Picture if you will: your event.  Scenery, lights, sound system, drapery, perhaps a fantastic looking gadget like a water curtain or an LED drape.  A 40 foot wide stage with steps that light up.  Projection screens, pyrotechnics, and performers.  Your audience of 5000 was floored.  You walk through the door of the hotel ballroom and notice for the first time that the only entrance into the room is only 8 foot wide by 7 feet high.

How did your show fit through that door?  For that matter, how did it get to your venue in West Palm Beach from the shop at Production Plus in Chicago?

The magic of theater, some might say.  We at Production Plus, however, know that it is the magic of Greg Pet.  Here’s what he has to say about getting your show across country, through the doors, and to your audience.

Greg Pet, on point and on the job.

13Q: What do you do here?

GP: That’s a good question.  (Laughs) I manage the company schedule, which includes staffing the shows and coordinating the trucking. I also help coordinate all of the scenic elements that are used on our shows. Carpet, drape, scenery, truss, everything. I meet with the designers, see what they’re building into the set,  and make sure that everything makes it on the truck. Basically I make sure that the show can get to where it’s going and has the right people to take care of it once it does.

13Q: How long have you been working for Production Plus?

GP: I’ll be here 11 years in January.  I took over trucking management about 3 years ago.  Before that, I was a scenic technician. I would build scenery, load the truck, fly out to the venue, meet the truck there, unload it, load the show in, then come back to the shop and do the next show.

13Q: So you have eight years experience loading and unloading trucks, loading into venues, just figuring out what the most efficient way to load and unload a show is?

GP: Right.  When I started, whoever was in charge of that show was responsible for loading it onto the truck and getting it inside the venue.  Now we’ve progressed; we’ve gotten busier, shows have gotten more complicated.  We need someone to concentrate exclusively on making sure that every show gets out on time, with every piece intact. Every show has special and particular things it needs to make sure it looks and works perfectly.

13Q: Sometimes you’re working on a very tight schedule, correct?

GP: Yes.  One of the differences between us and, say, your average A/V company is that almost all of our scenic stuff is custom built.  Frequently we don’t know what the final set is going to be until very late in the game.  Even when we use a stock set, it gets repainted, redesigned, rebuilt in little ways to fit the particular client.  Sometimes we don’t know what the set is going to be until nearly the day it’s supposed to be packed and loaded!  This is a complicated step that our clients are sometimes not aware of.

13Q: Are there sometimes problems with things not fitting?

GP: Sure.  There are plenty of shows where the venue is great, but the elevator getting to the room is really small.  That’s another aspect of my job: making sure that the set pieces can actually get through all the doors and elevators and hallways.  Frequently we discover that the easiest way to build something from a carpentry perspective is not the way that’s going to allow it to fit through the door, or into the truck.  So when I talk to a project manager I have to make sure that I know all the ins and outs of a building, what can and can’t fit in an elevator, what has to come in through the front door instead of the dock, etc.

Any time we don’t know something there is a risk that there will be scenery that won’t fit.   Our on-site scenic technicians have to be ready to cut the set to fit and rebuild it.  So, every truck has anything a scenic tech might need to make any sort of repair; full sets of tools, paint, Bondo, spare rolls of muslin, even stacks of raw wood – 2x4’s, plywood, sheet stock, whatever.

13Q: So another part of your job is preparing for anything that might happen?

GP: Yes, definitely.  We send a little shop on wheels with every show.  Our larger tool kits are equipped with an entire shop’s worth of tools.

13Q: What’s the tightest deadline you’ve ever had to deal with?

GP: We’ve gotten calls on Friday for a show Monday morning. We’ve had shows add things or add entire breakout rooms so late in the game that we’ve had to hold up the trucks and double-drive to California.

13Q: Double drive?  What does that mean?

GP: A truck driver can only drive a certain amount of hours in a day.  Then the driver has to rest, sleep, do all that stuff.  They can only work so many hours in a day.  But if you really need to get something across the country quickly you can throw two drivers in the cab and get something to the West Coast in two days instead of four.  The truck basically doesn’t stop.  One sleeps while the other drives.  We try really hard to avoid this, though.  It costs a lot.

