By Darrell L. Hope

Director Lou Antonio

With more than 100 episodes, 28 long form and four sold pilots under his belt, his expertise has been acknowledged in the fast-paced world of television direction. He received Emmy nominations for Something for Joey (1978), Silent Victory: The Kitty O'Neill Story (1979) and a 1994 Emmy nomination for his Chicago Hope episode "Life Support" as well as a 1993 DGA nomination for the Picket Fences segment "The Dancing Bandit."

It's been a long journey since Antonio, who was a well-known actor, accepted an invitation to try out his directing chops on an episode of the family show Gentle Ben that starred his friend Dennis Weaver and a very large bear.

"They used to shoot those shows in three and a half days," recalled Antonio. "So I went down to Florida and did a guest shot, to kind of get the lay of the land, then started directing."

He thought that his prior experience directing theater would give him the confidence to handle a TV directing assignment.

"Hah! I couldn't sleep before my first day's shooting, because there wasn't just upstage, downstage, center stage, stage right, stage left. It was 360 degrees and the camera could move, go up and down, and have different lenses to boot! Hell, in acting all I had to worry about was myself; as a director I had to worry about everything and everybody!"

Despite a rocky start, Antonio was immediately offered two more episodes. However, the second go-round was more challenging than the first. "I had just read the second one when my mom had a heart attack and I rushed back to Oklahoma City, leaving my script in Florida. But she and my two brothers said she'd just worry about me if I stayed and to go direct."

He took a red-eye and went straight to location, a swamp, and immediately, without any prep at all, began to wing it.

"I'd go home too exhausted to prep, wake up, go to the set, and figure it out as I was shooting. The stress wore me out. But the whole deal gave me so much confidence. It doesn't mean I knew anything, it just gave me confidence. I really didn't much care for directing, what you had to sacrifice to stay on schedule. I did one more and went back to acting."

It took an invitation from Sally Field to coax Antonio back into the director's chair. "I was teaching a class at the Actors Studio and Sally was one of my students. She said, 'Why don't you come do a Flying Nun?' I said, 'I don't know about this directing, Sally.'"

Antonio laughs now about his inexperience and his first "Hollywood setup." He was composing a shot on the Columbia ranch featuring a then unknown actress named Farrah Fawcett. "Someone handed me the parallax viewfinder and said, 'Do you want to show us your first shot, Mr. Antonio?' Mr. Antonio? I might have been 28 or something. So I kneeled down and looked through the viewfinder and said, 'Yeah, OK, so we'll be down here and then Farrah does this and she crosses here and....' It's quiet on the set. The assistant cameraman said, 'Uh, Mr. Antonio? You're looking through the wrong end.'"

After the first day's dailies the producer, Jon Epstein, came down and offered me two more episodes.

Antonio soon found himself in a comfortable career split between directing and acting.

Antonio (right) discusses a scene with actor Robert Conrad on Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.

These days Antonio's main focus is directing episodic television. Although the money is better than it used to be, the pressures of delivering a one-hour show are greater than ever. "Most producers schedule a location scout on the first day of prep, whether you've gotten a script or not! I'd say, 'I don't know the story yet, how do I know if this is the right location?' Everyone's in such a hurry because everyone's under the gun."

Having occupied the director's chair for three decades of television, Antonio has seen the medium grow from a place where the photographic quality of the show was not the utmost concern, to a point where the production values sometimes threaten to outstrip the content. He recalls how different shooting early episodes of The Rockford Files was from some of his more recent experiences.

"Back when I shot Rockford Files, we had six days and that included the stunts and the chases. They were long, grueling days. Thank God for Jimmy Garner and that crew. There were only three networks and photographically most of the shows looked like hell and it didn't matter. They just didn't have time. You threw up a 10K or 20K, what the hell, 'OK, we're lit.' Now they're competing with HBO and DVDs, so there's all this new emphasis on lighting and 'the look of the show.'

"Every now and then a director will run into a prima donna in the crew or cast who'll think the show is only about their work. They cost the director and the production time and money. To catch up the director has to print an acceptable performance, but not the performance that he or she was after, as well as dropping shots, coverage, simplifying camera moves. Everything. It hurts our work and therefore the telling of the story. The director has to get the day's work done and everybody has to help. Crew and cast."

Antonio feels that some of the headaches he has to endure are due to writer/producers who are inexperienced when it comes to the requirements of shooting a show.

