The Boring Bits

Now comes the not-so-sexy stuff. I have so much to learn, it is overwhelming. But it is also incredibly exciting. I can't remember the last time I felt this way. Maybe I never have.

Now I have to read, read, read, learn the lingo, the equipment, and the process from soup to nuts. I also have to cut about 20 pages out of the script, which is going to be difficult. "Be prepared to let go of your children," my friends who have been through this already keep telling me. It is not so easy. I am rather attached to some scenes that I know I am going to have to drop. But it doesn't matter how funny or poignant or visually stunning a scene is - if it doesn't move the story along, it has got to go.

The good news is, I may not be ahead of the game, but I am further along than I originally thought myself to be. The script is not finished, as I have a lot of cutting and tweaking to do, but it is completed and I feel it is solid. That is more than half the process in and of itself. The initial teaser is shot and the people who have seen it responded very positively. The casting process has begun. I know almost all the locations that I want to shoot and I think I can get most of them with little difficulty or expense.

But now I have to get into things like contracts and releases and insurance and accounting. I have a love/hate relationship with paper. This is the part that I really hate. But, it must be done. Back to the books!

It takes a mid-sized East Coast City

I am SO perma-smile right now. The party was great, as always, and there was quite a buzz going around before the big announcement and the surprise screening of the trailer. Why was this going to be the last Holiday Gala? Was I quitting my job at the hotel? Was the building being sold? Am I moving to Paris? I loved it. One of my neighbors said, "So are you pregnant, or going to jump out of the closet?" Once Sean had the screen and projecter set up, the buzz REALLY got going.

I kept it pretty simple and let the trailer speak for itself, just saying that I am going to be very busy in the coming year with my next project.

They loved it! They whooped and hollered and laughed in all the right places. I couldn't have been more pleased with the final product, and with everyone's response to it. Afterwards I was literally bombarded with offers of help to make it happen. Some people who are actors and want to get involved, others who are musicians and want to be a part of the soundtrack, everyone wanted to at least be an extra or put me in touch with other people who can help me. That is exactly what I was counting on. God Bless Smalltimore.

My buddy Kat offered herself. "So hey, if you need any, you know, hot black lesbians for the movie, let me know."

It's a film about Baltimore. OF COURSE I need hot black lesbians!!!

1:33 a.m.

Just got home from 8 hours of editing the trailer with Sean. Well, in all fairness, we took a break for an hour at dinnertime. But in even more fairness, he had been working on it since before I got there, starting around noon. So, eight hours for me - thirteen for him.

My day started off with what I am pretty sure was food poisoning. I accomplished zero in preparations for the party tomorrow night (and by tomorrow night, I mean seventeen hours from now). But I was finally able to leave the house around five p.m., and Sean and I pushed through and got the whole thing completely finished. It was hard work, but even though we were exhausted, I don't feel we cut any corners - at all. He is a pro, and we see eye to eye on making sure not to gloss over the tiny glitches that probably no one else would notice except us.

I am SO happy with the end result and I can't WAIT to screen it tomorrow night! But right now, I can't wait to get some SLEEP.

In a Charm City Minute

How do people do this??? Really. You might already know that in a screenplay, one page roughly equals one minute of film. But did you know that that one minute takes roughly one hour to shoot? It is exhausting. And I don't even do the heavy lifting.

Monday night we filmed for four hours with two actors I had never met. They both did a fantastic job and I think we captured some great moments onscreen. I haven't seen the raw footage yet, though. Never assume anything, I am learning.

Tuesday evening, Director Sean and I drove around the city collecting some "B-roll" footage. That is all the extra stuff, the random shots of the city, the iconic buildings and neon signs, and as Sean says, "the obligatory Baltimore cobblestone shot," in Fells Point. Basically, all the same background crap you see on the local news.

Last night, more filming, this time with two actors I do know. A few technical glitches, one family heirloom, four sub sandwiches delivered to stave off low-blood-sugar-crankiness, and four hours later, we got some more good footage. I hope.

