Month: October 2011

After the first weekend of my stay at the Hotel St. Regis in downtown Detroit, I was pretty certain it was part of a CIA interrogation training center, designed to sleep deprive guests and either drive them insane or get them to reveal state secrets. The noise level on the sixth floor could best be described as siege-like.

Three times during my stay, the fire alarm went off after midnight. The first time I walked down all six flights of plaster-flaked stairs to the ground floor, only to learn it was a false alarm. The next morning as I was leaving for the day, I heard the alarm was still going off in the back business office. “Sounds like your fire alarm’s REALLY broken,” I said to guy at the front desk. “Yeah. It goes of anytime we turn the heat on.”

After that evening, I stopped leaving my room when the alarm – and the follow-up recorded message — blared. Unfortunately, the THIRD time after the alarm had been silenced and I began to slip back into sleep, I was suddenly awakened by the desk phone in my room. I stumbled to the phone and asked – my heart-rate somewhere up around cardiac arrest. “Hello?” “Hello, Mr. Schulze? I just wanted to assure you this was just a false alarm.”

My one attempt at direct intervention with the cavalcade of human noise-makers was opening my door at 4 AM to shout out to a mother who was berating her child in the hallway: “It’s FOUR in the morning. Would you SHUT up?!”

“YOU shut up.” she screamed, then returned to berating the kid for making noise.

David Dastmalchian, who plays the artist Joshua in the film, had perhaps the most astonishing encounter with late night revelers. A drunken wedding party banged on his door at 1 in the morning and asked if he would switch rooms with another couple so they could all “party together”. This then led to a confrontation hours later in which Mr. Dastmalchian clad only in his underwear stormed out of his room to confront the drunks who had opened all the doors of their rooms so they could better wander back and forth for whatever reason.

After a persistent faucet leak in the bathtub (which was no new occurrence – the drain was ringed in rust) and nearly non-existent Internet “access”, I switched rooms found myself in 621.

The photo you see is of the ceiling in the small mirrored area leading into the bathroom. This is what it looks like on a good day. On a bad day, where the rain has been coming down for nearly 36 hours straight, this patch of mold and pockmarked paint takes on a silvery, glisteny quality and when I step barefoot on the carpet underneath this science project I recoil at both the “squish” and the feeling I have stepped into a cold plate of carpaccio.

I leave you with that image for now; I’m off to catch up on a good month’s worth of intermittent sleep.

Three weeks into shooting, everything is a blur. “Was she carrying the bookbag over her left shoulder or right shoulder in that shot?” “Did we show anything IN the bookbag?”… Wait, a seccond! Was she even wearing that outfit?

Once the questions begin, you begin to doubt everything — the style of hair, the shoes.

Then in comes “Scripty”. Like Assistant Director, this is one of the more thankless jobs because, of course, you’re trying to keep everyone honest. No one — not hair and make-up, not wardrobe, not props — like to hear that Scripty has raised an issue with some element of the scene. But in the end, everyone knows the importance of checking these details.

One of the quickest ways to be jarred out of the illusion of a film is to see some continuity error that causes you to say: Hold on… wasn’t she wearing a BLUE sweater when she left the house?

On her notebook, Bethany Waldon (featured here with PA extraordinaire Kimberly Zavicar) has quotes she’s heard over the years, including “Script Bitch”.

While Bethany has the exquisite handwriting and meticulous detail of a 20th century NASA engineer, she’ll also make sure that every infraction of the film’s code is caught and brought to justice — and that every miscreant who might misses a detail knows just who the Sheriff is in 19th century Tombstone.

Careful, pardner.

As you can tell from the photos above, filming in the Diego Rivera court has been one of the highlights on this film for me. These are just three of the STILL images we came away with. There’s a whole ‘nother piece of art from the DIA featured in the Cass.

If you look closely at the shot of David Dastmalchian, you’ll notice two women in the background. They made shooting in the Detroit Institute of Art possible — and I need to give them a shout out: Barbara Heller, Director and Conservator (the blonde farthest back) and Director Antonia McLemore (to the left). It isn’t that we literally, logistically couldn’t have done it without them — their generosity made the whole experience a joy.

And as I hope I’ve made clear for the past three weeks, the hardwork of the other folks featured in these shots helped make that possible as well. (Thanks too to Michael Coakes for providing a good number of the photos I’ve been featuring in these blogs.)

Okay, so there’s one thing that’s been bugging me about that shoot, one thing that is like nails on a chalkboard, it’s three weeks out AFTER our time INSIDE the museum and hearing folks still refer to: the Riviera court! Like the Greek Cyclops, the artist’s name has just one eye… and he’s no relation to the French vacation destination. He’s Diego Rivera.

