MAKING CLEVELAND ROCK
The Directing Team of The Drew Carey Show

By Ted Elrick

It's a long day involving the most intricate part of a big musical number. It requires a green-screen and tedious stop motion work in order to sell the idea that the main character has split into ten individual characters. Each one of them will dance with the others.

There is no copying and repeating of the characters. Each moves individually and must move seamlessly with the others selling the notion that the main character has become ten. At the same time, the camera is constantly moving to cover the sequence. It's a combination of morph and motion control requiring 17 hours to film a mere 25 second portion of the musical number. 

Surprisingly, the number is not for a big Hollywood feature. It's for the season finale of a half-hour sitcom. The sequence is used to symbolize that the main characters — Drew Carey, a personnel manager at a downtown Cleveland department store, and his longtime friend and love interest Kate [Christa Miller] — have finally made love.

"We know the musical numbers are massive undertakings," director Gerry Cohen said. "I like to say that the ugliest word in the English language is morph. The single ugliest two-word phrase is motion control. It's a phenomenal effect that allows us to do complex special effects with moving cameras.

"It's easy to take a camera, lock it down and put whatever visual effect you will into that picture, but there's a suspension of disbelief that automatically comes with that. When the camera is moving and these incredible things are happening on screen, it adds a whole level of wonderment to it. That's what motion control allows. At the same time, it also allows those of us who are involved to grow estranged from our families, loved ones, animals, children, bed and regular meals," he adds with a laugh.

Despite the demands, many on the crew confess to a very fun set. Producer Holly Sawyer, who works closely with UPM/producer Lou Fusaro and who has been with show since the first episode, said, "About one in the morning, while shooting our latest dance, we were exhausted from dealing with the minutiae of the motion control camera. Then Drew, who had been dancing all day and understandably should have been worn out, started telling jokes and the whole crew started rolling. Our show is able to tackle these big-event episodes because we have an amazing cast and crew — people you can laugh with when you've been working 15 hours and still have more to go."

This is the sixth dance number incorporated into the five seasons of The Drew Carey Show. It's certainly the most complicated in that it required the action to be filmed in the round with complete 360-degree field of vision and utilized a 15-piece orchestra, 20 choreographed dancers, just as many background extras, state of the art visual effects techniques as well as the main actor, Drew Carey, singing lead and playing trumpet solo on the Nat King Cole hit "L-O-V-E."

But musical numbers are just one of the challenges thrown at the cast and crew of ABC's popular sitcom. Cohen, who has directed many episodes since the series first aired in 1995 and currently directs about 16 of each season's 22 episodes, thrives on them, saying, "This show is a dream come true for me. I have had the most remarkable opportunities to learn and to grow doing this show. It's a chance to break out of the four-camera comedy format.

"I've been able to do four of the big dance numbers which are tremendous experiences. I've been to China filming oversees with a crew that didn't speak any English. Any director will tell you that sometimes it's very hard to truly express what you want clearly in words. Try doing it to a Chinese Steadicam operator. I've shot underwater with scuba equipment when a pipe broke in Drew's basement and it flooded. We went down and shot in 7 feet of water with underwater cameras as well as cameras above the surface of the water. We did a live action animation piece with Daffy Duck coming in for a job interview. We did a piece we call Perpetual Motion which involved finally about 300 layers of image. Basically we set up ten loops. An actor would walk in, do something and walk out. Then we'd run that as a loop. Then we'd add another layer where another actor would enter and exit and coincidentally interact with the first actor. Then that loop would repeat, and then another, another, another and another. That was logistically incredibly tricky to have ten people walking in and walking out of one shot and interacting coincidentally and never occupying the same space at the same time. It was really cool."

Co-creator with Drew Carey and executive producer Bruce Helford attributes The Drew Carey Show's forays outside the conventions of the sitcom as a case of "necessity being the mother of invention.

