When you look at the credit list of a movie, even an indie, there are a ton of names from various facets of production: sound people, camera people, makeup, lighting, construction, stunts, etc.
Who actually determines who gets hired to do these jobs? Does a producer or director just tell the [whatever] union to send over some people, or is they have their own kind of audition to see who gets to work?
Same question with post-production: Someone has to get all these snippet san piece them together, dub, title, etc. How do those jobs get selected?
And just in case you were wondering, no, I have absolutely no talents that anyone would need on a movie production.
The Producers will have choices for some of the crew.
The Directors (Lighting, sound etc…as well as the main director) will have favorites that are always on their crews.
The rest will be provided by the studio or through the unions.
You won’t see an add in the LA times for “Help Wanted: Key Grip.”
Of all the jillion people listed as producer in movie credits today, some put up money, some are vanity designations for stars, some are executives in the studio, but one (sometimes one team) of them has to be the person(s) who does the hiring and hands out the paychecks. The director can and often does have specific demands of people to work with but the employer is the producer, even if they are the same person.
Not always unions - when, say, a movie comes here to South Carolina, the word goes out that they need PAs to all the people who have worked on productions before or are in the know. That’s how my boyfriend has seen Kevin Bacon take a crap. Not very glamorous.
Heads of different departments can usually hire their own crew (and they often will have favorites that they work with on many different projects). For example, the production designer and/or art director may hire set dressers, costume designers, prop people, etc. while the D.P. (director of photography) hires the grips, cameramen, and gaffers. There is a sound designer who will be in charge of all the audio people, and so on.
While Exapno is correct that the producer is the employer, and the person (or team) with the final say on who gets hired. fired, etc., Rigamarole is also correct. As with any other industry, the CEO is not the person who hires the janitors, secretaries, etc., but rather hires the heads of maintenance, office serices, etc., who make the choices of who will work under them, so too are the heads of the various teams involved in making a movie hired by the producer (probably with input from the director and others involved in turning concept to production), and they in turn will choose who they want to have working for/with them.
for the post production side, the production studio will put out calls for qualified post studios to bid on the post production based on the script and story boards. Some times one post production company will do everything including audio / editing / digital intermediate (color timing) and visual effects, but more often it gets broken up depending on the quotes.
those companies will have standard fulltime crew and then hire freelancers for deadlines, most of which do get included in film credits.
For a big special effects movie, the SFX house will be part of the planning from the very beginning. Those thousands of names at the end of a blockbuster are employees of the digital firm rather than the movie proper. Same with other specialty firms: drivers, catererers, animal wranglers, etc.
The CEO analogy is a good one and I wish I’d have thought of it. It’s not just ultimate hiring but contracting and outsourcing.
I managed years ago to get some very very tangential contact with the movie industry, and a college buddy of mine still shoots reality shows and sometimes The Office.
You start out working for free on little junky productions, some of which don’t actually get finished. As your phone list gets bigger, and you get on more of other people’s lists, you start getting calls for the second unit that’s being slapped together to meet the deadline, and once you’ve proven you can get along with people and are good with the equipment, you can start being a favorite for some DP or lighting director to use when their real favorites are unavailable. Repeat and scale up until you ARE the DP or head of some other department. And if you’re really good at something like DP or lighting, you might just have a shot at directing something. This of course is just one example.
I worked with a guy who was running the Nagra sound recorder (does Hollywood still use those?) who got his union card by being willing to go to Montana for a couple months on an audio crew. The work around the L.A. area was in those days still too good for the union people to bother leaving, so the shoot was non-union. The department heads waited for everything to be assembled, then demanded it be turned into a union shoot at union wages. They shut down the production for a few days until the producers caved in, and this guy got his union-shoot hours out of one production to qualify for his union membership.
So, who decides who gets hired? The immediate boss of that department, like almost every business, but in a pinch, little black books and cell phones come out and Jorge (“that guy from that second unit shoot last month on CSI”) gets a call from another focus-puller to ask if he can do a week starting, oh, now?
That’s pretty much how I ended up building sets for awhile (almost entirely non-union gigs). I had built stuff on-campus for a credit in the drama department and when a buddy of mine working in the Toronto film indsutry got desperate for some kind of crew, he called me and asked if I’d help him out as a favor (ETA: working for beer and pizza, not a wage). Through that very tenuous network, I started getting calls every once in awhile for paid work when people were caught short-handed. Eventually it became a regular gig for me, just because I was on various PMs’ radars as a generally reliable guy.
When they say the entertainment industry is “all about who you know”, they aren’t kidding.
I knew enough people eventually that I probably could have gotten a few people to help me join the union, but that was never in my master plan. It was kind of fun, often high stress and hectic, but not something that I wanted to do as a career.
If you’re starting out, don’t know anyone in the industry, and just want to work, you can sometimes go to production offices to see if there are any call sheets or job postings that are open to anyone (“anyone” meaning non-union).
He didn’t take a crap in the movie, he took a crap in the Port-A-John and failed to completely latch the door. Trust me, you didn’t see it - Death Sentence.