A Bassist by Any Other Name...

Sleep is still screwed up. My mind won't shut off, though I have far less to do on a daily basis at the moment. I have not watched (and therefore have not edited) any part of the movie (other than the trailer a couple times) since I watched it straight through last Thursday. It is hard for me to stay away from it, even though I was looking forward to a break from it. There are things I know are wrong with it that I want to work on. But that won't change what I will be showing at the screening on Saturday anyway, so I am not watching any part of it for nine whole days so that I can see it with somewhat-fresh eyes, to see what else I need to fix, or maybe even what moments are just fine and I am being too critical of them.

I kind of miss seeing my cast every day, too, and I am looking forward to seeing almost all of them on Saturday. Every time I watch a scene, I think about the goofy things that happened while we were filming it. Unfortunately, since we were filming on the P2 cards, we didn't have the luxury of just letting the camera roll all the time and capturing a lot of those funny offscreen moments, because we had to conserve space on the cards. There were some days we filled them completely. But I remember the little screw-ups that were amusing, and for the most part have forgotten the ones that were annoying. Like having kids, you forgot the bad stuff quickly enough that it makes you want to make more...

Probably my favorite blunder was made by my brother. He came up from Florida in order to see me on the set for a day before going to Ocean City with some of my other relatives on vacation. I felt bad because I had ZERO time to hang out with him really, but it meant a lot to me that he was there and got to see behind the scenes for a day. It was one of the days we were filming at the Wind-Up Space, and I threw him into the scene as a bartender. You'll see him in the first scene that takes place there. Though he threw in a couple other lines that one would just naturally say to customers ("What can I get ya?", etc) I only gave him one SPECIFIC line. He had to hand a beer to one of the main cast, whose character name is Thom who is playing in a band in the bar. All Ted (my bro) had to do was hand Thom a beer as Thom walks offstage, and say, "ThomBomb!" This is Thom's nickname, and this action established that Thom is a regular, everybody knows and loves him.

As with any and every scene, we had to do it a bunch of times, due to noise issues, getting it from different angles, and getting a couple safeties once we got it right. Ted did good the first 5 or 6 times. How could he not, it is one word, right?

Somewhere around the 7th take I think, the five other people in the scene hit their marks and delivered their lines perfectly, and my brother approaches Thom with the beer, reaches in his direction, and clearly says, "ThomJOHN!"

No one flinched (and BELIEVE me, it was all I could do not to burst out laughing, but this was one of the days we were running short on card space), Ted walks off camera and looks at me like, "WTF?" Just the look on his own face, wondering how the hell he could have possibly screwed up ONE word, is an hysterical moment I will never forget. And, of course, will never let HIM forget.

New Friends & Old Clothes

Good gracious, I don't know where to start, life has been such a blur the last few days. I don't know why this continues to surprise me. Saturday I was an extra (though a prominent one!) in Eric's film, but I don't want to say too much about that as I think he has personally been keeping a lot of it under wraps. I'll just say it was a very looooooooooooong day, but the footage is going to look incredible, I can't WAIT to see it! I hope to get a sneak peek this weekend.

Sunday was great. Started off by interviewing a young man named Corey Smith for my production team. A very sharp dresser with a thousand-watt smile, I am quite pleased to tell you that Corey is on board as our main wardrobe person, among other hats he will be wearing. He jumped right in and tagged along with me all day while I met up with three of my actors to work out their wardrobes. Beteween Killer Trash and the thrift store on Fort Avenue, by the end of the day, they were pretty well done.

The night before that, Saturday, I sent one of those actors, Phil Calvert, on a mission to research his role of Thom, which mainly entailed boozing it up in Dundalk while T.T.Tucker & the Bum Rush Band played at a bar there. Phil is dedicated to his work.

While the role of Thom is not a lead, Phil has a great task ahead of him, but all kidding aside, he is taking it quite seriously. The role of Thom, as I have mentioned here before, is based on my friend Thom who passed away. Tucker was Thom's best friend and bandmate, so Phil has been spending time with Tucker and the guys, and learning their songs, and meeting a lot of people who knew Thom. In many ways it is wonderful to talk about Thom and have people excited about helping Phil to get to know a man he is playing but will never meet. It is incredibly important to me to do him justice, and the film is dedicated to him. But it is harder for me than I thought it was going to be, and I find myself shedding a few tears almost every day when I talk about him or write about him, like I am right now.

