
I’m gaffing a horror feature out in eastern Long Island. The main location is this abandoned old house just outside of town in West Hampton beach. The director of photography is Larry Arleigh, a British guy who's friends with the producer. Larry's great. He’s shot some big stuff, is used to working for a lot more money with a lot more equipment and crew, but doesn't care how low-budget, understaffed we are. He's a super-nice guy and brings tremendous spirit and energy to the job.
With one problem.

Production’s got a 2nd 2nd AD (not a typo, an actual position,) who's job is little more than constantly revising the next day’s call sheet, (call sheets which never seem to make it to the lighting department despite the fact we’re all working in the same house together,) but they can’t find a way to boil water.
They make one lame attempt. They get a coffee maker, fill a pot with water, then put the pot on the warmer to heat it up. But it doesn't heat up. It just gets warm.
The DP tries to make a few cups of tea using the warm coffee water, as do I (I'm a tea fan myself) but it's an epic fail. The water isn't hot enough to steep the tea and also carries the flavor of left-over coffee from the pot. And there is nothing worse than tea made with left-over coffee water. Except tea made with lukewarm left-over coffee water which is what we're getting. There's a word for this: disaster.
I get in the habit of going into town on lunch breaks and buying tea at this little bakery. When Larry finds out about my missions, he begs me to bring him: “the biggest cup they have. And use three teabags.” So I start delivering his fix – super strong Irish Breakfast that he gulps down like a man who’s crosses the Sahara and has suddenly been handed a bottle of Gatorade.

Fifth day in we’re shooting in the kitchen. Our camera, an HDX-200, is on the tripod. The kitchen is a wreck, full of old, rotting furniture including this free standing dish cabinet. Larry is having a scheduling conflict with the 1st AD. He wants to shoot a certain scene and night, she wants to do it in daylight with the windows blacked out.
Larry is getting angry. He wants to see out the windows, get some depth into the shot. I understand his frustration. The scheduling has been very bad on this show. We’d often light a room, shoot a scene, move to another room, shoot there, then move back to the room we started in, shoot another scene there, then back to the room we just left. A mess. Normally you’d shoot everything you have that day in one room before moving out, but we keep bouncing around like ping pong balls in one of those lottery number drawing machines.
So things are not going well, and Larry is growing more and more pissed off. He's not really that pissed about not getting to look out the windows for this shot, he’s pissed because the schedule has made him do twice the work he normally would have to do. He's pissed that the production department has everyone they need, (including a 2nd 2nd AD) while camera and lighting are struggling on a skeleton crew.
And above all, he's pissed because despite having perfect call sheets, no one can figure out how to get him a cup of fucking tea.
So he snaps. All of that frustration comes out in one epic shouting fit. It starts low and slow, but you can feel it growing. He seems to be egging himself on, each word he shouts makes the one behind it come out louder and louder and louder until he is in the throes of a full throttle freak out.

Larry's fury reaches its crescendo. He turns away from the AD and punches the dish cabinet. Now Larry is a big man, a strong man, and his punch is hard enough to tip the dish cabinet over. It falls. On the camera. The camera snaps off the tripod, rolls across the floor, down the stairs and into the two feet of muddy water in the basement.
Silence. Utter, shocking, and complete. Larry stares at his handiwork, every ounce of fight drained from him. The AD ‘s eyes are wide. The producer, who’s camera was just trashed, runs to the basement to fish his baby out of the drink.
When Larry turns back to the AD, she gives her best, beast-calming smile. “You can shoot at night,” she says and flees.
I leave too, grab my one crew guy and slap thirty bucks in to his hand. “Go to the drug store in town and find a hot pot. Pronto.”
He goes, and we set up a tea brewing station in the back room where we have our power distribution set up. For the rest of the shoot, every half hour, one of us brings Larry a cup of hot, steaming tea.
He is a perfect gentleman for the rest of the shoot.
As for the camera, Panasonic builds a tough little beast. Despite being smashed, rolled and dunked, it still works. No disaster there.
But a lesson. A simple lesson. Sometimes the small things are actually big things.
Like tea.