THE KUDOS CRASHER

Pre-dawn patrol

Out of the darkness and into the klieg lights — behind the scenes at the Oscar nominations.

Richard Rushfield

The Kudos Crasher

January 31, 2006

At 5:38 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning each January, the Road to Oscars begins with a five-minute reading of nominees' names under glaring klieg lights at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The Road to Nominations Announcements, however, starts the midnight before, with a minutely choreographed kabuki dance in which the academy theater opens to the press and production staff who prepare for the great moment, and to me, who comes to watch their work.

All quiet on the Wilshire front
No Times Square this. At 12:15 a.m., Wilshire Boulevard is deadly still. I park in a creepily deserted and unlit structure a few blocks away and walk through the silence down the great thoroughfare. A nattily dressed young man in blazer and tie trudges along beside me, an intern, I learn, for a network morning show. "I have no idea why they sent me so early," he tells me.

We enter through the back alley; two security guards check our names. I experience a bit of vertigo stepping out of the night into the blazingly lit academy theater.

A couple dozen TV techies shuffle dreamily as they set up camera stands between the rows of red seats, taping long cords down the aisles. A press assistant reminds the crews to label their equipment so it won't be confiscated when they are away.

Up onstage, the white backdrop and crystal podium await their moment in the sun, flanked by two 15-foot tall Oscars. After years of watching the show, for the first time I notice Oscar is holding a sword. How, I wonder, scraping away sleep, did I never see that before?

Found in translation
As the crews drip in, I look at the cameras that have claimed the prime real estate, two open rows in the center of either wing. Of the seven cameras set up at this early hour, I notice four are from Japanese television (the others are Italian, Dutch and U.S. cable outfits.) I wonder whether the Japanese effectiveness at securing the best spots is due to heightened diligence, or perhaps the nation's exceptional interest in the awards.

I bring my queries to a four-person crew from Tokyo Broadcasting who keep watch over their cameras, two of them sleeping soundly in the theater seats while two others, Mariko and Ken, stare patiently into space. "The world media," Ken explains, "shows up early because, unlike the Americans, they are not assigned spaces."

I ask them if the Oscars are of special interest to the Japanese audiences. "Academy Awards are always of interest," Mariko says. "American films do more business in Japan than Japanese ones." She tells me the folks back home are rooting for "Memoirs of a Geisha" and my heart bleeds for her.

Veterans on the local beat, Mariko has attended these announcements four times, she tells me. Ken, eight or nine. As he slumps deeper in his seat, I ask if this is a tough assignment. He shrugs, "It's a job. It's not difficult, it's just the hours." Then he adds, referring to the promised mid-shift food break, "And the breakfast is very decent."

The man with his finger on the button
At the center of every almost major event broadcast out of the Los Angeles area — from the Academy Awards to the Rose Bowl to the Grammys — there is one man in whose hands rest the fate of every second, every shot we see on television. That man is Andy Hazlewood, the SBC systems technician in charge of the giant cable box (a DV6000) through which all the images broadcast to the outside world must run.

And as the nomination hour draws nigh and the preparations in the theater reach a slightly more fevered, if still drowsy, pitch, Hazlewood, clad in jeans and a blue SBC polo shirt, almost nonchalantly reviews his machine, a giant router that looks like an old-fashioned plug-in switchboard encircled by dozens of cables that send the camera feed to the assembled TV and radio networks and out to the world.

"I've done this for five years," he tells me. "Takes us five days to set up for a show that lasts four minutes and fifty-one seconds." I ask with so much riding on him, what is his biggest fear. He replies immediately, "Equipment failure. One of those fail," he points to the DV6000, "and it would be a pretty serious situation."

The rundown
At 2:30, an academy spokeswoman takes the stage and warns that we have one hour until we will be swept clear of the room. "If you have problems, now is the time to solve them," she says to the growing camera corps who are now set up throughout the theater's rows.

At the front of the room, a man squats on the floor feeding slides into a dozen carousels. Two academy employees stand above him, arms cross. I ask, "Are those —"

"They're real," I'm told. "They're the real thing." And the men train a menacing stare my way lest I try for a peek.

 

The maestro enters
Minutes later, the director of both the nominations announcements and the Oscar ceremony itself, Louis J. Horvitz, sweeps in flamboyantly in a dark overcoat. He is met by two assistants, who seemed flanked by a dozen more, who lead him directly to the stage where they use a small digital camera to take a picture of him smiling in front of the podium.

Horvitz takes his chair at the command console in the room's center. Set up for his arrival are a pyramid of five monitors, a spiral-bound script of the show, a giant digital clock, two pencils, two erasers, a pencil sharpener and little dispensers of four different colored Post-It flags. He glances with a steady, but deeply searching gaze from each of the monitors back to the script to the clock to the monitors again, calling into a headset orders to adjust the lights, sound, camera angles.

He begins the run-through, studying the shots and snapping his fingers toward the man sitting to his left when he wants a cut between cameras. In his 10th year directing the event, Horvitz reflects, "It's [like] we're going to play the Super Bowl again and…have to duplicate the win."

Breakfast of the gods
At 3:30 we are swept out of the theater and into the alley, where we trudge like vagrants around to the front of the building where after passing through the metal detectors we will be served breakfast. After the build-up the buffet turns out to be scrambled eggs, bacon, French toast and hash browns, bagels and muffins, fruit and cereal, juice, an espresso maker and, not at all surprising considering the crowd, Bloody Marys.

The academy lobby quickly fills and the mood turns as buoyant and cheery as a roomful of journalists is capable of, the magical effect of free food on the media. Along the edges, publicists, on hand to be the first to bear the news to their clients, nervously chatter while awaiting zero hour. One in a pink baseball cap says to a friend, "I try just to stay away from people. It's just too early to exchange pleasantries."

The guardian
Standing in the middle of the room respectable as a Swiss Guard, a man in a conservative business suit sips coffee and studies the crowd. I introduce myself and learn he is Bradley Oltmanns, managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers, a.k.a. the Bearer of the Ballots. Having delivered the names of the nominees at 9 p.m. the previous night, Oltmanns says his work is done, but he wanted to come back and survey the scene.

When I ask how it feels to be the only person in the room who knows the secret we have all gathered for, Oltmanns laughs, saying it will be a relief to have the news out and confesses, "I've assiduously avoided conversing about movies with anyone for the past week."

The countdown begins
At 5:20, the crowd is led up the stairs back to the theater. Many race for open seats in the front, while cameras grapple to set up. Every 10 square feet or so a TV reporter stands speaking into a camera, narrating the building tension.

At his table, Horvitz scans back and forth between his script with the countdown times written at the top of the page and the TV monitors. He stands at his console, rocking back and forth on his brown leather loafers, snapping his finger at his side. He leans into the mike and intones, "Five minutes."

At the front of the room, Andy Hazlewood serenely surveys the crowd, "Working no bugs at the moment," he nods.

Four minutes to go. The back rows of the theater are filled with publicists, cell phones poised at the ready, prepped to break the news to their clients. "It is what it is," one sighs to a friend, seemingly bracing herself to make an unpleasant call.

Two minutes and the room falls nearly silent. The publicists stop their chatter. Just to the side, one lone reporter suddenly goes on the air. In a voice of booming enthusiasm, he manages to get out the words, "'CRASH' DIRECTOR PAUL HAGGIS" before the sound of his shouting breaks the nervous tension and sends the publicists' section into a paroxysm of giggles, which in turn cause the reporter to break down and crack up on camera.

Horvitz speaks, "20 seconds...15...10..." and the music rises.