Due to the massive spike in cases in LA at the end and beginning of last year most productions there have shut down. Covid case numbers nationwide and in LA county have improved the past couple of weeks, thankfully. We recently heard Tom Cruise ranting at crew members on the set of the seventh Mission Impossible movie because they weren’t properly distancing. Cruise’s diatribe had a mixed reception. He sounded abusive on one hand, but summed up a lot of people’s frustration with those unwilling to take covid seriously. It’s possible Tom may have been one of the only people on set who could have gotten through to the crew. That doesn’t make what he did right or acceptable.
Buzzfeed has a new expose in which they speak with unnamed coronavirus safety people in Hollywood. They’re overwhelmingly low-level workers, often PAs, who don’t have the authority to enforce rules on set. Plus none of the people Buzzfeed interviewed were trained in medical or scientific fields. They were just given a job title and expected to figure out how to keep cast and crew safe. Actors would rant about covid being the same as the flu (because there are actors who get their worldview from Fox News and Facebook just like the rest of the population). There was nothing the covid safety person could do except say that’s interesting and ask them to put their mask back on. They do a lot of testing on sets, but it gives people a false sense of security and is inadequate. Here’s part of Buzzfeed’s writeup, which I highly recommend you read at the source.
Lack of resources and adequate training, conflicting messages from executives, and no industry standards have pushed some of the people in charge of keeping Hollywood’s sets safe during a raging pandemic to the breaking point. Others have had to make up the rules as they go just to keep the train from going off the track.
“This pandemic is only a year old, so as we learn more, we have to change what we’re doing,” the Warner Bros. employee said. “The ripple effects are so chaotic, and we’re the ones who take the brunt of it. The executives at Warner Bros. sit in their at-home offices and issue these mandates, but we have to deal with the crew’s fears and complaints.”
A COVID compliance assistant who works on an Amazon Studios show and also asked to remain anonymous said they received no training or additional information.
“I have no formal training. I have no medical training. I don’t know anything more or less about coronavirus than the next person,” the employee said…
The Warner Bros. employee, who spends their days managing safety on set and their nights and weekends answering emails and phone calls from concerned crew members, said they do work with a couple of production assistants specifically dedicated to handling COVID safety, as well as a registered nurse. But despite taking several online training courses, they’re not a medical professional and feel ill-equipped to handle every possible scenario.
“There are so many situations that are unprecedented. They can train you to a certain point, but at the same time, you just have to be really good on your toes,” the employee said. “I would get really frustrated at first about the lack of communication from higher-ups until I realized they just want me to solve all of the problems and questions. They just want me to govern the show. Once I understood that, I stopped looking for someone else to tell me what to do.”
“Some people act frustrated when I try to just do my job — it’s very much an ego thing in that regard,” the employee said. “I try to calmly reiterate and explain what I’ve been tasked to do, which also isn’t much. I’m just trying to operate on the minimal instruction I’ve been given.”
Another production assistant in charge of COVID safety on a documentary about Britney Spears over the summer also said they didn’t receive any training on how to keep everyone safe, and that it was uncomfortable to enforce what guidelines there were when everyone was their superior.
They recalled someone on set who kept refusing to wear a mask, even coming over at one point to “go on and on saying, ‘More people die from the flu [than COVID-19] every year.’”
“And I can’t say anything back because I’m a PA,” the assistant said. “I just responded, ‘Interesting, I didn’t know that.’ He would only wear his mask for maybe 10-minute increments, and we’d have to keep reminding him.”
A year ago I would say this is surprising, disappointing and they should be ashamed for giving assistants this job instead of hiring medical experts or scientists. Productions hire medical experts all the time as consultants for plotlines! After 10 months stuck at home due to gross incompetence and willful negligence, I’m not surprised as this is typical. It’s not about protecting people, it’s about keeping up appearances so they can continue business as usual. A lot of productions have shut down and the people tasked with making the remaining ones safe are doing the best they can in that situation. A lack of planning and top-down direction are making it scary and frustrating. We’ve seen that play out in so many ways that hurt the people who work the hardest.
These are photos from the sets of Only Murders in the Buildings in NYC with Selena Gomez, Mission Impossible 7 in Venice with Tom Cruise, and Across the River and Into The Trees, also in Venice with Liev Schreiber. Credit: Backgrid
Dear Liev,
That mask protecting your neck beard isn’t protecting you from anything.
Sincerely,
Reality
My thoughts exactly, yikes. More to the point, it isn’t protecting his co-workers from anything.
As noted, productions hire experts on all topics all the time, why would they not spring for someone more well versed in COVID protocols? I’m sure it’s purely because no one wants to spend the money, sadly.
