by Darrell L. Hope

		Director Ernest Dickerson (left) and actor John Turturro as sports commentator Howard Cosell on the set of Monday Night Mayhem. Click picture for larger view.

The brightly lit space is abuzz with people either doing, or watching and waiting to do their jobs. Although the room is filled with modern equipment and skilled actors and technicians, including Dickerson's well-oiled machine-efficient directing team, the lack of the thick soundproof walls and reconditioned air of a typical soundstage conjures up the spirit of indie filmmaking. The set experience has the desired result: We are harkened back to when the first film crews stepped off the train from New York and opened shop in the small pueblo of Los Angeles, a place dominated more by orange groves than people.

Based on a true story, Big Shot originated as a script by the late director Michael Ritchie. "We really feel it's too bad that this has to be on television because it has the breadth of a movie," Dickerson said. "I've always been fascinated by kids and crime, and especially kids who become criminal masterminds. Benny's story is an interesting one. He's a New York kid who goes to Arizona State. It's a party school and he gets caught up in a lifestyle and finds himself in a downward spiral that he can't pull himself out of."

As for what made him decide to shoot in the converted warehouse instead of a conventional set, Dickerson explains, "We're trying to come up with a more interesting space. Even though it's set in Arizona, we wanted to do something that was more like a New York loft, so we decided we had to do it in a warehouse. We do a transition shot at the end of this where we actually bridge the gap of several months."

With tactical squadlike precision, the crew sets up a shot in a scene between actor David Krumholtz who plays Benny Silman, the ambitious kid from Brooklyn who wound up in the center of one of the biggest point shaving scandals in collegiate basketball history, and actor Nicholas Turturro, who plays a dangerous high roller who's placing a huge bet with Benny. Dickerson uses the opportunity to give further direction to one of the actors portraying Benny's friends, then retreats to his director's chair situated behind the monitors while his army finishes the rest of their preparations.

"We've been cranking it out because I've got a great crew. We've been averaging 21-25 setups a day. And we've got some quality performances. FX has been supportive because they know I've been trying some things to keep the experience pretty subjective since Benny is telling the story."

		The Directing Team on Big Shot. From left to right: 2nd 2nd AD Jeff Bilger, DGA trainee Carolyn Esposito, 1st AD Rodney Hooks, director Ernest Dickerson and 2nd AD Karen Horwitz. Click picture for larger view.

"I like to maintain a pretty easygoing atmosphere on my set," says Dickerson. "We do joke a lot, but the work gets done. I think it's my job as a director to be the glue that holds everybody together and give them gentle nudges in the right direction."

Within moments the crew is done with their preparations and the actors are all at their starting marks. The camera rolls and in a voice registering barely above a whisper the headphoned Dickerson calls out "Action!" then settles back to watch the scene unspool on the video feed as the camera team dollies through their preset pattern.

"And cut!" Dickerson calls out at the end.

Hooks looks to his general, "Are we going again?"

"I thought you wanted two of them," the DP offers in reminder.

Dickerson shakes his head. He knows he's got what he wanted. A check of the gates, and it's off to the next setup. The crew moves in and does its prep with such speed that no further nudging is needed from the 1st. In minutes they are done.

"Rehearsal or shoot?" Hooks inquires.

"Let's shoot it," Dickerson announces.

"OK, let's make this." Hooks echoes to the cast and crew.

Fifteen seconds into the scene Dickerson calls "cut."

They quickly reset and go again. It seems perfect, but Dickerson isn't satisfied.

"Let's do one more," he says.

A few moments from the endpoint a ceiling noise announces its presence, the vagaries of shooting without the buffer of soundproofing. Dickerson is unperturbed. He seeks the boom operator's best opinion on the sound quality of that last take and is told that it's 'iffy.' They decide to go again.

Then in the middle of an otherwise picture-perfect take, a cell phone rings. An actor ad-libs "Pick up the phone," without breaking character. But Dickerson, without a hint of annoyance, stops the scene, rolls back a few lines from the interruption and prepares to go again. Twenty seconds later the same offending phone has the impudence to ring again. Dickerson has had enough.

"I don't ask for much, but please respect the acting on this set and turn the phones off!" Once again his voice is barely above a whisper, but the weight it carries probably has the culprit wishing they'd opted for a carrier pigeon instead.

