Saturday the 21st was my penultimate shooting day. I don’t return again until April 12. It was a short day, compared to my other days. I arrived at 2:30 and was on the road home around 8pm. The good thing was that, other than the dinner break, there was little waiting around. Things moved along quite speedily, which is to my taste. I would have been perfect in an old Hollywood film, or a Roger Corman picture—just keep it moving, is my motto. Probably wouldn’t have been good for a Michael Cimino film, or one of those 70s auteurs… too much waiting, too many takes.
I met one of the main characters for the first time. Merri Biehler plays Flora, the character with all the guinea pigs, who eventually burns down her trailer. Odd. I’ve been on this picture since February, and she since January (she was in the first scenes shot), but we’ve never been on set the same time until now. I’ve filmed a number of scenes where I am supposed to be looking at her from my window, but of course I was just looking at an eye-line point, or a freezing grip.
Merri is a very sweet woman, and quite meticulous in her approach. Our styles on set are quite different. She constantly asks questions, seeks clarification, discusses all aspects of the shot and the set-ups, while I usually ask very little. I tend to stay in my own head. Most of the questions I do ask have to do with whether I can change a line, or asking where the frame line is (in other words, what is actually being seen in the shot. They say Brando was a master at acting within the frame—if his left arm was out of the shot, it remained at his side, while the right arm did all the gesturing. He also tended to wear only the costume pieces needed—if he was being shot from the waist up, he wasn’t wearing any pants.)
For Merri and me, it’s just a matter of style—neither is correct nor incorrect.
The guinea pigs were the stars of the day, actually. There were a number of cages set up in the trailer belonging to Merri’s character, and the guinea pigs were being shuttled in and out from their own trailer to the set trailer, presumably to stay warm. They were much noisier than the hamsters from a few weeks ago, and more skittish. Merri and I went to their warm trailer to get acquainted with them, and most protested at being held. One, however, only a few months old, was quite happy to be held and cradled. He made a shimmering, soft, purring sound as I held him against my chest and stroked his fur. He also started chewing on the earpiece of my glasses, which were in my shirt pocket.
While the crew were busy setting and focusing the cameras and lights on the guinea pig cages, the rodents were endlessly entertaining—chasing each other round the pen, scratching and grooming in their high speed ways, yawning and stretching and whistling-- in short, being all a guinea pig can be. Yet, when “action” was called, they all sat there, quietly chewing, resting, doing nothing at all. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I heard the Michigan J. Frog song from the old Warner’s cartoons “ Hello my honey, hello my baby, hello my ragtime gal.”
I suspect very little of my close-ups will be usable from this day’s shooting. My left eye inexplicably swelled up a few days before shooting—looks like Rocky after the fight. Dunno why. Probably pink-eye, which is going round Columbus, or so I hear. Though the eyeball itself isn’t red, but the lid is badly swollen and rimmed with red along the lash line. I used what makeup I could, but it looked like I had a week old shiner. Sheesh!
Tonight, my dad makes his film debut. He’s an extra in the bar scene, and will get to be in a bar fight. I told the directors he is uniquely qualified for this role. He is very excited—I warned him that there will be lots of waiting, but he said that was OK, he was interested in watching the process. There was talk that someone would be leering at a girl, which starts the fight. Dad reeeaaally wants to be the leerer.
I wish I could be there to see it all—but I have a medical procedure (ok, it’s a colonoscopy) in the morning, which requires the usual preamble of fasting and laxatives and misery, so no visiting the set for me. He was really hoping I’d come down for it, and we’d go golfing on Friday. But I’ll be anticipating quite a different kind of hole-in-one. OK, TMI…moving on…
No comments:
Post a Comment