Arts and Entertainment

'Whales' shoot stretched local stagehands to the limit

0105-feat-anc-stageEric Lizer spent his fall immersed in "Everybody Loves Whales."

Lizer is the business agent for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees' Local 918. In addition to serving as the union's contact for film work, he worked on set as a rigging electrician, one of about 150 Alaskans the union dispatched to build, dress and light sets, handle props and wardrobe, and provide hair and makeup services.

"There was so much work on this movie," Lizer said.

By the time production wrapped, he said, the union had processed something like $2 million in wages and nearly doubled in membership. Those who joined did so, Lizer said, because they want to be on the front lines when the next film shoot comes to town.

Whether there will be more movie work in Alaska remains to be seen, although it appears there are more projects coming down the pike, and soon. But while film production has been a windfall for local stagecraft professionals, it has at times made life a bit more challenging for Anchorage's performing arts organizations.

In the months "Everybody Loves Whales" spent filming in Anchorage, the local arts season forged ahead as scheduled -- but with lucrative movie jobs luring away experienced theater techs, stage crew members were suddenly scarce. The issue, local artists say, is one of a pool of talent that's already small and spread thin being spread even thinner.

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Tom Skore, chair of the theater department at the University of Alaska Anchorage, is used to some competition with local productions, but Hollywood's arrival has definitely been felt on campus. UAA staged two full-scale productions in October and November, overlapping with the filming of "Everybody Loves Whales," and felt the personnel pinch -- which is continuing now with the filming of the Jon Voight vehicle "Ghost Vision," on which some of Skore's students (who comprise UAA's company of actors and stagehands) have landed jobs. He's also had trouble filling an open staff position.

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"At one point we put out a call for a scene shop supervisor, and in an economy with 10 percent unemployment, at first, we got no hits," Skore said. "I do know that some of those people we would've naturally gone to ... they were working on building the sets for ('Whales')."

While he's honest about the situation, Skore is careful to be clear: Jobs are good.

"I don't even want to say it's a problem," he said, "but it is something that we have to deal with." And, he added, "My assumption is if we're experiencing this, so are other theater companies in town."

Shortage of stagehands was a ‘perfect storm'

"It was really tough, frankly," said Alaska Center for the Performing Arts president and chief operating officer Nancy Harbour. "All of our really well-trained leads pretty much went to work for the movie. We had a very, very hard time meeting our needs onstage."

Stagecraft is specialized, potentially dangerous work, Harbour said, and there are jobs that simply can't be done by novices. That leaves the Center in a bit of a catch-22; the people who do the work must be qualified, but there really isn't enough work to keep them all busy all the time.

"Stagehands cannot make a living working in this building," Harbour said. "I don't care, movies or not. The movies add some sort of pillows as people fall to the ground trying to make their mortgage payments."

Harbour described the situation as "the perfect storm" but said Lizer and the union did what they could to try to make things work.

"When we got into serious trouble, we screamed and yelled, and people double-shifted," she said. "Eric would run from working at the movie to try to fulfill something here in the building." The biggest challenge: Staffing "Mamma Mia!" for the Anchorage Concert Association. A full-scale Broadway production requires lots and lots of local help, and suddenly it wasn't easy to come by.

"I'm just glad, frankly, that we didn't have 'Lion King,'" Harbour said. The Disney musical enjoyed an extended run at the Center in the fall of 2009. "'The Lion King' and 'Whales' would've eaten each other alive."

A major part of the problem, Harbour said, is that the Center and local arts groups had no idea what the "Whales" shooting schedule was, so there was no way to compare it to their calendars and try to head off problems before they arose. Harbour said she hopes if the film industry continues to come to Alaska, local production teams will be more open to communicating with the Center.

"Those that were hired to sort of prepare for this movie were completely silenced. They were not allowed to tell anybody anything," Harbour said. "If they communicate with us, we'll keep it in appropriate confidence."

For stagehands, feast or famine

Here's the bad news: It could all happen again if a major production comes to town at the peak of the arts season.

"I don't have any magic bullet to give our other employers," Lizer said. Union members get to choose which jobs they take, and they may choose Hollywood. "This movie work is real lucrative, and the conditions have been real good."

For most of the members of Local 918, the theater is not a full-time job, particularly in the summer, when local stages are mostly dark. Lizer estimates about half of the union's 70 members have full-time jobs outside the theater. Some take seasonal work like commercial fishing in the summer and work theater jobs over the winter. Only a few, like Lizer, try to make a go of full-time theater work.


