The impossible is not usually laden with promise, but that’s what Lark Bernini always manages to see in the machinery of making a movie.
Getting a film finished takes a frenetic, neck-or nothing pace against time, personalities and expenses that drains the energy of the participants even as it pumps it back in. As a production coordinator cum associate producer, Lark (Wiltshire) Bernini ’72 feeds off that force of energy. She’s usually in the office by 6 a.m., coffee in hand, running down details and mowing down problems at full throttle.
Those thousands of minutiae are her forte: settling scheduling issues for busy actors with the Screen Actors Guild or location changes, maintaining crew lists and cast lists, managing clearances and equipment, studio liaisoning or, more specifically, luckily locating a River Oaks home to furnish as quarters for chimps and their trainers during a three-month shoot for the Disney film Rocket Man.
That experience comes in handy for a difficult shoot in a foreign country. For Mission Impossible III, Bernini took her organizational skills to Italy and China, navigating the intricacies of working with parallel crews. “You’ve got to remind yourself those people know what they’re doing. They know as well as I know what I’m doing. I have to respect that, or I lose the ability to communicate in that country,” she said.
With a Panavision resource in Rome, shipping and communication headaches were much reduced, but China was a different story. “We had to locate a Chinese production company and a Chinese government representative that would agree to work with us. They would go to the government and get permission for everything we had to do, and, without them, we lived or died,” she said.
Her primary job was ensuring every piece of equipment made it to China intact and on time, which took months of working with shipping companies and creating extensive manifests. “A customs agent on any given day can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It was a very political learning experience,” she recalls. For the return, everything had to be trucked 1,000 miles from Shanghai back to Beijing, checked and organized on pallets for a charter flight. “We had seven automobiles and camera equipment, wardrobe, lighting equipment, special effects, automobile parts. We had thousands of pounds of equipment to get back. My greatest pride in that film is that we never lost one piece.”
Those challenges have kept her engaged and exhilarated by the business. Although the mechanics for each project may be the same, the concept and people are always different with varying logistics.
“You’ve got this enormous animal of a movie that has a mind of its own,” Bernini said, “and at the same time, though, it’s got to move forward in a realistic, cost-effective way to get made in a finite amount of time. So, that’s the challenge.”
And she loves it. The excitement and interest that was piqued in the Lamar theater program as an undergraduate is still there, even after three decades in the industry. She played the Goldie Hawn role in Cactus Flower as a senior education major and Phi Delta Zeta. After graduation and a year’s teaching in Conroe, she couldn’t let go of the joy of acting and moved to Dallas to become a student again, this time at the Actor’s Workshop. She was an extra in Logan’s Run, did a couple of commercials and, after two years, decided to head to Los Angeles. “I didn’t know enough to be afraid,” she said. “I got rid of everything that couldn’t fit in my car. Within a week, I had an apartment just off the Sunset Strip for $175 a month. A year later, through a temp agency, I got my first job in the industry.”
That job was with Max Baer Jr., Jethro on the Beverly Hillbillies, who had a film production company. Bernini ended up being hired permanently. While working for Baer, she met her husband, Jeff, a writer who had sold a script to Baer, and other people who would become colleagues. “One assistant director called me needing a production coordinator. It was from one job to the next after that because people remembered me,” she said.
Since then, Bernini has worked with a list of industry greats that make a movie buff drool: On Only the Lonely, “I spent a lot of time with Maureen O’Hara, and she’s such a gal. She’ll tell you the most fabulous stories about John Wayne and Tyrone Power. That was just a gift to be around someone like that.” She’s done three films with Danny Glover: “Love him. He’s a smart, lovely man, kind to everyone.”
She describes Johnny Depp, whom she worked with on Nick of Time, as “an absolute professional. He came to work every day totally prepared, does his job as economically as possible, is very nice to everyone and has a great sense of humor.” On The Replacements, she said, “We were all in awe of Gene Hackman. He’s just a wonderful, warm man. The most interesting thing about him is he has so many other interests: art, books and boats. Acting is what he does but not what he wants to talk about.”
Meeting, and subsequently working for Martin Scorcese, she says, “was one of those things that you couldn’t plan if you tried.” A colleague of a colleague called and said, Last Temptation of Christ: The casting agent is coming out here, and she wants you to help out. Are you available?” Two months later, Bernini was asked to become Scorcese’s assistant for the time he would be in Los Angeles for film prep. “It was just totally being in the right place at the right time, so I worked with him for about six months. He’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever been around. He has an intensity that if you could bottle, you could probably cure all illness. He was an education on film, and that’s the thing I loved so much about Marty,” she said.
Bernini feels fortunate to have worked with people “who were interested in keeping me working,” such as line producer Richard Prince, with whom she’s done 15 films. “Experience will get you a job, give you an edge. Maybe it’s the fact that you’ve done two movies in a certain city, worked with a certain actor or done four movies for a certain studio. It’s going to make the producer’s job easier.”
As a member of the Producers Guild of America, “I have had occasion to be in the same room with huge producers who everybody respects so much,” Bernini said. “You can literally call someone up and ask their advice. They are very giving people . . . You can go up and shake someone’s hand and say, ‘I’d love to work with you.’ And it happens, ya’ know?”
The dichotomy inherent in the job keeps it from being boring. Most people in her line agree “it’s a love-hate thing,” she said. “You’re stressed to the max. You’re tired. You’re overloaded, but you’re so jazzed at the same time because we love what we do. I deal with the sound department and the extras and the actors, producers, the studio, the crew. I think for me that would have to be it: watching all the pieces come together and watching the impossible happen every day.”
Most recently, she completed the pilot for Brothers and Sisters, directed by Ken Olin, which premiered Sept. 24. “That made me tired, that one,” she said. “I had a couple of 20-hour days on that thing. But that’s the norm. Twelve hours is a short day, and 14 or 16 when you’re shooting is normal. But we all look so good, maybe that’s the secret,” she laughs.
At the moment, she’s anticipating work on a film Alison Eastwood is directing and her father, Clint, is producing, and producer Bill Borden of the recent High School Musical smash has asked her to work on the sequel.
A self-described movie snob who is harder to please the older she gets, she’s awed by the mercurial quality of filmmaking. “It’s a creature. It’s got its own pulse and its own brain. Every day, you can watch the scene you’ve shot; you can hear the discussions between the director and the producer and the actors, and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. A movie that you swear can’t miss, something happens and it doesn’t click. And something that you may have low expectations for just knocks your socks off. It’s an ethereal thing.”
“I don’t know. Movies,” she ruminates, “I don’t know if I’ll ever get them out of my system.”