There. Now that’s off my chest. Let’s move on.

I’m not sure if it was Darren Aronofsky or Steven Soderbergh who said “Filmmaking today is 90% paperwork.” And frankly, I don’t have the time this close to wrapping Cass to track the source down….

I’ll let the image above do most of the talking — this is the packet I received just yesterday. (In the past few weeks, there have been many more forms to fill out and checks to sign.)

Of course, this paperwork isn’t all about the “directing”; many of these documents technically fall under the role of Executive Producer. But on a low budget independent film, everyone is wearing multiple hats and putting money on the line: whether as a direct, personal investment of money (*gulp*) or an investment of their time and talent.

As I write this, sadly, Time is something we don’t have much of. But thankfully, for the past month, Talent is something we’ve seen in abundance.

To create the ceiling of a boy obsessed with space travel, John Keenan, our Production Designer, created a universe with mobiles, glow-in-the-dark stars and model spaceships. The result — when the lights went down and the stars began to glow — is a magical moment that got members of the production team to begin humming “Also Sprach Zarathustra” from Kubrick’s 2001 (of course, Stanley had a slightly bigger budget even back in 1968!)

John and his team of Rocky Galloway-Gooden, Carl Schram, and Utility Infielder, Brion Dodson (who is so good, the camera department has been stealing him whenever possible) have helped put together all the details on the set, from a bowl of cereal to a .50 calibre bullet and a whole universe of details.

One of the biggest responsibilities for any director is to ensure the safety and well-being of the actors. We’ve had stunt coordinators onset for a close quarters fight scene, a firearms expert for a scene where we were looking for the muzzle flash from a handgun, and even Don, Tutor to the Stars, who provides our underage actors with the teaching required by SAG.

But this photo is a glimpse into the gritty, crumby (sorry, I couldn’t resist) underbelly of filmmaking.

The scene? Cass walks into the kitchen and her brother, Franklin (played by Craig Woodall) is dunking a chocolate chip cookie in a glass of milk, delivering his first line with his mouth full.

The first challenge? The morning of the shoot, the thespian’s mother, tells us that he is lactose intolerant. There is discussion of substituting orange juice for the milk — but since that would kill the dunking anyway, we stick with milk and have Craig hold the glass of milk as he bites off a cookie.

But with each take, we need to reset — and that means another chocolate chip cookie. As you can see, Craig is not troubled by this challenge. Like Tom Cruise doing his own stunts on the latest Mission:Impossible, Craig is set to  In fact, as we begin setting up for the reshoot, we find him nibbling edges of the cookies and within half an hour the guy is jacked up on sugar, threatening to go Tasmanian Devil on us.

Perhaps the most amusing part of the shoot was a moment when I ask that we cut to a close up and use one of the already-gnawed upon cookies. I laid out the cookies as if I was dealing cards and found one with the least amount of toothage… “Oh, not THAT one,” he moaned the minute I reached for it. “That’s the one I wiped my nose on.”

[Craig is a bit of a whiz with the one-lines and improv… In one scene where he has to exit the back seat of a car which was inadvertently locked, he called out to James McDaniel in the front seat: “Door, PLEASE.” And tonight, when Cass was walking down a wet stairway, her shoe flew off and hit our DP, Ron Forsythe who remarked:  “I think that’s the first time I’ve actually been kicked by talent.” Without missing a beat, Craig turned to him and in his best commercial voiceover said: “That’s the Power of 3D!” So, we’re going to keep feeding this guy chocolate chip cookies until we wrap.]

Wardrobe is one of those underappreciated departments. Like many aspects of a film, it’s when you DON’T notice the wardrobe, when it works seamlessly and subtly to maintain the illusion, that it usually works the best (though there are some notable exceptions: Breakfast at Tiffany’s sorts of wardrobes where Audrey Hepburn needs remarkable chic.)

 

On the Cass set, Amy has been working to create the illusion of a middle-class family in Detroit. But given our limited budget, she’s brought in a cavalcade of assistant who have definitely gotten the crew’s attention. Almost every day of the show, she has brought a DIFFERENT attractive young designer on set to help out: Saint Caitlin (see below), blond Brit Katherine, Mallory, Cayla, Rachel, Mary, Lara, Kristen, and William.

 

You’ll never see these individuals in the finished film but they’ve all helped to keep the stars well-dressed thus, the film believable.

First Assistant Director – wow, what a cool title to have on a film.

Wait. Let me revise that slightly: First Assistant Director – what a frustrating, sleep-depriving-and-hangover-inducing, chaotic role on a movie.