		Dickerson (center) preps actor John Turturro for a scene in Monday Night Mayhem as actor Brad Beyer (as Don Meredith) looks on. Click picture for larger view

They go again and the scene is perfect. Dickerson calls "cut" and orders the crew to set up for the close-up coverage of the scene. A glance at the video feed reveals the shot is at an angle a typical of what is thought of when television movies come to mind. But that's typical of the former cinematographer Dickerson who likes to let his camera do as much talking as his actors despite the 25-day schedule.

"I work pretty visually," he admits. "My cinematographer tells me he's having a ball on this because we are trying stuff. In pre-production I always sit down and storyboard the key senses from the film because for me it's composing the film. I think the art form that's closest to film, is music. You have to compose its highs and its lows and how you move the camera. Where you move the camera, when you move the camera, and whether the camera is high when it moves, or low when it moves, whether it's straight track or a track and zoom, they all elicit a different feeling from the audience. I'm always planning that in the early stages. I imagine how I want to shoot a scene. Even though I might not stick to the storyboard, it gives me a spine from which to take the movie.

"That's why Scorsese always inspires me. Nobody uses the camera like Marty. He uses it expressively, and not necessarily realistically. I don't think I'm in the business to make documentaries, so I'm not always going for realism, but trying to use the camera to find the emotional truth in a scene, or help elevate it."

Later in his trailer, Dickerson simultaneously eats his lunch, watches dailies from the previous day's shooting and continues the interview. Free time is something he doesn't have in abundance. Asked how he keeps up with this breakneck pace he shrugs, "I take vitamins, but I don't know if I get enough sleep.

"And my workout schedule is always interrupted when I shoot," he laughs. "But it helps that you have a real love for the project. I think if you really love what you're doing, and feel that close to it, then it's really easy to get out of bed everyday and do it. I can't imagine doing a project I couldn't be attached to emotionally."

Dickerson's emotional attachments have produced some sterling results. The Howard University and NYU film grad began as an award-winning cinematographer on films like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X and John Sayles' The Brother From Another Planet before making his feature directorial debut with the visceral urban youth drama Juice. From that point his filmography weaves between feature film projects like Surviving the Game, Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight and Bones and projects directed for the small screen like his Peabody Award–winning Showtime film Strange Justice, which reenacted the controversial Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his Outfest Grand Jury Award-winning Showtime film Blind Faith.

Dickerson's Our America, which is based on another true story, was also made for Showtime. "I was working on Monday Night Mayhem, and the [actors] strike was threatening," Dickerson recalls. "I wanted to find something to do before the strike, but I didn't want to do just anything. A friend of mine on the crew told me that Joe Stern was interested in getting the script to me. I got it sent to my home in California and my wife read it, called me up and said 'You have to read this! This is right up your alley.'

"These kids lived with death so much through their lives on a day-by-day basis. The story forces them to confront images of life and death and, by extension, their own mortality, which is something that no 15 or 16 year old should have to deal with."

[Jones and Newman won the 1996 Peabody for their National Public Radio show, Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse.]

Dickerson points to the scene on the monitor. "This is leading us up to the transition shot we did earlier today. It's a piece of visual effects. When the guys jump up, they freeze in midair. Benny unfreezes — we shot him today separately in green screen — steps down and talks to the camera. We pan him into the kitchen in one take. He gets a beer out of the refrigerator, comes back out of the kitchen and the whole room has been transformed into an entirely different place. It's a complicated effects shot. But I look at these as short movies. I don't look at them as TV shows, even though there are commercial interruptions. I consider myself a filmmaker, and the movies I've done recently just happen to air on television."

The shot he described seems ambitious for a TV movie. "I have a tendency to be a bit of a perfectionist," he admits. "You want to get it just right and sometimes you can't take the time to do it, or you'll have to work extra fast to do it. You always feel when you're working really fast like that, that you're trading something off, even a shot like this, that's a really complicated bit and took us two days to shoot."