"You can't make a living," Harbour said. "You'll be lucky to make $25,000 (a year). So everybody's out there trying to figure out how to make it work. It is what it is, and frankly, we are no different than communities our size and smaller."

If Hollywood continues to make its way to Alaska, there seems to be no question: The state needs more skilled labor.

"Every destination that a production goes into and starts an industry, there's limited crew," said Bob Crockett, president of the Alaska Film Group. "Each time a production comes in, it trains people. 'Whales' came in and they had to bring in a lot of people, but they also hired a lot of Alaskans." Some of those Alaskans, he added, took the skills they learned on "Whales" and carried them over to jobs on "Ghost Vision."

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"There's got to be an effort to train people at least into entry-level positions, to be able to come in and work on a set, either as an intern or as a production assistant," Crockett said. "That's the way to do it on a fast track, and that's what we're in the process of doing right now."

With each new movie that comes to town, he explained, Alaska's film crew members will gain more experience, and as more entry-level workers get trained up, the pool of available skilled labor will grow. Neither Lizer nor Crockett expects a repeat of the fall and winter of 2010, when the local creative workforce was, to some extent, caught off guard by the sudden influx of employment.

"I think this first time, with this one job, is going to be the most difficult," Lizer said. "'Whales' was a big body-snatcher monster of a situation."

A push for more training

The University of Alaska Fairbanks theater department is advocating for the addition of a film studies major, and an Alaska-raised California producer is seeking a workforce development grant to start an apprenticeship program, according to a recent Fairbanks Daily News-Miner article. Harbour said she has spoken with three local groups about workforce development, although it's not as simple as it sounds.

"You just can't go to a vocational school and say, OK, let's train some lead carpenters," Harbour said. Stagecraft and film work require specialized skills.

There are existing opportunities for training, though. Along with colleague Deborah Schildt, Crockett formed a 501c(3) nonprofit, Alaska Crew Training, that offers affordable entry-level courses to quickly train up production assistants, camera assistants, grips, set dressers, sound engineers and even screenwriters. Crockett estimates 80 Alaskans have completed the program, which will welcome new classes in January and February.

Crockett and Schildt work with the American Film Institute to bring up instructors to teach specialized skills, and they have plans to expand their offerings. While some courses are recommended for professionals with prior training (licensed makeup artists, for example, who want to learn how to translate their skills to the screen), Alaska Crew Training also caters to those who just want to get a foot in the door with "Production Bootcamp 101," a crash course in film terminology, set procedures and etiquette to help prepare Alaskans for entry-level production assistant jobs.

IATSE is prioritizing training as well, Lizer said, investing some of the extra dues it collected last fall in education for both untrained workers and experienced union members.

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Expanding the labor pool doesn't come without risks. If film production jobs don't keep heading north, there's a chance Alaska could just end up with a lot more chronically underemployed creative professionals. There could be another issue: brain drain. "There's a part of us that worries about training all these people and then having them go off and work on the next three movies (outside Alaska)," Harbour said -- adding that it's still a risk she's willing to take.

A future for Hollywood on the Last Frontier

Crockett is optimistic about film's future in Alaska, although he says it's crucial the state extend film tax credits currently set to expire in 2013. Sen. Johnny Ellis, who sponsored the legislation creating those credits, plans to introduce legislation this session to extend the program another 10 years. "As long as that film incentive is in place, and it's a moderate to aggressive incentive program, which ours is, then we'll see production here," Crockett said. "If there's no incentive, there's no industry."

In states like Louisiana and New Mexico, it took somewhere between three and five years after tax incentives were implemented to achieve stability and sustainability. Crockett said he thinks 2011 will be "a fruitful year" for Alaska's infant film industry.

"I'm aware of several projects that are trying to come into here in the spring and fall of 2011," Crockett said. "We've made great strides, but it's a big industry. It's very competitive and it takes time."

In a perfect world, Harbour said, the movies keep coming and Anchorage trains up enough qualified stagehands to keep everyone busy in film and stage work without glutting the market. Three years from now, she said, the community should be past the kinds of problems encountered last fall. No one should expect to get rich, though, she warned.

"I don't think there's going to be enough of either to make anybody $60,000 a year," she said. "Stagehands do it because they love it and they're able to get other work that actually feeds their families. These are artists."

Contact Maia Nolan at maia(at)alaskadispatch.com.

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