Man, it's been a long time, hasn't it? Haven't blogged since the Oscars. That's late February to mid-May. Did you miss me?Well, here's a little bit of a fill-in -- about two weeks after the Oscars, Maz and I popped back over to New York, to stay for three months, and try our luck and see how things would go back in the US of A. They didn't start too well -- we had some screw-ups with the places we were supposed to stay at, and essentially spent the first week of our stay in New York jumping from hotel to hotel (including, unfortunately, several nights at the Penn, where we had to change rooms twice due to unexpected rodent roommates, and where every trip to the front desk in the morning was like attending the Rudest Clerk Ever Olympics). Then Mary spent a week at our friend Jenny's, which was lovely, but still didn't solve the problem of our having been back for two weeks and still living out of our suitcases, and I spent a week in L.A., sleeping on a deflated air mattress on the floor of the most disgusting apartment I've ever been in (there was also four of us sleeping in there at the same time, when it's got enough to room for one). We then managed to find a sublet for a month in Gramercy, on 22nd, which was good -- the neighborhood's lovely, and even though, there again, we had a mouse friend, the stove was dysfunctional and nearly blew up on us (true story), and we both had to sleep on couches because the radiator in the bedroom threatened to explode (it did -- every half hour or so, it'd start hissing, and then start spitting boiling hot air right in the direction of the bed). But we did all right, we made the best of our month, and now we're staying in a new sublet back down in the East Village for a couple of months. Which has its own problems -- the dumbass who leased it to us is in Brazil, hasn't been in the apartment for months, and hasn't bothered checking that the TV and wifi she promised would work, well...really don't. But there's worse things in the world, heh?
Anyway, surprisingly enough, after all the hotel crap, things went fairly well -- Maz enrolled in classes at HB Studios (the famed Stella Adler school), taking acting classes, directing actors classes, and improv classes, all to improve her actor direction. Which is not only a very smart move, but also a really balsy one -- never mind how dismissive everyone is of actors, it takes a lot of courage to go up on a stage and perform in front of an audience, baring pretty much all. Especially if, like Mary (or me), you don't have a visceral need to do it, and know you're probably going to suck. So I'm really really proud of her for that (there's more details to that story, of course, but they're hers to tell).
On my end, I got lucky enough to get...work on a film set! One of the producers I've been eyeing to potentially work for, a man called Art Linson (who produced such films as Fight Club, Heat, The Untouchables, The Edge, This Boy's Life, Scrooged and Fast Times At Ridgemont High), recently announced that he'd be going ahead with a fictional adaptation of his true life books, entitled What Just Happened? Now I've been excited about this, not only because of my respect for Linson, but also because I love his books -- how well-written, funny, and honest they are -- and because his stories are truly great Hollywood stories (the most famous one being how, when shooting The Edge, Alec Baldwin -- the thoughtless little pig! -- turned up on set overweight and with a Santa Claus beard, despite having been hired to play the young sexy lead, and refused to shave or lose weight, claiming being fat and hairy was his "artistic integrity"). So what I did is I tracked down the ADs, who happened to be Michael Lerman and Peter Thorell (institutions in the indie AD world, if you will, having, amongst them, AD'd Marc Forster's films all the way since Monster's Ball, Garden State, Far From Heaven, You Can Count On Me, Frida and more of the like), and both were amazingly nice. Michael passed on my calls to Pete, who then passed on my calls to their key PA, Chris Gibson, who gave me a shot, and told me that I could come in and work.
Now by the time this had happened -- barely two weeks, right before we left the UK for New York -- the picture of the film itself had gotten more precise, and even more exciting. It turned out that Barry Levinson (of leepers, Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam, Toys, Wag The Dog and Bugsy fame) would direct the film, and that it would star Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, Catherine Keener, Michael Wincott, Stanley Tucci and John Turturro. That's about as cool as life gets, man. So I got hired to work for a day on the film's first day in L.A., which was a great experience, filming on the Paramount backlot, and then got to work for a full three weeks in Connecticut on the end of the shoot, effectively working on the first day and the last day of a feature film shoot for the first time of my life. Which was a wicked, wicked experience. And the reason why I haven't had the time to blog much.
