“Anita, we’ve got to find something better,” Hoffman finally said, poking his bearded face out from behind his camera. “From this position, I’ll have him on-screen for less than five seconds, and that’s a best-case scenario. The interview’s out, you know. He won’t hear one word over this bloody lot.”
She turned away, rolling her eyes in exasperation. Despite having been born and raised in New Hampshire, Hoffman had been adopting British speech patterns for as long as she’d known him.
At first, she had shrugged it off, thinking it was a joke, but then, less than two weeks into their partnership, she’d been disheartened to learn just how seriously he took his British “heritage.”
Anita had coached him against the annoying habit on several occasions, but this time she let it slide and began weighing her options, trying to visualize the shot from various locations. The second-floor balcony was no good; from where she was standing, she could see that the angle was all wrong, and besides, there seemed to be a number of security men blocking the stairs. At the same time, pulling back wouldn’t help in the least; in fact, it would put her on the outskirts, where her separation from the crowd, ironically, would be too great. Viewers wanted a sense of excitement, a sense of being in the thick of things, but they also wanted exclusive material. A good compromise was nearly impossible to find, and Hoffman wasn’t helping at all.