Ever since the first flickers of movement graced the silver screen, audiences have craved the thrill of getting lost in the movies. Entrepreneurs capitalized on this desire immediately, everywhere from lowbrow nickelodeons to lofty picture palaces—New Orleans being one of the first cities to adopt the new medium. But during the Great Depression, when audiences proved they’d spend their very last dollar to ditch their sorrows and live vicariously through movie stars, Hollywood realized just how much they had us over a barrel. Since then, the film industry has raked in more cash than any creative enterprise in human history, with most of it predictably pooling among its ruling class. Consequences of this extreme concentration of wealth at the top include innumerable displays of flagrant egomania, predatory behavior of every variety, corny propagandist hack jobs perpetrated in the name of box office sales, and some truly wonderful films that continue to stand the test of time.
Most of what the average person knows about the film industry concerns the fabulously wealthy few referred to in the biz as above-the-line talent—principal actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters. But while they may control the money and wield the power, they are incapable of making movies alone. A film production is a vast collaboration between teams of expert craftspeople with highly specialized skill sets. Much of the credit for your favorite movies belongs to people whose names you will never know, with jobs you’ve never heard of. Step onto a film set, and everywhere you look you will see working people in tool belts, climbing ladders, adjusting lights, laying track for camera dollies, and solving all kinds of ridiculous problems with tremendous urgency. Reaching the level of verisimilitude required to fool modern audiences is exacting work, with little margin for error—think of the stray coffee cup in the final season of Game of Thrones that nearly started a riot. Avoiding such catastrophes, not to mention building and deconstructing entire worlds in a matter of days, requires every department to operate with maximum efficiency and ingenuity.
For their trouble, below-the-line industry workers are given the rare opportunity to make a middle-class income in a working-class position. It is also one of the last industries where professional advancement can occur through merit alone. Career heights are often reached from the lowliest positions in the business, which boasts as many apprenticeships as a medieval guild. When the film industry came to Louisiana, the low barrier to entry meant locals could learn the trade and start careers that, in many cases, ultimately allowed them to buy homes and send their children to college.
The state’s tax credit incentive program for film productions remains controversial, with some studies showing that the money spent does not add up to the promised fiscal impact. But living in New Orleans, a city that otherwise hasn’t had a prosperous working class in at least half a century, the economic benefits are plain to see. The state puts our tax dollars towards all kinds of nefarious ends; incentivizing a non-extractive global industry that offers high-paying creative jobs is hardly at the top of the list. The economic ripple effects are obvious too. As much as I admire New Orleanians for feeding ourselves on the same sweaty $20 bill we’re forever passing around, it’s nice to get an influx of cash from people who like to spend it on local businesses. In the heyday of the Louisiana film industry, Stein’s Market and Deli [an ANTIGRAVITY advertiser] received hundreds of dollars’ worth of lunch orders from film crews a week—often from multiple departments within any given production—and plenty more from industry people who he counted among his regulars. But these days, according to Dan Stein, that’s all over. “Now it’s close to zero,” he says.
Louisiana’s tax incentive program has by now been surpassed by states such as Georgia and Texas. But they too are being outdone by many European countries that are further lowering production costs with even better incentives—and whose universal healthcare means not having to include it in benefits packages. Add to that the dire straits that the industry finds itself in, thanks to the budget austerity imposed by streaming services, the recently finalized corporate consolidation of the movie studios, and the looming threat of AI, and you’re looking at a future none too bright for Louisiana’s below-the-line workers.
Brook Yeaton, president of the local chapter (478) of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Union (IATSE) and prop master with decades of experience on set, isn’t ready to call it just yet. “I’m hopeful,” he says. Acknowledging the problems facing the industry in general, and Louisiana in particular, he still thinks it would be a mistake to discount the inherent value of this location for the industry. “[Louisiana is] very special. New Orleans is a beautiful backdrop, but it’s not just the city itself. It’s all centrally located—it’s America in miniature.” He is also adamant that the work ethic and quality of local crews will be a deciding factor when film productions are considering locations. Already, he says there are a number of shows budgeting for New Orleans to hypothetically start shooting in the fall. “Our crew base is the best in the country. We are a very strong labor force in New Orleans. I’ve worked all over L.A., Boston, Baltimore, Philly. I’ll put our crews against anyone.”
