“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” —God (from the Futurama Season Three episode 20, which was titled “Godfellas.”)
“When you mess up, people race to post it on social media.” —Chris Lose
The quote at the top never fails to make me feel better about a hard day of thankless work. I will send a brigade of emails until every truss is bolted on time and under budget. I will program until I have downed a pallet of energy drinks just to make sure that my tangle of Art-Net streams don’t collide with each other. I will spend countless hours sitting behind six monitors arranging bits and bytes of information until every single gigabyte is in its’ proper location. I will discuss design options until I have satisfied as many clients as can be made happy. All of this effort goes into making performers look good. At the end of the day, if no one notices or even mentions the lighting, then I know in my heart that I did the job correctly. Everyone will go home satisfied and content.
That is sooooo boring. If you have done everything correctly, no one will remember anything at all…but if you mess up, everyone wants to hear about it, talk about it and share it online. Making mistakes is what makes live events live. I’m becoming aware that other productions have wised up to this sad truth and started using technical difficulties for publicity reasons.
The Missing Ring
This has never been clearer to me than after watching the opening ceremony for the Sochi Olympics in 2014. When that fifth ring did not open up, anyone who had a clip of the incident went straight to YouTube and Facebook to blast out the technical difficulty. Immediately, anyone who had previously been unaware that there was a winter Olympics taking place in the little Russian city of 420,000 people was now unknowingly watching a historic Olympic moment. I’m not saying that anyone did this on purpose, but I am saying that the mistake gained extra notoriety for the event.
I felt the same feeling when Steve Harvey announced the incorrect winner of the Miss Universe pageant in 2015 and then waited a full two minutes before mentioning his mistake. It was the flub heard ‘round the world, and as it turns out, it may have happened because the Family Feud host declined to practice that portion of the program beforehand. He made a huge mistake in front of a live audience and went viral almost immediately. I haven’t watched nor cared about the outcome of a Miss Universe pageant in several years, but as soon as I heard about the faux pas, I Googled it immediately. I can only imagine that ratings went through the roof for the Miss Universe pageant in 2016.
This theme resurfaced when Mariah Carey had an excruciating New Years Eve show in Times Square. I am quite sure that she didn’t put any more or less effort into preparing for her show in New York than she had done for every other show in recent history. The only difference was, that this time, something didn’t work and it didn’t get fixed quick enough. She paraded around that frozen stage for three full minutes without her in-ears, monitors or whatever piece of equipment it was that they blamed for the mishap. The moral of the story is, if the show had gone off without a hitch, fewer people would have noticed Mariah Carey in her skimpy outfit in the cold.
Most recently, I saw a big mistake that hit me closer to home as a lighting and video programmer. At the Chainsmokers’ Pittsburgh show, they misspelled the city’s name on the video wall behind them. Pittsburg. Without the “H.” As in Pittsburg, Kansas.
I am fairly certain that neither of the band members were responsible for the lack of spell check, but it was their names and faces plastered all over the news clips the next day. I can only imagine the poor programmer who had to answer for that mistake. But, nonetheless, it got their name in the headlines, and every time the misspelling was reported on Facebook, the subtext said, “Chainsmokers are currently on tour to promote their latest album, Memories…Do Not Open. Tickets available.”
Getting Noticed
I am starting to see a trend here. If you do things terribly wrong, you get noticed. If you do things right, you get forgotten. Here is an example from my own resume. I was working for a surly old rock star, one who is considered to be a legend to many. I took over a difficult tour very successfully and maintained anonymity for a majority of the run. He had no idea who was running lights for him, but he knew that they were doing a great job. He was lit when he was singing and he wasn’t lit when he didn’t want to be lit. His band was lit when they were soloing, and not one second longer. That lasted for seven weeks out of the eight-week tour. On the third-to-last show of the tour, I noticed during the verse that the girl who was about to start her violin solo had stepped farther stage left than she was supposed to and would be out of her special. I went to update the position of her special, only to realize that I had not turned off highlight or solo mode. As soon as I hit “please,” the entire stage went black, and there was one light hitting the background vocalist, who was standing where the violinist was supposed to be. My principal artist was cast into darkness for a split second during his heartfelt verse, and he noticed. Even before I could put the cover on my console at the end of the show, I got the dreaded radio call, “Boss man wants to see you, now.” I went to the dressing room, and he was surprised to see me and not the previous LD. I introduced myself, and then he knew my name from then on out. When I was doing everything right, he didn’t care about the lighting, but when I messed up, it was time to meet the lighting guy.
Phineas T. Barnum said, in the 19th century, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” I’m starting to believe him. In a world of reality television shockers and political circuses, it is hard to imagine what people have to do to get noticed. I will continue to avoid the impulse to make a mistake so disastrous that it makes the headlines, but I’m considering it. I’m not sure that I am prepared to go Faye-Dunaway/Warren-Beatty-at-the-Oscars big, but I would consider some Britney-Spears-at-the-2007-MTV-Video-Music-Awards levels.
Chris Lose is a lighting director who prefers that the artist doesn’t know his full name when he makes a mistake, but he makes sure that the production manager knows his name when he does a great job.
