Q&A WITH FILMMAKER/AUTHOR
MARJORIE SHORT
Q. Making Mischief: The Intern Diaries is a pretty unusual book. Why did you write it?
A. Actually, it was never intended to be a book! It was my notes about my Academy/AFI Directing Internship on the feature film Mischief that was shot in Ohio in 1984. By the end, I had five notebooks full! I was supposed to turn it into a report to the AFI assessing my experiences on the internship.
Q. What kinds of things did you write about?
A. Well, when I first got to location, it was things I observed or overheard. Conversations, meetings, arguments, gossip, and various goings-on. Once we started filming, I also took notes on camera setups that I observed. Crew comments and the director’s comments. Issues with cast members; issues with the motion picture studio; gossip and rumors. I even wrote about the weather! Believe it or not, weather has a huge impact on pictures that are shot on location. I also wrote about my own feelings, experiences on the set, advice I was given, lessons I learned. Back home, I did AFI’s exit questionnaire, then started typing up my notes for my report. In early 1985, I moved to Los Angeles but kept typing. By then, I had over two hundred typed pages, but three notebooks still left to transcribe! Life intervened and I had to put it all aside temporarily. “Aside” lasted nearly forty years!
Q. So, how did it end up as a book?
A. I owe it all to Nat Segaloff. We were friends in the Boston and Cambridge film community back in the day. In 1990, he gave me an inscribed copy of his first book, Hurricane Billy. The Stormy Life and Films of William Friedkin. I finally read it in 2022. Of course, I had to let him know, but we had fallen out of touch.
Q. How did you find him?
A. Through Facebook, which led to a long phone call. I mentioned the directing internship, and read him my summary statement from AFI’s exit questionnaire. He absolutely loved it and said,”This is a book!” He pitched it to Ben Ohmart at BearManor Media. Ben offered me a contract, and the rest is history!
Q. You weren’t just the directing intern. You also worked on the hair and makeup crew. That’s pretty wild. How did that happen, and what did you do?
A. The hairstylist on the picture needed help to prepare hundreds of extras for large crowd sequences. Mischief was set in 1955, and all the hairstyles had to be accurate for that period. So she asked the director to let me prep female extras for those sequences. He agreed, and they found a way to pay me for it. From then on, I cut and styled the hair of hundreds of female extras. After prepping, I would go back on set, and continued observing and taking notes.
Q. Did the direction internship change your view of Hollywood?
A. It sure did. I saw just how hard it is to direct a feature film, especially a studio picture. There were conflicts and power struggles. A daily flood of decisions about every aspect of the production. The wear and tear of shooting on location – long hours, day and night, in all kinds of weather, away from home and family. But there was fun, too. Silliness and slapstick among the crew between takes, usually in the middle of the night. Fun outings on our days off. The excitement of creating something together. And the solid friendships I made. It could be rough, tough, and ugly. But the good outweighed the bad.
Q. As a young woman on the set, did you have any issues with male crew members?
A. Yes. I experienced occasional hostility from some of the lighting, camera, and grip crew. They made it clear I was a nuisance, a pest, and mostly in the way. Also, my note taking made some male crew members uncomfortable and suspicious. They demanded to see what I was writing, and wanted to know what I was going to do with it afterwards. Luckily, other men on the crew were accepting and supportive.
Q. Was the internship a stepping stone to your future career as a director?
A. That was a core idea of the internship program, and I wish I could say it worked for me. It did lead me to the Directing Program at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, that was not a good experience. So I branched out into other aspects of the industry.
Q. How did it feel to look back at this chapter of your life after so many years?
A. It was a real revelation and surprisingly emotional. I hadn’t laid eyes on any of the material since 1985. But once I started typing it into Word, everything came back to life. I was surprised and impressed that what I wrote was so detailed and so vivid. My young self had written this, and it was good!
I began to realize that it wasn’t just an insider account of this movie being made. It was my own story. A young, rising female director in Hollywood. My feelings, hopes, observations, insecurities, and struggles. It was also a tribute to the art and science of making movies, and the dedicated, talented, hardworking people who create them. I look forward to sharing it all with my readers!