Review of Below the Line

Below the Line

Below the Line is set in Toronto, where big-budget American productions are filmed on the cheap with Canadian creews. The action centres around the shooting of a B-grade film entitled Life and Death in Little Italy. This fictional production is bad enough to be funny, but realistic enough to be believable. McFetridge and Albert joke that they have yet to receive any interest in Life and Death in Little Italy as a project, but it wouldn't surprise them if they did.
    Every movie, according to the authors, follows a certain progression. Initially, there is a wildly optimistic phase, full of high-sounding talk about 'pushing the boundaries.' But this type of chatter soon subsides and by day two, they're back on track. Artistic integrity is the first thing sacrificed, as directors, writers and producers scramble to keep the production running.
    There is, however, a certain purity to creation of a B movie, argues McFetridge. 'The producer will say to a screenwriter, "On the next draft we need more sex." He doesn't hint about it and it isn't justified in any contextual way.'
    'They really don't care how you do it,' adds Albert.
    Every production shot in Canada almost inevitably begins with a rousing speech on the quiality of Canadian crews by the director. This sort of thing works only once, says McFetridge — but it's enough to get wide-eyed beginners passionate about mediocre films.
    As shooting progresses, however, any given project will seem doomed to those working on it — but this is illusory. Once shooting begins, McFetridge says, 'it always works out.'
    McFetridge believes that a film set is a world with a mix of people found nowhere else. 'There are carpenters and electricians, makeup people and wardrobe people.' On any movie set, the homophobic and exceedingly homosexual coexist peacefully. It's an incestuous environment in which unlikely pairings are formed and severed breathlessly. Above all, the vicissitudes of daily life on set are as involved as, and frequently more dramatic than, any script.
    Both Albert and McFetridge have extensive experience in film, having done, in McFetridge's words, 'anything in the credits with the word "assistant." Below the Line is a product of this experience — a unique fusion of the well-traversed world of stars and directors with the more obscure world of grips and paid duty officers.
    In writing the book, McFetridge and Albert were interested in accurately portraying and drawing attention to this lesser-known world. As McFetridge points out, 'The experience of the camera trainee, after all, is going to be a very different film-set experience from that of the set dressers.'
    The dynamic of Canadian and American relations on a film set is one of the main themes of Below the Line. Beneath a veneer of cordiality, McFetridge and Albert see a lurking assumption on the part of many Americans that their Canadian crews are little better than cheap labour. The Canadian film industry, says McFetridge, is 'a branch-plant industry.' And like any other branch-plant industry in this country, the finished product is American. In the economics of film production in North America, Canada supplies the raw materials — location, crew — and America supplies the talent.
    And despite the assurances of American directors, it is not the innate brilliance of Canadian movie poeple that draws Americans here. As anyone working in the Canadian film industry knows, when the greenback drops, the shooting stops.


— John R. Wallace ffwd

More Reviews of this title

Below the Line

Screenwriters Scott Albert and John McFetridge found out the difference between the movie industry and book publishing with their just-released novel, Below the Line, about the unseen, unsung denizens of film sets. “In the ‘about the author’ section, we had a little bit that said Scott wrote the screenplay Lab Rats … and I said, ‘Let’s change this because Scott got fired,’” says McFetridge. “Our editor asked, ‘How could the writer get fired?’ And I realized that it would never have occurred to her to take this book through two or three drafts with us and fire us and bring in somebody else cause they’d like the book to be a little funnier…. But you know, in the movie business, I’ve come to accept that the writer is below the line.”

The title of McFetridge and Albert’s book refers to the extras, crew members and legions of assistants who appear on the bottom half of call sheets and cost reports — those uncelebrated people, often Canadian, who labour behind the scenes to create Hollywood cinema.

“We were really after the kind of workaday stuff,” McFetridge says, and that’s what the book delivers. The episodic, fast-paced novel takes place over six weeks on a Toronto film set, concerning itself with make-up artists, grips, location managers, set dressers and local talent. Save for a starlet who gets romantically involved with the transport captain, the celebrities — director, producer, lead actor — appear as annoying side characters, like the adults in a Charlie Brown comic strip.

As film analogies go, this novel is more Short Cutsthan The Player; a set of not-always-connected short stories that hit a nerve often enough but don’t hang together as cohesively as they might.

The authors’ explanation that they wrote the book in 2000 for the 3-Day Novel Contest sponsored by Anvil Press goes some way to explaining its casual structure. “We worked out the movie that they’re working on and some of the characters who are working on that movie,” McFetridge says. “And then we went off on our own and wrote stories that took place on that movie set.”

They submitted the completed novel but received no word — “Nothing,” says Albert. “No, ‘Dear sirs, this is the worst thing we’ve ever read.’ Just nothing.” — until a year later, when a bulk-mailed flier asked them to “Please enter the 2001 3-day Novel Contest.”

Nevertheless, they felt they had the kernel of a good book, so they rewrote and polished and eventually got an acceptance letter from Signature Editions. Upon entering the publishing world, they found that writers are not only above the line, people actually pay attention to details.

On that subject, McFetridge recalls their editor pointing out typos in the call sheets, parking permit, invoices and script fragments interspersed between the chapters just for fun. “We thought, ‘you’re reading this crap?’ Man, most of the people for whom this is vital information don’t even read it. She said, ‘In the book world, we read everything.’”

The inclusion of this material helps set the scene but doesn’t deliver enough useful information or subtext to justify the space it takes up. As McFetridge points out, there’s nothing in these trimmings that will advance your understanding of the story. Perhaps this is a case of form matching content. In the book, the film production is disintegrating, with the script being improvised throughout the shoot. McFetridge and Albert have first-hand experience with this, having met on the no-budget vanity project The Protector in 1997, and they are currently rewriting a project called Hunt for the Devil, heeding the producer’s request to include more sex.


