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Wednesday, June 24, 2009. We didn’t have to start quite as crazy early this morning, so I slept until 6:15, then gathered the star actor of the day, my cat Toshi, and all his contractually required amenities. He would be playing Buttercup, who bats the black hole around on the kitchen floor. I brought his litter box, food and water, a whole bunch of toys and, most importantly, two laser pointers that would hopefully induce him to run around on the kitchen floor chasing the black hole.
[SinglePic not found]I got to Joel’s house at about 6:45 and deposited Toshi in the downstairs laundry room, which we’d converted to a production office. This was where Nathan and his staff did the thankless job of keeping the production running and preparing for the upcoming days.
My friend Kate, who had flown out from Massachusetts to help out, was designated as the cat wrangler, and she spent most of the day with Toshi as we shot all the non-cat scenes upstairs, keeping him from freaking out in this strange place.
The day got off to a frustrating start. We were supposed to shoot a high-school-type portrait of Johnathan that would pop up on the news report later in the movie. So there was Johnathan in an argyle sweater vest, with his hair slicked down, ready to shoot the portrait. But none of the many still cameras we’d had on the set the previous day could be found, and finally we had to get him into makeup and costume. I apologized, and he agreed to come the next day in the same getup. It wasn’t a huge disaster, but it turned out to be the first of many little things that went wrong that day and led to probably my worst day of production.
[SinglePic not found]After that, it was just one thing after another. We had a bunch of prop problems, most importantly that the candies we had for Owen to use to try to shrink the black hole were way too big. We had to send poor Stacey out on another run to try to find smaller candies. She came back with the perfect solution: individually wrapped atomic fireballs.
Also, we’d had some costume problems the night before. Having lost our costume person we hadn’t been able to get the costumes dry-cleaned the night before. Many of them had had to be hand washed, which was all right for most of the costumes, but the linen shirt that was part of Joan’s costume (and which belonged to Joanna Kerns) had shrunk noticeably. It wasn’t too visible on camera, but Joanna was justifiably upset that we’d shrunk her shirt. I promised to replace it after production. Well, I thought, this is why you include a 10% contingency on every movie budget.
And other things went wrong. We had trouble keeping it quiet on the set during rehearsals and takes, and getting props reset between takes. And I wasn’t doing my best work either. We slogged through, but I could see in the actors’ eyes that they were having doubts about the movie. The funny thing about directing is that once you’re on the set, you actually have very little to do. During the vast majority of the day, when lights are being set up, and props arranged and so on, the job is just a constant stream of answering everyone’s questions. Then, in the few minutes when you’re actually shooting a take, you get to see if you’ve communicated your intentions to everyone properly. It’s quickly clear to everyone if you haven’t, and it’s very easy to start to feel the production slipping away from you. That’s the feeling I had this day. It got bad enough that at one point, during a break, I found myself wondering what else I could do with my life. Luckily, I’ve done this before, and had the same thought on that set, so I knew not to panic. I knew it would get better.
[SinglePic not found] [SinglePic not found] [SinglePic not found]But things didn’t get any better that day because much of it was bogged down with practical effects. We had to have a broken mayo jar on the kitchen floor for a lot of the day, which didn’t smell too good. We had put down linoleum to cover the tile floor, since the script called for Owen to cut a piece out of the linoleum. Each of the shots involving the linoleum or the mayo jar or anything else required discussion, rehearsal and a lot of planning, so it moved at a glacial pace. Some things, like cutting out the piece of linoleum, were nerve-wracking because we only got one take of it.
[SinglePic not found]And then we had to shoot the cat scene. Here’s the way the scene was supposed to work: The black hole would roll across the floor, at which point the cat would spring out and start batting it around. The stand-in for the black hole (which would be “sweetened” with computer effects) was a big gumball that had been spray painted black, and then smeared with mayonnaise. But it was really hard to get it to roll just the right distance across the floor, and every time we tried it, it would leave a trail of mayo which had to be cleaned up before the next take. And eventually it started leaving a trail of black paint, too, as the mayo dissolved the paint. We had to keep switching gumballs as old ones would start to disintegrate.
And then, a worse problem: Once we got the black hole rolling to the right place, Toshi simply refused to perform, freaked out by the strange house and all the people. Toshi is not a shy cat. He’s extremely high-energy, and the laser pointer is his favorite toy. It drives him completely nuts without fail.
[SinglePic not found]Not today. We’d waggle the laser pointer at him, and he’d kind of jump toward it, and maybe bat once or twice, and then just hunker down and look at it, or try to run off out of the kitchen. Poor Kate had hung toys and a bag of catnip off her belt and tried everything to get him to perform, but it just wasn’t happening. We spent probably an hour trying to get some usable footage of him before we wound up in such danger of not making our day that we had to just give up and quickly write the cat out of the scene.
Thus ended Toshi’s acting debut—on the cutting room floor.
Joanna, in addition to being an incredibly accomplished actor, is one of the top television directors working today, and I learned a huge amount from her throughout the four days she worked on the movie. One memorable bit of advice she gave me this day was that, whenever possible, animal action should be shot last, even after inserts. You just can’t ever predict how long it’ll take, so nothing else should be waiting on it. Makes perfect sense. I think it was Johnathan who added that Turner & Hooch took longer to shoot than Lawrence of Arabia.
There was one last crisis. At the end of the day, I found out that we didn’t yet have FBI windbreakers for the next day’s scene, another consequence of losing our costume designer. Luckily, Kate said that she could head over to one of the costume rental houses first thing in the morning and get them for us.
[SinglePic not found]So all in all . . . a terribly frustrating day. While the crew were wrapping things up, James and I took a walk. It had been a tense day for him, too, and we talked it out and decided we needed better communication between all the different departments. We hashed out how we should handle rehearsals for blocking, and rehearsals for camera, and so forth, so that everyone knew what we were doing and could prepare, and we wouldn’t have the kinds of problems we’d been plagued with all day.
We then met with with Becca, Brandon and Stacey and worked out a plan to have a regular meeting at the end of each day to go through all the props and practical effects needed for the next day’s shooting. It felt good to take some action given the frustrations we were going through.
And finally the day was over. For me, anyway. Katherine had to stick around at the house to get the costumes to a dry cleaner so we wouldn’t have a repeat of that day’s shrinkage disaster. Hardly the location manager’s job, but by this time job titles were starting to get a little fluid.
I went home and scrounged some dinner from the fridge, feeling as bad as I’d felt good after the first day. What a roller coaster. I stayed up working on script analysis for the next day’s scenes, and fell asleep after midnight.
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