On Locations: Lessons Learned from My Life On Set with The Sopranos and in the Film Industry - Softcover

KAMINE, MARK

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586424033 ISBN 13: 9781586424039

Verlag: Steerforth, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

The executive producer of The White Lotus shares how he got his big break in film and television production on “the greatest TV show of all time” (Rolling Stone)

An inside look at the film industry for fans, students, and aspiring professionals — featuring a foreword by Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning creator of The White Lotus, Mike White

This page-turning account of starting at the lowest rung on the production ladder among enormously famous & outrageously demanding people will be devoured for its insights, gossip, humor, & storytelling. Married and with a child, the author takes unpaid gigs to get a foot in the door, and eventually ends up working on all seasons of The Sopranos, often named the best TV show ever.

The show's setting and its creator's insistence on accuracy placed the native New Jersey author in the right place at the right time to become part of television history, and to witness the effects of sudden fame and acclaim on the show's principal players.

Includes many stories about guest stars like Steve Buscemi, Peter Bogdanovich, and Lauren Bacall, as well as the beloved cast, including new tales of James Gandolfini, who Kamine first meets after David Chase casts him as the Dean of Admissions in the classic first season "College" episode. Later, after he’s been promoted, Kamine gets the calls from Gandolfini when he's hungover, or still drunk, and might or might not make it to the shoot that day. One night, Kamine tries to prevent Gandolfini from taking a swim in the ocean after they've been drinking all night, telling him it could be dangerous but Jim doesn't listen.

Woven in is a personal story of home life and strife, achievement and frustration, anxiety and accomplishment. The book's epilogue brings readers up to the moment as the author, after many more years as an anonymous everyman, eventually enjoys outsize professional success as executive producer of the HBO hit series created by Mike White, The White Lotus.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Kamine is an Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning executive producer of The White Lotus. His numerous prior film credits include American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook, 42 and Ted. While working on all seasons of The Sopranos, chiefly as the show's location manager, he also contributed frequent book reviews to the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Believer and The Wall Street Journal. Born and raised in New Jersey, he lives in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Foreword
Throughout my career, I’ve had bad experiences with line producers. It’s not always their fault. They must play the role of the in-house heavy and their job is to tell me when I’ve asked for too much. I can handle a “NO” (mostly) but sometimes I find the manner in which the ‘NO’ is delivered to be unforgivable. If she defends her ‘NO’ with only mumbo-jumbo about budgets and studio mandates, I lose all trust. Does this philistine care only about the bottom line? What about art and my vision? For this sequence to work, I need 200 extras and the yacht to explode — don’t you get it, you traitorous myopic weasel?
Mark Kamine came into my life, I don’t exactly remember when. It was a job interview and he seemed affable enough — he said all the right things about my script, and how his job is to support the director, yadda yadda — but I didn’t trust him — because I’m a junkyard dog and I wasn’t born yesterday, and line producers are shady as Hell.  I got home and began my due diligence with a Google search, and to my confusion, up came a bunch of inarguably well-written book reviews. A line producer who is also an astute reader of literature — and a great writer himself? This can’t be the same Mark Kamine. But it was. I haven’t worked with another line producer since.
Mark and I have shared some amazing experiences in the last few years. Maui at sunset, drinking cocktails — made by his wife, Tana — the only guests of a giant, fully-staffed hotel. Dinners in Sicily, watching Mount Etna shoot red lava into the night sky. Location scouts that extended into “atmospheric pilgrimages,” touring some of the most picturesque spots in Japan, Thailand and France. We have shared moments of pain, too — crazy long hours, insufferable actors, angry network calls. But even in the darkest moments, I have never lost my trust in Mark. It really does help to have a fellow writer minding the store. When he says “NO,” I sense it pains him more than it does me. I still go back to my hotel room cursing his name, but it takes the edge off.
It’s not just with me — Mark engages everyone with a writer’s curiosity and respect. He knows we are all heroes in our own stories — and therefore, treads lightly and kindly as he goes about his job, careful not to become someone else’s villain. I love him for that — and this reminds me of my one quibble with this book. In it, he says the showrunner — and perhaps a few of the actors — are crucial to the creative enterprise.  Everyone else, including him, is replaceable. I disagree. Not to get too airy-fairy, but I believe that the art reflects the collaborative, alchemical spirit in which it is made. Mark is a leader of our show, and his humanist outlook — born of his writerly mind — is essential to the final product, and I am grateful for it.
There is one downside to having a writer in his position — a creeping suspicion that Mark is taking notes, and will one day bear witness to all that he’s seen. After reading this great memoir, I have a right to be paranoid.  When I’m an asshole — or an idiot — or a pretentious artiste who demands 200 extras and an exploding yacht, I can now assume it will all be revealed in the follow-up to On Locations.  But it’s a price I’m happily willing to pay.
 
