- Friday, March 22, 3:30p.m. DAY 1
Who says we don’t have a sense of humor? First shot of the day: A cemetery! Lead character Falcon(Rush Pearson) lays a wreath, rises to be observed-confronted by a Lynchian groundskeeper (Rich Cotovsky). 20 degree late-March temps with wind chills make it feel like zero. Perhaps it’s basic superstition but this former craps dealer is not starting out in a graveyard. Sit this one out. Skeleton crew grabs the shot.
16 months of conception and pre-production have come down to this as I approach the West George apartment location of IVAN44. Ivan is a slimy sub-basement-living mofo, a client of Mayfaircams and Little Orphan Annie. We’ve found the appropriate teeny-tiny location and I’m surprised when the first person I see is Rush, hanging outside. “Whacha doin’?” “Grabbing some air.” “Where is everyone?” “In there,” sez our Falcon, pointing down into the windowless studio apartment. I open the door, to find an anthill…
No less than 30 people. In a studio apartment?! Note to self: Next time you write in: “Lives in a tiny sub-basement” remember that you’re actually going to have to shoot the thing in that sub-basement! We’re crammed in but organized, every department well coordinated starting with our intrepid director (Boris Wexler). As Sara from Art Department organizes a cheesy, frameless Botticelli on the wall, Boris works with our DP extraordinare (Fred Miller), looking over framing, talking lenses. G&E crew busy themselves setting up lights. The wonderful lady who donated her apartment and her cute kittie are locked behind her bedroom door. I walk a whole five paces to get to the only other room in the joint, the kitchen, where the staff for makeup, wardrobe, data management, catering, actors and PA’s are all slammed one atop another. A human car wash. A brave few have ventured into the backyard where a table with snacks and beverages has been set up in the zero degree windchills. Everyone here has a defined job and so do I…
I’m the Writer-On-Set. Christ help me….
I forget if it was Boris or I who devised that I’d be taking “additional photography” on set. For the DVD, for social media purposes, the backstage looks at the making of Chat. It’s nice to have an active function on set but writers, I’m here to tell ya, the cliché is true. Never is a person so useless as to be the guy on set who created the whole enchillada. The fact that you’re the reason everyone of those people are there doesn’t much matter. They’re working—you’re a tourist. But it’s the dream, right? To finally, FINALLY, watch it all come together. But as writer that’s pretty much all you’re doing. You’re a fanboy within your own world. I do my best to stay out of the way while 30 folks all around me help my vision come to pass.
Art and camera are ready for Talent. Enter Little Orphan Annie (Marielle de Rocca Serra) and Ivan44 (Pat Zielinksi). The script calls for Ivan44 to bait Annie into a meeting at his place with claims that he’s contacted Falcon’s daughter (Caitlin Collins). When she arrives he tries to “perv” on her and gets slammed into the wall by an angry Falcon. AD Paula calls quiet on the set. Don’t ask me howtwenty some-odd people go silent in that kitchen, but they do so, and we shoot sleezy Ivan44 on his chat cam, then forcing Falcon to stay outside as he gets in Annie’s face, then Falcon saving the day. We cover the hell out of this scene and the better part of the day vanishes in rehersals, multiple takes, reverses, and pickups. Look up, it’s midnight.
Onto Day 2.
- Saturday, March 23: 12 noon: DAY 2
We’re down at our home for the next three weeks, a large office space on West Jackson near the Chicago Board Of Trade. This office takes up a good portion of the second floor of the entire building. As small as the Ivan location was, that’s how big this joint is.
Open those glass double-doors and the first thing you see is that wardbrode has commandeered the conference room. This is the classic boardroom you see in movies and TV used by our wardrobe mistress an almost endless series of lingerie and bondage gear for our Chat Cam actress/“models”. Turn the corner and there’s a canteen with tables big as the yesterday’s kitchen alone. Craft food tables are set up across from Syd’s Office, which for today is being used as Production nerve center, our fabulous producers, Lucy M and Jessica B, on laptops along with three or four other folk. Across from these, the full expanse of the trading floor. Sprawled out are G&E gear, dolly tracks, sandbags, “apple boxes”… The majority of the set we’ll be using is down a single corridor which will be lit nightmarishly for Falcon’s POV, and straight-up business like for the objective POV. Multiple rooms which serve to make Board Of Trade money Monday through Friday have been converted for a slightly different purpose come Friday night. These will be the Cam rooms of Little Orphan Annie, Mary Rose, and the other Cam Models of MayfairCAMS.
