Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Alicia, Bill, Kyle and I get together at Bills house to go over the audition footage and select a cast for the film noir project and Episode 4.

Damn these meetings we have seem to always go long. We all get together and we all like to talk and we always get off topic. We decide to push principle photography back to the 20’s of June, as the first week is going to be pretty hard to hit, and I have to wait on this new equipment now. This sucks, as I had told Theresa she had the part. But she’s preggers so anytime we push it back, she has the chance of showing, and that probably won’t work. She’s also going on vacation in the 20’s of June, so we wouldn’t be able to start until she gets back in July sometime. I’m not looking forward to breaking this news.

We go through the DVD and decide on people we’d like to work with in the future, who’s a possibility for the roles we have available now, and who we don’t really want to work with.

Alicia also tells us that Andrea (I was right about her name) was treated pretty badly by one of the people that auditioned, so that dude’s automatically in the pile of “no fucking way.” I don’t know what the dude was expecting. Maybe he thought we wouldn’t find out or that he was so good we’d put up with that baggage. We put up with too much from previous prima donnas, and there’s no way they’re worth it.

Eventually with some battling back and forth, we settle on a cast for Episode 4. Sweet, that’s out of the way. A few hours pass by and we settle on a cast for the film noir. Then we change our minds and go back to another cast set.

While watching the DVD, there’s a woman that’s not in the appropriate age range to play any of the characters, but she’s definitely good. I remember about the land lord character, and I was going to just write her out of the noir as I didn’t think we’d find someone to play it. If she’s game to play that small role, we have our landlord.

Alicia whips out a copy of King of Hearts, which is finished except for the score, which is being worked on. We throw it in and we’re all blown away by it. I don’t think anyone was expecting anything this good. She asks if it’s good enough to put up on the Backlot site and I ask her if a frog’s ass is water tight. The answer to both is a yes.

Kyle leaves and we go back to the casting for the noir and bounce ideas back and forth some more. A couple of characters are locked in by actors I’ve worked with before. The characters of Seth, the villain, and Carter, a supporting role are cast, and Detective Baldwin is cast to a dude that came and auditioned for us. Some people come in and read and they’re just a lock right away. It happened when we were casting for The Weight, our second feature, and the role of Betty was a lock as soon as Jessica Grosdanof walked into the room.

We go on about the characters of Grant, the lead, and Dana, the female lead. There’s two people we’re considering for the role of Grant but both Alicia and I got a bad vibe about the one guy. Bill relents and drops him.

We finally hammer it out and choose our Dana. Man, these were tough decisions. I’m pretty nervous about the whole thing as this will be the first time I haven’t worked with Logan since Streets of Wonderland back in 2004. Alicia suggests we have a rehearsal for it and if someone isn’t working out, we can replace them. This sounds like a great plan and everything, but if we do have to replace someone, it’ll be pretty short notice to the person we call up to take the part. Also, this means we might have to delay the start of shooting this film again. I just kind of want to get out there and shoot. But the rehearsal is the best option, especially if it’s only to squelch my fears.

Alicia says she’ll let the cast know they’ve gotten parts for these two projects, tell them when the rehearsal is, and let the people know who we want to work with, that we want to work with them in the future, but we don’t have a part for them in these two projects. This woman’s organizational skillz are unparalleled. The rehearsal date is set for Saturday, June 7th.