000. So whatever we charged, he wanted $1,000 off the top. “Please give me $1,000 for my incompetence and I will step aside and let you save my ass.”
The good news is that when someone is really screwed, and you could care less whether you work with them or not, you can sit back and relax until the sweat starts running down their brow and they crack. Eventually, they conceded to our price. Keep in mind, our price was totally reasonable. It was their starting offer that was laughable. We weren’t trying to screw them. NYC production is a small world. It pays to go the extra mile for people and do a good job.
So on Sunday Ethan and I brought his truck down to our studio to pack up a whole bunch of speakers, subwoofers, stage monitors, microphones, mixing board, equalizer, cables, mic stands, etc. We called in a favor from one of Ethan’s friends (keep in mind this is Sunday, the day no one is open) who owns a production rental company in the Bronx for some last pieces of gear. He was in Puerto Rico, so he gave us his 2 son’s cell phone numbers. One of them drove to the warehouse to let us in to grab some mic stands and back-up speakers.
We got to the venue and it turned out to be an event for Citgo, the Venezuelan state-owned oil company. Citgo was giving away something like $3 million in grants to a few different Bronx organizations in a very public way. I immediately thought to a commercial I had seen a few weeks before showing big oil tankers heading to America from Venezuela – heating oil donations from Venezuela to the poor of America. At the time I thought to myself “how awesome, a big public F-U from Chavez to Bush.” It’s not like the US government can, without looking really bad, turn back aid, no matter who it’s from, to help people in need. And to people in need, they don’t care what kind of political strings come with aid, as long as the aid helps them feed their families, heat their homes, and take care of them when they’re sick.
Well, this was the big PR event for that initiative. “From the hearts of Venezuela to the hearths of America.” How cool. And they only blew about $100,000 to show off their $3,000,000 donation. I love when big companies spend as much money showing themselves giving money away as the amount of money they’re actually giving away.
So we arrive on site and the guys producing the event greeted us and thanked us profusely for coming through on such short notice. One of them then grabbed me to show me where we can draw power from. He brought me to the back side of a trailer on cinder blocks and pointed to one lonely 110 volt edison jack. The jack already had a heavy duty extension cord coming out of it, tunneling underneath the trailer, and powering, on the other side, a large tent with about ten 60 inch plasma TVs. Now, for those of you who don’t know much about power, I’m sure you at least know that when you plug a bunch of things into one circuit, the whole circuit blows.
So imagine my surprise when this guy told me that not only would the lonely 110 volt jack be powering his plasma screens, but the entire sound system for a band and hip hop group…oh, and the chairman of Citgo.
This was my Penny and Inspector Gadget moment. For those of you who don’t know, Inspector Gadget was a cartoon crime fighter when many people currently in their twenties and thirties (present company included) were little. He would go around thwarting the bad guys in every episode. Kind of like Scooby and the gang. What no one knew, except for the TV viewer, was that Inspector Gadget was a bumbling idiot and it was his niece Penny (who was about 11 years old) who really solved all the crimes. She would lurk in the shadows and basically set Inspector Gadget (unbeknownst to him) up for success. Without her he would miss clues, run into walls, knock over crystal vases, trip and fall down, and miss the bad guys.
I tried to explain to this guy that his event was going to be a giant disaster come show time when every piece of equipment was turned on and hitting a single circuit. He didn’t really get it. We talked to his boss who kind of got it and agreed that it would be a good idea to have an additional power source. He told us to do whatever it takes to make it happen.
We were supposed to start setting our system up at noon. Of course, we can’t do so until they set the stage up. So noon turns to one turns to two turns to….six. They finally built the stage so we could actually set things up.
At about 8 one of the guys comes up to us and asks us if we can get them a podium. Confused, I asked what he meant. They already set the stage up. He said they needed something for the speakers to stand in front of…oh, a lectern. Strictly speaking, a podium is a raised platform on which you stand to give a speech; the piece of furniture on which you place your notes and behind which you stand is a lectern. Production 101…
Now call me crazy, but if you’ve known that you’re going to produce a major event for a huge company where the CEO is attending, wouldn’t you set this stuff up earlier than the night before?!?! Next task: find a lectern at 8pm on Sunday night for a 9am Monday start time. Oh, and finish setting the sound system up (in the dark) that we could only start working on at 6. Nice…
At about 11:30 Ethan and I, having finished setting up, headed to Armonk (about 30 minutes north of the Bronx) to visit Stew to pick up 3 movie quiet generators. We loaded them in the truck, drove back to the city, passed out, woke up at 5, and headed back to the Bronx to set up for the event.
We set everything up, fired up the generators and had power for all of our gear. Then the press started to show up at about 8:30. They needed power. So we powered them. Then the producers decided the stage needed to be lit because it was too dark. 1000-Watt Arri lights? No problem. Plug ‘em right in.
To wrap this long meandering story up, the event went off without a hitch, as you can see in the video we produced above. The kicker…the event producers didn’t see any reason why they should pay us extra for the generators that we secured at midnight the night before their giant distaster waiting to happen of an event for a major oil company in front of the press and about 300 people.
Lesson learned? Get a commitment to price up front. Because once the event is over, your leverage disappears and the customer becomes awfully forgetful of how you saved their ass and made them look good to their customer.