"We had to figure out a way to get attention on our own," Helford explained. "The first thing I came up with were the dance numbers. Then we started doing unusual special effects. NBC put Third Rock From the Sun against us, so we did a show where Drew was fighting aliens which was kind of symbolic to what we were doing. We've even had a line in the script where he says, ‘All you 18 to 49-year-olds, follow me.' Then I came up with the idea for the April Fools show. But a lot of it was to try and generate an audience as an island because God knows they kept throwing everything against us. The idea was to have special innovative things to draw the audience to us. That's part of it, but then I also love television and I love to have fun. Drew is so versatile. He's up for anything I suggest. He's also a very great sport. There are plenty of actors who would say, ‘That's way too hard.' But he'll say, ‘OK, I'll give it a shot.'"

Helford said that one of his early inspirations was one of the great innovators of television, Ernie Kovacs. "My parents would let me stay up to watch his specials. They were on at 10:00 because I think they were considered quasi-adult because they had girls in bathtubs and things like that, but my parents would let me watch those. I remember those shows real clearly and just loved watching them."

"The first dance number involved the Vogues' hit "Five O'Clock World." "That brought a lot of attention and recognition to us," said executive producer Deborah Oppenheimer. "That catapulted us into the next level. What we do is very ambitious, made even more so because we're on the five-day, half-hour schedule. Maybe it wouldn't be that daunting if we had more time, but to incorporate it into the conventional schedule is really difficult. When we shoot a big special effects sequence, we bring in special effects supervisors who do movies like Face-Off and Batman. Those guys have a lot more time and a lot more money than we have. So what we try to do with them and the other members of our crew is find people who come out of a single-camera background who have hopefully worked on this scale before and can handle what we throw at them.

The other thing is that Bruce and Drew don't want to do anything they've seen before," she added. "Instead of going to Italy or Europe, we went to China knowing that it is still very new territory, and I think that's the kind of show that challenges."

"These guys have presented me with the greatest opportunity to learn about new stuff," Cohen said. "That's probably one of the things I value most about being involved in this show. We have such a great team here that when the writing room throws these 90 MPH fastballs, we're able to hit them. For me, it's like I play in the coolest sandbox in the world."

Preparation on this season's dance number began with Cohen's involvement six weeks beforehand, the final four weeks becoming the most intense. "During that period we were really pouring over the ground plans," Cohen explained. "We recorded the entire orchestra track, brought in vocal coaches and choreographers. It was a fairly endless series of large and small scale production meetings.

"One thing that we're very cognizant of here is that communication is paramount to getting things done well and efficiently. There are no behind-the-back conversations. I work for Bruce. I make sure that Bruce always knows what my plan is and then we communicate very well back and forth to make sure that we're on the same page so that we're not working at cross purposes.

"I've been working for him for a long time now. Not only have we grown stylistically together, but I know what he likes and he knows what I like to do. There's sort of a symbiosis or something that we both sort of know what's in each other's mind. My goal as an episodic director is to deliver him the show that he wants. It's not a question of compromising my vision or my integrity. A large part of my job is to make sure that the original artistic vision of the writing room is brought to life. It's a teamwork thing. Keith Richmond is a great AD; Ed Dilks, 2nd; Lou Fusaro, UPM, and nobody's operating in a void. Nobody is trying to usurp anyone else's power. There's no one over here who thinks they can do this whole thing by themselves."

But what about an average show? Is there that much pre-planning?

"If it's something that is fairly tricky, I'll get a heads up weeks ahead of time," Cohen said. "If it's a fairly standard multi-camera comedy script, I may not see the script until the day before we read it at the table. In my travels around town in the last 15 years, there have been other shows where I haven't seen the script until the day after we were supposed to read it at the table. 

"Every comedy script goes through an evolution. We're not immune to that. But I would say that on this show, what we end up putting on film in front of an audience usually stays remarkably close to the original writer's draft, much more so than in a lot of places. This gives me a lot more time with the actors. When you're not worrying about, ‘Oh, gosh, what do we say here now,' then you can be paying a little more attention to how we say it.

"There is a reason why we need five days to do these shows. To do them properly it really takes five days. Every time you find your production week is shortened, through late script delivery, massive rewrites, something is going to give somewhere."

AD Keith Richmond joined the show on the first episode after the pilot. Previously he had worked eight seasons on Full House and 165 episodes of The New Mickey Mouse Club filmed in Orlando.

