Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  He got to hang around on set, see how it all worked, the endless set-ups, the construction of a filmic narrative shot by painstaking shot. Exciting moving pictures created by a process that seemed paralytically slow and terminally boring. The magic of being where the action supposedly was quickly palled: everything happened at snail’s pace, and you were out in all weathers, exposed to the elements, eternally waiting for the sun to go behind the clouds or emerge from them. It quickly struck Will that if you weren’t the man on set, the name at the top of the call-sheet, the director, or maybe the DOP, or at least the sergeant-major first assistant director, you were at best a tradesman or, more likely, a labourer, a navvy, loading and unloading lights or cameras or tracks, setting them up, laying the cables to the generator truck, driving and parking the trucks, controlling traffic, getting coffee and food for spoilt fucking actors. He soon realised that the real action was happening back at the office and at the bars and restaurants around town. That was where the relationships were forged, where the networking with the ad agencies was done, where the deals were made that put all those people and equipment and celluloid into motion. And Branko and his father were the ones who made that happen.

  Instead of putting him down in the ground-floor production office, Den had set up a temporary desk for Will in their open-plan mezzanine office, where he could see and hear his father and Branko doing their stuff, working their contacts on the phones and face-to-face – though a lot of that happened outside the office, at venues he wasn’t initially invited to. That had changed on his seventeenth birthday, when Branko took him to a bar where naked women swam in a tank and there was cocaine on the bar tab. He knew Den hadn’t wanted him there, but for Branko it was some kind of a test, that Will passed, right before he passed out. It was a lesson: if you had Mexican marching powder on tap, pass on the tequila.

  Watching Den and Branko in operation was eye-opening. They worked the big ad agencies like a couple of sheep dogs: Branko the eye dog, the header, and Den the yappy huntaway. Will began to see the layers, and realise it was all about the layers, how they worked, the connections between them.

  Within the big agencies, there was always a head of TV, usually older, often an ex-producer, who wielded huge power. The HTV took the brief and budgets from his suits to his team of creatives. He might have a few to choose from, but the creatives always worked in pairs, always, an art director and a writer. That team might bond for life, move from agency to agency as their stocks rose. The creatives were gold and Den was the miner. His smile was his pick-axe and his background as a writer his shovel. He knew these guys – they were all guys – he and Branko had rubbed up against most of them round the traps. And they’d done exactly the same kind of work before they set up Flame, Branko art directing and Den copywriting.

  From their position inside one of the big agencies, they could see the eye-watering budgets the production companies were working with, and decided they could get a share of it if they jumped the fence and set up a hybrid agency-cum-production company. Besides, Den wanted to direct and the production company gave him the vehicle.

  The hybrid concept didn’t work – the industry was accustomed to a separation of powers – and the boutique agency part quickly withered while the production company took off and began minting it. By the time Will got there, Den had largely given up directing and was working in tandem with Branko, feeding the machine: wrangling the agencies, working the system of mutual grace and favours, the nexus of connections where the main players ate and drank, snorted and sometimes even fucked together. Back then, in endless long lunches or after-work drinks, they actually seemed to enjoy one another’s company.

  Will pulled into the lane to turn right from Ponsonby into Richmond. Four back, Will watched the first car miss the green. The bastard would be texting, unforgivable when you’re the first in line. Will hit the horn in frustration, but too late: the first car got round, followed by two others, leaving Will stuck on the red. He took a deep breath, tried to calm himself, wondered how he’d ended up such a lone wolf at Flame.

