Philadelphia Business Journal: Pope Francis' historic visit to the United States ended with a bang on Sunday in Philadelphia, but work continues for a local union, which said to expect equipment dismantling to continue into the week.
"It was as good as it appeared on TV," said Michael Barnes, president of the Stagehands IATSE Local 8. "There wasn't a hitch and there were no safety issues; everything got up that was planned to get up, and the show went off on time."
7 comments:
The pope once came to Philly
The city went rather silly.
With massive reverent crowds
Prayers most loud,
at least the weather wasn't too chilly.
But wait! Local 8 cries,
"We put on quite the show for you guys!"
With stages and equipment abounding,
Our tech's cries are resounding,
work lasts longer than you imply.
For you see, strike will take a bit.
On our asses, we do not sit.
For this task we have multiple crews,
(such good planning surely is not news)
We'll go with the night oil lit.
Now the workers of dear local 8,
they will be working 3-5 days straight.
And when they finish with the city,
All will praise IATSE,
For the wonders they work are great.
So great it was as "seen on TV."
(Said Michael Barnes, not me)
The pope I'm sure, is most glad.
If he weren't, t'would be bad,
Such a wonderful guy, you see.
Now this concludes my epic,
a tale of tech most poetic.
I hope to god that this counts,
if not, a war cry I'll sound,
and the rest of my comments will be linguistically eclectic.
I did not follow the Papal Visit really at all – except I know my aunt wanted her friend in DC to get her a papal bobble head, something I learned from Facebook, of course. But this seems like a huge event that it would take 3-5 days to clear, according to Barnes, and I believe that Union gigs typically are not short on workers, either. I also have never seen the Ben Franklin Parkway, but I can only imagine its scale if it’s requiring this many people and this many hours just to turn the stage back – 10 whole hours! That’s almost an entire weekend of CMU scenery load in just to turn one stage-altar hybrid back to whatever it is – probably a skeleton for the next event to come through it. Not that I expected anything less for the Pope’s visit, but it does seem like a huge scale and a lot of work for one event, that I’m pretty sure was one night.
I commented last week on the mockups for the Papal Stage, explaining how it was more intricate than any show I've ever been a part of, so it is no surprise that the strike for the set is going to be a long and tedious one. The fact that 300 workers will take a week to take down one set on a Parkway is insane, and a true testament to the fact that religion is slowly becoming a bastion for designers and technicians to create masterpieces outside of the theatre world. With another 175 at the convention center takedown, you're looking at 475 union guys all standing around for a week doing nothing. The thought is terrifying. The final quote, saying that they've reached a new high for stagehands, those who participated on the papal tour, doesn't surprise me at all. The scale of the project was truly massive, and touched thousands of people, and without the papal visit, we would never have gotten Ruth's poem up above.
It’s so bizarre to me that we live in a world where IATSE Local 8 is striking a show that starred the Pope. It makes sense, but it definitely shows how broad event work can be, and gives perspective to potential career paths. It also is very interesting, though perhaps expected, that an event like this will take about a business week to strike. I don’t know much about the details of the event but there must be a lot of work to do, It looks like the Pope landed a helluva gig in Philly.
I guess my fascination with this article stems from the fact that it has almost nothing to do with theatre, but everything to do with what we do here at CMU. Planning and managing events, be them plays and musicals, conferences, classes, you name it. Having a foundation in that world is definitely an asset, if not a requirement, for anyone who wants to work in entertainment.
Also, on an unrelated note, I have not read any papal poetry before today, my life has been more enriched.
Wow, I didn’t know that the Pope Visit infrastructure was so extensive, and that it was all being crewed by IATSE Local 8, it seems like all of the prep work for church functions wouldn’t be covered by the entertainment stagehands union. Earlier this week we were talking about how some of the union contracts are written so that individual people end up working for 30 or 40 hours straight, because of mandatory overtime payments. I support the union and the fact that the spirit of the contract makes it such that management cant bring in a new crew every time they would have to start paying the old crew over time. But it seems ridiculous that that would mean that a single crew has to work for the entire time, because their contracts prohibit management from calling in other crews. It should be set up in a way that the union members can make an appropriate amount of overtime without be required to work for excessive hours.
This article really drives home how much work goes into preparing for visiting dignitaries. It’s the kind of thing that seems like it wouldn’t require that much set up in terms of equipment. Definitely this much time for security matters but not for equipment and venue set up. But this article just goes to show how much work goes into the infrastructure behind visits from foreign dignitaries. The idea of one event taking almost a week to strike even with several hundred people working on it is the kind of thing that sounds crazy normally. Yet with events like this its almost the norm, In the article they mention that the previous longest strike was three days for the Budweiser Made in America concert and I would assume that other similarly massive concerts would have similar strike times. What the article doesn’t explain though it how they coordinate all this work with the security concerns surrounding hosting someone like the Pope. It makes me wonder how much of the set up and take down time is tied up in dealing with protocol with the swiss guard and secret service.
Why so much time? I can’t imagine that the pope, who specifically instructs his staff to only book the most modest transportation and events, would have a “show” that would have such a long out.
I’m curious to know who paid for the event. Did the Vatican foot the bill? Maybe they’re dragging this on because they know the Vatican has deep pockets.
It’s really going to take three to Five days to strike everything? That really does seem like an excessive amount of time.
The Pope, a Local 8 Stagehand, and a piece of truss walk into a bar. Actually nevermind, I got nothing.
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