Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 16

On the other hand, I've had many wonderful experiences with clients. I love my clients. They're great. I just want to help them, you know. And I want it so bad for them because I know they want it. There's a lot of clients that I remember from when I first started this. They stick with you because you think, this is the reason I want to help people. It might be-you know, one client said to me once, she said, "I grew up on a dairy farm. My whole life was centered around food. When we were happy we ate. When we were sad we ate." And she's still to this day one of the my favorite clients. And I see her when she's singing. She sings. She's a beautician, and she also sings. You know? I mean, it just makes me feel good to know that I had a part in helping her to be happy.

But one thing that's frustrating, and a lot of people don't understand this-losing weight is a lifetime commitment. Because the key thing is actually keeping that weight off once you lose it. I mean, maintenance, that's the most important step as far as I'm concerned. We have a maintenance program for after you get to your goal weight. And some clients don't see the value. Because they have to buy a maintenance program. So they feel that once they've gotten the weight off, they can keep it off and not spend the extra money. And that's fine. You know, they have that option. And for some people it works very well. But over the years, I've seen thousands in here, and the clients with maintenance programs are much more successful. They're the ones that, if they start gaining a few pounds, they do something about it. Because if you're up five or six pounds you need to think about doing something before it's ten or fifteen. You know what I mean?

I'm constantly running into people on the street who have not succeeded in maintaining the weight they lost with me. And they all say the same thing: "I've got to come back. I've got to come back." And sometimes they do. You know, a certain percentage of them come back. Because that's really the answer.

I mean, I've never had a weight problem myself, but I'm very vigilant about my diet and always have been. There are mornings I step on the scale and go, "Oh, I better Jenny today." It really works.

And you know, I'll tell you what I absolutely love about it-if I get home at seven at night and my family is already done eating, like do I want leftovers or do I want a Jenny Craig turkey dinner? Which is turkey and sweet potatoes and dressing. Well, I'm going to choose the turkey dinner every time. And I won't even have to do anything except spend five minutes with the microwave. I won't have to prepare it and I won't have to clean up the mess and I won't have way too much food sitting in front of me. So I won't overeat. Because it's portion-controlled. You know? I can just sit down and enjoy a wonderful meal. And then I'm much happier. [Laughs] I'm not worried that I ate for the wrong reasons, or I ate too much-or anything. I'm just happy. Really, I wish everybody was as happy as I am.

With stealing, I was making almost a

hundred and fifty a day, cash.

PRETZEL VENDOR.

Isabelle Quinones.

When I was a senior in college, I got a part-time job selling pretzels at a farmer's market. It was a day a week, ten bucks an hour under the table, which was really good money. And, in reality, it was even better than that because, since it's an allcash business, it was really easy to steal-sometimes like forty bucks a shift-to supplement your earnings. [Laughs] At the time I thought, well, this is just a silly something to do while I'm a student, but the money was so good that after I graduated, I switched to full-time. I ended up selling pretzels for four years. Way too long. I just recently stopped. [Laughs] I kind of retired myself for personal reasons.

I think the reason I kept at it for so long, besides the money, is that it was a nice, simple job. You'd roll out of bed in the morning, pick up the van from the parking lot and get to the market around eight A.M., set up the table, which was a piece of plywood on two sawhorses, and hang the sign that said how much the pretzels cost. Then you put the bags of pretzels underneath the table and that's it. The rest of the day, you'd sit outside and talk to people and sell pretzels. There were usually three of us working in the stand together all day. It was really low-key and fun.

The pretzels cost five for a dollar. Eleven for two dollars. They were hard pretzels, made by the Mennonites in Pennsylvania. The way they're made is they're boiled, which is what soft pretzels are, and then they're baked, which takes all the moisture out and makes them hard. People loved them. They were addictive. We sold a ton. About twelve hundred dollars was a good day. All cash. It was enough so that, like I said, I could pocket a five here and a ten there and no one would notice. I stole all the time, every shift, and never got caught. It was one of those jobs that was sort of like the golden handcuffs thing-totally menial, thoughtless labor in one way, but it paid really good. With stealing, I was making almost a hundred and fifty a day, cash.