  While they divided their responsibilities, Branko and Den often overlapped, and were the perfect combination. Branko big and bluff with a face like a cliff, a face that showed complete assurance even when he was nervous or worried, even when, ten years later, he was diagnosed with type 2 Diabetes, and they started amputating bits and pieces of his extremities. Never seemed to have a worry in the world, and then he died. But Branko had been the best, the straight man to Den’s smiling gadfly. Will had studied them closely, trying to pick up whatever he could. What were they really good at? Disarming people, Will decided. Making people feel comfortable. Making them happy to be sharing the space. And a big part of that was simply ridiculous, when you analysed it. They knew their shit, sure, spoke the ad industry patois, targeted the guys who counted, but the other big thing they did was tell jokes. Really well. They made people laugh, Branko and Den. The mystery was where they found them – jokes were open-open-source long before the internet. They seemed to drop from the ether. Way before email became popular, there seemed to be a network of people, men, who needed to hear the latest joke before getting down to business. For Branko and Den, once heard, a joke was never forgotten. Whatever the topic under discussion, it gave them a segue to the latest they’d heard, and when all else failed, they had some Default Classics – that’s what they called them – which, even if the particular audience had heard them before, seemed, like Fawlty Towers, to improve on reprise. So Will heard some of these classics many times: The Irish Zookeeper and the Orang-utan and Crocodile Dundee Walks into an Outback Pub with a Pet Crocodile on his Shoulder, and The Babysitting Gorilla and Roger, the Last Great White Hunter and The Girl Who Got a Job with a Scottish Laird. It gradually dawned on Will that there was a science behind what Branko and Den would do. They knew an essential truth: that people, no matter how gifted and cool and talented and rich and entitled, liked to laugh. And there was always laughter when Branko and Den were holding court, and the HTVs and creatives, talented as they were, cool as they liked to imagine they were, couldn’t resist a laugh. He remembered his father once telling him that when people opened their mouths to laugh, they were at their most vulnerable, and there was no telling what else you could slide in there.

  Will couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed. Times had changed somewhere back there at the turn of the century. He hadn’t picked up on it soon enough because there still seemed to be so much money around: there were still expense-account lunches that lasted all afternoon and kicked on into coke-fuelled parties, there were still $100,000 dollar days, big sets and art department budgets and travel.

  Will had taken all the big meetings with Branko and Den, sat there and felt the tension as the HTV introduced them to rooms of maybe twenty people, up to six each from the client and the agency, assorted hangers-on. Then Branko and Den had the floor, to live or die, with these people hanging on every word. It was show and tell. Branko and Den might have storyboards, or just a script. If Den was directing, it was his show. If he wasn’t, they’d have brought the director with them, but he might be articulate or he might be a visual maestro who had trouble stringing two words together. Branko went first, telling them why the money was so wisely spent with them, they’d see every dollar up on screen, then hand it over to Den, with or without the director. Den would sell the script, tell them what it really meant, describe the pictures, show them how it would work. He’d act out all the parts, the gunslinger, the child, the naif, the beautiful lover. He was so convincing that Will was often dismayed when he attended the first read-through of the same script with the actors. They sounded flat, wooden, they couldn’t read: the words that had sung when Den did it in front of the HTV and the suits and the creatives, died a death round the big read-through table. ‘You’re so much better than them,’ he once whispered to his father when they broke from the table for coffee after one of the disasters.

  �
��I know the material,’ Den told him. ‘I wrote it. But in a week’s time, I’ll be at the same level, no matter how many times I rehearse it, but they’ll have found all sorts of nuances and angles, and be a hundred times better. That’s the difference.’

  And Den was right, mostly: he was right if he and Branko had made the right decisions about the director and the cast and if the script was up to it. A mistake in one of those elements could tarnish gold in the other two. That was what the agencies saw in Flame back then: a safe pair of hands who could mould those elements into a magic alchemy.

  But things began to change, tighten. Good ideas were leached through ten layers of market research till all the juice was gone. Clients began interfering in the creative process. Production budgets shrank. Will had seen Branko get it dreadfully wrong once and have to drop his budget estimation by half a million on the spot, in a nanosecond, right in front of an incredulous HTV. ‘How the fuck will you do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Branko had said. ‘What I do know is that we will do it. For you.’ But the margins were getting stringy, even then.

