Michael Hausman photo by Ken McCray

“The AD’s job is to serve the director,” Hausman says, “and the UPM’s job is to serve the production as well. One gets the train to the station and the other moves the train down the tracks, and sometimes the roles conflict. I think one advantage I have is the crew sees me executing the director’s battle plan as well as signing all the checks, and it gives them confidence.”

Humor is a key to winning the hearts and minds of fellow filmmakers. For instance, working as a 1st AD on the Prague location of Amadeus, Hausman was told the generator operator would be quitting at 7 p.m. “Five minutes later, the lights went out. So I asked our American gaffer what happened and he said, ‘In Czechoslovakia, the operator takes the generator home when he leaves.’ Fortunately, Milos never eats lunch, so I went up to him and said, ‘You must be starving. Let’s wrap for dinner.’”

Hausman says he runs his sets according to his director’s personality. For Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he became Michel Gondry’s Siamese twin, riding in with the director every morning to keep pace with his fertile, creative mind. “I had great seconds on that film, and they waited for me to call down to the set, knowing everything we planned the day before would be changed,” he chuckles.

Creating a calm, orderly set for directors who value total control is a Hausman trademark. However, sometimes it backfires. “David Mamet is in love with what his characters say, and the locations are less important,” Hausman notes. “So there’s a scene in House of Games where Joe Mantegna walks across the street to a pool hall late at night. I sent two extras through the background and after the take David said, ‘Mike, who are those people?’ I said, ‘David, they’re two people coming out of a bar. It’s not like an atomic bomb has just hit.’ He just shook his head, ‘No way. Lose ’em.’”

A one-time Merrill Lynch stockbroker who owns a buffalo ranch in Montana, Hausman credits his first career on Wall Street for his financial savvy. He’s taught graduate film students at Columbia University for 30 years and his biggest advice to aspiring ADs and UPMs is to know everybody else’s job on the show as well as or better than your own. “I’m like a construction foreman realizing the architect’s plan,” he concludes. “You don’t bring the cement in until the forms are in place, and you don’t put up the doors without the frames.”

Christine Larson-Nitzsche photo by Brian Davis

The myriad of paperwork—everything from equipment rentals, deal memos and purchase orders—is a far cry from Larson-Nitzsche’s past life as a 1st AD. She says the adrenaline rush she once experienced on the front lines has been replaced with more pragmatic management skills such as ordering pizza when the crew is still shooting at midnight, or getting in between a director and DP who are in a heated argument over how to cover a scene.

“Whenever there’s a conflict between departments, I’m sort of the parental unit who calmly listens to each side,” Larson-Nitzsche explains. “I remember once when I was a trainee, one of the leading actors on the project pretended not to hear anything anyone else said to him, except for me. I basically became the on-set interpreter. Every time one of the ADs wanted to communicate with this person, they went through me.”

Larson-Nitzsche says experiences like that helped hone her managing skills once she became a UPM. Series television is her strong suit, having worked shows like Arrested Development and The L Word. Her most challenging job, she says, was on The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire where she had to hire three different crews and negotiate separate IA and Teamsters contracts.

But Numb3rs has been her most satisfying job. That’s because she gets to share the workload with co-producer/UPM Michael Attanasio. “It’s the first time in my career I have a partner. We alternate episodes, which means I get to spend eight days on the set on every other show. It’s gratifying to be close to the creative process.”

Although it’s been eight years, Larson-Nitzsche still vividly recalls her first day as a UPM. “It was a completely different vibe than two months earlier when I had been an AD,” she recalls. “I wasn’t one of them anymore—I had crossed over to the dark side.” But it didn’t take her long to learn the most important things. “Renting the right amount of air conditioners or heaters and having enough food. If you miss either of those two elements, the crew will hate you. And there’s no defending yourself.”

Renée Hill-Sweet photo by Lorenda Rios Groce

Renée Hill-Sweet

Second Nature

“Most days you’ll find me at base camp with two cellphones, someone on my walkie-talkie, three people in front of me with questions and an actor calling out my name from his trailer,” she jokes. “My job is about making decisions on instinct. The challenge is to correctly prioritize, while ensuring everybody still feels their needs are uppermost and being met.”

No one’s more important to Hill-Sweet than the cast. On Dreamgirls she had to make sure more than 40 actors and dancers, including all the featured extras and leads, arrived at the staging area away from the set and made it through hair, makeup and wardrobe, to get to the set on time. Where most shows will have a single trailer for both hair and makeup, Dreamgirls had five—and Hill-Sweet had to run between all of them to keep her cast on schedule.

Sometimes it takes more than fast feet to get the job done. When a Dreamgirls star was more than an hour late for a set call, Hill-Sweet started to get worried. “It was very early in the morning and I couldn’t get in touch with the manager of the apartment complex,” she recalls. “I had the limo driver climb up onto the balcony and bang on the patio door. It turned out the person had just overslept and was so startled to be awakened, the actor ran downstairs to the car and left the driver to climb back down himself.”

Since going through the DGA Trainee Program nine years ago, Hill-Sweet has jumped back and forth between series television (The Practice) and features (Norbit, Crank). Her day usually ends hunkered down at her laptop doing paperwork—production reports, timecards, and actor’s sign-out sheets—or supervising a DGA trainee. Although she says she’s known for her open, even raunchy sense of humor, Hill-Sweet insists a 2nd 2nd’s job should come with a warning label. “Actors’ trailers are very open and vulnerable environments,” she laughs. “I’ve had to learn fast how to be cool and not react outwardly, even though inside I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God. I don’t want to see that person without their clothes!’”