But I am very happy the way things are working out, how everyone is so into it and seem to be becoming friends in real life as well as onscreen. Cheryl Scungio, who is playing the lead (Gracie), has been spending a lot of time with Kelly Coston, who is playing Gracie's best friend Mel. They are hysterical together and their dynamic in real life is going to lend itself to the camera perfectly. Cheryl, Kelly, Phil, Corey and I had a blast shopping together all afternoon, laughed the whole time. I think my favorite part was making Phil try on the leather pants with flames up the sides of them at Killer Trash. But my favorite outfit of the day was a bright blue halter-top jumpsuit that Kelly absolutely ROCKED. When I saw it on the rack, my comment was, "That is so Donna Summer." It looks amazing on her, and she was so happy that I gave her the thumbs up on it that she literally skipped back to the changing area.

I got a boatload accomplished on Monday and today also, but more on that later. I have to complete the production schedule before we start our first day of rehearsals tomorrow at 2:00pm, so, signing off!

All Grown Up (or at least on my way)

Hurray! I did not have to set my alarm clock today. That was nice. And I had a great night's sleep, so I think I am back to normal (relatively speaking).

Quite a weekend. 5:30pm Friday I showed up on set for a short indie called, "The Mystery Date," written and directed by Arlette Thomas-Fletcher, who is also the President of the Women in Film & Video Maryland Chapter. I was recommended to Arlette by Michelle Farrell of Absolute Independent Productions as an AD (Assistant Director). I'm not sure if that was actually my title. I'm not even sure if I'm getting screen credit, I never asked. I probably will. But it doesn't matter. I got what I was looking for from the experience, and that is what is important to me.

Every book I have read and every person I have met in the business has told me the same thing - work on as many sets as you can to gain experience for doing your own work. I couldn't agree more, the experience is invaluable. When it is not your set, when you are not the Big Cheese, you really get a great perspective on the whole process from the inside out. As an AD (or whatever I was) I was pretty much smack in the middle of everything. I took my orders from Arlette directly, I helped to keep the actors and the PAs (Production Assistants) wherever they needed to be and doing whatever they needed to be doing. On this particular production, however, I think my experience was slightly Utopian. Everyone was so pleasant to work with! Everyone was really happy to be there, nobody complained when we ran over (which we did each night), just genuinely nice people and REAL PROS, even the youngest actors who were only 10 and 11 years old and who had HUGE amounts of dialogue.

I was also the Script Supervisor. Now that is no small task. Sometimes I assisted with blocking (which actors move where and when within a scene) but mostly I dealt with continuity and the lines themselves. Continuity, to put it nicely, is a bitch. But for some reason I kind of like it. Continuity is trying to remember every single frickin' little nuance of how a scene was filmed, and then make sure it is done that way again in every following take, especially for the close-ups.

A good example of patchy continuity is a classic, "The Wizard of Oz." Dorothy will be skipping along the yellow brick road, and her hair is tightly curled at the ends of her pigtails. Then they move from the wide shots to the cutaways when she is having a conversation with someone, like the Scarecrow. Close-up on Dorothy, her hair is tight and falls only an inch or two below her chin. Cut to a close-up of Scarecrow for some dialogue. Back to a close-up of Dorothy. Now her curls are loosened and fall several inches further down her chest! Back to Scarecrow. Back to Dorothy. Tight curls again! Many a drinking game has been borne of movie mistakes like this.

So that is the sort of thing I had to watch for. "Cross your legs the other way!" "Put your elbow on that pillow!" "Don't lean in, you're casting a shadow on the other actor's face!" Plus if someone forgot their line, I would feed it to them. Or if it was a scene where it was important they run straight through and I NOT feed it to them (because for whatever reason my voice could not be edited out later), I would have to remember where they screwed up, and try to help them find a way to remember the line correctly.

All in all, I think I was properly prepared for the experience, and approaching it the way that I described in my post a few days ago, like it was a wedding or any other huge event that I have already had plenty of experience doing, served me very well. Some things were a little different, because I was describing that wedding as if I were the Director, which I was not on this set. When you are an AD (or whatever I was), it isn't the lead actors that are your Bride & Groom, it is the Director (Arlette) and the Director of Photography (Michelle). But again, lucky for me, they are both pros and there was no major drama between them. I can see, though, how it could get pretty hairy if you are not in such an ideal situation, because there will always be differences of opinions from time to time about how something should be shot. In the end, the person who wins is the person who is writing the checks.

Friday's shoot was from 6:00pm-12:00am, Saturday's from 8:00am-9:30pm, and Sunday's from 8:00am-9:00pm. You do the math, I'm too tired. But I think everyone involved walked away from that set with a sense of satisfaction of a job well done, the knowledge that they were part of creating something that they can be proud of, and the hope of working with a lot of the same people on other projects in the future. Not to mention a new appreciation of their own pillow.