Why all the negative qualifiers to what otherwise sounds like a cool title?

Let me try an analogy from the 1^st AD’s POV (that’s “point of view” for those of you who don’t know the lingo – and trust me, the First AD is master of acronyms, nicknames and other forms of shorthand (“bring in the realies”, for example, means bring in the real actors rather than the people who have been standing in their marks for lighting (the reason why folks don’t just say “real actors” which is just one syllable longer has been lost in the mists of time, the way medieval guilds had secret handshakes and a new terminology to obscure it from common folk.))) But on to the analogy…

Imagine your director as basically an overgrown adolescent, half asleep in his or her own movie theater in some labyrinthine Octoplex of the mind….  YOUR job as First Assistant Director is to head into that twisted maze and FIND the director (who is either crazy or drunk, you’re not sure which but certainly, at times, irascible and unreasonable “What? Where are we GOING?!”) and drag him or her out into the lobby where an entire crew of people is waiting, not just to hear the description of the film but to be told how they are going to RECREATE that movie this rather odd director has imagined.

And just when you’ve finally pulled the director away from the popcorn machine where he or she is babbling on about how this could be a KEY SCENE in the film to symbolize the seering hot oil of human emotion opening the kernel of possibility in each of us (“Come on! Can we just shoot it as an Insert?! It could be brilliant! BRILLIANT!)… just when you feel you’ve finally got this guy or gal to outline, shot-by-shot how the movie will go – you realize they’ve begun speaking another language.

With the help of the SECOND AD (thank you, Ryan Shaw) you will have to translate to the crew (and with the help of Ryan, do another translation for SAG).

So THAT’S why all of the qualifiers above.

And if you need a visual analogy of the work done by the First AD, consider this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-yBc8txHaA&feature=related

Well, and every other PA I may have forgotten at the moment I write this….

One of the reasons I like this picture of the Ninja Production Assistant Bailey is her smile. This photo was taken somewhere around 1 in the morning on a rainy, chilly night in late October. By the time the camera shutter closed, she was undoubtedly being asked to help slate the next scene. Or asked by the production department to help bring talent to the set or to take the director coffee (not because he asked for it but because folks are getting increasingly concerned about the circles under his eyes from not sleeping at his rundown hotel the last three nights.) Or any of a hundred other tasks.

Whether it is Chrissy capturing behind-the-scenes shots or John chauffering actors to and from the airport or Kim taking control of the construction site backhoe to tear down a house (okay, she didn’t actually work the backhoe itself but she birddogged the construction company so we could GET the scene of the house being torn down that the idiot scriptwriter decided to drop in) or Tony running from department to department with the football (the folder containing important production-related paperwork)… each one of them has shown up on set on time and with a smile. That attitude is what is going to help get this film made too.

In the title essay for her book on writing, Anne Lamott tells the story of watching her brother in grade school, the night before a paper was due. All semester he was supposed to have been doing research on Birds. Of course, he had procrastinated; the paper was due and he had nothing. She describes watching him, sitting with their father at the dining room table before a huge stack of books they had just checked out of the library. Her brother, close to tears, turned to his father and said: “How am I going to DO this?”

Her father opened up the first reference book and said: “Bird by bird, buddy. Bird by bird.”

Certain days on the set, after being presented options from wardrobe, after inspecting whether the cut on an actor’s head is “scabby” enough, after discussing whether this next shot needs a Diva or just a bounce card to knock down annoying shadows, when you’re trying to get the shot in before lunch is called in five minutes — or your child actor needs to be off set, you get that sixth-grader feeling in your stomach… How am I going to DO this?

But there in camera frame is a professional like James McDaniel who has come to set so thoroughly prepared you know you can count on him delivering — the way you’ve been counting on every other professional on the set to give your their options and their best work.

When asked to do a scene in which there’s been an attempted carjacking, James walked up to the car and without futzing or worrying about broken glass on the seat from the LAST shot, sat down behind the wheel and got into character.

In fact, he didn’t simply sit in the seat… he asked for the art department to bring MORE glass that he could “play with”. He sparkled his shoulders and lapels with the actual glass shards from the window. Because that is, of course, what getting down to work is: realizing the images you had in your head — days, weeks or even months –before you ever got to THAT moment.

If you look at the image from the last post and put it side-by-side with this one, it gives a pretty good sense of how a film gets made: shot-by-shot, image-by-image.

And watching someone like James at work, helping you shape this one image, gives you that sense you have watching an entire flock of birds on an autumn afternoon startle up and take flight in unison. The entire set gets galvanized, bird-by-bird, and you see it all come together in one breathtaking move.