I'll tell you about the heirloom later. It is kind of funny. As much as, you know, breaking-a-china-bowl-that-has-been-in-my-family-for-longer-than-I-have-been can be funny. These moments are always followed by the director saying, "but the important thing is...we got the shot!" Yeah. We better have.

But I can't go into that right now. My job today is to script the voice over, the "glue" that is going to string together random moments from about half a dozen random scenes that we have shot from the script, and shape them into some sort of congruous story for the teaser/trailer to be screened at my party two days from now (breathe, Jeanie, breathe!). This is tougher than it sounds, because the scenes that we have shot really jump around through the script. It wasn't something I was thinking about when I chose to use these scenes as screen tests. Then Sean has the very tedious, thankless task of chopping and splicing and cutting and pasting and taping and stapling it all together in a neat little package no more than three minutes long.

But, we will, "make it work." So, I'd best stop procrastinating and get on that, as my deadline is 7:30pm this evening. And if I don't have the goods, Director Sean might up the ante from breaking my china to torturing my dogs or chopping off my little finger.

But, hey - we'd get the shot.

Drawing from experience

Four hours from now, the film crew along with two actors I have never met are arriving to shoot some more screen tests. I have to do a scene with one of the actors in which my character is hungover, a scene I could have easily done with conviction about six hours ago (I think they call this, "method"). Ah well, a night at the infamous Cat's Eye Pub while T.T.Tucker and the boys rock the stage will do that to you. We filmed a tiny bit there last night, for some footage for the trailer. It was early, though, so the crowd (and I) wasn't that loose yet. I was directed to stand in front of the stage while the band played and, "rock out." But, I had only had one drink at that point. I tapped my foot a little. We probably should have met later in the evening...

Wagons, Ho!

I had drinks the other night with a friend of mine who has done a lot of extra work, as well as some stage work and small film roles. Pete is a cowboy in his spare time (long story), but in real life he has one of those good, government jobs that he can't talk about. Although I don't think it is quite 007 stuff, there is no way to be sure. This works out well for me because we get to talk more about what is going on in my life.

Before my first night of filming some screen tests for, "Charm City", I was a little worried because of some things Pete had told me about being on set: mainly, that it was extremely tedious. It is a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. Being (in my own mind, at least) the quintessential hostess, this concerned me. When you are asking people to give you their time and best effort, you have to make sure they are at least having some fun.

I needn't have worried. Amazingly, everyone showed up on time, or close enough to it. That, as I have been told by anyone I've met in this business, is half the battle. Sean Stanley, the director that evening, kept everything running like clockwork. He ran lines with all of us inbetween takes and whenever the film crew had to move equipment around. Not a moment was wasted. My favorite moments were spent observing his directing tricks, that worked wonders whenever we were struggling with a scene. In one scene, my character confronts Bentley. We were sitting on a sofa and it was difficult to convey the conflict within that confined space. So Sean tells Bentley, "When she confronts you with this, stand up. Get off the couch." Bentley says okay. Sean walks by me before we start the scene again and whispers, "Make sure he doesn't get off the couch."

The look on Bentley's face was priceless when I grabbed a handful of his Joe Banks sweater and threw his skinny Canadian ass back on the sofa.

Three of the four scenes we shot that evening were comedic, and even while we were shooting the one dramatic scene, we mostly laughed any time we weren't filming. Sean and his film crew are fantastic, and the dynamic between the actors (with each other, as well as with the film crew) was light-hearted and fun, but at the same time everyone worked hard and did their best.

That was two weeks ago, and a lot of things have, "shaken out," since then. Some people I thought would be involved in this project might not be, some other people I hadn't really thought about are emerging to the forefront. I was telling my buddy Pete about all this the other night. "I'm not sure what to think," I told him. "Some things are going much better than I could have anticipated. But other things that are happening make me feel like the wheels are coming off the wagon."