Even though I stole, I was very close to Michael, the guy that owned the company. He was really, really sweet, magnanimous, really generous. You could say, "Oh, I want to go to the beach tomorrow," and he'd figure out how it would be okay. And I was very invested in his business. For example, I felt a personal obligation to appear neat and clean more than usual-very well groomed-because we were supposedly representing these Mennonites. Michael had lived with a Mennonite family for quite a while and he took the whole thing very seriously. So I stopped bleaching my hair while I was there, which was something I'd been doing since I was like thirteen. I wanted to look natural because people thought that we were Mennonites sometimes. I mean, I wouldn't actually try to look like a Mennonite, 'cause they wear simple clothes, you know? But I didn't discourage people who thought I was one.

Michael had this kind of complicated business thing with the Mennonites. He was "representing" them because Mennonites aren't allowed to do business deals with people. That's part of their religion so, like, there wasn't going to be a piece of paper that was signed. It had to be a verbal agreement. But the farmer's market's rules say that you couldn't sell somebody else's stuff. So, for the market, Michael had to say, like, "We're partners." And so they were. Once or twice a week, he'd drive to Pennsylvania and fill up the van with more pretzels.

I think Michael is really a good man-truly benevolent. And he was a very good boss, very generous. But my relationship with him was casual and I don't think there was anything really wrong with stealing from him. I mean, it wasn't evil. Michael was making plenty of money himself. He has a nice apartment, a nice car. And it didn't hurt anybody. I still go to his apartment sometimes for dinner, still send him Christmas cards. It was nothing significant.

All in all, it was just a fun, very no-ties kind of job except I made it complicated because I ended up having an affair with Sasha, who was Michael's right-hand man. This was a really difficult period of my life. I was married, but my husband, Grant, was on tour all the time. He's a musician. And Sasha was a huge flirt. So it was one of those things where I was working next to him every day and he was flirting every day and you have such a flirtatious relationship that I just thought, nothing's ever going to happen, this is just the way it is. But one night Sasha and I were out together with a bunch of other people. We got drunk and everyone else left and we were like, "Uh oh, we shouldn't be alone together-" and we made out without kissing. I guess we were kissing each other's necks, but thinking it doesn't count if we don't kiss the lips. That was step one.

Then, maybe a month later, Sasha spent the night at my house. It was the day before I was going away on a trip for two weeks so, in my mind, it was like, "Oh this is safe 'cause I can have s.e.x with this guy and then I'll go away, then I'll come back and then we can pretend it didn't happen." My husband was away and I was deluded. Totally deluded. Pretty soon, the affair was full-fledged.

We didn't tell anybody at work, but that was a place where we were kind of alone together a lot, so it was an opportunity for us. I sometimes had s.e.x in the van with Sasha. We'd shut ourselves up in there and fool around among the pretzel boxes. [Laughs] We also had s.e.x in the storage s.p.a.ce.

Sometimes Grant would come by while Sasha and I were working together. It didn't really matter. They didn't like each other anyway. I mean, Grant doesn't like anybody. It really wasn't a problem. But, in the end, I pretty much had to quit because of Sasha. It got kind of ugly, especially after I split up with Grant and I didn't want to-you know-just throw myself into Sasha. I mean, it was just an affair. We weren't a great couple. We'd have fights and jealousies and stuff that you shouldn't have until you've been, like, married for a while. [Laughs] At first, he was more into it than I was and maybe later that kind of reversed. I don't know. I just ended up feeling really uncomfortable around him. And I was kind of tied to him, seeing him every day there, and it got to be like almost unbearable for me. I was like, "Why am I putting myself through this?" It was a meaningless job, totally meaningless. So I quit kind of impetuously one day. I told Michael I'd gotten another job, which wasn't true. I still haven't found another job. I worked at a restaurant for a little while, but I hated it.