"Unfortunately, in this day of writer/producers, many of the inexperienced writers don't understand the nuts and bolts of production. Hopefully there'll be a line producer who'll tell them 'I'm sorry. You've got too many locations. You've got us five days out and we're only budgeted for three. You've got to change the script.' Sometimes you'll run into writer/producers that say, 'No, no, that's it!' All I can do is give my script notes. I can't force them to make the changes. Whatever they write, I have to shoot. We all want to make a good show so I just keep on talking to them.

"In theater and we were never quick to change dialogue. We looked for the meaning of the moment. The writers have worked hard, so I work hard to try to give them what they want. The trouble is there's usually not just one writer on a script. There are three or four. And it can get awfully political with a lot of egos and 'Who's the Boss Here?!' Mainly, they have as tough a job as anybody. As you know, George Cukor once said, 'A director can't make a good picture out of a bad script.'"

Antonio finds that in episodic some of the politics and infighting have occurred before the director begins prep.

"When I was doing movies for television, I was the only one who would fight for my picture because the producers always wanted another assignment from the network. The director was standing alone, like Don Quixote swinging at windmills. It's like being in the infantry. You take one foot of ground at a time."

Today, being in the infantry is more difficult.

"There's too many people, too many opinions now. Take casting for example. There can be three to five writers sitting there and if the auditioning actor stresses the right word the writer is liable to say, 'Oh, see? He understands the script.' But it's not about the underlined word, it's about making the character come to life. Casting sometimes is when I get into the most discussions, as we'll call them."

Antonio notes that this veritable explosion in the number of personnel who now claim producing credits on a typical TV show is a far cry from how it was done a few years ago.

"I grew up as a director on one-hour dramas at Universal when Jon Epstein, who had been the producer on The Flying Nun, hired me. David Victor was the executive producer, meaning he sold the show to ABC and then you never saw him again, and Jon was the producer. Besides him there were an associate producer who did the post. Jon worked with the writers, sat there with you in casting -- just the two of us -- and then there was a story editor. That was it. Now it's like the song from The Boy Friend, "There's safety in numbers..." I got a Christmas gift once from the producers of Chicago Hope. Being brought up correctly by my mama, I sent out 13 thank-you notes."

The worst part of that syndrome is the fact that sometimes some of these individuals don't even know the basics of production.

"Alice West, who is a real producer and a terrific one, asked me to do a segment of a series she was doing. During prep I saw a young woman sitting in an office with 'Producer' on the door. I asked Alice, 'Who's that?' She told me her name, and I said, 'And she's a producer?' Alice said, 'She can't even read a call sheet. They saw a ten-minute one-act that she wrote and they hired her.' I'm told a series needs so many on staff now because the networks take longer to give a new series a 'go' and again it's rush, rush to get a series ready. Plus the bushels of rewrites the networks demand."

Antonio (right) directs a scene with actor Heath Ledger on ROAR.

Still, for directors, some semblance of sanity prevails. Antonio notes that there is a different attitude toward the work when a DGA member occupies a show runner position.

"Usually when the director hands in his cut it undergoes what I call the 'committee cut.' You'll see five or six people around the AVID, 'I want an over-the-shoulder. No, I want this, I want that.' The directors are seldom, if ever invited to this. And again it can become political or who's the 800-lb gorilla? The 'committee cut' can make a jumble out of your intentions. Whereas on The West Wing, Tommy Schlamme is a blessing. I think Tommy is the only one that re-edits the director's cut. I had a shot in my episode that began with showing the whole interior of the Biltmore Hotel lobby and as Rocky Carroll comes downstairs I tilted down from the ceiling, picked him up, dollied past some foreground to establish the place, then went in for coverage when they sat down to talk. I said to the editor, 'OK, so a shot is only a shot. They'll go right for the coverage.' Writers always want close-ups of their words. I'll be damned but Tommy left my whole opening in. He's very respectful of the director's vision and invariably helps the director's cut. He's a collaborator in the best sense of the word. Michael Pressman is the same way and so's Mel Damski, Jim Hart, and Bill D'Elia."

Antonio also finds that those sets with the DGA members in show runner positions often are the ones that offer him the greatest freedom as a director. "When we go into a new series, the style of the series has already been established. But at places like Chicago Hope I had D'Elia, Michael Dinner and Pressman, all directors, saying, 'Shoot it any way you want to. Whatever you think is right for the scene.'"

Antonio's experiences on other shows haven't always been as liberating. "Writer-producers always want a whole lot of close-ups, you know, talking heads. I've said to some of them, 'Why don't you just go write for radio, for Christ's sake?' I've burned many a bridge over the years.