Property Master / Armorer and IATSE Local 478 President Brook Yeaton checks weapons on the set of Motion. (Photo by Rachael Perez)
Yeaton is bound to be a little biased. But when he says his opinion is informed by experience, he has the credits to back it up. His first job was as a “popcorn boy” at the local art house theater, which he reckons means he’s never done a job that wasn’t connected to the movies. Not only has he worked everywhere, he’s done so many different jobs on film crews he’s almost lost count. Born in Baltimore, his introduction to film came early. “I grew up on the John Waters movie sets—my mom [Pat Moran] is his producer and best friend.” He started working on film sets while still in high school, sweeping floors at first, watching the machine at work. On the set of Hairspray, Yeaton picked up carpentry, and, fatefully, prop work—he is credited as prop master in the majority of his hefty stack of IMDb credits. Yeaton was also a central crew and cast member of the seminal HBO series The Wire, credited as both a set decoration department representative and as White Mike McArdle in Season 2. After going from L.A. to the East Coast, he moved to New Orleans in 2008, right when the film industry was picking up steam. Living here all these years, he’s seen how the industry has woven its way into the life of the city. “It’s a big part of our society in New Orleans, and it can’t be lost,” he says. “I will fight for the union until I can’t breathe anymore.”
New Orleans below-the-line stalwart Brad Benischek is trying to view the sea change with equanimity, though after decades of providing indispensable work on film crews, the level of uncertainty he’s facing doesn’t make it easy. Benischek got his start as a scenic painter on the 2004 Taylor Hackford-directed biopic Ray. Both his parents were theatrical set painters, and his father, Roger, was working out of UNO, which was being used as a location by the production. He heard the production might be looking for painters and he knew Brad was looking for a job. Now, over 20 years later, he’s a certified movie magician. Scenic painters are responsible for some of the most intricate elements of the cinematic illusion—they transform the materials used by the construction department to make them look indistinguishable from the world the actors inhabit. “I can walk into a room whose walls are just plywood, and me and the crew can turn them into anything—bricks, wallpaper, caves out of foam complete with dripping water. After adding layers and layers of paint, it can be difficult to tell if something is real or not,” he says. “I can make an old coffin that looks like it’s been buried for 25 years dirty, a wood wall look like metal, and a metal wall look like wood.”
But while the particular skills Benischek honed over the years are a vital part of the art form, scenic painters are more vulnerable than most. He points to the advent of streaming services as the beginning of the end. Before, no matter how power-crazed or greedy studio executives could be, movies were their business, and they were willing to spend the money to do it right. But when the tech startups took over, they looked at below-the-line talent and saw redundancies. “Movie studios were in it for the business, but at least they knew they were doing something special. Amazon, Apple—they started treating productions differently. They gave us less time and less money.”
Scenic Artist Brad Benischek poses with a set piece from Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (Photo by Paul Giglione)
The 2023 SAG-AFTRA (actors) and WGA (writers) strikes, with the support of industry unions such as IATSE, tried to address the major threats to workers posed by changes to the business model, and increasingly, AI. But if they had leverage, they didn’t use it, and after four grueling months, the strikes ended without accomplishing more than a few concessions. As Benischek puts it, “We had to go back to the table with our tails between our legs.” Negotiations failed to address the threat of annihilation facing the workforce, and sure enough, the work soon began to dry up.
And this is before the full force of AI has really hit, Benischek points out, though he knows it’s not far off. “There is a reckoning coming, I have no doubt about that.” When that happens, he doesn’t see a world in which he and his crew aren’t sidelined. But that doesn’t mean his prognosis for the industry overall is so bleak. “I honestly think it’s going to be the young filmmakers, who are coming up and interested in the craft—they’re going to make awesome movies for no money.”
I interviewed Benischek a couple months ago and his thought proved prescient when indie horror films Obsession and Backrooms, made by young, self-made filmmakers (i.e., YouTube stars), swept the box office, inspiring a flurry of think-pieces about the changing of the guard. Whatever the long-term significance of these low-budget, high-concept success stories, they demonstrate how restriction can drive creativity. Certainly in New Orleans, deprivation is a permanent modality for any artist, and young filmmakers are no exception. Orson Welles once explained his chronic struggle to find financial backing as inherent to working with the “terribly expensive paint box which is a movie.” Anyone who shares Welles’ unfortunate addiction to that particular paint box has their work cut out for them and will need all the creative solutions they can find.
