Who Needs Sleep?

Last night I was fortunate to be at the West Coast premiere of a new documentary by acclaimed director/cinematographer Haskell Wexler called "Who Needs Sleep?" The movie grew out of Wexler's decade-long effort to get saner work hours in the entertainment industry. But the movie branches out and looks at sleep deprivation, government regulation of industry, and the cost of long hours on the job to family life, health and personal safety. This was a remarkable film.

I have to say I've been one of the lucky ones in the entertainment industry, in that I haven't had too many projects requiring obscenely long hours. I have had short jobs where I've worked 14-16 hours at a stretch, and I did one 13-week assignment where all of my time cards were filled out by my supervisor in advance. For MY benefit, I was told. You simply haven't worked in this industry if you don't have stories like that.

And "Who Needs Sleep?" artfully shows some of the more extreme examples of that. The movie's moral center is the case of Brent Hershman, an assistant cameraman on the movie "Pleasantville" who died while falling asleep at the wheel in 1997. He was getting off a 19-hour shift during a week full of 16-hour days. This shocked the industry, and began a long campaign to shorten the ridiculous hours that had become commonplace on movie sets. As one electrician put it, "We're the only mechanical, heavy production industry that's lobbying for a 12-hour workday."

This campaign went absolutely nowhere. The unions, particularly IATSE, didn't get behind it. A petition with 10,000 signatures was turned in to the union offices and then mysteriously went missing. The ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) refused to endorse the tamest of statements, written by the late Conrad Hall (who died after an illness, which may have been due to a torturous 6-month shoot on The Road To Perdition). Producers continue to force crews to work ridiculously long hours with short turnarounds. As everyone on the set is entitled to overtime, this ends up costing them money. But as one interviewee puts it, "we were told they could hide overtime in the budget; they could not hide an extra work day."

Imagine that you're on a movie set. Heavy equipment is everywhere. People are moving lights, cameras, dolly track, sandbags. There are electrical wires all over the place. The environment is already dangerous. Is this the place you want to work your crew for 18 or 20 hours at a time?

The real-world consequences of this are obvious. Families can't connect with one another (One cameraman says "I've never had dinner with my family while I've been working"). Divorces and broken families are commonplace, and that absence undeniably plays a role. Workers may have union protections and rake in the big bucks during the "golden hours" of double overtime, but since jobs are increasingly scarce, and the work schedule practically demands some down time, their annual salaries aren't all that different from plumbers or librarians. Health care in the entertainment unions is almost always predicated on annual hours worked, so when you do have that job, you need to maximize to make sure you can see a doctor once you get off that hellacious shoot.

Incredibly, when Wexler goes to OSHA to see what they can do about this problem, they tell him "we don't regulate time." Actually, under the present Administration, it's hard to figure out if they regulate anything. But OSHA is basically suggesting here that 19-hour days on a worksite with heavy equipment and dangerous pitfalls at every turn doesn't constitute a safety hazard. It's absurd.

This may sound like a bunch of folks in "liberal Hollywood" whining (indeed, on one of the petitions in the film, somebody wrote, "If you don't like it, go sell shoes!"). But nobody should have to endure the kind of work conditions that have become all too routine in this business. And strengthening the community of working Americans is in the best interests of progressives. Fights like this have the potential to become high-profile; everyone watches movies and TV, but not everyone understands the workplace issues involved. The film talks about how there can become this kind of macho "Oh yeah, you can work 85 hours a week? I can work 90 hours!" mentality, where pride in your work is dictated by how long you'll slave to do it. I think everyone, no matter the industry, can relate to that.

Sadly, the Democratic Party at the leadership level has jettisoned any kind of strong support for worker's rights. It's up to us in the grassroots to force Democrats to return to those ideals. I believe it's the only way we'll return to prominence.

There's something you can do to support this effort to get some sane labor practices back in the film and TV business. 12on12off.com is a nonprofit that's pushing for a mandated standard of 12 hours on, 12 hours off for everyone on a film or TV set. In addition, The Writers Guild of America is trying to organize the storytellers of reality and documentary TV, who aren't afforded the same basic standards and privileges that their counterparts in scripted television are. By raising awareness and contacting the management (namely, those film and TV conglomerates that are making these decisions), we can get improved labor conditions in what I like to call the last manufacturing industry in America.