Now, the upside to being Writer-On-Set is that you can stroll onto set 90 minutes late and very few folks take notice. But I take notice… People are in motion, urgent motion. I soon find out why. Seems the central air for Annie’s chat room—just as they were about to set up—kicked in like it hadn’t done during location scouting. It sent ripples on our sound guy’s meter like some kind of geiger counter, making the room, a major location we planned to use today, unusable! Not a single shot had been filmed yet! 90 minutes late, not good….
Sara and crew furiously creating a new Annie room from scratch down the hall. Boris conceives that if we reverse the blocking all will be fine. Just have to set up Annie’s bed and bondage gear. Oh, and light the damn thing. Tick, tick, tick…
The crew pull it together fast as humanly possible and by 3pm we’re in business. Shooting all Annie stuff today. This is a movie about disconnection. It will be told through screens–literal and personal. Boris and Fred shoot Marielle in close chatting with Falcon, who isn’t even on set yet. In post we’ll add the graphics and live cam elements. Great job, art department! The room, decorated with whips, vibrators and elegant catsuit, looks like that of our bondage queen, Little Orphan Annie.
To Boris’s credit he finds a place for me in the room to use my commercial Canon for “additional photography”. Personally I think he’s getting a kick telling his old teacher what ten-inch wall space he can lean against, limit the actor crossfire, Paul, and for Christ sakes no directorial suggestions!
Boris has full command of this set and we start plowing through takes, new set ups, push ins to CU and ECU’s. The hours rolls by.
I wasn’t born to be a producer. If it’s my choice I’m feeding my people Chicago-style pizza and chips, top it off with mini-eclairs, ice-cream cake or Hostess Ho-Ho’s. And watch them fade into a carb coma two hours later…
All this has to be thought out! #1 Objective: Feed your people! You want a diet that drives the crew through potential overtime situations. Lunch yesterday was chicken and salad. Boring as sin, but functional food makes sense. Today it’s Italian sausages and salad. I hear rumor there were a dozen single-bite candy bars in the snack tray, gone now. Now who could have eaten all those Snickers bars???
I make it until 9 PM before the bad back sends me back home after only 8 hours on set. The crew is rock solid—don’t think they’ll even notice I’m gone. Nobody bitching, nobody bolting. Make our day and playbacks look great.
Onto Day 3.
- Sunday, March 24, 12 Noon: DAY 3
Most challenging day of the weekend. Easily. Shots today include almost every key character. Open with Falcon, Geoffrey (Joe Mikieta), and Syd (Rick Peeples) walking the corridor during Act 1, then the mirror shot (same shot in Falcon’s POV) with camera on sticks, reverses, then laying dolly track and shoot it that way too. Singles of Mary Rose (Caitlin Collins) and Annie dressing in catsuits for an anticipated meeting with Geoffrey. Top it off with maybe the second most important scene of the movie: Falcon confronts Mary Rose, and the fight that ensues.
Fred Miller’s crew does a fantastic job setting up the dolly track, replacing the cold white neon bulbs overhead with a off-shade of blue. The whole feel is creepy and will pull an audience into Falcon’s mind for the POV of a man with “photophobia”—the inability to look at normal light for any period of time. Subtle subversion of reality is what we’re after.
This has to be balanced, of course, with the realities of making our days, of getting the movie in the can. Today everyone is working double-time; wardrobe and makeup making Marielle and Caitlin looking like XXX-goddesses, Marielle wearing some kind of stringy black top and zebra print. Rick P’s Syd is told by Boris to roll around in his discount suit, this a character who might change that suit once a month. And Falcon in brown shoes no human ever wears, the clumsy black tie and mothballed jacket, moving toward the inevitable meeting with his daughter.
Boris nailed a two-for-one with his casting of Songa (Craig Harris). Craig is a full-fledged stunt coordinator and he takes Rush and crew through the steps of how to make this fight believable. It’s fascinating to watch. The actor getting pushed or punched actually does most of the work to make it believable. In this scene Falcon decks Geoffrey with a punch before he’s taken off by security guard Songa. They rehearse it, then we shoot it…
And shoot it…
And shoot it…
The new element today is going handheld. It’s a great choice by Fred and Boris, and really, a necessary one. Howto get directly into the head of the character? Fred’s using a “tilt-shift” lens—please don’t ask what it does, I’m just the Writer-on-Set and additional photographer—but we’re looking for a wider, flatter, deeper look than the way the normal human eye processes things. Again, Lynchian, subtle subversion. Mulholland Drive meets PI. That’s CHAT in my mind. Something else to watch Rush Pearson dragged away by Songa screaming “THEY’RE BLEEDING YOU!” over and again.
Turn to some of my students and ex-students, doing grip work and watching it unfold: “Now THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT!”
Onto Day 4.