It's February. I quit in December and I have to say, right now, I miss it. Without Sasha in my face, I can remember what was good about it. Like working for Michael and spending so much time at the market. I got to know the different farmers. Some of them would give me free stuff or pretty seriously discounted stuff. I felt like I was privy to this community. I'd even fantasize sometimes about going and living on a farm, tilling a field. But I know I really wouldn't have enjoyed that in reality. [Laughs] I mean, hard labor is not for me. [Laughs] I hated getting up early and-oh, the winter-it's awful out there. But for the very simple job that it was, I really liked it a lot. I loved dealing with so many customers, you get to know a lot of people that way, it almost feels like being on the stage, and that was kind of cool. And random people would come up and ask me out. I never said yes, but you know, I was married and having an affair. [Laughs]

I don't quite know what to do next. A lot of things are do-able. The problem is just focusing on what you want to do. I've had trouble making decisions like that in my life. I mean, like the last four years I've spent just pretty much struggling with my marriage and just growing up. You know? I'm only twenty-five years old. And maybe having this silly job held me back a bit from having to really focus on a career or whatever, but I don't know. I think it also gave me the freedom to look at my life and make some changes-and I'm pretty happy with those changes. And I have grown up. I mean, I got married and divorced and I've worked and supported myself-that's growing up. And this job was definitely part of that. It helped me along. It was great for what it was.

I'd rather be doin' this than have a

million dollars.

PRODUCE STAND OWNER.

James Norwood Corbett.

I own a produce stand on Highway 389 off of I-20 in South Carolina. I sell about anythin' you want. Apple, oranges, bananas, peaches, watermelons, cantaloupe, honeydews, grapes.

Boiled peanuts is what sells the best. I got two big old pots boilin' away and I just keep 'em going, day and night. And peanuts, I make seventy-five percent profit. If I sell a bag for four dollars I'll make three-clear profit. Canned goods, I probably don't make but twenty percent off of it. But the canned goods is a callin' card. If somebody comes over here to look at 'em, they gonna buy somethin' else.

I started off cooking peanuts back in 1956. I was fourteen. Sold 'em for ten cents a bag. And see, I've always cut my peanuts with lemons. That's what makes mine different. Most people just boil 'em in salt. Well, I've always cut them with lemon. I got that idea from the Good Master-the Good Master up there. I dreamed it one night. And I just woke up one morning knowing I was gonna start putting lemons in.

Plenty of people buys 'em, they'll start down the road and just turn around and come back and buy more. I've probably had a hundred people do that since I've been here. They start eating 'em, and before they're done they'll come back and buy more. They'll say, "I want the biggest bag you've got." You'd be surprised at the people that buys ten-dollar bags.

I do a lot of business with the truckers at the truck stop over there. I couldn't survive just on the local people 'round here. But the trucks-we stayed up one night and counted, and from one that night till seven the next morning, there was over five hundred truckers come by here. They'll get on the interstate and go to Atlanta or North Carolina. They'll get off and go to Charleston. I have 'em from Texas, Canada, everywhere. If they startin' for home they might come here and spend sixty, seventy dollars. And they's more and more truckers stop by here every week, 'cause them truckers gets on a CB and tell people I'm here. That's my advertising.

I just love it. I stay at the stand twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. See that thing right there, that's what I sleep in-a camper. It's probably eight by ten, but it's comfortable. See, I took the stove and everything out of it so I could put me a single bed in it. I sleep right there, with a pistol up under my head. If people want a bag of peanuts at four in the morning, they wake me up. It don't bother me, 'cause I'm here to make money.

I mostly eat at the Huddle House over there next door at the truck stop. I like the seafood. But you know people bring me food all the time. Everybody in this community is family. I mean, even though they ain't kin to you they look out for each other.

Some days, I go over to my son's house to take a bath. My exold lady Betty, she washes all my clothes. And sometimes I go to her house to eat and all. See, I had the best wife probably that walked this earth. She done a good job of raisin' my kids. If I needed to, I could go and borrow three or four hundred dollars from her right now, tonight.

But I won't never be married again. 'Cause I'm gonna do what I want to, with who I want to, how I want to, and when I want to. And if I'm gone four or five days, I ain't gotta put up with no lip when I come home. See, I used to be gone for four or five days and come home and then raise h.e.l.l that she didn't get up and cook me breakfast and stuff when I wanted it. And she told me for five years she wouldn't be puttin' up with my s.h.i.t and then one day she didn't put up with it no longer. [Laughs]

My friend Wesley, what he says is she still has got that feelin' in her heart for me. She loves me. She'll cook me supper, wash my clothes and all like that, but I never sleep there. We don't sleep together, we don't get no sugar when we leave or depart. You know, "Bye," you know? But I'm not really too broken up about it.

