Networking and Self-Promotion
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When I first started in the business, like most people, I knew no one. I began by getting designers’ names and setting up interviews, and I suppose I did this by six degrees of separation: somebody knows somebody who knows somebody. I asked everyone I knew and finally had a list. Only one designer I met actually had an opening for an assistant, but during my interview he was dwelling on my lack of experience and familiarity in knowing where to shop for set dressing. At another interview the same day, I met Debbie Hemela. She was selling this guide for set dressing that she had just completed. So I bought one and turned around and went back to the interview I had just left, placed the book on his desk, and said, “Now I know where to find stuff.” The designer then hired me on the spot. So, I guess landing a first job is about a bit of chutzpah and a bit of luck. (That book has now blossomed into Debbie’s Book.) I went right to work and learned on the job, mistakes and all. In the beginning, I came up into the business as an assistant in videotape where we all crossed over job positions. We drafted the set first, supervised set going into the shop for building and finishes, and then went out and shopped the set dressing. Videotape at the time wasn’t governed by the film agreements, so the benefit was that it was excellent overall training ground to learn all the pieces of the puzzle. Now my process for finding work or hiring people is based on whom I like to work with because of their taste and how well we get on. I look at the Hollywood Reporter to get a sense of what’s going on and that might springboard me into a possible job contact, but I tend to refer to my list of every person I met and have worked with which I started at the very beginning of my career. The list just builds on itself. It might take 20 years, but an original contact might eventually land me a new work situation.4
Steve Saklad (Spiderman 2, Red Dragon, The Mambo Kings)
Explain your networking process going from Yale Drama School to film. Out of Yale, I first assisted Broadway set designers David Mitchell and later Tony Walton on a series of Broadway plays and musicals. During the eighties in New York City, I was typically involved in segueing between assistant art directing/drafting on movies and working as assistant designer on Broadway shows. I first met art director, W. Steven Graham, when he hired me to draft on Radio Days in 1985, and later hired me to work as a set designer for Stuart Wurtzel on Old Gringo in 1988. Stuart and I hit it off, and eventually it was Stuart who gave me my first shot at art directing for him when we made Mermaids in 1989. I attribute the rest of my film career to Steve and Stuart, as these two connected me with a solid networking base in film. In the early nineties, there was a lockout by the West coast studios against the New York unions’ demands for better pay scales. Most movie work dried up, signaling a large exodus for many of us to the West coast. Knowing no one in L.A. at first and waiting for East coast designers coming west with projects-in-hand, I began designing commercials for TV. For the last ten years, my career has