To be fair, most businesses’ people tasked with managing Covid aren’t experts. They’re people forced into an entirely new area that they need to learn about and figure out, quickly. Look at schools/universities, restaurants, stores, park districts…everyone seems to have a different take on what to do. And most of the people in charge have zero medical expertise.
One of the key people at one of my sons universities is a housing and dining person, normally fielding questions about dorm pricing and move-in schedules. Now she is the go-to person on everything Covid. I don’t envy her as she gets an unreal amount of abuse from MAGAs who think their kids should be on campus enjoying a “normal” college experience and not being “held prisoner” by so many rules and regulations. It’s horrifying and I’m so glad my son stayed home this semester again, as cases there have surged again thanks to big parties.
My sister is a HR person for a massive corporation and her days are spent Zooming with colleagues and experts, all trying to figure out how to keep their many offices and thousands of employees safe. It’s been almost a year and most of their employees are still working remotely. My office, a non-profit state agency that serves people with disabilities, is back part-time and we follow a combination of guidelines from the state, the CDC and our risk management team. Unfortunately none of this is easy and most places are just figuring it out as they go along.
There are special certifications people in events and production can get lead COVID safety precautions. So I’m really kinda confused by this article.
Maybe the productions don’t want to spend the money for the training or to hire someone with the certification? It’s beyond stupid of them, but they make entry-level PAs do a ton of work for almost no pay to begin with. 🙁
Yeah, that was my thought. The fact that training exists may not do the PAs any good if the higher ups won’t pay for it.
I’m not surprised unfortunately
My brother’s girlfriend is a covid safety officer. From everything she’s said, it sounds like she’s mostly supported on set – but she’s been an assistant director, so I think she has a tad more experience managing people (and some of them know her in an authoritative role). But she’s still said nothing they’re doing is enough.
Last November, someone on my brother’s set tested positive. They shut down the whole production, but then left everyone hanging. He was furious. They had no plan to test everybody, no guidance on where everybody should go. They were all on their own, and it was such a mess.
Not surprised at all. Film sets are notorious for abusive and neglectful environments.
I am on the board of a small day school and we are open in the Bay Area and have been throughout the year. In order to open we submitted a plan to the county for approval. We have an MD consultant actively advising and regular testing and established protocols for returning after vacations. If we can do this for pre-school through 5th grade, so can adults on sets.
I was a member at a chain gym that made a big sound and fury about “social fitnessing” in their signage and messaging. Visiting the gym, I saw a guy who had completely pulled his facemask down and was having a loud phone conversation. The staff did nothing. I pointed it out and he pulled it up to his nose. Then I realized that nearly every person in the gym had their mask pulled halfway down. The staff was minimum wage, not trained, not instructed, and not supported in doing what the company claimed was going on, which was vigilant covid safety protocols.
Asking folks who are the lowest on the rungs of a company to be the standard bearers of actual on the ground person by person compliance of covid is a bad and I think common practice.
“I would get really frustrated at first about the lack of communication from higher-ups until I realized they just want me to solve all of the problems and questions. They just want me to govern the show. Once I understood that, I stopped looking for someone else to tell me what to do.”
Basically, the execs are lazy and greedy. They just want the peons to keep making them money, the consequences be damned.
If the responsibilities are testing, masks, temperatures, and distancing, I don’t think one needs any special training or medical experience (especially as the one set had a nurse there also), but more the ability to enforce the rules and manage a lot of people – so they should be paid more as a safety manager than as a PA.
My friend just got hired to be a covid safety person on a show that pretty much everyone has seen. She has no medical background, but she’s doing her best — insisting people stand 6 feet apart or wear a mask correctly is pretty straightforward, you just need the right personality type. The rules and guidelines were created by experts at the network, and the safety personnel are simply expected to enforce that.
For a 12-hour day she makes $500, so it’s not about money, it’s about the fact that there aren’t enough set medics and trained personnel to do this. A lot of people who would do this work on sets are EMTs, and obviously most areas of the country need as many EMTs as they can get right now. So they are trying to find proactive, well-meaning people (like my friend) who remind people not to get lazy with the rules. Idk, it’s not the best situation, but I do understand the predicament.
I don’t think there’s enough trained people to do this. Here in Mexico (where the pandemic has been as baldy managed by our authorities as in the USA), in order to have the personnel in charge of covid safety in offices, school, bars and restaurants, they make us take a crash course online and then a test. If you pass the test you get a PDF diploma saying you’ve taken the course and you passed the test so that makes you a covid safety person.
All of this is laughable, but at least they’re trying to have someone accountable for the safety of a place.