No endeavor quite encapsulates that ethos like Let’s Make A Scene!, a labor of love born out of a film collective’s refusal to let lack of financing prevent them from learning the craft. Founders Nicci Wright and Elíaz Rodriguez, who met at a film industry poker night, explain that the idea came out of conversations they were all having about the vulnerability of creative fortunes completely at the mercy of bigger industry players. “We slowly started realizing that even if there was no paid work, we can still create,” says Wright. So began Let’s Make a Scene!, a quarterly filmmaking community that pools their resources every three months to shoot original scenes. Wright refers to it as a self-perpetuating engine of creative reciprocity—if you help your friend realize their vision, you can be sure they’ll do the same for you. Wright started out as an actor, and Rodriguez as a writer and director, but one of the joys of the project is how quickly you end up developing new skills. “Everyone’s getting to both have their creative outlet and step into roles that they maybe haven’t done before. If you’ve only been a P.A. but want to try being a camera operator, well, if there’s no money, it’s not like we can fire you.”
The learning experience is reason enough to put in the work for everyone involved, but they’re mainly motivated by good storytelling. “We’re looking to support films that may be experimental, but ultimately speak from your identity and experience,” says Rodriguez. “If everyone’s going to volunteer their time to make this, it’s got to be your baby.” At the end of the process, they have a film screening to give their scenes an audience and celebrate the scrappy filmmakers for pulling it off.
Still from the Let’s Make A Scene! production The Cycle
Their work goes to show that even as filming technology grows cheaper and more accessible, getting a feature film made without financial backing still takes extreme ingenuity and a fuck-the-money attitude. The most traditional application of this approach to film remains documentaries, ever the refuge for filmmakers unwilling to compromise on storytelling or their political values. New Orleans has long punched far above its weight in documentary film through heavy hitters such as Tim Watson, Darcy McKinnon, Zac Manuel, and Lily Keber. They tell stories no one else tells in a way no one else could tell them, for almost no financial reward. But at least if you live in a city with a thriving film scene, anyone who knows how to work a camera can find jobs to pay the rent and subsidize passion projects—until those jobs dry up. As Keber explains it, “There just aren’t opportunities for freelancers like there were. And even the jobs I do get, when I go to crew up, I realize just how many people have left.”
New Orleans native and documentarian Benjamin Simmons acknowledges the problem, but armed as he is with the city’s signature combination of humor and a healthy mistrust of authority, he relishes the challenge. “New Orleans isn’t somewhere you come for financial success,” Simmons puts it bluntly. “You just hustle, and not like just, I’m out for myself. I hustle for us—we all gotta eat, so let’s eat together.” Simmons fell in love with filmmaking in a high school film class and has had every type of gig that a man with a camera can do. He learned much of what he knows about the trade living in L.A., but since returning in 2010, he hasn’t looked back. “New Orleans has a way of grounding you,” he says. “It’s always letting you know that you’re a star, but you’re not special. All these people here are stars.”
This sentiment is threaded throughout Simmons’ 2018 documentary Animals, the story of a New Orleans street fashion phenomenon (centered around the Bally shoe) that can only truly be understood by those who lived it—or have watched the film. Part of its ephemeral joy comes from the fact that it breaks the industry’s unspoken narrative rules, or more accurately, it tells the story as if those rules don’t exist. The documentary is only 40 minutes long, which is almost never done, but it’s the length the story needed to be. His visual effects are totally unique to him, and no clunky exposition is shoehorned in to make the film more accessible to wider audiences. It’s a New Orleans film for a New Orleans audience that allows outsiders the pleasure of figuring it out for themselves.