Now, if what you're expecting is a lot of inside scoop, leaks and the like -- I'm the wrong guy. I have a script at home, and the only person other than me who's read it is Maz, and that's about it. Is the film going to be good? I don't know. It's hard to tell. As far as I'm concerned, both Levinson and Linson are in a rut in their careers right now -- concerning the former, his last two films are Man Of The Year and Envy, and in my opinion if those two films had been his two FIRST then no one would've hired him to do a third. And as for Linson, he seems to be stuck with David Mamet and Brian DePalma, both of whom haven't had the best of times at the movies lately. And I will say this -- I don't think our script was as good as the books. But the books are terrific. Other than that -- every take I've managed to see on the monitor looked really funny, and a good deal of them looked gorgeous to boot. And there's a lot of unknown factors in a film like this -- it's a film about Hollywood, so it could go either way, either self-indulgently obscure or revealingly funny; DP Stephane Fontaine (who shot The Beat That My Heart Skipped) was pretty much shooting his first Hollywood feature here; Robert DeNiro doing comedy is always a gamble, whether it's going to end up like Midnight Run or whether it's going to be another Rocky & Bullwinkle (I personally feel like it's going to be the former, based on what I've seen of this, and I think Midnight Run is one of his coolest, funniest performances ever)... But I'm excited. Really excited.
What I am going to share is all my random thoughts about filming this, about how it felt to be on it, how it feels to be done with it, how the people were, and what kind of thoughts it brought up in me about filmmaking in general. So here we go.
a) Location managers and scouts are amazing people. There's some places in Connecticut that we shot in -- I have no clue how anyone found them. They're in little towns, up a back street and at the end of the drive, and they're PERFECT (not only in terms of look, but in terms of room to park the trucks, power to plug the lights into, and so on). Places you didn't even think existed, they find. And that's mind-boggling to me -- how do they do it? Contacts? Pure scouting? Calling up local film offices and asking? So one of my soon-to-do things is to try and find a location scout who'd be willing to let me tag along for a week or two of work, and just see how they do what they do. Which I'm really excited about.
b) Most of the time, when there's a fuck-up in a shot, it'll be because of a crew member. You have no idea how many times you'll yell "ROLLING!" at the top of your lungs on a set (not just you, but all 8 of the other PAs, too), and the grip standing right next to you will still walk right onto the set, speaking really loudly, and then act as if no one told him the camera was rolling. If there's ever a shot in a film, where one of the people in the background is just standing there and staring at the action -- it's definitely not an extra, and it's probably not a passerby. Odds are it's a dumbass crew member. Crews -- and by this I mean the guys who aren't involved with the actual shooting part, who are more involved in the set-ups and so on, and often, the guys who tend to be 30 or 40 or 50 and blase because they're still stuck being grips, being drivers, being best boys -- those people in the crew have a surprisingly limited respect for filmmaking. No matter what the country -- be it England or the US. They're not happy with being their age and still having people tell them not to do. They're not happy to see directors and actors get a certain treatment, when they have to lug shit around. And they also know that they have a certain amount of power -- because you need them to work fast to make your schedule. So they know they have you by the balls. They can bitch, be rude, and talk about nothing but their paychecks, overtime, and how much of an asshole everybody is, and you can't really do much to them. Of course they don't behave that way when the above-thems are around -- but if you're a PA, well...expect a tidal wave of bitterness. And expect them to walk through a shot, or spoil a lock-up by yelling "jokes" to each other, at least every other day.
c) Robin Wright Penn is, well...amazingly lovely. There's a story about her I won't tell here, but there is one I will: the first day she was on set when I was working, I had to run a Starbucks order (my first! woo-hoo!) for her and Stanley Tucci. And when I got her order, and brought it to make-up where she was at the time, she was amazingly genuine, grateful, open and nice. Conversation went something like this:
ME: Aaand there you go.
HER: Oh, thank you! Wow, who did that run?
ME: ...I did.
HER: My God, that's so nice. Thank you so much!
ME: Um...you're welcome.
