The Lighter Side

Photo By John Anderson

I meet Todd Smiley at what he calls a warmly lit coffee shop. I tell him that I've always wanted to meet a gaffer. The word just sounds so funny. "Well, it means something else in Amsterdam that doesn't just have to do with movies," he chuckles like a good West Texan. I wrinkle my forehead in the forgiving light. But Todd Smiley is a gentleman. He won't elaborate.

"In England, they used to use gaffing poles to turn on streetlights. At night, the gaffers would go around and light them," Smiley gestures. Today, a gaffer is the chief lighting technician, who works closely with the director of photography to help build a movie set.

During my hunt for the Austin gaffer, I kept hearing Smiley's name. He'd either gaffed or "juiced" (as an electrician) on Dazed and Confused, Waiting for Guffman, four Robert Rodriguez films, and "35 or 40" other projects from his 20 years here in what Smiley calls "the velvet rut."

I tell the man that he is loved. "They're just trying to be nice," he laughs modestly. "Maybe I've just got a vibe about lighting." Smiley certainly has a humble vibe about him – the sort of vibe I suppose you've got to have if your job description is making someone else glow.

"A gaffer's job is to make people look like movie stars," Smiley says. "A lot of lighting deals with looking at peoples' faces and seeing the lines ... you are trying to show what's inside somebody."

But isn't that disingenuous?

"You can use light to do anything. It depends on what you want the truth to be." Smiley's an inquisitive guy with a calming drawl and a penchant for thinking. "What is light?" he ponders. "It's a play of shadows. When you see a movie projected, you're seeing shadows on the wall. Light and dark. Good and evil. It's primordial."

So, the guy has powers. I ask him how often he gets the chance to use good and evil to influence a film's content. "Lighting people really depend on the writers. The writers are the ones that are imagining these worlds, and we have to help find the creativity and their dreams by trying to execute the physical."

Smiley's modesty forces me to force him to admit to his importance in 50 words or less. "Okay," he says. "When you're on set, the guys in the electrician union in Hollywood make a big deal out of saying 'lights, camera, action.' So, it's real important. Lights are right there before camera."

A former playwriting major at UT, Smiley broke into film after training as a stagehand at local theatres. But it's the Old West "picture shows" that really got him juiced up for his career. "It's pretty amazing to me when I think back on it," Smiley remembers. "In the summertime we had what they called swamp coolers back in the old days in West Texas. We slept with the windows open, and we could actually hear the dialogue from the drive-in movies. So I'd be lying in bed listening. It's just the way I grew up."

Skip ahead 25 years. How does he see his future? He shrugs. "I'll keep making movies, and try to have fun."