The Hindu Business Line : To study how teams work, go behind the scenes

The shot is going to be of a long line of tanks coming down the road, but you are out there in Czechoslovakia and there is only a dirt track and no road.

If you had asked for time and money to build the required road, a special effects expert could have beaten you in about ten minutes, spray-painting the dirt black and putting a white line out.

"It looked perfect — as long as the wind didn't blow too strongly," reminisces David L. Wolper in Producer, published by Scribner (www.simonsays.com).

"The tanks destroyed it when they drove over it, but that didn't matter because at that point it was no longer visible. And they did it in one take."

Now that you know the trick of road-laying, how about managing a major battle scene that needs destroying an entire town?

Perhaps, you need to talk to a government that has towns to dispose of? Which is what Wolper did. The Czechs gave an entire town for $20,000 for blowing up.

"It was named Most, in northern Czechoslovakia. This old industrial city was apparently of so little historical value that the government was planning to knock it down to allow expansion of neighbouring coalfields."

Films are a lot of entertainment, usually, but they are the result of enormous team effort, requiring good management. Producer is a memoir from an entertaining entrepreneur where "he recalls most of the behind-the-scenes complications."

In one of the chapters, the author recounts his experience about shooting a documentary on endangered animals for the World Wildlife Fund.

"Animals sell," he writes, looking at the commercial side of the effort. "People love animals. People like to help animals."

But there was a problem: They wanted to show how prairie dogs get shot, baby seals get clubbed to death, and polar bears targeted by hunters flying in helicopters.

"The only way we could photograph it was to actually do it, actually shoot a bear," he recounts.

"So, I was in the paradoxical position of having to shoot a polar bear to make a film against the shooting of polar bears." Ultimately, they decided to shoot the bear with a tranquilliser dart.

"The plan worked... We researched and found existing footage of a polar bear being shot with a tranquilliser."

And the documentary ran and the gun clubs became angry because the picturisation made animals seem to be all warm and cuddly.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) attacked the credibility of the entire film when it learned that the bear had been anaesthetised and not killed.

It was in 1969 that an actress told Wolper about "a book then being researched by a black writer, who was tracing his family origins back to Africa."

Three years later, Wolper heard over a dinner that the writer, Alex Haley, was still working on his book tracing seven generations of his family from Africa to the US.

"From the moment I heard that simple description, I knew I wanted to turn that story into a film."

That's the story of Roots for you that took the book world and the TV screen by storm. "Roots gave a proud history to black Americans; it allowed them to understand their heritage. People were buying multiple copies for all the members of their family and their friends... When it was on at night, restaurants and movie theatres were empty. In bars they watched Roots rather than basketball games."

To say that the docudrama was a great success would be an understatement. And a good manager has to manage success too.

ManageMentor@hotmail.com

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication

Stories in this Section
How to bring order to your purchase orders

Consolidated pay can burn a bigger hole in your pocket

`Can't stop this thing we started — no way'

To study how teams work, go behind the scenes

A four-letter word you can't do without