A new-ish producer called for information last week and asked a question I don’t often hear: “How do you do the work on a clearance report?”
Well, here’s how we don’t do the work. At a client visit a few years ago with a room full of that company’s employees, one of the people in the room – a young intern – asked, “Do you have a computer that reads the scripts for you?” There have been too many days when I have wished that such an invention existed! Where is Rube Goldberg when you need him?
Sorry, there is not yet hardware or software that can read a script to flag for clearance issues. You still need a human brain for that job. So the first thing we do is read the script. As we read, we highlight any piece of text that needs to be flagged and we paste that item into the appropriate section of the report.
Our reports are separated into distinct sections: cast list, dialogue references, art department concerns, locations noted, music use, and a final “sources consulted” area. This reading/report set-up part takes a whole lot of time and, quite frankly, laser focus that takes us to another place; sometimes you forget there are other people in the room. The categorized sections of our reports are not a feature of most clearance companies’ reports but are very helpful to production.
Once we fill in those sections of the report with the relevant items, we make what we call our e-notes document on which we then begin research. We start at our “report sources” area. That place tells us whom to contact for a crazy variety of story elements, among them: airline call signs, comic books, disc jockeys, food critics, gemologists, high school yearbooks, law firms, pilots, stockbrokers, wrestlers, and others. Those lists tell us where to check and they give us well-researched authoritative sources for knowing we are covering our bases. If we don’t have a source list set up for an item in the script (Tibetan monk? Arizona graphologist?), that becomes part of that day’s work.
For cast and business names, our first level of concern is an invasion of privacy issue in the place the story takes place. We check in the setting. If we are working on a project set in New York City, the first sources we consult are those specific to that city to determine if the name is “clear” to use there. In phone directories and internet searching, do we find only 1 person listed by that name in New York City? If so, we find some similarly flavored alternative character names that can be checked in all the relevant sources too.
The next level of concern for a cast name is checking the profession. If that New York City story has a lawyer in it, we check the licensing office for lawyers in NY state to confirm that the name is “clear” (non-existent or common enough). We’ll next check for prominent people in the profession who may not be right in your setting. Maybe we find no one by your character’s name who is licensed to practice law in New York State but the name is the that of the current president of the American Bar Association. Again, we’ll check alternative names so that you have something you can use instead.
We research art department items as well: business names being featured, products being shown, other named items used as set dressing. If your intention was to have created fake business names to put on signage, we’ll confirm that there are no conflicts. If you need contact information for featuring actual items, we’ll track that down for you.
We take copious notes from sources consulted and draw conclusions based on our findings so that we can, after research is complete, provide you with “clear” or “not clear” in our report. If “not clear,” we will have cleared some names that you can use instead. We type up a report of the flagged items and our findings. Before sending if off to you, the client, a peer review of both the report and the e-notes is performed for quality control. Typically you have every answer you need then to proceed. And that is how you assemble a clearance report. Thanks to last week’s caller for asking the question !
First published September, 2014