Lights Camera Snacktion!
Every set needs a hero
THE LIFE OF A CRAFTY…
The crew is bleary-eyed and the film set has a calm chaos. Camerapersons set their lenses, actors study their scripts, electricians frantically run cables. Make-up is prepping for the first shots of the day, while set decorators and wardrobe check for continuity. It is an hour until dawn but the shoot must begin as everyone is hoping to wrap for the day in twelve hours. It is a ballet of a hundred-thousand moving parts.
And everybody is hungry.
Oklahoma’s film industry is blowing up, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars being spent with a boom in jobs that resembles an explosion in an action movie. With all this effort, people need to eat. Most film shoots have catering, unless it’s a shot-on-video hellfest where you’re lucky to get treated to a Little Caesars Hot and Ready at the wrap “party.” Craft services, however, is a different yet equally important world that exists alongside catering. A world filled with coffee and snacks.
The lingo of the industry is ‘crafty,’ which sounds like something you would call a person who is into knitting or you can’t trust, but, if you’re on a film set, you want to know the crafty.
Enter stage left: Cameron Peery
Cameron has been in the food industry since the 1990s. In 1999, he attended culinary school in Pittsburgh. As a horror film fan, he visited the nearby Monroeville Mall where 1978’s Dawn of the Dead was filmed. This also placed him in the orbit of special effects wizard Tom Savini (if you know, you know, and if you don’t, you should).
Cameron’s first job was uncredited, but it’s a thankless industry. He’s had stints in wardrobe and set decoration, but craft services is where Cameron is happiest. Every morning he shows up early to set, finds catering for breakfast, and then sets up shop.
Among a host of other pictures, Cameron worked on Hellraiser: Judgement (2018), the tenth film in a franchise that could’ve tapped out after the second but has kept chugging along with a power only extra-dimensional beings could muster. It was shot mostly in Guthrie and Oklahoma City, and Cameron was doing crafty.
“We provide all kinds of snacks, all manner of snacks, and always coffee,” Cameron affirms. “You always have to have coffee. I’m a coffee snob, so I always have a French Press. People just queue up and wait. Wherever I’m at, I go local [for coffee], but I can make red can Folgers taste like gourmet shit.”
Beyond coffee, you need to cater to everybody’s different needs and interests. With dietary restrictions and personal preferences, it’s hard to know what everybody might want in the moment. The job requires continual communication with the crew and a level of extra-sensory perception. There could be anywhere between one hundred to two hundred people on set with all those behind the scenes and the extras.
“I just call myself a machine because you just tell me what you want me to do and I do it. Give me the specifics, let me do it. I’ll do a low paying job just because I want to. I did Seven Cemeteries with Danny Trejo in the beginning of October in Okarche and it was a fun job. I got to work with Danny Trejo, it was freakin’ awesome.”
The Seven Cemeteries gig involved him working his craft services table during a scene where a car drives, but it’s not actual driving, just moving the wheel around in front of a green screen while production assistants bump “the car” around. I assume you’ve seen a movie, so you’ve seen this in action. “I just took a nap. I slept like two hours, it was awesome. I got paid to just sleep.”
Okay, that sounds great, but obviously the job is not all naps and giggles. Cameron works in Oklahoma and Texas, so it gets HOT. He has to stay strapped with as much cold bottled water and Gatorade as possible. With film shoots in old Guthrie buildings, there are a lot of hot lights in stifling stuffy buildings and people wearing twenty pounds of black leather, makeup, and latex prosthetics.
Having the crafty canteen is essential to keeping blood sugar stable, hydration at a max, and morale high. Some people assume film production is a piece of cake, but it’s grueling and tiresome work. After doing thirty takes of the same scene or working with hundreds of hungry extras, a piece of cake may be exactly what you need.
Next time you watch a movie, sit through the credits and give the catering or craft services people the applause they deserve for making your movie magic happen.
