August 9, 2004
We shot a chunk from the climax of the movie. Huge acclaim must go to Leah for awesome production design and Dave Curd for going way above and beyond the call of duty to help bring the set to life. The awesome drawings on the wall are the work of Dave and you can check out more of his stuff at davecurd.com.
August 30, 2004
Friday
We grabbed some exterior shots of Claire's House for a few different scenes. Shogo pulled off quite a few different looks that will get progressively more ominous the farther we get into the movie. Jessica got to do more "scared running" with no shoes on. She was pretty bruised up from last weekend so we tried to take it a little easy on her this time. A pretty severe lightning storm was coming in so we couldn't shoot the footage of Frank and Claire walking at night. We also were too slow to get the sunrise shot.
Saturday
We knocked it way out of the park and shot almost ten pages in three different locations including a pretty complicated fight scene with a special effect. And we banged out a quickie commercial for BLUE 7 where we were shooting. Thanks to Rusty and Regan for letting us shoot in the alley behind their store.
Location 1: 66 Bowl Bar. We got two scenes. Sound is always a nightmare at this location, but the footage looks great and performances were solid.
Location 2: John's tiny apartment, doubling as Owen's place. One Scene and a cool insert of Frank ascending a metal staircase.
Location 3: The alley behind Blue 7 which will serve as the alley behind the evil strip joint. Leather Girl vs. Frank in hand-to-hand and foot-to-testicle combat. John once again proved his skills at physical acting by throwing himself against trash dumpsters, walls and shopping carts. John also found a pet cat that was hanging out in the alley looking for a friend. She was watching us from a distance and we weren't even sure if it was a cat or not. Once we fed her, she quickly made herself at home. Leah picked up some litter and other cat supplies to get him started. He named her Blue. We started mixing Seagrams and Sprite in the alley around 2 a.m. and wrapped at about 4 a.m.
It was exhausting, but easily the most fun day of shooting for me so far. Shogo is concerned about the quality of the footage and whether the lighting will cut together well, but I'm really happy with it so far.
Sunday
In contrast to the excellent day before, this was my least favorite day of shooting. I hated every minute of it. Some of it could have been avoided by better location planning, but some days things just work against you. Nevertheless, we got about five pages - the Leather Girl interrogation scene. The motel room we rented was tiny and HOT. And the scene was fighting us every step of the way. The shots look good, the performances are excellent, but it was hell.
September 7, 2004
We are about to shut down principal photography. I'm exhausted and I'm sure everybody else is as well. But before we hit this temporary finish line, we have an all-nighter planned for Thursday night. We'll be shooting at the bowling alley and basically we have to get a ton of scenes. It's do-or-die time.
After that and some sleep, we will hopefully bang out all the driving sequences on Saturday and Sunday as well as picking up anything we're missing with Claire. My goal is to wrap up all her scenes this weekend. Other than looping a few lines, shooting an insert and reshooting a couple of lines, Jessica will be done.
Here's a quick recap of last week:
Saturday:
Shot Frank vs. the Goons in an alley downtown. I actually got permission from the city and the building owner, so I felt like the shoot was pretty legit. but we didn't have power so we had to rely on Shogo to make it work. I'm very happy with the results. Leah supplied cardboard boxes to cushion the guys when they fell. The alley was very seedy and filled with broken glass, cockroaches and piles of pitch-black human feces.
The nook we filled in was definitely a popular spot among okc's homeless population, because there was quite a bit of curious foot traffic including a lady who dropped a crack pipe right in front of me. The funniest was when i turned the corner to see a skeletal crack-head enjoying a sandwich and mountain dew from our craft services cooler.
John, Tyler and Joshua beat the crap out of each other and John really clocked both of them hard in the head -- accidentally.
The scene took us about 8 hours but it was well worth it. A few of us went to Margaritas and ate out on the patio. Then we came back and shot a scene between Frank and Claire in Claire's bedroom.
Sunday:
We met at John's house at 5 a.m. to grab a sunrise shot between Frank and Claire. Sound conditions were terrible - laughably terrible - but the footage looks beautiful. We kind of had to steal the shots for various reasons I shouldn't go into here. After that we headed to my house to shoot the end stuff between Frank and Claire. The sad stuff.
Then we grabbed some Owen shots over at John's apartment.
Really, we should have gotten more stuff on Sunday. We didn't really get a lot of pages this weekend, but the stuff we got is really good. Now we have to pick up the pace and finish this thing off.
September 15, 2004
Okay, so principal photography isn't finished after all. I guess I was being overly optimistic, but we DID get a lot done this weekend -- including the re-shoot of a very important scene that just wasn't working. We are taking off for 2 weeks in order to regroup, secure a troublesome location and get some sleep. Current plan is to shoot two additional weekends at the beginning of October.
October 4, 2004
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. October 12, 2004
Our last full weekend of shooting. It was one to remember...
Next: Production Part 3