Just DISARMINGLY nice. And the natural, genuine kind of nice -- not Lindsay Lohan trying to be "one of us" nice. And it's all the more surprising because Robin Wright Penn just, very simply, seems like a strong woman -- like she's been there, done that, and has thought about it at length. And she's stunning. Absolutely stunning. So. Yes. She's a very nice person. :)
d) It was a great shoot. That's the thing that'll stick with me strongest. Starting with the L.A. part of the shoot -- which was just a film geek's wet dream version of your first day on a Hollywood film set, considering it was DeNiro, and we shot on the Paramount backlot, on a beautiful California day that ended with a gorgeous sunset behind palm trees. And it had everything you'd imagine a studio shoot would have -- golf buggies, movie stars, soundstages, the works. And it ended magnificiently in the Connecticut part of the shoot, with me going from being promised a day's work, to working full-time, to being put on the crew list. Not only that, but I also spent most of those three weeks essentially acting as Robert DeNiro's 2nd set PA, meaning that while his first set PA, Dan Cone, would be staying with him, keeping him notified of the schedule and the sides, and bringing him water, I would be in charge of everything else -- getting his food ready, getting him the lunch menu, getting his espressos, and so on so forth. Which, when you're like me and have grown up around Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta and Johnny Boy and Jimmy Conway and Neil McCauley and young Vito Corleone and Ace Rothstein and Al Capone and Harry Tuttle and Noodles Aaronson and Rupert Pupkin and Michael Vronsky and Jimmy Doyle, and happen to think that the man is probably the greatest actor alive, just makes every SINGLE workday a pleasure and a dream come true. Nice guy, too. (And if all those names I just shot out don't mean anything to you, that's Bob -- he, calling him Bob -- in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Heat, The Godfather II, Casino, The Untouchables, Brazil, Once Upon A Time in America, The King Of Comedy, The Deer Hunter and New York, New York. And that's only half of the guy's great performances and films -- can anyone say "perfect career"?)
e) I wonder if I'd get depressed on a location shoot. On this one, I was lucky enough to commute back in forth with Manhattan (a bitch of a 2hr commute, often longer, but with two advantages: a. you get to see a deserted Grand Central Terminal every morning at 5am, the rising sun just barely shining through the archways, and I grew up day dreaming of such perfect New Yorkness, and b. you get to sleep in your own bed, with your own friends and close ones around). If you're an actor or a director or a producer, a location shoot is probably fine -- you get set up in a fancy hotel, or an apartment, or a house, and you have a driver and you just go about your life as you would anyway. The background just changes. If you're a crewmember, a PA, you end up just being set up in a succession of Holiday Inns or Marriotts, the kind of dimly lit, dreary little traveling salesman hotels, where a luxury room means you get the previous day's USA Today on your doorstep every morning. And this being Stamford, CT -- and considering you finish shooting between 7 and 10pm, and are so exhausted that if you went to see one of the three movies the local theater is playing you'd probably fall asleep during the previews anyway -- all that seems left for people to do is sit in their rooms and either watch TV or drink beers together. And once you've had enough beers, maybe venture out to a bar or two and try and pick up a skanky 20-year old. To bring back to the Holiday Inn, where you can't do much to her, because you've got a fellow crew member bunking in the bed next to yours. So you go to sleep -- and repeat the next evening. You could read, of course, but you've already been reading all day on set while you waited -- and on a film set, 8 out of 10 minutes are spent waiting -- so you don't quite feel like it when you get back. And this goes on for a month. Fair enough if you have a bunch of fun crew members around, and if you don't have an ambition that stretches beyond PAing -- in which case it'll have plenty of time to devour you in that dark, smelly little hotel room. But what if you do...?
f) Night shoots are hard. I'd never had one until the last night on this production, when we were on set in Stamford, CT from 6pm to 6am on a Friday night, filming nearly five pages of script, on the Stamford high street, with Bob DeNiro, Robin Wright Penn, Stanley Tucci, John Turturro and 75 background actors all in attendance. Your body doesn't like it. You get exhausted because you need food -- since you've skipped dinner -- and as soon as you eat, you get sleepy because, well, that's what your body is used to after dinner. And Friday night traffic control is a nightmare -- ever tried controlling crowds when they're drunk, loud, and whose every male member is trying to impress the female member nearest to him? Well, try controlling that same crowd when it knows that every 10 or 12 minutes or so, for the whole night, Robert DeNiro is going to step out onto the sidewalk just feet away from them. And your job, your privilege of a job, is to stand between him and them, and make sure they shut up, don't video him, don't take photos of him, stay behind a certain line and generally just don't make a sound whatsoever. Soon enough, one of them's going to shriek or pull out a camera phone, and then they're all going too -- and then you get the blame for not being able to control them, and then you snap back to whoever blamed you, and next thing you know it's 2am and everyone is in a bad mood. Suddenly all you want is to be out of there, and this being a film set, everything around you moves excruciatingly slow. Works to make you feel even Jim Dandy-er. And there's still 4 hours to go...
