crazy weekend shooting

Last weekend (Oct 1-3) was an exhausting but incredible experience and probably one of the most satisfying weekends for me personally so far. It began with a series of problems. Sheridan ended up selling his VW bus which we were using for several scenes. This means we HAD to finish shooting the bus this weekend. To complicate things further, our fx guys had disappeared and Erika (Leather Girl) had been fighting off sickness all week.

Friday
We started late because Shogo was finishing up a commercial shoot. Then we grabbed the camera, wrapped up Johns head and headed for section of OKC called LITTLE SAIGON because there are so many Vietnamese owned businesses. We shot a scene with Frank and Claire walking in front of a strip mall at night, exchanging a brief but important bit of dialog. It was surprisingly cold. Fall is definitely here and we kept the car running so Jessica could jump in and stay warm. It took us about a half an hour to get the shots. We jumped in the car and headed for 66 BOWL where we grabbed a shot of Frank and Claire walking out into the parking lot. We got this one even faster. Now FINALLY the sequence of Frank and Claire walking at night is complete.

Saturday
We got to 66 BOWL at 8am and shot conversation scenes between Frank and Owen. They came out great. We ate lunch at my house then headed for our sleazy motel. Unfortunately, neither of the rooms we'd reserved were available. Which means we had to shoot in yet another motel room and somehow make it look like the last room we had used. Shogo made it work and we shot the rest of Leather Girl's motel scenes. We really cranked it out and I think we got around 14 pages in the can. Most of it was dialogue, but still. Also, we duct-taped Erika and threw her in the bathtub which was a pretty extreme sequence. Erika was a real professional, fighting off the rest of her sickness which we diagnosed as carny disease - probably picked up from the temporary job she had as a barker at the state fair. Here performance was amazing and she was great to work with. I really think people are going to love her character.

Sunday
We tried to grab a scene with Owen and Claire in the back of a motel, but were stopped by a crazy security guard who evicted us from the premises. We tried to stage the scene in the Celestial Cycles parking lot, but the sun was just too bright by this time. Instead we shot a conversation between Frank and Owen sitting in the parked van. We broke for lunch. John, Jessica and Leah went to turn John's brothers room into Frank's bedroom. Shogo, Sheridan and I figured out a way to stage a scene that would effectively get rid of another scene that was causing problems due to locations. I think the solution was pretty brilliant, but it involved a very sleazy strip joint called THE BLUE FOX. John had a bad experience there when we were doing the HE-MAN STRIP CLUB article for Hitch Magazine, so he was a little nervous about it, but totally pulled it off. As soon as we had that in the can, we sent John back to make-up and we grabbed Jessica and went to another sleazy motel where we pulled off the shot we had missed that morning. It was pretty exhilerating to run and gun like that. Finally we went to John's brothers house and shot several scenes and inserts there.

As I mentioned, it was a very exhausting weekend. My thanks to everybody involved. You couldn't ask for a better cast and crew than we have on this project. I am going to miss everybody a lot when we finally wrap.