Before this job, I was working with Wesley clearin' telephone lines. I worked at a nuclear place, too. I've slept in the streets. I've been around, you know. I'm fifty-five years old. I about done it all. Service stations. I worked construction. Back in '78, I had a job that paid me twenty-eight grand a year just to take a little pencil and write. I was an inventory clerk at a gravel company. I kept up with my own time, had my own office, had my own telephone. I worked when I wanted to and was off when I wanted to. And I left that job. I walked out one day. I wasn't happy.

Runnin' a store is what I was thinking about, even when I was little. See, I had an uncle who did that. He sold everything-groceries, gas. And he used to sit on a nail keg. You probably wouldn't even remember them. But that was a wooden keg with nails. And he had a potbelly coal stove in the middle of the store and that's how he heated it, with coal in the wintertime. This was down in Sawyerdale. They ain't got no town in there. It's got that one store and that's it. And ever since then I knew that's what I wanted to do.

There ain't nothing better than this. I just hang out here all day, talking, drinkin' a beer, playin' the radio, listenin' to the car races. That's my favorite hobby right here. NASCAR, that's about the growinest sport they is in the world. The rest of the time I'm out here, meetin' good people like you. You meet a lot of good people. I mean, you're gonna meet a a.s.shole every now and then, but the good people overrules the bad ones.

And I'm my own boss. I can smoke when I want, drink when I want. I drink seven days a week. I start in the morning. I mean, this place is my place of business, what can they say? But, see, I don't let alcohol overrule my business. I'm always nice to people. I treat people like I like to be treated.

I love old people, you know? That's on Social Security and stuff. They was a church group about three weeks ago come by here. And a woman wanted a four-dollar basket of peaches. She didn't have but forty-eight cents so I told her I could handle that. I gave her the peaches. I didn't make nothin' off of her. But I made money off the other fifteen people that was with her.

My philosophy of how to do business is always give the people a good product at a reasonable price. I do my stuff in volume. I'd rather take twenty people and make ten dollars than take one person and make ten dollars off of 'em. And, you know, you ain't gonna outgive the Lord, no way. You're not gonna outgive the Lord. What you do to other people, the Lord's gonna-he's gonna do ten times that much for you.

See, if you bought a watermelon from me and I told you it was good, I'd be lyin' to you. Because you're not gonna be able to tell whether a watermelon is any good till you cut it and eat it. That's just the way watermelons are. And cantaloupes or anything else. I mean- you don't never know until you cut 'em open and see. But if you come here three weeks later and you tell me it was bad, I'd either replace it or give you your money back. You wouldn't have to bring the watermelon back or nothin'. I tell everybody-black, white-I guarantee what I sell. And I don't have that much come back.

I think I'm good to people, and people are good back to me. The people I buy from-just like, I bought a case of honey a while ago, it turned to sugar. I took it back to the man and he done replaced it. No argument, no nothin'. It's the people that's really got money, they're the only ones who try to Jew you down. Your middle-cla.s.s people and your lower-cla.s.s people, you tell 'em the price, they don't never exchange words with you. I think that's just 'cause rich people are greedy. They's just greedy. I used to sell peas on the farmer's market in Clemons. And I ain't never had as much trouble as I had out of the governor's wife because she wanted to buy 'em about four dollars a bushel cheaper than what I was sellin' 'em for. And hey, I knowed who she was 'cause I seen the tag on her car. Come up in a big limousine. That's rich people for you. How much of that do you think they gonna take with 'em when they die? Nothin', right? I think money is probably the biggest evil there is in this world if you come right down to it.

The reason rich people worry so much about money when they already got so much is 'cause they want more. It's like they can't help it. But I done accomplished everything I wanted to in this world. Ain't nothin' else I'd rather do. I'd rather be doin' this than have a million dollars. As long as I got two or three hundred dollars in my pocket, I'm happy. And I got ten grand in the bank, so you know if I died tonight I ain't puttin' no burden on my kids or nothin'. And I made it right here. Didn't do nothin' but cook peanuts.

