Duana and I established a friendship before we met in person. When I think about it, it’s quite a love story. She was producing me for my first etalk hits on Mondays. We’d talk every Sunday and we could have gotten it done in 15 minutes but those conversations ended up being, sometimes, three hours long. When I finally set eyes on her, it happened to be JUNOS (our Grammys) Sunday in Canada. She was at etalk headquarters in Toronto while the rest of our team was on the ground somewhere else, I can’t remember the city because that’s not the point. The point is that that’s how I first saw her – doing her job, running sh-t, producing the f-ck out of everything, walking from one end of the office to the other, viewing tapes that were coming in from the crew, asking the editors where to stop and start the record, vetting scripts, waving her extra large coffee cup with a straw stuck in it around, and still carrying on a conversation with me about my parents. It was one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen. I will remember her like that forever.
Because producing is sexy. Producing is POWER. It’s never the person on the screen who’s the power, it’s the person in her/his ear. Which is why I love working in the control room. All those buttons. All that control!
So the Money Monster trailer came out yesterday. Directed by Jodie Foster, it’s George Clooney and Jack O’Connell on set and Julia Roberts with a headset in the control room. Duana loves Julia. As soon as I watched this I sent it over to her with the note, “Julia’s doing your job. Are you seeing this movie on opening day?” She, predictably, freaked out and then got pissy that the movie doesn’t come out until May.
To us, Money Monster looks good. Frenetic, melodramatic, and we might have to ignore the fact that a battery pack on an IFB (his earpiece) only lasts so long so if this lasts for hours and hours, they’ll have to address that, because we work in television and this is all kinds of navel gazing. Does the producer porn appeal to you the same way?
