Friday, June 26, 2009. It was hard getting up this morning. It was what’s known as a “forced call” meaning there’s less than a 12-hour turnaround from the end of the previous day to the beginning of the next. In our case it was quite a bit less, with an hour-long drive up to our new location in Agoura Hills to boot.
Katherine drove us to the location, which was Brandon’s parents’ house—a beautiful place with a gigantic, three-car garage that would become our set for Owen’s laboratory. Brandon had done a spectacular job transforming it, particularly in creating the centerpiece of the location: the unnamed device that Owen has been building for years.
[SinglePic not found]By now daily crises were becoming the norm, and true to form, within a few minutes of my arrival, we had a huge rolling rack of lights fall off the equipment truck liftgate and narrowly miss crushing two crew members. As it was, our intrepid best boy electric, Mary Doyle, hurt her knee in the accident and had to go to the hospital to have it checked out. But she wasn’t going to let mere injury stop her, and within a couple hours she was back on set. The equipment damage wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, either. The outer bodies of a couple of the lamps were damaged, but those could be replaced pretty cheaply. We got back to work.
[SinglePic not found]In a much more positive development, this was the day that Amy Shelton-White joined our little band in the role of Karen. And it was Joanna’s last day. She only had one little scene to shoot, but brought the same positive energy and professionalism that she’d brought to the bigger days in the house. As we rehearsed the scene both she and Johnathan had good suggestions, and we ended up doing a small rewrite to make their interaction a little richer and better establish their relationship.
[SinglePic not found]By lunch, we were able to wrap Joanna Kerns. We all applauded, and I got Katherine to take a couple snapshots of me with her.
Our work-flow improvements of the previous day held up pretty well, but not perfectly. We’d been so far behind at the end of the day that we’d never gotten to do our prep meeting for this day, so again we had to deal with a lot of issues ad hoc. Our rehearsal process had started to get a little haphazard too, and finally Becca reminded me that James and I weren’t including her in our rehearsals, which meant she wasn’t able to keep on top of the schedule, which was one of her main jobs as first assistant director. This had a lot to do with why we were falling behind every day. I apologized, and promised to try harder to include her in those conversations.
[SinglePic not found]There were some lighter moments in the day, too. I’d found out that Johnathan is a competitive slam poet. On a break at some point that afternoon, I finally got him to recite one of his poems for me, and it was amazing. It was a really clever, self-referential poem about a breakup, with such a rapid-fire delivery that you really had to stay engaged to keep up. The multi-talented Johnathan McClain!
After lunch we moved on to a very important scene, the first between Owen and Karen, as they perform that depressing breaking-up ritual, the Exchange of Stuff. We ran through it a couple of times and discovered that a couple of the “beats” (sort of units of action within a scene) worked better if we switched the order. That’s one of those things that you just have to be open to on the set.
Then, when we had a good baseline, I asked them to do some improvisation in a section of the scene where they banter about Owen’s list of reasons they should be together. Some really funny stuff came out in those takes, which I hoped we’d be able to cut into the scene.
At some point later in the afternoon, before we finished up in the garage for the day, there was a rough moment. Nathan, Becca, James and I hadn’t had time to meet again to figure out our strategy for telling people that our last two days of production had been pushed off indefinitely. I was worried about this, because we really needed to announce it soon, and in some orderly kind of way.
[SinglePic not found]Then, in a casual conversation during a break, Johnathan found out and was justifiably upset. We walked away from set, down the driveway, and talked it over. He had two main concerns. First, he was worried that the movie was not going to get finished. Second, he was upset we hadn’t told him right away, because the cancellation meant he could go out on auditions on those days, but now had less time for his agent to submit him. He asked what the chances were that we’d finish the movie, and I mustered all the confidence I could to tell him “100%,” though to be honest, at that point I wasn’t so sure we’d be able to put it all back together.
He gave me his schedule for the following week so we’d know his availability to pick up the last two days. And then, because we were still under pressure to make our day, we got back to work.
Once we’d finished our scenes in the garage, our schedule called for us to shoot the two driving scenes between Karen and Owen. We hadn’t been able to afford to do it right, which means putting the picture car on a tow rig and having police escorts fore and aft. Our plan was to shoot it “guerrilla-style,” meaning that we simply mounted the camera on the hood of the car, pointing in at the actors, and had them actually drive the car around as we shot take after take without cutting between.
[SinglePic not found]With the day’s various delays, we’d left the driving stuff quite late, and we were really fighting the sunset. Also, the picture car we ended up with was a complete pile. We needed a hatchback so there would be room for me to hide in the back and watch the monitor, and the only one we could get that looked vaguely right was this really crappy gold early-90s hatchback that was really barely driveable. The hoodmount also obscured the driver’s vision quite badly and couldn’t possibly have been street legal, which really scared me. But we really had no choice if we wanted to get the scene.
I showed the setup to Amy, who would be driving the car for both scenes. I was really worried that she wouldn’t be up for it, but she didn’t blink and just said, “Let’s do it.” This was typical of Amy throughout the shoot. She was a pleasure to work with from start to finish, always willing to do whatever it took to get the shots we needed. Johnathan was up for it, too, so off we went.
I had to scrunch myself way down in the trunk with headphones, a monitor and the sound mixer. Chris, our excellent boom operator, had wired the car up with lavalier microphones and had set basic levels so all I had to do was push a button to roll sound when we were ready to shoot.
We drove several miles down Thousand Oaks Boulevard, then turned around and pulled over. James rolled the camera, and of course I forgot to do my one job and roll sound, so we had to re-slate once I’d done that. We drove off, and I had Amy and Johnathan go through the first scene several times, just giving them small directions between takes.
The light was a bit of a problem, as we’d managed to hit the perfect hour when the sun was right above the horizon and therefore shining straight in through the back window, completely blowing it out. But it was better than shooting the other direction, which would have resulted in a giant camera shadow over them.
When we ran out of road we turned around and did it all again, but this time we shot the second scene. When I felt we had enough takes, I called cut, and we headed back to the house. The plan had been to shoot from inside the car as well, but we just didn’t have time. We’d have to pick up the other angles later. It was our first blown day.
[SinglePic not found]So the guys dismantled the camera mount, and as everyone was wrapping out, I had an impromptu meeting with Nathan, James and Becca about rescheduling the missing two days. We were constrained in when we could shoot them by the fact that James and Becca were both leaving Los Angeles for long periods starting July 10, only ten days after we’d finish shooting. So we really had to get the days in before then.
[SinglePic not found]We discussed the possibility of getting the locations locked in time to shoot on July 8 and 9, the following Wednesday and Thursday, if we threw all our resources at it. It looked like an uphill battle, but I called Mike Venezia, who had swept in during our very compressed pre-production and saved us by locking down all our key locations. He was just finishing up an editing job and thought he could meet with us on our day off on Sunday to plan strategy. He thought if we worked full-time starting the day after we finished shooting, we could probably make it happen. That gave me a ray of hope.
I conveyed the latest information to Johnathan and Amy, who both agreed to come back the following week and pick up the extra days.
We were all heading home by about 8 p.m. I was so exhausted from lack of sleep and the stressful reversals of the shoot, that after a quick dinner I just went straight to bed without looking over the next day’s pages. It was all solo scenes with Johnathan, so I figured I could get away with a little less preparation, as it would be simpler from an acting standpoint.
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