by element, often with a tiny leaf added at the
end with tweezers.
“It sort of moves along like an assembly line.
But the quality of the product is so high it’s like
doing assembly lines of the most expensive
Mercedes you can buy,” says Harrington.
Viewers also watch the butlers’ meetings,
when waiters are told to take advantage of the
2-minute commercial window by swarming
to clean tables and take drink orders. “Watch
your thumbs! No thumbs on the plate!” they
are warned.
As much as the servers were challenged, so were
the filmmakers. “It was so frenetic,” says Watkin.
“There’s so much happening so fast and trying
to find ways of capturing all that and making
sure we got cameras in the right place and
making sure we’re making the shots that we
want to make — it was really challenging.”
In the second episode, 1,200 business venture
capitalists and business bigwigs gather for the
Upfront Summit at the Rose Bowl for a two-day
event that requires catering for breakfast, lunch,
snacks and dinner.
The Puck crew had to deal with a few curveballs,
including high winds, not enough servers and
the so-called “quiche incident” — in the rush
to get the quiches plated, there wasn’t enough
time to let them rest so many ended up being
messy. “It’s not about the fumble. It’s how you
recover,” the film quotes Barbara Brass, vice
president of catering sales.
Watkin and Harrington began the project last
January, only a few days before the SAG awards
— “It was a baptism by fire,” says Harrington —
Image: Chelsea Lauren