"I never really knew what a chalenge this show would become," Richmond said. "The first year we didn't even know if the show was going to make it. Then all of a sudden the ratings kicked in. Bruce comes up with these incredible ideas to push the envelope. He started bringing variety back into the world with the dance numbers and that's been quite an experience. We even started doing a live show last year. It was great. I come from videotape and have done some live. You need quite a few people working a live show, so our producers brought in two of the top live stage managers, who I have also worked with before and who are friends of mine, David Wader and Dency Nelson. Both do most of the big awards shows and live pageants."

The live show featured an additional twist in that it combined some improv aspects and was also done live for each of the three time zones resulting in three different shows. Occasionally and randomly, while the cast was in the midst of a scene, a bell would ring forcing the cast member who last spoke to come up with an alternate line of dialogue.

Director Sam Simon has also directed a number of Drew Carey Shows, about half during the first two seasons. Simon began his career with Filmmation as a storyboard artist and writer on such programs as The New Mighty Mouse, The New Heckle and Jeckle and Fat Albert. He then sold a spec script to Taxi and became a producer on the show a year later. He worked as a writer/producer on Cheers then became executive producer and director of The Tracey Ullman Show which led to his being one of the co-creators of The Simpsons.

Simon considers his experiences on The Drew Carey Show some of the most pleasant of his career. "By and large I've worked with people I really enjoy hanging around with," he said. "This show is special because of the lack of egos involved, how loose the set has remained even as the show became a big hit and huge success. It's really like it was during the first season where you have a bunch of bright-eyed eager beavers on the stage. I have to give the credit for that to Drew. I watch a lot of television, and I think there's nobody better or who does more than Drew, yet he doesn't seem to get the recognition.

"The shows are always extremely ambitious. I directed the Internet show with the Drew cam." The Internet episode was the first simultaneous transmission of a network program over the Internet and the airwaves. But, true to Drew form, the team was not content to merely air the program you could just as easily watch on your television. To get the complete show, you had to watch your television and your computer monitor.

"The idea of the show was that Drew had webcams installed in his house," Simon explained. "When there were scenes that weren't taking place in his house, on the Internet you could see what was going on in his house.

"For instance, as soon as Drew left, his dog, Speedy, let 30 other dogs into the house and they just started running around having a good time. With the encoding on the video stream it kind of blurred together. It was like video art and really cool. Then, we had these ghosts running around his house in the middle of the night and they played out this melodramatic scene. Unfortunately, ABC didn't archive that stuff on the web. If you saw it the night it aired, you saw some interesting experimental stuff."

"Bruce comes up with these great ideas and our job is to make it happen," Richmond added. "Because of it we've all gotten to the point where there isn't anything we can't do. Like when Drew did a scene with Daffy Duck or getting 3,000 extras to safely run down a Cleveland street for the "Cleveland Rocks" dance sequence (directed by Gerry Cohen which has since been edited down to be the opening title sequence of the show). That was fun. We did that in two takes. It worked out perfectly.

"I am really lucky, Drew and the cast are great to work with. And there is a great team of directors."

"Another great thing about the show is that Bruce respects his directors," he said. "The collaboration during production is good to see."

Helford said that it's a conscious effort to make certain that Drew Carey is a good show for directors. "Some of the directors I've worked with before and we already have a shorthand," he explained. "But for others, when a director first starts, I sit down with him and talk about pitfalls we've had, so a director doesn't have to come in and find everything out as he experiences the problems. We get around that at the beginning. Plus, I think we have a great support crew that are all really director-friendly."

Does director Simon ever feel daunted by the demands of an episode? "A lot of times I'll open a script and say, ‘Oh, my God,' but now I can't remember which episodes were the hard ones." Simon said. 

"There was another show where we had security monitors positioned around the department store and Drew was watching these monitors. We had action going on the monitors and we had to cut very seamlessly between Drew and what was going on in the store. The show is challenging for directors because of things like that. The audience would like it just as much if it were just Drew and his constant antagonist Mimi sitting across the desk. That's very easy to shoot. But they add these larger more, challenging scenes which are fun." 