I've had people come by here and offer me twenty grand for the stand if I'd guarantee 'em I wouldn't set up another place of business within fifty miles. Not interested. 'Cause, eventually, the money I make, I just put right back in the business and it just gets bigger. I'm fixin' to build me a building back there. Maybe something about twenty by thirty. I'll have pumpkins in October and Christmas trees for Christmas. And all year round I'll be sellin' pillows, bandanas, quilts, the Aunt Jemima dolls-which I'm probably gonna get a kick from the n.i.g.g.e.rs about that, but that don't mean a d.a.m.n with me. Ain't nothin' they can do about it, you know? I'll be selling everything. Hardware. You name it.

You probably haven't never seen anybody that loves their job more than I do mine. An American person can be what he wants to be. And I think G.o.d put us on earth to accomplish what you want out of life. I think the Good Master wanted everybody to be happy, you know? I might be wrong but I think He wanted everybody to be happy. The only thing that keeps some people from being happy is they're greedy. They don't follow their heart. You know, like I say, you can come up here today and say, "Hey, I'll give you a million dollars, walk off from this." I'd tell you no. I wouldn't be happy with a million dollars. I really wouldn't. 'Cause I'm just happy doin' this. I honestly think if G.o.d made anything better he saved it for himself.

You know how ice cream feathers

when you scoop it? Crisco does the

same thing.

FOOD STYLIST.

Deborah Gordon.

I was a baker in college, that's how I paid for college. But I didn't want to be a chef. I think that's a really hard life. It's sixteen-hour days, you're standing up all the time, and you don't get paid s.h.i.t. A top sous chef makes like twenty-four grand! And it's a totally male-dominated world. It's almost impossible for women to get recognized for their work. If you watch the Food Network, you'll see nothing but men. It's weird.

So when I got out of school, I knew I didn't want to be a chef, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just kind of stumbled into this. I ended up working for a photographer who mostly shot food for advertising. We worked with a lot of food stylists-they're people who prepare the food that you see, like when you see a Cool Whip commercial, the stylist was the one who spent twelve hours making those dollops of Cool Whip look just right! [Laughs] That's me now. One day when I was working for this photographer, a stylist's a.s.sistant didn't show up, so I just stepped in. And that was it. I a.s.sisted for a while, learned from a bunch of different stylists. And I've just kept going.

I like it, but it's a very stressful job. Everything is incredibly composed and controlled. Like, say it's a TV dinner ad, like Lean Cuisine, well, you have to use their products and only their products. Representatives stand there and watch you make the food and make sure that you aren't slipping in some real broccoli that looks nicer than the frozen c.r.a.p they send you. If it's a cake, you have to bake it from their box. The art director-who's like the designer of the ad- has to sign a contract and say, "Yes, this shoot was legitimate, we used the actual product." When you do food shoots for television, they even have lawyers present. There's this whole ethics thing.

And it's not easy to make Lean Cuisine look good all by itself. Basically you get a ton of them and you sort through everything. They probably send about a hundred dinners-it's really ridiculous. Say it's penne pasta with chicken, if you buy it in the store, it comes in one bag, and you just throw the bag in boiling water, and that's your dinner. But to advertise it, they give me a hundred of these bags. I cut open each one, go through them, pick out each vegetable, get a whole stack of carrots, a whole stack of broccoli, a whole stack of pasta. I separate it, wash it, strain the sauce off. And then I pick the best carrots, the best broccoli, and so on, and I make a little serving of penne pasta-and that's what they shoot.

It really has nothing to do with food. You aren't concerned with how things taste, just how they look. When you're a cook, it can look like complete s.h.i.t, and as long as it tastes good, it's fine. When you're a stylist, it's exactly the opposite. The whole time you are working with it, you don't think about eating it. At the end of the day you'd never eat it, you'd never want to even touch it.

Most of it isn't even food at all. Pretty much everything's fake except for the product. Because legally, if you're shooting Rice Krispies, they have to be Rice Krispies, but everything else in the shot can be fake. So the milk-it's actually hair tonic. It's like a lotion for if you have kinky hair, but it's the same color as milk and it won't make the cereal soggy. If you were to use real milk, you'd have about two minutes to shoot, if that, before everything turned to glop. And you want as much time to shoot as you can get. You want forever, basically. That's a lot of the stylist's job, to figure out how the food can last longer. You use a bunch of little tricks. Like for ice cream, if you aren't required to use the actual product, you use Crisco and dye because that will sit on the set forever and it's not going to do anything. It's very convincing. You know how ice cream feathers when you scoop it? Crisco does the same thing.

