National Underwriter - April 16, 2012

Film Crews, Dorm Safety:
Day’s Work for NYU’s Chief RM

match up the films to the script to make sure what they actually said they were going to do and what they put in a film are the same things. It goes to the honesty and the ethical responsibility of the student.

script for what we call the red flags. These are scenes that are being shot that take place either on or near the water; scenes that take place in hazardous buildings; scenes that have stunts in them.

And we make sure the students have properly risk managed those red flags and have created a risk-management plan not only for the scenes where the actors are acting but for the rest of the crew. For example, if they are shooting a scene in the desert, we make sure not only that they have all the proper communications equipment available to them, but they have someone who is certified in first aid and that they have items in their first-aid kit to deal with wildlife that they might come in contact with such as snakes.

And we go over safety issues they don’t really think about, like how to store the gasoline they need to power the generators they use for lighting and for charging batteries.

We make them put safety into their programs every day: When they do their pre-production meetings at the beginning of each day’s shoot, safety is a part of that.

The faculty is responsible for going back and
looking at their safety diaries to make sure
that has taken place. Then occasionally we’ll
But the biggest issue for us is really
a catastrophic issue where I sustain
claims because of injury and/or death
on a mass scale. The biggest risk that
concerns us, and it has happened in other
universities throughout the country, is
a fire in a dormitory room. People, no
matter how many times you drill them,
when they hear the fire alarms, they will
panic—especially when you have that many
people in what is really a small space. And
when people panic, they tend to get hurt.

They make the wrong decisions. That’s the exposure I insure for here at NYU.

DIGITAL EXTRA:

In a video interview, NYU Director of Insurance & Risk Management Michael Liebowitz discusses with NU Editor-in-Chief Bryant Rousseau some of the risks he must manage, including those of the University’s film school and dormitories.

Have you ever had to say no to a film student?
Has there been some scene that was just too
risky to allow them to go forward with?
We say no probably 5 percent of the
time. We almost always find a way to
have the student make the shot in a safe
way. Filmmaking is creating the illusion
that you shot the scene and getting the
audience to believe that it really took place
without doing it—such as shooting in a
“moving” car when the car doesn’t move.
These are the kinds of tricks that we try
to explain and teach our students when
they sit down with us. Another one is
students love to break glass. Well, you can
get hurt with glass. Glass goes flying all
over the place. The cleanup is very messy,

and you can get hurt. We may have our students use something called sugar glass; it looks like real glass, it sounds like real glass, but it’s not real glass. So there’s many different ways in film production to trick the scene.

NYU has a very famous film school—Spike Lee and Oliver Stone are professors—so you have coverage needs that are very similar to a Hollywood production studio.

Our coverage needs are exactly like a Hollywood production would purchase. Our students are making everything from short films—they might be two minutes long and shot using a hand-held camera on the street—to full-length feature productions that have budgets in excess of $1 million.

For the large films, the thesis films, with budgets in excess of $100,000, we will sit down with the student and his or her production supervisor and go through the

One of the key trends in higher education is American universities expanding their presence abroad, and NYU is certainly at the forefront there. You have a number of campuses overseas. What are some of the unique risks that come with that sort of international expansion? The biggest exposure overseas is the lack of a sophisticated insurance market and the lack of having vendors able to provide the kinds of coverages similar to what we have here. You can purchase $1 million or $2 million dollars of General Liability fairly easily and cheaply here. But in locations such as the Middle East, those limits of coverage are not readily available, and companies doing business there on a local level might not have it or might not want to purchase it.