— Edward Keenan Eye Weekly

Below the Line

Mesmerized as we are by the presence of Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere working right here in Winnipeg, the novel Below the Line arrives as a timely reality check about the real business of making movies. Better still, it is about the making of a Hollywood-financed 'runaway' production in Canada à la Shall We Dance.
 
The book is a product of Winnipeg-based publisher Signature Editions, but it is set in Toronto, where authors John McFetridge and Scott Albert did their own research while working in the industry in a cross-section of crew positions including production assistant, location manager, transport director and assistant director.
 
To use the film-savvy lexicon of the book, the story is loosely structure in the manner of a Robert Altman movie. flitting from character to character, witnessing a comic moment here, an illuminating revelation there, with an occasional skirmish to liven things up.
 
It's especially delicious that the movie being made over six gruelling weeks is titled Life and Death in Little Italy, a dubious little New York-set gangster picture apparently destined for a broadcast berth on a sub-HBO cable network.
 
The film's bratty, music video-spawned director Edward J. Nijar, has delusions of art. But he then proceeds to follow every cliché in the book when it comes to choosing Toronto-in-lieu-of-New-York locations and outfitting the supporting cast — mostly Toronto actresses/strippers portraying hooks — in the requisite fishnet stockings and leather jackets.
 
One story deemed to merit a through line is a Notting Hill-esque romance between the female star — Playboy model-turned-actress Ainsley Riordan — and transportation captain Roger Doyle. Their relationship is viable. The authors, who delight in mixing fact with their fiction, mention that both Julia Roberts and Gillian Anderson married crew members beneath their star stations.
 
And the dynamics of the relationship nicely delineate the film-set class structure between 'above the line' talent — stars, directors, producer — and the 'below the line' grunts who facilitate their wishes, no matter how ridiculous.
 
Below the Line offers a multitude of pleasingly salacious insider portraits: the desperate actress who discovers a lesbian casting agent is keeping the casting couch tradition alive; the frazzled hack scripter who rubs his copy of Syd Field's how-to guide Screenwriter for luck; the assistant director who glibly puts an actress in harm's way once she has ascertained she won't be held accountable for any potential mishaps.
 
The novel's details are unerringly true, especially in describing the cultural distinctions between Canada and Hollywood. In that, it is especially strange to see urbane Torontonians presented as cheap labour, or as the vile Nijar describes them: 'Mexicans in tuques.'


— Randall King Winnipeg Free Press

Below the Line

Working in the film industry has always held a certain cachet among those who don't. Regardless of how many times they hear about the long hours, the hard work, the egos and the back-biting, your Everyday Joe can't get enough of the behind-the-scenes stories.
 
Which star had a hissy fit on set? Who's anorexic, who's into drugs? Who starts knocking back the booze before noon? And who's that young actor with the bad-boy reputation who's actually saving himself for marriage despite having flocks of eager girls to choose from?
 
It's the gossip, the salacious details that keep the myths — and glamorous image — of working in the film business alive. Two new Canadian books have turned the glamour myth on its head, while at the same time offering readers a window into that world.
 
Below the Line is a novel set in Toronto, during the shoot for the fictional American film Life and Death in Little Italy. Toronto, as usual, is doubling for a big American city — this time New York — and all of the big stars, big producers and the director are from the States.
 
As is typical with what are known as 'service productions,' it's the hands-on labour — the grips and electrics, caterers , makeup artists and extras — who are Canadian.
 
It is that story McFetridge and Albert have chosen to tell. The authors take readers on-set to watch the shenanigans being played out behind the camera, among the crew.
 
The book incorporates daily call sheets, snippets of script and mock official forms as both a novelty and an attempt to bring readers closer to the action.
 
Both McFetridge and Albert have worked in the film industry in Toronto, working as location managers, assistant directors and lowly PAs (a.k.a. production assistants), so much of the film crew insider shtick will likely ring true to those who work in the business.
 
For anyone outside the industry who thinks the stories in Below the Line are unbelievable and absurd, think again. Talk to anyone who's worked in the film world and they'll tell you all the ego, sex and bad behaviour is par for the course — just maybe not on every shoot and maybe not all at once.


— Pamela Klaffke The Calgary Herald

Below the Line

Our citizens are finding work on the film sets in the city this summer and they have their tales to tell of Hollywood, brushes with celebrity, and the movie business For those not involved, there's Below the Line, a new novel by John McFetridge and Scott Albert. Besides being writers, both McFetridge and Albert have had ample experience working on film sets as location managers, drivers, production assistants and assistant directors. They know what they're writing about.
 
As we all know, American film crews come to Canada because it's cheaper. Locals do the grunt work; they scout locations, cater and run errands. On the budget sheets, these crew members are listed 'below the line.' Typically, these lackeys don't always get a lot of respect from the Americans.
 
That's what we have in Below the Line. Edward J. Nijar, a director who made his name in music videos is in Toronto to make his first feature, a crime movie called Life and Death in Little Italy. Aging star Myles Day believes this film could be his comeback. Poor deluded man.
 
The film's a disaster. New dialogue, new scenes, new locations and new characters are constantly being added. Actors and crew members arrive on set with different versions of the script. Edward throws tantrums. You know things are bad when the writer is on the set and Myles corners him to describe a big speech he wants written for him. It makes for a very funny story conference involving a goldfish in a strip club.
 
It's a fun read, with lots of snappy dialogue and one-liners. There are back-bitingly nasty comments, and plenty of sex and drugs. Actors are called 'talent' because they have no skills. All of these characters make the book seem Robert Altman-esque, like Nashville North or The Player II: Toronto. It's a worthwhile peek behind the scenes of the dream factory.


— Quentin Mills-Fenn Uptown

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