Ed Dilks has been the 2nd AD on the show for the last two seasons. Before, he worked in both single camera and multi-camera. His credits include the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon as a 2nd 2nd AD on all the Earth portions and key 2nd on all the moon sequences, 2nd AD on the feature Meet Wally Sparks and in multi-camera on Something So Right and as a DGA trainee on Dear John. But The Drew Carey Show proved to be his most challenging right from the first show.

"Right after my first prep days we were into two days of visual effects shooting on the stage for this really wild sequence that involved people coming into a room, doing something and leaving. (The Perpetual Motion episode Cohen talked about)," he said. "We were creating very intricate effects shots with loops and multiple loops. I'm setting the background in real time hoping that it will all look OK when they loop in all these principals coming in and out doing their thing, climbing over furniture, hiding under desks. I had come into shows that were running before, but this one was moving full steam ahead."

While there is a core group of background extras who serve as the employees of the department store office, there are numerous episodes requiring many more extras. "This show is heavy on background," Dilks explained. "We've had episodes where every scene involves background. I'll watch the rehearsals and I'll make notes on the principal blocking on rehearsal days. On our camera blocking day I'll get a chance to see the shots the director has in mind. Then, on shoot day, I can pretty much set the background to make the most use of which camera a particular piece of the script is being covered by. 

"In single camera you're basically setting it for a shot. On multi-camera you're making the entire scene work continuously and match. That's the real tough one, but it's fun. Keith is good about scheduling the shoot so that I get a jump-start. Usually camera blocking will begin with another scene at the other end of the stage. I'll get that group of extras set, then when cameras get down there, I'm already further ahead in the schedule. Sometimes, if you have a lot of scenes, it can be a little tricky to get everything set so that you can watch what you set. If it's a show where I only have to worry about the background in the Warsaw Tavern, I'll get to see it. If it's a show where there's a lot of background, I'll have to move on to the next and Keith will have to see it. That can be trickier. We've had scenes in courtrooms and a wedding party on the deck of a ship, then we'll have single camera background like when we shot in a bowling alley or took a group of extras to the back lot for an exterior outside the courthouse in Cleveland. It's different from episode to episode."

Dilks said that a lot of the business for the extras comes extemporaneously. "The scenes are never the same. In the Warsaw, people will always order beer and socialize with people at tables, but every scene will have something about it that is unique. There are many times where the writers will write for the background to participate. In one bar scene somebody formed a conga line, or Drew's diary was passed around the bar in another episode and a lot of people had to react. So those things get added into the mix."

UPM/producer Lou Fusaro has been with the show since the second season and also has a varied background, coming from features and one-hour dramas. "I production managed Miami Vice for a few years," he said. "That show was innovative at the time, and The Drew Carey Show kind of reminds me of where we were with that show. When Miami Vice hit the airwaves it changed television a little bit. As far as sitcoms go, by going to China, doing these dance pieces and the live show, they're not usual sitcom behavior. It's exciting because I always feel we're doing things that other people haven't done before. It's rewarding. I didn't expect it because I had never done a sitcom before.

"When I first got here Keith took the time to get me up to speed on how a sitcom works. And it's been great," Fusaro said. "Look, every show has its moments. Sometimes we'll want to kill each other, but this is a really great family here and I think it all stems from Drew. He's one of the hardest working people I've known and he's special."

Fusaro is also quick to dispel any notion that the innovative aspect of the show plays haywire with the budget. "We manage to do these shows on budget. Not all of them, but by the end of the season we generally are pretty close. We've basically made it hard for ourselves because our audience expects bigger, better, more interesting every time."

Holly Sawyer agreed saying, "It's been wonderful to work on a show that has evolved throughout the years. I could see if you did the same living room/kitchen type show year after year, you might get bored. But because we do so many innovative pieces, it keeps us challenged and it's to the point now where they'll say, ‘Let's dance but now let's shoot it on the moon,' and we'll say, ‘OK, bring it on.'"

Cohen said that one of the things they are most proud of about the show is that they are willing to do anything for a laugh. "We don't feel that we're above physical comedy," he explained. "There are some shows out there that have a certain cache, if you will, of being more cerebral than we are. That's great. If that's their taste, fine. But there are those of us who still think that a guy falling over the back of a sofa can be quite amusing."

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