My adviser in college told me that only about twenty percent of the graduates in my field actually find jobs working in the field; and that only about five percent would still be working in the field after five years. I was part of the twenty percent, and ultimately became part of the 95%. I was thrilled to get a job in the production field and even more thrilled to have gotten on with the top production facility in the area.
We knew we had a great opportunity and we worked hard. Pre-production and shooting made for very long days with lots of stress and often few breaks. We normally started early in the morning and worked well past the world's "normal" quitting time. Sometimes we needed a little time to unwind after a long day.
Ralph and I made a great team for a few years; both at the working part and the unwinding part!
We were known to hang around Video Wisconsin for hours after the work was done. We were the guys who turned off the lights and locked the doors when we finally decided to head to our homes to get at least a little sleep before going at it again the next day.
Oh, the energy of youth...
Ralph and I became the kings of "unwind time." We had several fun activities that kept us hanging around Video Wisconsin. John Barto, our boss, had several pinball machines in the back storage room. I'm not sure where he picked them up, but he had bought them for one reason or another. There was one minor problem with them, though.
They didn't work.
That was not going to stop us! I quickly tore into them, repaired them and rigged them so we could just push a button to play without actually inserting any money.
And play we did! We spent hours playing pinball. We had a blast.
I proved to be much better at repairing pinball machines than actually playing them. Ralph soundly beat me pretty much every every time, but I didn't care. We were just unwinding.
Ralph and I came up with another unwinding routine that was not quite as innocuous. We invented the game of Tape Ball!
A typical film or video shoot uses lots of gaffer's tape. Gaffer's tape looks similar to duct tape, but that is where the similarity ends. Gaffer's tape is cloth-based and normally about two inches wide. It has a special adhesive that will stick to pretty much anything but remove easily without leaving a sticky residue. It is used to tape down cables, secure props and thousands of other tasks on film and video shoots. It is available in a wide range of colors to blend in as much as possible on shots.
Gaffer's tape is also quite expensive, but tape is cheaper than lawsuits so we used a lot of tape. The tape had to be pulled up and thrown away at the end of each setup. We came up with the brilliant idea of wrapping the tape into balls as we pulled it up. The balls would end up being about six inches, or so, in diameter.
Now the simple game would be to launch them into one of the trash cans like we were shooting hoops. We really weren't into simple and we weren't into basketball. We had to come up with a better game.
We invented Tape Ball!
Tape Ball involved one of us pitching the balled up tape while the other one would attempt to hit it with a hunk of two by four like a baseball bat. The goal was to hit it as high up on the cyc wall as we could. The ball was quite heavy and not very aerodynamic, so it didn't fly well. Hitting high up on the cyc wall was a real feat.
The cyclorama, or cyc for short for those who have not worked around a soundstage, is a very expensive wall that is built to gently curve from the walls to the floor and from one wall to the next so there are no corners anywhere. They are used to give the illusion of something sitting in infinity or when other effects will be added to the shot during post-production. We regularly painted the walls and floors to keep the infinity effect or change the color for a particular shot. Most of the time, though, the walls and floor were painted white. They can be painted very quickly because there are no corners to cut and no hard edges.
Did I mention that they are very expensive.
Now, I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is for damaging a very expensive cyclorama, so for the purposes of this story, which may or may not have actually happened, the names have been changed to protect the totally guilty. I can't recall who was supposedly involved, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Ralph and Scott. I'll just refer to them that way to keep you from getting confused with a suspect number one and suspect number two type of report. I will leave it up to the actual guilty parties to fess up on their own.
One person, who certainly wasn't Scott, threw a particularly nasty pitch right down the middle of the plate to the batter, who certainly wasn't Ralph. The batter, who usually won anyway because he was more of a jock, reared back and hit the ball like he thought he was Hank Aaron. It was a thing of beauty. The ball leaped from his bat like a rocket headed for the cyc wall. This was a certain winner!
The sound of the ball hitting the cyc echoed through the soundstage. As you can imagine, an empty 60' x 40' room with high ceilings can hold a sound for a long time. The sound was slightly different this time than hits in the past. I can't remember what was louder; the sound of the tape ball hitting the cyc or Ralph's exclamation of, "Oh, bleep!!!"
This time, the tape ball punched a six inch hole right through the drywall that made up the cyc wall.
This was bad.
Very, very bad!!
Have I mentioned that a cyc is very, very expensive?
While our initial reaction was not one of joy; we quickly realized that this was a mere bump in the road. After all, the guilty parties had once lit a ceiling tile on fire while using it as a bounce card for lighting a commercial shoot at Kuettner Oldsmobile and had gotten that taken care of and repaired with no one the wiser. Certainly there would be no problem handling this little detail, either.
Suffice it to say that it turned into a rather long workday. Everyone reported to work the next day as if nothing had happened. The Tape Ball league was dissolved and the guilty parties just shared a sly smile between themselves and kept on working.
No one was the wiser.
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