  He remembered Branko telling him after one pitching session that ‘the only thing worse than not getting the job is getting the job’. At the time, Will had no idea what Branko was talking about, he put it down to the fact that he was ailing, already terminal. Now he knew. It was a tough business. You might be exhausted, you might be traumatised, you might be creatively bereft, but you couldn’t stop, and then, having quoted skinny to get the gig, you had to find a way to deliver what you’d promised.

  Will had a recurring nightmare where he was out in a wheat field, maybe at Stan’s farm, though he’d never seen Te Kurahau and had no idea whether they even grew wheat. But Will was stumbling through the chest-high grain, trying to run, pursued by one of those massive combine harvesters that had a clown’s exaggerated lips round a huge black hole where the wheat disappeared. As the thing closed on him, Will kept tearing off bundles of wheat and throwing it into the machine’s giant maw, trying to slow it down, keep feeding it before it ate him. Will was real but the machine was an animation. The last time it was so graphic that Will had woken in a sweat.

  At some point, Flame became a liability, rather than safe pair of hands. The big agencies wanted cool. They wanted the new boutique production companies, Robber’s Dog, Sweet Shop, Curious, not old-school diehards like Branko and Den. The jokes had already lost their currency. When Branko died, Den lost the will to continue and Will saw an opportunity to reignite Flame. He’d done his best, took a punt on new directors, subsidised a few of them with film stock – those were the days! – and free post-production into music videos or short films to give them a calling card, but the directors who were any good fucked off to features, never felt they owed anyone and never came back.

  Will had been hoping that Branko’s daughter Yelena, by then an accounts suit at one of the agencies, would take over her father’s share. She was smart and ambitious, and would have been the perfect partner. Too smart. She didn’t want a bar of Flame, and Will had to persuade Claudia to mortgage the family home to pay her out. He’d had a stark choice: go it alone, or fold. He could see that, yes, he’d been sucked in by the glamorous peripherals, but the truth was he knew nothing else. Credit to Yelena, she saw what Will couldn’t, that the lucrative business model was at the end of its cycle, that the corporates were about to smother creativity, and that technology, available to anyone, would kill whatever was left. Had Den known what was coming? There was no point in asking him now. In any case, the die was cast. Will had borrowed to pay out Yelena for Branko’s share, and Yelena had taken Will’s money and put it down as a deposit on the building Flame occupied.

  Back then it’d been a nondescript warehouse/office in an unfashionable cul-de-sac at the bottom of Richmond Road. Now there were lights controlling the entrance from Richmond Road, due to heavy traffic drawn by a posh boutique supermarket, three cafes, a shop selling faux Italian furniture and Euro toilet fittings and a huge hardware depot. He should have known: real estate was where it was at. He would have been better off sitting on his arse doing nothing, coining the tax-free capital gains on his house, rather than mortgaging it to run a business. Yelena was now his landlord and Flame was late with the rent, as with everything else.

  There were two parking bays, clearly marked for staff only, in front of the double garage doors of the Flame Inc. warehouse, both taken, by the cars of his next two appointments, for whom he was already late. He kerbed the left front rim of the Sportage trying to park it against the footpath further along, and cursed the arrogant fucks who had taken his place. He hit the wheel with his fists, then grabbed his mobile, searched for the tow-truck number, imagined for one heavenly moment the faces of his lawyer and accountant when, after harassing him, they’d find their overpriced steel chariots in the can. Sorry, Rod, he’d say, and sorry whoever-the-fuck the current iteration of his accountant was, so sorry, the tow-trucks round here are quite predatory. Can’t do a thing, you’ll have to just pay the fine. He enjoyed the moment, then put the phone away. He needed to keep his cool, be confident and ingratiating, convince his advisers, who should know better, that he was solvent.

