Joe Reidy - photo by Patrick Harbron

It’s an obsession that’s helped fuel his relationship with director Martin Scorsese through 20 years and 11 projects. “We have that love of film in common,” admits Reidy. “He encourages it and it helps us with a shorthand. He’ll often give me an assignment, a ‘you should see this,’ just so we can draw on it at some later time.”

Scorsese first hired Reidy in 1986 to help him work out technical pool shots for The Color of Money in Chicago. He’s been 1st AD on nearly every feature the director has done since, including his latest, The Departed.

Other A-list directors have also chosen Reidy as their right hand, including Oliver Stone, Robert Redford and Sidney Lumet. But while he plays a key role in many of the best New York-based productions, Reidy is no hard-boiled native–he’s actually a slightly shy midwesterner, who grew up outside Cleveland in a large Irish Catholic family, the son of a funeral director. Enchanted with the American films of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Reidy attended NYU film school, finishing in 1976, and soon after found his way into the DGA Assistant Directors Training Program. “I had great mentors,” he recalls, naming Yudi Bennett and Candace Suerstedt, and it was “a great turning point in my life.”

Reidy has worked steadily ever since, as an AD, a co-producer and even as on-screen talent, doing various bit parts, including his favorite, as a gambler caught cheating in a scene from Casino with Robert DeNiro and Don Rickles. “Sometimes a part will come up and the director somehow thinks I’m right for it,” he says, adding, “I find it very hard to watch myself.”

While he’s passionate about shooting on location in New York, the Tribeca resident gets his greatest fascination from the period films he’s been involved in, like The Last Temptation of Christ, where “we were in Morocco filming and re-creating the Crucifixion,” and JFK, in which “we were at the exact locations, seeing what the assassin would have seen.” “Those are powerful things that really speak to me,” says Reidy.

Another highlight was recreating early Manhattan for Gangs of New York. Talking about Scorsese’s creative process, Reidy says: “He composes a film sort of intellectually and emotionally, and puts it on paper, and then he turns some of that shot list over to me and the cinematographer to prepare and get organized. He’s the boss, that’s for sure, but I’m put in a position of trust.”

On the set, Reidy strives to “help the director be organized and prepared, and to set a tone in which people can work.” Of his personal style, he says, “I think calm and level is the way to go.”

Grace Liu - photo by Mark Estes

Grace Liu:
View From the Bay

Liu’s fluency in Chinese–her first language–has often come in handy. She’s landed work on commercials aimed at the Chinese community, as well as features involving cast and crew from China and Hong Kong, including Cradle 2 the Grave, Rush Hour and Red Corner.

Liu’s naturally engaging personality and easy-going style have helped forge her path. “The crew would always come up to me and say, ‘You’re so nice. You don’t act like an AD,’” she says. “I’m pretty laid-back for an AD, but I get the job done, and I see no reason to be barking out orders and being the whole gung-ho military type.”

It’s been a couple of years since Liu gave up her apartment in Los Angeles and re-settled in Berkeley, and she’s still adjusting to a city where production jobs are considerably more scarce.

The San Francisco film scene is slow right now, she reports, to the point that it’s not uncommon for DGA members in the Bay Area to take interim jobs between productions. Liu, an active member and Secretary-Treasurer of the DGA’s San Francisco Coordinating Committee, is hopeful that an incentive package aimed at stimulating film and TV production that was passed in April by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors will bring more production to the region. “Although a lot of shows are supposedly ‘based in San Francisco,’ they don’t shoot here,” reports Liu. “Hopefully that will change with this new legislation.”

Now that she’s stopped spending half the year in Los Angeles, she’s pouring her extra time into other pursuits–including digital filmmaking for the Internet. “My boyfriend thinks I’m very driven, and that I always have too much on my plate,” she says. “But isn’t that what an AD does? There’s never enough time, and we’re always fighting the clock. I like that.”

Mark Corwin - photo by Dale Berman

Mark Corwin:
As the Wheel Turns

“It’s like a rock concert for us,” he says of the crew’s experience doing “remotes” from other cities. Shot live-to-tape, often in big stadiums, the show brings out “thousands of people who stand in line for hours, for the joy of being part of the show. Then Pat [Sajak] and Vanna [White] come out, and it’s just explosive.”

Feeding that fan fervor is a big part of what motivates Corwin as he goes about his job. “The goal is to not get in the way, to make it the best experience for the viewer, putting the camera where they would want it to be, and keeping the pace moving.”

An L.A. native and game show pro for more than 30 years, Corwin was a longtime AD on Wheel and took over as director when Dick Carson, brother of Johnny, retired from the post in 1999. He grew up in the TV business, and fondly remembers its early days, when his father worked at NBC in the ’50s at the corner of Sunset and Vine. “That was a great, swingin’ corner, then,” he recalls with enthusiasm. “Across the street was a men’s store called Cy Devore’s that had a barbershop in the basement, and on Saturdays my father would take me there to get a haircut with him. Then we’d go across the street and see Roy Rogers, who was doing his show there.”

During a summer relief job at NBC in 1973, Corwin earned his DGA card. He began working as a stage manager on sports and game shows, then moved into AD work thanks to mentors Jim Kantrowe and Clay Daniels, “guys who really went out of their way to help me.”

He began working Wheel on a freelance basis in 1975. The show has yielded not only a career but a family–he met his wife, Robin Kenner, a former AD/SM, when she sat next to him in the edit bay as a PA.

Continuity has been a key theme in Corwin’s life–he’s gained great satisfaction from the stability afforded by the long-running show. But the job remains fresh for him. “The game constantly changes. You never know what’s about to happen–it takes total concentration. I’ve never known a director who isn’t thinking five steps ahead.”