Pete just smiled his calm, cowboy smile. "From what I know of the business," he said, sipping his whiskey, "That means you're right on track."

Lights, Camera...

...and, WE'RE ROLLING!

Okay, "rolling" is a deceptive term, as the word implies a quick motion. I am learning (albeit, quickly), that there is nothing fast about making a movie. But as long as I feel like I am making a teeny tiny bit of progress each day, I can live with that.

So, how long has this been in the works, you ask? Believe it or not, it started three years ago. One morning, I woke up and I imagined a story from beginning to end, a complicated romantic story with a few twists and turns and plenty of amusing characters, all set within the beautiful, boisterous borders of Baltimore, Maryland.

Though I have enjoyed writing for my entire life, my attention span had never been long enough or strong enough to withstand writing anything more than 20 pages or so before I would be distracted by another project. So, I decided, I had best write this new story down as quickly as possible, before I lose it. The first draft of the script was completed in 30 days, in December of 2004.

It was good. I was happy with it. I honestly felt it was better than a lot of the formulaic romantic comedies out there with big names attached to them ("Runaway Bride," I'm looking at you...). But, something wasn't ringing true. It was too tidy, the ending was too perfect. Life is messy! And messy is funny. Messy is good, embrace the mess! But I couldn't put my finger on it. I didn't know where to go with it.

I knew it would come to me in its own sweet time, so it gathered dust for almost a year while I waited for my, "Eureka!" moment. It finally came, almost exactly a year later.

The night of my annual Holiday Gala of 2005, (the best party in Baltimore, as anyone who has attended will attest to,) one of the first guests to arrive was my dear friend Thom Hickling. Thom was in the band, so he came early to set up the equipment. As he was hanging up his coat on the rack, he said something that struck me like a bolt of lightning. I knew just where to take the script now! I was so excited I could hardly wait to start writing. But, it was the holidays, and we all know how that goes, and three days after Christmas I was leaving town to spend three weeks in Europe. But that was all right, it would give my subconscious time to percolate this new information.

Tragically, two days after Christmas, the day before I was leaving for Europe, I received a phone call from Thom's best friend, Tucker. Thom had been killed in a car accident in Zambia, Africa, where he had been visiting his daughter for the holidays (http://www.thomhickling.com/). I was devastated.

What Thom never knew was that I had written him into the script, as himself. I hadn't told anyone about the script at that point. But I had never imagined anyone playing Thom except Thom. If you had ever met him, you know what I mean. I abandoned the script, and all thoughts of rewriting it. There didn't seem to be any point. I couldn't think about Thom without crying, which does not make for good comedy writing.

Life, fate, whatever you want to call it, has its own plan, though, and for me at least, it always seems to fall into place the way it should. The summer following Thom's death, July of 2006 to be exact, I met a great person by chance. I had never met him before, but there was something about him. He was kind and funny, and it seemed impossible for him to speak without smiling. When he talked to you, you felt like you were the only person in the room, and whatever it was that you were saying seemed very important to him. There was something familiar about the twinkle in his eye.

After getting to know him a little better over two or three weeks, I realized what made me so comfortable with him. Above and beyond his own charms, this man reminded me very much of my friend Thom.

I was reenergized. It is difficult for me to write a character without attaching someone I know in real life to that character. When Thom died, I couldn't write about him anymore. It was too hard to imagine what he might say in a situation when all I could focus on was how sad I was that I would never hear him say anything again. But now I had someone that I could imagine as Thom, and I could write again. It still needed time to percolate, but I was on my way.

I made a complete overhaul of the script, which now bears little resemblance to the original draft. And then I wrote it again. And then I tweaked it. And then I tweaked it again. And I am still tweaking. And I am learning that I won't be done tweaking until the whole thing is, "in the can". "In the can," is a good thing. I am really looking forward to, "in the can."