Work Hard & Don’t Get Arrested: 90’s film sets and paying your dues
Steve Brennan, a retired film prop director, set dresser, and art director, is the coolest family friend around. He’s worked on Castaway, The Last Samurai, Equalizer 2, and Buffy, to name a few, traveled to live on sets from Fiji to Reno, surfed the best waves and met Hollywood’s shining stars.
But it’s no big deal.
He’ll tell you stories if you ask, but is never looking for the perfect moment to name-drop or prove that his life has been more interesting than yours. It’s a refreshing perspective in a world where everyone and everything seems to be screaming for your attention.
Steve worked behind the scenes for his entire career, one of the many (often unthanked) people that built the worlds of your favorite films. It wasn’t easy to get there.
“I was in school and I had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life. You know what I mean? I kept thinking of things that I wanted to do, and they all seemed to be something that I recognized at one point would be a terrible job. The only parts that you want to do are the good parts that you saw in a movie,” he explained. “I actually thought that I'd try and get into film, to be in the music portion of it, and try to score films with music.” But with only one film class at UMass Amherst, Steve “ended up becoming a Communications major. And went forward knowing “I was going to graduate without a real, you know, film degree.” After graduation, he made his way to California to live out the dream.
“I got out to California, and I was broke. I had no one. I knew no one in the film industry. I knew nothing about the film industry.”
So, he went back home to Boston. Months of knocking on doors and cold calling anyone he could led Steve to an agent at central booking who was able to help him into working his first commercial. Afterwards, “I got a phone call from him, and he said, ‘Listen, you should go down and talk to this guy. They're starting a television pilot for Fox TV (...) , they're looking for for people that are willing to work and to start out as production assistants.’”
“I went to the office dressed like in, like a tie and a button down shirt and a nice pair of slacks. I met with the producer, this British producer,” he remembers, “and he sat down, he looked at my resume, he scratched his head, and he was like,” Steve puts on a British accent. “Ok, right. So basically, you haven't done shit, have you?”
“Years later I asked him, I said, ‘Why did you hire me?’ (...) He said, ‘I saw you had driven a garbage truck, so I saw you were a garbage man. He said, ‘I knew you'd fucking do anything for me.’ I got hired because I was a garbage man at one time in my life and I knew how to drive a truck, and that was my birthright to the film industry. That's how I got into the business.”
Day one on set, he was washing toilets in the Art Department. Day two, he was flying to New York, finding the truck production had rented in a warehouse in the East Village, and driving it back to Boston. “I mean, it was only nine hours from start to finish. That was the shortest day I think I've ever had in the film industry.”
“We would, on average, do 15 hour days, as these production assistants, and we would make $100 a day.” One job led to another, in New Orleans and then Reno. Each time, Steve packed his entire life into the backseat of a car and drove to the new set. The moments where he could really change the course of a scene were few and far in between, but that 1% of the time made the brutally hard and fast pace of the other 99% worth it. It was all worth it to ask if there was a better shot to get, a better way to block a certain scene.
A reputation for hard work and consistency was what let him go from set to set. “Everybody else got arrested. Everybody else did some crazy things. Some people showed up drunk. I was the guy that came in and was good and worked.”
With AI and social media fame, the rise of ‘nepo baby’ culture and influencer opportunity, sometimes it’s hard to remember that the work we do is worthwhile. The literal shit that you scrub off the toilets can be your golden ticket, the part time waitressing gig can be the stepping off point for your acting career. Sometimes, it seems we’ve forgotten that the movies we see aren’t just about the stars or directors– they are about the thousands of hours of love that hundreds of different people have poured into them. The art department, the key grips, the makeup artists, costume designers and production assistants aren’t just the names typed in credits, they are people who have waded through the difficulty of dedication without praise in order to become a part of the worlds they build, the stories that our favorite movies tell us. When you think about your favorite movie, you might think about your favorite director, but, “there's a, you know, a long, long list of talented people that worked with him to create that vision.” Because of that, “What came out was probably better than what he actually ever dreamt.” There’s an honor in the hard work that goes unnoticed, and we need to find a way to better respect the people who show up and don’t get arrested– they get shit done.