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That's my basic thoughts that I can think of now, so I apologize if they don't make much sense. I hope they do. You probably won't come back to this blog if I keep going two months without blogging, and then post a bunch of nonsense. Bad customer service.
In any case, that's pretty much what's been filling 18 hours of my day every day for the past three weeks. Plenty more is new -- Mary and I are coming back to Europe for a two-week period, the highlights of which will be, on the one hand, getting to celebrate our birthdays with out families, and on the other hand, going to Cannes for three days, with passes, entry to Martin Scorsese's masterclass, and (knock on wood) more goodies. But I'll talk about all of that as it happens, as I don't want to brag about it now, then see it never happen, and then have to make up a story for why it never did, all in an effort to save face. So for now, let's leave it at what we know for sure: Going to Cannes, Scorsese masterclass, and maybe more.
What else is new? The short film is coming along. It's been an incredible fight from the night that mugging happened -- it's about as much money and time as I was planning to spend on a first feature, not on a short that I originally conceived, and still do conceive, as the first, and least ambitious, in a series of shorts that'll work as a calling card, reel, and early track record as a producer. But the film is coming together -- I have a terrific sound designer within a week of finishing it, a terrific (and, if I remember right, award-winning) USC composer working on a score, and even though we've toned down our color correction effects a slight bit, I'm still looking to come away with a great-looking film. That, and this amazingly talented guy called Brian Murtaugh is designing our main and end credits, and is doing a fantastic job at it -- expect some of his non-used designs to pop up on film festival postcards and posters (that's how good they all are). It's a lesson to me in how long, slow, and expensive rebuilding a film's soundscape from the ground up can be, especially when you can in no way afford to stop and spend the bulk of your time on the film -- when it has to be an after hours, evenings-and-weekends type thing, always delaying, always pushing back, always convincing and hounding and cajoling the people with the resources so they'll help you out and throw you a bone. But we're getting amazingly close now, and will be done in June, and as such we'll be able to make most of the summer film festival deadlines, and all of the early fall ones, all around the world. If you were cast or crew and are still in New York, expect a cast-and-crew screening somewhere in Manhattan during the month of June -- and hopefully a few festivals I might try and convince you to come out to, maybe to see the film and do some Q&Aing (knock on wood again, all together now), which would be a really, REALLY fantastic experience.
I've also started doing script reading and actual development notes for this management company in L.A. called The Collective, which has been great since they manage such people as Eddie Izzard, Emile Hirsch, Shareeka Epps, Dennis Hopper, Whoopi Goldberg, Forrest Whitaker, Michelle Rodriguez... I've been working with (for them, really) since February, and it's been really fun, especially considering a couple of the scripts I put input into might actually get made very soon (including one for comedian Katt Williams, which is exciting -- his stuff is SO obviously not my side of the tracks, but I can appreciate it, and it was a real kick for me to send my notes on the screenplay and see everyone involved actually agree with my notes and work with them -- it kind of proved to me that even if something's not right up my alley, hopefully I know enough about screenplay and film and have a good enough bullshit detector to improve it in some small way). That's been great because as much fun as it is going to be going to the cinema to see the films I've PA'd on, and as AMAZINGLY fun as it is going to see the films I'm an extra in (oh yes, you read that right -- I'm a battersman guard in one shot of The Golden Age, and a "film crew member" in the background of a crucial scene of What Just Happened?), it'd be great to see a film I've had some sort of creative input (however small) and see if it made a difference or not, if the choices work or not. It's the only true test, really -- you could be an amazing script reader or note-maker for years, and the second a film gets made based on your notes, maybe your notes suck. Maybe they work on the page and not on the screen. So it'd be interesting to see. That, and it'd be a validating experience. :)
On the paid work front, the upcoming goal is the same it's been for over six months now -- Indiana Jones 4. They start shooting June 18th, I know the first three geographic locations they'll be going to, and I know who the ADs are and how to get to them. So wish me luck...
That's all I can really think of as of this point -- I'm sure there's so much more I could rant and rave about (like Spider-Man 3 -- I personally think it's by far the best of the three. Bite me if you don't.; or like how Bron Bron is currently making us all proud, leading -- it's not quite done but I expect it to happen in the next couple of days -- the Cavs into the NBA Eastern Conference Finals and, who knows, maybe further), but this is probably long enough as is.
I hope you're all well (and if you're not, please let me know why and how, and we'll sort it out!), and see you next time -- when I'll be speaking to you...from Cannes!
