Jim Giovannetti - photo by Matthew Gilson

Giovannetti’s local knowledge, which includes knowing when the Cubs are in town (no parking film trucks near Wrigley Field on game days), and what times are best for scheduling bar scenes (Chicagoans start their weekends on Thursdays), invariably leaves directors smiling. Although the AD does recall one instance on John Hughes’ She’s Having a Baby where chaos almost broke out on Michigan Avenue.

“The shot was Kevin Bacon chasing his fantasy girl into a taxicab,” Giovannetti recalls. “All of the traffic had been set for the ground-level cameras, but John and his DP had put a camera up on the roof of a building at the last moment. From that high of an angle, Michigan Avenue looked empty.” So Giovannetti, a 2nd AD at the time, pleaded with Chicago’s finest to hold traffic to allow Hughes to redo the shot. “They hold the traffic through two or three green lights, John calls ‘Action!’ and that’s exactly the moment our actress tells me she has to go the bathroom,” Giovannetti laughs. “Michigan Avenue is now a parking lot, and the cops are looking at me like ‘you go now or not at all.’ I begged her to hang on until the shot was done and, fortunately, she agreed.”

Juggling cast, crew and locations for Giovannetti often comes down to preparing the all-important schedule, the heart of the AD’s craft. “Before laptops,” he explains, “the schedule was done with handwritten production strips that corresponded to each scene. The strips were fit into 14- or 17-inch boards and each time we made a change, we had to re-Xerox the board.” For his last picture, Sydney White, Giovannetti created eight different schedules, tinkering long into the night like a painter mixing color tones.

On the set, Giovannetti likes to stand close to the A-camera during takes, clutching a palm-held wireless monitor, aiming to be “the eyes and ears” of his director. On the subject of directors, he says working for Robert Altman, which he did on The Company, was a dream he had harbored since attending film school at the University of Iowa.

“We were shooting a bar scene,” Giovannetti says, serving up a classic Altman memory, “and, unbeknownst to me, Robert had given one of the extras at the bar some instructions that were different than what I had told the guy. So Altman calls ‘Action!’ and the extra does what I told him to do. The director calls ‘Cut!’ and says, ‘Who told you to do that?’ and the guy says, ‘That AD over there, Jim.’ Altman turns and says, ‘You know, Jim, I have never fired an AD.’ So, I turned back and said, ‘Robert, we definitely don’t want to spoil your perfect record.’ He burst out laughing, along with the rest of the crew.”

Cindy Sinclair - photo by Dean Dixon

“I’m sort of like a doting mother,” laughs Cindy Sinclair from her renovated log cabin in the woods outside Nashville. She has guided country music’s biggest stars through two decades of live TV specials. Sinclair sees to it that the performers are comfortable and briefed on the schedule. “I’ll give them a 30-minute, 15-minute, and 5-minute knock [on their dressing room doors] before I take them to the stage,” she explains. “The onstage managers deal with production issues, but we’re dedicated to the performers. We have isolated channels on our headsets to track their comings and goings backstage.”

Stagehands who work with Sinclair say she wields a “velvet whip” in getting performers to the stage on time. Her friendly but efficient workstyle has earned her many fans among musicians. Over the years, Roy Acuff has sung to her in the halls of the Grand Ole Opry, and she was startled when former president Clinton offered his compliments backstage (to which she spontaneously replied, “Thanks, Bill”). She’s never missed a performer’s call, although she came close when Erykah Badu slipped away to the bathroom moments before she was due onstage at the Grammys.

Sinclair, who grew up in Central Illinois playing guitar and banjo, credits a chance encounter with Grammy-winning musician John Hartford with her unique career. “I had a high school job playing banjo on the Julia Belle Swain, a steamboat on the Illinois River that John came to pilot,” she says. “After college, John and his wife invited me down to Nashville, and I never left. My very first job was as the trophy girl for the Country Music Awards (CMA),” Sinclair recalls. “It was a way to get my foot in the door before moving up to stage-managing.”

Sinclair knows firsthand that working in live television is unpredictable and has seen her share of near misses. “I was a stage manager one time at CMA when a wheel broke on the band cart carrying Lyle Lovett and Asleep at the Wheel,” she remembers. “The wheel kept going and going and stopped just short of the edge of the stage where Julia Roberts and other celebrities were sitting in the audience. Luckily, only a few footlight bulbs were broken.”

Wainani Young-Tomich - photo by Mario Perez

Wainani Young-Tomich

Lost in Hawaii

“Only in Hawaii can you get behind schedule because your cast sneaks off to go surfing,” jokes Young-Tomich. But waves are one thing; extreme weather is another. To organize cast, crew and paperwork on Lost’s jungle locations, Young-Tomich wears knee-high, ripstop nylon covers with a waterproof bottom on her boots just to make sure they stay functional. “It’s a challenge keeping your paperwork dry with all the humidity,” she adds. “If you drop something, it disappears into eight inches of mud and water, and it’s pretty much lost.”

Being prepared for the unexpected is what a 2nd 2nd AD’s job is all about. Young-Tomich’s week begins with a full day of prep with the 1st assistant director, confirming scene order, cast and any special equipment needed for the show’s rugged locations. She’ll burn up cell minutes calling cast and crew members with time and location reminders, and then be the first on the set the next day to shepherd actors into hair and makeup. She also tracks actor’s timecards, moves the extras into place, and typically completes her daily production reports hours after camera wraps.

Her family prompted the professionally risky move of returning to Hawaii in 2003. “When I came home, all of the TV shows had been short-lived, so I didn’t hold out much hope of AD work.”

So with Lost on hiatus, Young-Tomich had planned to spend the summer on the beach with her two kids. But when a feature, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, shooting at the Turtle Bay Resort, came along, she couldn’t say no. “Moving back here was the best thing I ever did,” she says with a sigh of relief, “because having a work/life balance was difficult in Hollywood.” And then there are the joys of being a native, like when the tsunami warning sirens are tested the first day of each month at 11:45 a.m. “Where else can you see haole [non-Hawaiian born] crew members running for cover? So it’s easy to tell the locals from the Mainlanders,” she laughs.