Joe Reidy on the set of Scorsese's "Gangs of New York"

We had worked together on "Talk Radio" (1988) when I served as a technical advisor to director Oliver Stone. That extraordinary experience was my first time observing an Assistant Director in action. (Before this, I couldn't have defined what an "A.D." -- or most of the 100 or so people listed in credits -- do in the long and challenging hours that occur before a film arrives in a theatre.)

Years ago, I pitched an article to the late, lamented film journal, Premiere. It was a cameo about Joe Reidy, tied to the opening of Martin Scorsese's film, "The Age of Innocence" (1993). My first story for the magazine, it seemed easy enough. Probably a nice bit achieved rather quickly.

Little could I know that the Scorsese film would be delayed around 18 months --- enough time for "Premiere's" founding editor Susan Lyne, who'd commissioned my piece, to depart, and for the magazine to be extensively redesigned, dropping 'Cameo.' But I always believed in the piece with its worthy subject; I'm incorporating some of that material here.

On an afternoon in the early 1990s I phoned Martin Scorsese. Our conversation was entirely about Joe Reidy, with whom he'd then collaborated on five films; I was also interviewing Oliver Stone about him. Scorsese was articulate and generous with his time, telling me of "a kind of trust. Joe has a kind of control and objectivity. I even appreciate hearing bad news from him because he knows how to deliver it. He reminds me of Edgar Kennedy, a comic actor in the Laurel and Hardy films, who was kind of the foil. He was known as 'the slow burn' - - he had a wonderful reaction of annoyance and anger, but totally kept in control. Joe Reidy reminds me of Edgar Kennedy's slow burn."

The Director's Guild of America offers this definition: "The First Assistant Director (A.D.) is the Director's right hand. A.D.'s are responsible for the assembly of all the elements needed for filming and for the daily operation of the shooting set. Their objective is to provide the Director with everything he or she needs to put his or her vision on film. Their duties are supervisory, organizational, administrative - and multifarious. Working within the structure that is governed by budgets, union and guild contracts, industry custom, and so on, they make schedules, attend to the cast, direct extras, oversee the crew as each shot is prepared, create detailed reports of each day's events, among many other things, and are looked to by cast and crew to solve the many problems that continually arise."