It helps, too, that we have some good drivers on our staff.  Our drivers are amazing - and I’m not just saying that because they are our drivers.  They are on time, they don’t stop, they love doing what they do.  I count on them.

13Q: So, you have to figure out, or know beforehand, what kind of truck and given show is going to need?

GP: Right, what kind of truck, how many, and what each venue can accept in their dock.  Right now, for instance, we have three straight trucks in New York because the loading dock at the venue is not big enough to take a semi-.  I had to figure out a plan to work around that.  So, we sent three straight trucks and a semi-, all full of gear and scenery.  The three straight trucks unloaded at the venue, then left and met the semi- offsite.  We took the gear off the semi-, reloaded it onto the three smaller trucks, then went back to the venue and unloaded again.  It had to be organized so that all the gear we’d need right away for the load-in was in the straight trucks. The semi- was carrying gear that did not need to get set up until about 6 hours into the load in.

This is something that you have to pay attention to when packing: you need to balance how best to load the truck against what needs to be loaded in first.  Usually rigging and truss are the first things to get set up.  Those things have to be packed in the truck so they can be unloaded first so the guys in the ballroom can start working. We had to do that operation in New York in reverse, too: on the way home we had to fill up the straight trucks, drive to the semi-, fill that up, then drive back and get all the rest of the stuff, then drive all the way back to Chicago.

13Q: So you plan the whole load-in in advance, too?

GP: Right, so we can pack the trucks accordingly.  And if there are multiple trucks, those need to be loaded correctly and unloaded in the right order so the crew can get to work right away.  For example, if you unload a bunch of scenery, and the scenery is supposed to go on a stage, but the stage is not unloaded yet, then you’ve got a bunch of scenery laying around waiting to be put in place.  That’s not productive.  (grins)

13Q: What’s the most tricky, delicate thing you’ve ever put on a truck?

GP: We did an Orange County Chopper for Wendy’s.  That was interesting.  It was a TV episode and a tour to show off the motorcycle they made in the episode.  It was my responsibility to make sure that the chopper made it everywhere. The motorcycle was, I think, worth $350,000.  We had to get a special crate made by a guy who had made crates for motorcycles before, and could certify it and sign off on it.  Our shop had never made a crate for a motorcycle before and didn’t want to practice on a $350,000 one.

Did you know that Wendy rode a chopper like this?

13Q: Have we ever sent stuff by plane, or boat?

GP: By boat, sure.  That’s a whole different challenge; shipping is done by weight, so you have to weigh everything so the shipping company knows for sure what they’re loading, how much it weighs, so they know what to expect.

We don’t send huge sets on planes; but last minute graphics, files that the client changes in the eleventh hour or files that come in late, little things that get damaged during shipping, that sort of thing we’ll send by plane.  In really strict deadline situations we’ll fly a person out to hand-carry graphics to a venue to make sure they get there on time.  Outside carriers cannot guarantee an exact time of delivery, even on express service; the best they can do is give you a window of time.  So if it absolutely needs to be there at a certain time, sometimes we’ll send a person to hand carry things to the venue. Sometimes if the venue is within an eight hour drive, we’ll throw people in cars to drive things there.

13Q: What would you say is your strong suit?

GP: Keeping everything organized.  All the trucks I schedule, all the employees I juggle, all the additions, changes … keeping everything straight is where I’m best.  I use my brain. (Greg reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pad of post-it notes)

It goes everywhere I go.  Every time I go to a meeting, walk through the warehouse, get a phone call, something changes.  So I write it down on my brain.  When I get back to my desk I have a whole pile of notes.  They get entered into the computer, stapled into the show’s logbook, and marked ‘done.’  That’s my system. (grins)

I really need my brain– all the time, but especially when we get busy.  When we’re busy, we’ll do over 20 shows in a two-week period–and that is more than twenty trucks, that’s for sure. I have to keep all of those shows straight.  It wouldn’t do for chairs that are supposed to be in California to end up in Dallas, you know?  This is why I need my brain. (waves the post-it note pad) It’s funny: I recently got married, and my wife complains that I don’t remember things.  But I remember everything at work!  It’s because I don’t have my brain on me at home.  (laughs)  My little yellow brain.  And I don’t like other sticky note colors.  Not pink, not blue.  Yellow.

Greg Pet using his "brain" at work.