  Will rubbed his eyes, tucked in his shirt and readied himself for the heat. There were no choices left: he’d jumped into this saddle, and now had to ride this broken nag until it staggered across the finishing line or died underneath him. He had to do what Den would have done: deal with the lawyer and accountant, then take Nick Preston to dinner, spend money on him, flatter him, play to his ego. Wine him, dine him, butter the bastard up, butter himself up if necessary, bend over the table and present his anus. Whatever it took. He had to do it quickly, before Anton got in Nick’s ear. And before . . . At what point did the smell of fear metamorphose into the stink of failure?

  ***

  THE interior of the warehouse was exactly as Branko and Den had configured it nearly forty years ago. A utilitarian production house, with the central well dominated by a huge table, around which a cast and director might fit for a read-through, or the heads of department, camera, lighting, wardrobe and art might gather, crossing the floor from their partitioned spaces around the perimeter. It was open plan, big connecting spaces built for fifty-odd people to collaborate closely in. As Will made for the mezzanine at the far end, his leather soles rapped the polished concrete floor and echoed back its emptiness.

  Under the looming mezzanine, there was storage on one side, containing all kinds of production equipment, much of it now redundant: Branko had been an early adopter and an even quicker rejector. On the other side was a big editing suite, with all the bells and whistles, bought in better times when it had been state-of-the-art technology. Now Will could download software onto his MacBook that would do much the same things.

  Will tried to remember when the suite had last been fully utilised. That $300,000 road safety TVC, Christ, when was that? Last year? Year before last? The edit had gone well. By day three there was real consensus between Will and the director and the HTV and creatives from the agency. In fact there was genuine delight – the HTV actually used the word ‘genius’ – and so much back-slapping and high-fiving that shoulders were in danger of dislocation. The client, the CEO of a fucking transport agency who’d personally okayed the script and the director’s storyboard, was wheeled in for the final sign-off. He sat there and started clicking his tongue, then said at the end, ‘This is nothing like what I was expecting.’ The HTV from the agency immediately threw Flame under the bus, telling the CEO that he hadn’t thought it was quite right either. And who was that HTV? Nick Preston, the ectomorphic fuck.

  Another production came to mind, some years earlier, a shoot for a mobile provider. The HTV brought in three underlings, kids who’d done a marketing degree at Vic and had no knowledge of the world, no knowledge of film, no knowledge of edits. It was clearly the first time any of them had stepped foot inside an editing suite. This
HTV played the fine-cut through three times, offered no opinion, then turned to the kids and said, ‘What do you think?’ They knew they were fucked. ‘That was interesting, that was fascinating,’ they said, and the clever-dick HTV asked ‘Why?’ Will had watched this absurdity play out, thinking this guy’s company has paid 200K so that this dick can use a TVC to demonstrate his superiority over some pimply-faced graduates. Who was that turd? Nick fucking Preston. Will felt sick.

  Guarding the stairs to the offices above, and commanding the central well, were the desks of the production manager, production co-ordinator and production secretary, but the only current occupant was the lone figure of Trish, the stalwart company secretary, who’d cross over to production co-ordinator when the cameras were rolling – a figurative expression these days. Trish had been with Flame longer than Will and she knew the drill: her piano calves, Boadicean chest and stentorian tones would keep the circling vultures from picking him to pieces, to the degree that this was within her power, given that two of the fuckers had already commandeered his parking space and the inner sanctum upstairs.

  ‘How long have they been here?’

  ‘Ten minutes. They’ve got coffee and water, they won’t die.’

  Trish was the widow of a grip, Pete, who’d worked with Branko and Den from the start, a strong, practical little bugger who laid tracks, set up dollies, made cranes and generally supported the camera and the lighting in whatever way was needed. Pete had been taken quickly by a melanoma, maybe from being outside so much. They never found the melanoma, only its metastasised tentacles in his groin and lymph nodes. Witty bugger, Pete, gallows humour. Will remembered visiting him with Den, and Pete grimacing or smiling, Will couldn’t say which, telling Den to enjoy every breath while he still could: ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the magic hour, boss.’