Shawn Shea
Nowhere in the job description for a 1st AD working in comedy television does it mandate making crewmembers laugh, but it sure doesn’t hurt. Just ask Shawn Shea, whose production career on shows like One Day at a Time, Home Improvement, and The War at Home, among others, has included almost as many yucks behind the camera as when the red light went on.
“I like to make up songs to quiet down the crew,” she deadpans, offering up an example that features War at Home director, Andy Cadiff, in the opening bars. “Oh, Andy, oh, oh, Andy,” she croons. “People stopped socializing and went back to work after hearing that song,” Shea laughs. “I wonder if it’s too late to get a copyright?”Shea’s gifts for corralling comedy crews are most likely genetic: her father, former DGA President Jack Shea, has a directing resume stretching back to The Bob Hope Show, with hit sitcoms along the way that include Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Growing Pains and Designing Women.
Shea is quick to dispel the conventional wisdom that comedy crews have it easy. “There are many days when those of us who have made a living on multi-camera sitcoms know we have the best deal in town,” she acknowledges. “But there are many more days when we have too much show to shove into too few hours and are working our butts off just to get it all done.”
Case in point was the time Shea and her seasoned stage crew left the comfort of their Home Improvement studio set to shoot rafting scenes on the Kern River in the Sierras. “One minute the raft holding the entire audio crew was there,” Shea explains, “and then suddenly, the next minute they capsized and went over. They were not very happy.”
Shea says everyone on the set expects ADs to have “magic heads,” meaning they can answer any question, anytime, anywhere, about anything. “I don’t have a magic head,” she laughs, “and I have the screw-ups to prove it.”
Like the time Jonathan Taylor Thomas’ character on Home Improvement was having a birthday party on the show and the producer instructed Shea not to have child extras that towered over the diminutive young actor.
“Jonathan was exactly 4-foot-8. No problem,” Shea recalls.
So she called central casting for extras and said that under no circumstances should anyone be over 48 inches. “They kept calling me back to say they were having trouble booking that call and would need to go much younger in age, and I just said, ‘Do whatever you have to do,’” she recounts. “When they all came in on the rehearsal day I realized my mistake and just started laughing—4-foot-8, not 48 inches.”
The last laugh will most likely come from Jack Shea, whose pride in seeing Shawn take to television like a fish to water has been an ongoing delight. “All he wants me to do is direct,” Shea chuckles, “and I say, no really, Dad, it’s fine. I like being an AD.”
Michele Imperato-Stabile
Not only did producer/UPM Michele Imperato Stabile never get the memo about the perils of working with kids and animals, she’s actually become a bit of a specialist in both notoriously tough genres. After a decade working with Mike Nichols on films like Primary Colors and The Birdcage, Imperato Stabile began a run of talking animal films—Dr. Dolittle 2, two Garfield features, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the upcoming Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel—productions that would no doubt make W.C. Fields blush.
“I was planning to go to vet school,” says Imperato Stabile, a lifelong animal lover who lives on a Ventura County farm filled with horses and dogs, “until I took a job on a movie my uncle Ray [Hartwick] was a UPM on called Out of Bounds. I liked working on production budgets so much that I never applied to vet school.”
Veterinary medicine’s loss has been the movie industry’s gain. Not only has Imperato Stabile saved studios money by hiring the best possible animal trainers, she’s figured out four-legged-friendly ways to get the job done.
Initially, she recalls, “the studio [Fox] wanted to do Garfield at a price, so they had us bring in a real cat in a fat suit to audition for the role.I knew there was no way you could train a cat for the part and that we would have to go CGI. But a roomful of adults standing around a conference table staring at a kitty in a fat suit was pretty comical, nevertheless.”
For Dr. Dolittle 2, she faced the mother of all scheduling problems—Mother Nature herself. “We had to start late in the year to accommodate Eddie Murphy’s schedule,” she remembers, “so by the time shooting began, the bear was going into hibernation. So to keep the bear awake, we had to keep the stage really cold the entire time. We were all bundled up in coats while the trainers fed him sugary treats.”
While Imperato Stabile says the talking animal movies have been technically tricky, it was another project from a much different genre that accounted for her toughest production challenge to date. Last year’s romantic teen vampire film, Twilight, which she also executive produced, was a low-budget feature shot on a tight schedule and demanded roughly 90 percent exteriors with a very specific location requirement. “We couldn’t shoot in rain for obvious reasons, and we couldn’t have sunlight because the vampires would sparkle.”
Rich Gonzales
Ask television crews from hit comedies like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or The Office about Rich Gonzales, and they’ll probably mention his long career as a 2nd AD. But ask any parent with a kid under 10 years old, and their response is likely to be Capt. Undergarments, an award-winning series of short films that Gonzales shot, directed, edited, produced and starred in. Dig even deeper and his name also comes up as an actor and stage manager in local theater, and as an extra in features and television.
“As an AD, everything has been made easier by having worn so many hats in the industry,” explains Gonzales, “whether I’m setting background, running base camp, or getting stars to the set on time.”
Having worked primarily on comedies, Gonzales notes that it’s not all laughs on the set. “Great comics, like Steve Carell on The Office, are often pretty straightforward and low-key when they are prepping their characters. They treat comedy as a very serious business that takes all their concentration to get it just right, and that attention to detail, in my experience, has always filtered down to the ADs.”
Little Britain USA, HBO’s version of the hit U.K. sketch comedy show, posed a different challenge. In the tradition of Monty Python or Benny Hill, the show’s two comics play nearly all of the characters, sometimes spending up to four hours in prosthetic makeup preparation. “I created these detailed charts and graphs that showed how long it would take for each makeup change,” says Gonzales. “Working with the director, actors, and makeup artists, we’d do shooting schedules based on how long it would take the guys to get in and out of makeup for each character. We attacked it like a battle plan because there were so many changes in any given day.”
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, his current show, is shot with multiple digital cameras that change setups after a few takes to keep the acting fresh. “You have to set your background quickly and make sure your extras know what spots to hit,” Gonzales explains, “because the last thing you want is to slow everyone down with retakes. The trick is to make your background live behind the main action, but not be so big that it’s distracting.”
Given his own background in front of and behind the camera, tasks like these come easily to Gonzales, who says creating entertainment in any form has always been a part of his life. “I’ve became very good at communicating the director’s vision to all the other departments, and creat-ing a plan each day to accomplish that goal.”
By David Geffner
Photo by Brian Davis