It's a really a.n.a.l job. Like they call you and say, "We want French fries on a plate." Sounds easy, right? But the trick is you have to make sure they look spontaneous, like a human being put them on that plate. You have to make sure that the lines of the fries aren't like creating a shape of their own. The key is to throw them, and then stand back. Maybe tweak a fry or two. If it's not working, just throw them again. A lot of stylists will put them down one by one with tweezers- that drives me nuts. I remember once when I was a.s.sisting, I got completely b.i.t.c.hed out about the way I was arranging a bowl of rice. Rice is hard because it's nothing but a sea of little lines. It tends to look either way too composed and unnatural or else it's like a boring lump. And I wasn't doing a superb job, but still, this woman went insane. A total a.n.a.l freakout.

But that's advertising. The pay is great-I make usually a thousand dollars a day-but you have to put up with so much s.h.i.t. People get so mad. Sometimes they just leave, they walk off the shoot. There's always a power play happening between the photographer, the art director, and the food stylist. It's the art director's campaign, so they have this whole idea of what they want it to be, but they'll have no sense of food. Like they'll say, "We need the meat really dark," so you torch up the meat. And then they say, "Oh no, not that dark, let's try rare." You have to start all over. And they want it immediately, always, and a lot of times that's just not possible.

There's this whole cooperation thing that needs to happen. But it can't always happen happily. Like I recently made this cake, a beautiful cake, and the prop guy brings me this platter that's twice the size it should be. The art director's like, "Well, it's my call and I really want it on that platter." So now we need a new cake or I need to put up a fight, which I did, and I lost. That was a very bad day.

Or, like, I've done cookbooks and the authors come by the shoot. And there are some very nice authors, but for the most part, they don't understand food photography. They only know about making the food in your kitchen so it will taste good. So if I skip items, or use something different-say I subst.i.tute something because it has better color or a nicer shape-they freak. Like sauces. It's almost always easier to go out and buy a sauce because then you're certain of getting a good color. A lot of these homemade barbecue sauces, for example, they look like s.h.i.t. Excuse me, but they look like diarrhea, and you certainly don't want to see that on a piece of meat you want someone to eat. And maybe that's the author's recipe, so in reality it would really come out and look like that. But you don't want that. And in cookbooks, you're not legally bound to use the author's recipe exactly, so you go to the store and pick out the nicest shade that you can find and you subst.i.tute it. A lot of authors object, but it makes a good photograph.

Authors, art directors, producers, they nitpick everything. They literally watch over your shoulders. n.o.body likes to be monitored like that. So there's a lot of arguing. A lot of ego. You fight with everybody-everybody is in everybody else's face.

The thing is, all this food has been photographed before. Chocolate cake has been photographed how many times? So you have to make it look fresh and new. And n.o.body really knows how to do that. I mean, there's styles. You can imitate what other people are doing. But, by definition, styles change. So, you know, you just have to be confident. I guess that's why there's so much ego in advertising, because there's so much money involved and so much uncertainty. Really, no one's an expert on this, there's no answer. So we're all puffed up because we're all trying to convince ourselves and each other that we know what we're doing.

It's all a lot of insanity over nothing, but it pays great. [Laughs] And I actually think it's a pretty nice life. I don't take my work home with me, which is key, and I'm proud that I've built a career for myself out of this weird knowledge, you know?

I'm burned out on eating, though. Totally burned. That's the occupation's hazard. I'm a vegetarian and I'm pretty much repulsed by baked goods. There's a lot of stuff I just don't eat. [Laughs] But that's a small price to pay for fame, right? I mean, just go buy your Cool Whip, okay? [Laughs] Don't worry about me.

Good ideas are good ideas.

FILM PRODUCER.

Jerry Bruckheimer.

My name is Jerry Bruckheimer, and I'm a film producer. I've produced American Gigolo, Flashdance, Cat People, the Beverly Hills Cop movies, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Bad Boys, Armageddon, Enemy of the State, The Rock, Con Air. Some others.