Still from the documentary Animals featuring Shantrelle P. Lewis
Audacious storytelling is such a refreshing experience in part because of how accustomed we’ve grown to stale narratives. This is due in no small part thanks to Hollywood’s mortal terror of creative risk. The history of film is an endlessly repeating cycle in which executives load the dice to avoid bombing at the box office with safe bets, like recycling old material and hypnotizing the audience with beautiful actors. Then, out of the blue, some filmmaker will make something that reminds everyone that cinema is art; and in art, if nothing is ventured, nothing is gained. When the venture fails, you don’t look back, you try again. But instead of taking their cues from the creative process, executives smother the iconoclasts’ momentum by making cheap copies of their achievement rather than fostering an environment in which it might actually be repeated.
The most recent edition of art’s triumph over Hollywood’s bean counters and professional sex pests stands dead center at the crossroads the industry now faces. Low-budget mind-benders like Obsession and Backrooms are taking an ax to the rotting tree of I.P. (Intellectual Property, i.e., industry speak for once-profitable creative assets such as Marvel Comics that are down to lukewarm leftovers). But then you also have films that show how much money Hollywood stands to make by investing in big budgets that prioritize top-of-the-line crews. When Barbie, the box office queen of I.P., became the highest-grossing movie in Warner Bros.’ history, it was because director (and fanatical cinephile) Greta Gerwig understands that even the tiniest detail of a big-budget movie makes a difference, and everyone on a film set is equally important. Barbie put its movie stars to work and let the crew shine. In every aspect of the production, from the lighting and hand-painted sets to the dazzling costumes and props worthy of the most accessorized doll of all time, the craftsmanship is superb.
And then Sinners demonstrated far more profoundly how the big-budget paradigm can shift. Sinners made its $90 million budget back three times over, proving that if you do it artfully enough, you can tell America the hideous truth about itself, and people will come back to the theater and pay to hear you say it again. This success was no accident—Sinners was the product of a judicious strategy crafted by director Ryan Coogler (and his wife and creative partner Zinzi). When it went over budget, Coogler covered it out of pocket, and kept the I.P. for himself. He shot in film, with gorgeous camera work, and he did it based out of New Orleans. The line at Stein’s Deli was again out the door with industry people. Brad Bensichek and his scenic painters (under the helm of production designer Hannah Beachler) transformed wood and shining metal into rusty antiques, and made the massive barn look both sturdy and older than time. Brook Yeaton, who was the key armorer, reports they worked so long in the 110-degree heat that the bottom of his shoes melted off—and that it was one of the best professional experiences of his life. “That was a truly magical set,” he says.
Both Barbie and Sinners were produced by Warner Bros., whose films have historically been the most politically courageous of the old Hollywood studios. At press time, Warner Bros. is being absorbed by the Paramount media conglomerate, despite efforts to block the merger on the grounds of its obvious violation of antitrust laws. But members of this administration are by no means free market purists, and so the merger has been allowed to proceed. When the dust clears, who knows if there will be anyone left to allow future Greta Gerwigs and Ryan Cooglers to realize such grand visions.
The term movie magic is one that above-the-line talent often use in interviews while describing their passion for the craft. But movie magic is just another way of saying below-the-line workers. Elves don’t turn plywood into mountain caves, or ensure that weapons are historically accurate and safe to handle, or make a whole wardrobe from colors and textures that previously only existed in the director’s mind’s eye. People do. People with families and mortgages, who love their jobs just as much as actors and directors. The tension between the extreme egos above-the-line and humble anonymity below is actually what makes Hollywood what it is. To lose half of the equation is to lose the whole. In order to save the industry we all love to hate but would really hate to lose, it will take more than the perfunctory shoutout to the crew in Oscars speeches. For once, above-the-liners will have to deprioritize self-interest, and find the courage that has been lacking when it really counts, ever since the blacklist codified political cowardice as industry standard.
If you take all the magic out of the movies, the revelations that balance out all the cheeseball nonsense, then you run the risk of failing to deliver to audiences the parts of the fix we crave the most. I’m not one to overestimate the 21st-century collective consciousness, but how long can you really expect to tell cheap, cynical stories before people lose interest? When they’re bored, they can always watch films that were made back when they knew how to do it—or turn to social media or any variety of other entertainment options. If the industry’s new overlords know what’s good for them, they will take a long look at the value proposition here, at which point they can only conclude that, fiscally speaking, artful filmmaking is the most prudent course of action.
Top photo by Chip Carey: On set in New Orleans East for season 1 of Twisted Metal.