"My daughters wanted me to do Party of Five. So I'm filming and a writer-producer is hovering around the video assist and he is not only annoying but disrupting my concentration. I can't do a shot and wait for some writer or producer to come and give me a grade. They hire us because supposedly we know what we're doing. When producer Ken Topolsky asked me back to do another one I said, 'I won't come back if there's anybody hanging around the video assist.' He said there wouldn't be, and he kept his word.

"Often you hear the writers say, 'Oh, I want to protect my work.' Well, we're there to protect and serve and enhance. The writer should trust the director and the actor to bring something to a scene that they haven't thought of. N. Richard Nash, one of the playwrights I worked with in the theater, said that sometimes the writer will write from his unconscious or subconscious and not even know what it is. Then it's the director's and the actors' job to find that subtext and reveal to the writer what he or she meant for the moment."

Despite some of the above horror scenarios, Antonio has always had a great respect for writers.

"They go through such punishment. It's unbelievable the amount of notes that they get from networks, then from the corporate production company, from the stars, from everybody. Then they get notes from the director. They even get notes from each other. I think they're hit by the cleaver as many times as the director is. Notes slam down on writers like an Oklahoma hailstorm."

But part of what makes the job so appealing to Antonio is the art that can grow from a true sense of collaboration.

"When I have an open exchange with the writer, there's nothing more exciting. Once I went in to do a McCloud and a new writer came in named Michael Gleason. He'd been a stage manager on Broadway, a theater guy. I'd prep during the day and then we'd work on the script until midnight, but in the most non-egocentric way. We really worked the way writers and directors should work and it was wonderful. It was exciting.

"When I was doing Rockford Files, I'd say to Steve Cannell, who wrote most of 'em, 'Sit with me. Let's read the script out loud.' I asked questions. 'Now, Stephen J., why did you put this stage direction here when possibly this is happening underneath the smile? What did you mean by this line? Why is the guy leaving the room when he should be standing there arguing?' That kind of work with a writer is informing and helps me see the vision of the writer. And then if something pops into my mind, I can share that with him and we start building on each other's ideas."

Antonio feels that the best is accomplished when the atmosphere is conducive to everyone's contributions. "That's what the writer has to understand. It may not be better or worse, it's just different, and each can be valid. When I was working with Elizabeth Taylor on Between Friends, she started rehearsing a scene entirely different from the way I saw the scene. Maybe it wasn't better but it was different, more interesting and it didn't hurt the texture of the piece at all. Everybody, director and writer, has to be open to that. Elia Kazan was that way. When I was acting in America, America, Kazan used to say, 'I want you to bring me 100 ideas a day. I may not use any of them, in fact, I probably won't. But bring them. You gotta listen to everybody. But still you have to be the last word."

From left: Barbara Tyson, Elizabeth Taylor, Carol Burnett and Antonio on the set of Between Friends.

"When an actor comes in to audition, I first look to their training to see on what level I should communicate with them, because I'm familiar with a lot of different techniques. Too many young directors think it's just lenses and angles and three-foot cuts. I encourage them to take acting classes. When I've taught at AFI, I'd make the directors get up and act to find out why an actor can be panicky and tense and rotten. Our job then is to help them stimulate their talents."

Antonio finds that as a director he is constantly learning his craft. As the technology changes and television

production sophistication encroaches on territories once only the purview of feature films, he finds more and more tools at his disposal, including the latest digital techniques like CGI.

"I've done a lot of CGI, particularly on C.S.I. where I'll have a shot of a corpse with his mouth open and I push in with the lens, and then it goes into CGI and goes down through the intestines and all of that stuff. Phil Conserva was head of post when I was there and he and his staff do a brilliant job. I don't see how they do it in the time allotted them. I finished one episode and eight days later it was on the air. I tell you, Hollywood is brilliant. CGI is really a great tool."

Currently enjoying the summer hiatus, Antonio is recharging his creative batteries for the season to come by basking in his time off with his daughters, grandchildren and his garden.

He is looking forward to the new season and his dance card is already rapidly filling.

"I'm thrilled that my first assignments are on brand-new series. Undercover, The Guardian, The Agency, and I'm really excited about working with Jim Garner again. It's called First Monday, about the Supreme Court, with Charles Durning, Joe Mantegna, James Karen and Gail Strickland. I can't wait to be around those actors. Being on the floor and having great times with the crew and the actors. Keeping it light. I try to make it like a party because I really believe when everybody's energy is up the creativity is up. I also love having an actor surprise me with a beauty, or a crew person or a cameraman say, 'Hey, Lou, I've got an idea....'"

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