The scene on the monitor ends then starts again as a new take. The two versions seem almost identical. "Sometimes I'll like a little bit of what happened in one take and I'll do it again just to see what happens, or I'll want to cut in tighter. I think we did this again because we had slight focus problems. Sometimes I'll do stuff over again basically because of timing. I'll like what they're doing performance-wise but I'll just try something that may be a little faster. Like this one," Dickerson points at the shot, "I wanted to get a little more time and pacing before we actually start in on the dialogue. Sometimes when I'm playing with timing in the editing room, I'll want to shave off a couple of seconds I'll need a couple of seconds before he goes into dialogue.

"It's going to be on the air some time in March so the post production's going to be pretty fast. We shoot up until December 20th, and then I'll start cutting right away."

Despite the serious time constraints he's under, Dickerson still hasn't opted for shooting digital.

"There's still the 'film look,'" he says. "The digital things I've seen still have their limitations in terms of contrast. If you want to go for blowout or really dark areas, sometimes digital can't handle that as well. I'm looking for the right project to do digitally, but still a lot of networks are resisting it because they're so used to film."

One wonders if his resistance to digital filmmaking isn't a residual conceit of his cinematographer background. But for Dickerson, that career path has only enhanced his skills as a director. In fact he shot Our America himself.

Asked why he'd voluntarily incur the extra workload the director shakes his head. "I don't know. It just felt right. I knew the material was going to be pretty raw and I thought I'd try to see if I could have more of a connection with the material if I shot it as well. And I guess part of it was seeing if I could do it. Another part of it was to play with the new Vision film stocks. I really wanted to see if I could push it as far as I could go. I wanted to try to shoot the film with available light. And I did. Sometimes I let the room light it. I was going for a more realistic, documentary feel. I wanted to shoot it like a photojournalist goes into a room and has to use whatever's there. I didn't do a lot of movie lighting except when it was absolutely necessary.

"I think one of the reasons I'd shied away from shooting and directing before, other than the fact that it's double the duty, is that I've always been afraid that if I were lighting it, I wouldn't have much time to spend with my actors. But it actually worked out pretty good. I didn't operate the camera so I would spend time lighting it but while I was doing so, we'd also be rehearsing and I'd be fine-tuning. But I'm not sure I'll do that too many times."

He had no such ambitions on Monday Night Mayhem, which debuts on TNT this January. But the film did give Dickerson the chance to explore the early history of Monday Night Football of which he was a fan.

"I grew up watching Monday Night Football. I started my senior year in high school and watched it all through college. Also it was the chance to explore who Howard Cosell was. This was after his persona was decided by his relationaship with Muhammed Ali. I guess, like everybody else, I grew up with a love/hate relationaship with Howard Cosell and it was a chance to really come to grips with how I felt about him because when he died, I really missed him. I really felt there was a void and he was gone and there was never going to be anyone else like him. It was one of those situations where you don't really appreciate somebody until they're gone. But the more I found out about him, the more fascinated I was."

Monday Night Mayhem also gave Dickerson another shot of nostalgia by allowing him to work again on the East Coast.

	The DGA Directing Team Monday Night Mayhem Directed by: Ernest Dickerson Unit Production Manager: Natascha Tillmanns First Assistant Director: David Weshsler Second Assistant Director: Cindy Craig 2nd Unit: First Assistant Director: Roni Wheeler Second Second Assistant Director: Stephan Booth Click picture for larger view

He turns his eyes back to the monitor. The shots are now of a large man who's so angry with the lead character that he destroys his own television. It's obvious that Dickerson enjoyed shooting the scene.

"If I read a script and five minutes in I know where it's going to go, I'm not interested. I like to be surprised. I like to be taken for a journey, and I don't want to already know where it's going to end. I want to not be able to put it down because then that's what I can do with the movie. But it also has to be something I can get a visual handle on. If I have a style, I primarily choose to use the camera as a storytelling tool. If it's something where I can tell the story visually, I really go for that.

"It was always the visual that drew me to films anyway. I remember the films that affected me so much. When I look at them now, they're still intensely visual films, like Hitchcock's Vertigo, and the films of Stanley Kubrick. I think it was A Clockwork Orange that made me first realize the power of a director. Seeing how Welles and Hitchcock used the camera, and David Lean. I'm still really attracted to filmmakers who use the visuals as the primary storytelling tool. I'd love to do a film that has hardly any dialogue. Something that was totally visual. That would be really interesting."

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