As a kid, I loved going to movies. I didn't have a miserable childhood or anything. In fact I was always kind of a "gla.s.s is half full" kind of kid, but I loved escaping into the magic of movies. That led me to have an interest in photography. I was interested in composition and lighting. And as I got older, I won a number of awards in photography.

I ended up going to the University of Arizona, pretty much because that was the only place with warm weather that accepted me. [Laughs] I'm from Michigan, which is kinda cold. Detroit. You know? It's cold. So I went to the U of A. And then I came back home-and I was from a lower-middle-cla.s.s family, so I just started looking for a job. I found one in the mail room of an advertising agency. In about three years, I worked my way into the television department and produced a series of commercials. They were a rip-off of the movie Bonnie and Clyde for Pontiac. But they were a big hit. They got written up in Time magazine. And that provided me an opportunity to come out here to California-to Twentieth Century Fox-to work on a film as an a.s.sociate producer.

I was in my twenties. I was extremely excited. You know, driving through the studio gates. To actually drive past these places, through the gates, past the guard, after seeing them in movies or imagining them your whole life-it was a trip.

Then I just worked on a number of pictures and kinda worked my way up. a.s.sociate producer. Producer. What happens is as people realize that you do what you say you're going to do, you work your way up the ladder. Because a lot of people talk the talk but they can't necessarily walk the walk. And I don't know if I've ever been very great at talking the talk. Or talking at all. [Laughs] But I've always been good at delivering.

In movie production, there are a lot of variables that tend to go out of control. [Laughs] I mean, like, our first day on Armageddon we were up in South Dakota or North Dakota, filming in this kind of moonscape. And we were shooting at night. There's this wrecked s.p.a.ce shuttle, and we have all these fans and steam and you can't imagine the size of the operation. And the director says, "All right, let's roll the cameras." And everything went off. Like the entire power source went down.

This lasted for a couple of hours. Which is a disaster. Because if you're not shooting, I mean, it's like a taxi meter. You know, every minute you're out there the costs are piling up.

Finally, we get everything going again and we're shooting a very long shot of Ben Affleck coming out of the wreckage of this shuttle. And we've got these s.p.a.cesuits on the actors that we've spent a fortune making, like we spent a million dollars designing them. And they're supposed to have air flow systems in them. But all of a sudden Ben starts stumbling and then he's crawling around on the ground and the director is trying to talk to him on the walkie-talkie that's in his helmet. And there's no response. So he finally gets a bullhorn and starts yelling at him through the bullhorn. Ben's still crawling around. And we find out that he's suffocating. The air system is not working in the s.p.a.cesuit. And he's crawling around on the ground trying to get a rock to break the sh.e.l.l of the helmet.

Somebody cut the thing open, we finally got it off, and he could breathe. It wasn't a very good experience for Ben-very hot, scary- but he was fine. Which was obviously the most important thing. But as a production issue, you know, for me, this was another disaster. We had to do a lot of catch-up to get those suits running properly. Which we finally did. At great cost.

So there's a little set story for you. And there's a million of those. Literally, there are a million variables on a film set. And if someone is hiring you to control them, they don't want any surprises. That's a big part of my job. You know, people are relying on you to get things done. If you say you can do something for a certain amount of money and then you deliver it on time, you gain people's trust. If you f.u.c.k it up, if you waste their money, they're not going to hire you again.

And then, of course, no matter what goes on on the set, you have to make pictures that will return revenues. That's the main thing. You have to know what kind of pictures will do that. Because in the end, it's all about the product. You have to make good product. These things go on forever-they take on a life of their own as they go out to video, cable, satellite, foreign, hotels, airlines. It just keeps going. They can make a fortune. But they have to be good.

For a long time, I had a partner in this-Don Simpson. We made movies together for thirteen years. The first picture was Flashdance. He had different skills than I did. He ran a studio-Paramount-developing a hundred and twenty scripts a year. To make maybe eighteen films. So he had great development skills. A great storyteller. When we started working together, I was always on the business side. I knew how to make a movie, how to cut a movie, how to market a movie. While he'd always been developing them. So we kind of split up the duties to some extent, you know, because he went to the Don school and I went to the Jerry school.