Mike White
Thailand
April 2023
 
1 My New Jersey Family, Part One My father’s wife, Grace, calls me about my father. This is a few years before I meet my wife, Tana, before I go to film school, before I start working in the biz, but after I’ve come through the severest period of anxiety attacks and agoraphobia that hit me in my early twenties. It’s 1986. The conversation below, as with all the conversations in this book, is an approximation, some of it clear in my mind, some the result of a conviction of proper pace and meaning, some simply my best guess.
After we say hello, Grace asks, “Do you think you could come out and talk to your father?”
I am surprised and to some extent put on guard by this. We aren’t estranged by any means. I get invited to occasional sporting events and dinners and, more regularly, holiday parties. But clearly this isn’t that. We don’t have a stop-by-without-occasion relationship. I’ve never been asked to come over to, simply, talk. In truth we don’t, my father and I, in any substantive way, talk.
“What’s up?” I say.
“He’s having a hard time.”
“Meaning…?”
“Well, he’s not getting out of bed.”
It sounds like she’s talking about a kid sick with the flu, not my father, longtime forceful, often silent, and usually serious straight shooter who came up on the working-class east side of Paterson, New Jersey, went from there to college, to Korea, back to college then on to law school, and now lives on top of a desirable hill in Wayne, the suburb west of Paterson where I grew up. He was a distant and sometimes strict parent with a solo law practice, played catcher on a scarily intense adult fast-pitch softball team, and drove indefatigably anytime we went anywhere. He hasn’t, in my awareness, changed much. I don’t know what to make of what I’m being told. I assume that my recent experience with anxiety and analysis bears on my being asked to come talk to him. It makes me the family expert on — on what? Sudden descent? Incapacity? The options for treatment if you can’t figure out how to get yourself out of bed?
“How long has it been?” I ask.
“Two weeks,” she says.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone have any idea what it’s about?”
“I sure don’t,” she says. “He doesn’t seem to.”
“Got it,” I say. “I’ll come by. I’ll try to get there tomorrow. I’ll get there tomorrow. I’ll let you know when.”
“Tomorrow would be good.”
I borrow a friend’s car and drive out. Grace opens the door almost instantly. She thanks me for coming and waves a hand in the air, indicating upstairs. “In bed like I said,” she says. Then she says, “Archie! Mark’s here!”
She nods me up.
And there he is, lying flat on his back on the big, canopied bed, head elevated by a couple of pillows, eyes wide and unblinking.
“Hey, Dad,” I say. “What’s going on?”
He says nothing, looks at me with the wide eyes.
“You want to talk about it?” I ask. “Grace said you’re having trouble getting out of bed.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he says.
“There’s nothing physically wrong? Is that what you mean?”
He nods. “I don’t…I can’t get up,” he says.
“Okay, you’re, you’re not feeling good. It feels, what, like you’re weak” — I am watching him closely and he gives the slightest shake of his head — “or maybe more like it’s pointless?”
This conversation is going slowly. This is the way it happened: Him in his bed, under the covers, head propped up. Me standing at the end of the bed looking down at him. I have rarely been in their bedroom. The first time was when they gave me the tour after they first moved in, rightfully proud. It’s a beautiful house. A big, beautiful bedroom, big windows looking out over trees and a distant lake, a spacious bathroom through an area of walk-in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Steerforth
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1586424033
• ISBN 13: 9781586424039
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar