THE SHOOT WITHOUT A CLUE

Got up this morning with the sore throat Jade has been complaining about for the last few days (swine flu??). She asked if I could grab her some Mucinex from the bathroom medicine cabinet. I entered, searched for it, and found the laxative jar. I had an overwhelming and nearly unstoppable urge to give her the little white pill instead of the cornflour blue one. Can you imagine? We're cleaning the house today and every fifteen minutes Jade has to excuse herself and keeps telling me that if I REALLY have what she has, I'm gonna be in big trouble in about two days.

THAT, however, would be cruel and so I gave her the appropriate over-the-counter drug.

I spent all day yesterday digitizing our "Patrick and Molly all all the small things" tapes into my system with the use of my friend's HD deck. It's been about six weeks since we've shot them and now I can finally get moving onto editing them.......once I finish this music video I'm cutting.........once I finish my work over at MGM.........in three weeks.........

Prolonging the situation is sort of nice because it allows you to enjoy the ride for a bit. It's like getting trapped on a roller coaster or maybe just slouching down in the back seat and insisting to the carny that you just got on. It's sort of like that extended pleasure. Or it's like the Harry Potter movies and how they're turning the final book into two separate films. This upsets many people because they want to just get hit once, hard, like "Titanic", but I'm pleased with the "Kill Bill" decision to split it up. I want to see it done right and.........it prolongs the ride.

I also believe that titles of movies are supposed to be italicized and not in quotes, but I can't figure out where the italicize button is at on here so we'll have to work with what works.

My friend Jonathan called me the other day and said he was on set and they were lacking a bit of help. They were looking specifically for an assistant camera person, a position which I have almost no experience with. I've done it twice in the past seven years and both times I have been shouted at on set by some power craving bonehead who believes he knows what he's doing better than I do.........and while that's true............it is my opinion that shouting should be reserved for blogs when no one can actually hear you.

When I first showed up to set, my initial impression of what I had just gotten myself into materialized when I noticed the craft service table (snack table, which is generally filled with water, pretzels, chips, donuts, fruit, crackers, goldfish, nutritional bars, gum, etc) was curled up nakedly with one bag of bite sized snickers and a satchel of gummy worms. Six hours later the bottled water ran out and the plastic cups were brought on. Thirty minutes later the plastic cups were gone. When the camera guy asked the producer where the plastic cups were, he just matter-of-factly pointed to the trash can and said, "in there. Just pull one out. It's just water".

And the camera guy did.....and then I did.....and then I wanted to burn down this guy's house and all of his really stupid artwork with it. You see, the writer was the producer was the actor and was one of the occupants that lived in the house we were shooting in. Little swiss army knife with long legs and an "I hate Obama" shirt on.

There was no sound guy. There was sound equipment but no one to operate it. Mostly it was just this guy named Yams who kept holding the boom mic, but then, mysteriously, he was gone and then back and then gone for longer and then back and then people started asking where it was he kept disappearing to and no one knew. I thought he was hiding in the bathroom playing his Gameboy that he kept pulling out on set. One time I saw him just sitting on the couch with his shoes off, playing it while everyone else worked. Another time I saw him standing on the couch (just standing there while the guy who owned the place stared at him, incredulously) adjusting something. Yams told him it was okay for him to stand on his couch because he took his dirty shoes off. It was ridiculous. Another time he was just digging around in this guy's kitchen cabinets, looking for things and then he was shouting and I realized he was born with no "inside voice" the way some people are born without arms or pinky toes. Everything he said was shouted, no matter if you were in the other room or right next to him or down the block it was just him screaming into your face and the AD shouting at him to be quiet and the director pulling his finger across his throat and Yams having no idea what was happening, playing his Gameboy and crawling into a strangers bed and not flushing toilets afterwards and just being generally distasteful. That said, I found him to be the perfect secret weapon for getting back at the guy who lived there since he made me drink from a trash can cup.

About halfway through the day the guy who owned the house showed up and asked us all if we could just "keep it down a bit, he was trying to work". Sure. There were only roughly 20 of us hauling heavy equipment from room to room with no walkie-talkies. We'll just tippy toe around and whisper in one another's ears so you can check your facebook account on your laptop. However, I can neither vouch for, nor control, Yams. He will just be screaming at top decibel for the rest of his life.

When Yams finally had disappeared for quite a long time, the duty of sound person was bestowed upon the gaffer. When the gaffer found that he couldn't do light AND sound simultaneously, seeing as how he wasn't an octo-armed freak, born of the octo-mother, it was gifted to the set photographer....who was a girl in bright red spandex and a bull ring in her nose with no set experience. The refrigerator ran through takes. The air conditioner turned on in the middle of takes. The sprinklers outside turned on and off. There was this REALLY loud ticking clock. I kept mentioning it but nobody seemed to care. The director would say, "Nice call, but I don't think it's a big deal. I can barely hear it". Well, GUY, you don't have headphones on and aren't monitoring the sound, so maybe you should check.

At some point you just have to count your losses and decide that this is not YOUR project but rather, you are just an audience member watching something crumble before it is completely built.