We’ve been shooting non-stop for about two months now, and the pre-production on these projects began months before the summer actually came. Yes, we’ll work together again, and yes it will hopefully be soon. But just because you know there’s going to be other family reunions doesn’t mean you’re not sad when this one has to end.
But let’s get on with the show before we go to nostalgia.
Today is a staggered day with the cast arrivals and departures. We start out with the Boppers, as this is a day of basically Ajax kicking ass. So we’ll have Mac, Pat, and Mike, as well as Irish, Harry, and Keith, who will be reprising his role of Chiles on the last day of production.
The Boppers, Harry, and Alicia meet up at my joint before we head out. It turns out that in the hectic departure from the Dunner last night, Bill put the audio gear into his car before he scooted off to work. We won’t have him for the first half of the day as he just got off the midnight shift and needs to catch some sleep before he’s useful.
I’m not sure about everyone else, but I kind of don’t want to go. If we go, then we have to shoot, which brings us closer to having this end. Bill arrives to drop off the gear, and kicks around for a bit with us. We laugh about all the donuts Bill brought over, and this causes Sue to get sick, as she’s been sick ever since chowing down on some of Bills day olds.
Now, I’m a rotten human being. This kind of shit makes me laugh. She told me she was going to get sick from the donut talk, and I did nothing to stop it. I wanted to chuckle. So after she cleans herself up and comes back outside, I immediately start talking about donuts again.
I really don’t know what’s wrong with me.
So we eventually pack up the gear and head out to the park once more to begin finishing off the day.
The first scene that we’re shooting is the end of the scene we picked up here last time. The Boppers select Bulldog as the person Ajax has to jump in order to get into the gang and go from his blue plaid shirt to his read plaid shirt. We shot Cleon and Cochise selecting Bulldog for Ajax to jump; now we have to shoot the actual jumping.
Ajax does his business with a lead pipe. I figured Steve would have found some cardboard tube and a way to paint it to look real. Nah, that’s not Steve’s style. Steve went and got a machined tube from Home Hardware.
I break out the Glidecam, and we get to work rehearsing the scene and doing the hits slowly, because I can always speed it up in post to make it look more vicious. It goes pretty well, and we get all the coverage I’m hoping we’ll need. We chill out for about ten minutes before Keith arrives to shoot his scenes, and we move deeper into the park.
We greet Keith and then I start looking through my notes for the next scene. We grab a shot of the busy park, a long shot of Keith sitting on the bench, and then we start shooting the Boppers, who are now telling Ajax to jump Chiles. Mike throws in a bit of ad-lib at the end, and I like it, so we use it.
We run into a small problem while shooting this scene. It turns out that we’re not the only ones who like this park. The YMCA runs a traveling playground, so today they bring all the handicapped kids to the park and turn the joint into a jamboree. I really don’t want all these unfortunate kids running through my shots and running around in the background, so doing a shot selection is a little tricky now. We get through it with no real problems, other than one kid in particular screaming like a banshee and trying to grab our shit.
It’s cool though. If that would’ve kept up, I could’ve totally taken out that kid. I’m pretty sure of it.
The real spectacle of the bus loads of kids and their handlers was a fat man walking around with two fanny packs snapping pics of all the kids. I’m really hoping the dude was with them or the newspaper, because that’s pretty creepy shit.
Come to think of it, whenever I get bored I might just skip off to that park. There always seems to be entertaining shit going on there, whether it be slow kids running around, fat men with fanny packs waddling around taking pictures, or people in bikinis walking in some weird pattern on the field.
Real life is more entertaining then TV.
After we shoot Pat and Mike’s part, they’re wrapped until four, where we’re once again, back to the bank. Mike takes off with his girlfriend somewhere, and Pat takes off to wherever Pat goes when he’s not entertaining the shit out of me.
We move over to the bench where Chiles does his business and quickly kick off the scene where Ajax does the actual jumping of Chiles. It goes pretty quickly, and now Mac is wrapped until four. He bounces to wherever he goes when he’s not beating people down with a pipe.
We have one more scene to shoot before Steve arrives, but there’s a small problem that we never thought of.
Bulldog has a wound on his face when he meets up with Chiles, but when he beats on Steve, who’s making the final part of his cameo, he is pre-beating. What this means is that Alicia would have to apply the wound for the scene with Chiles, take it off for the scene with Steve, and then reapply it and then some, for our final sequence at the bank.
She doesn’t have much makeup left, and is doing all this for free, and sacrificing her kit for us, so we decide that we’ll just wait for Steve, do his scene first, and then apply the wound, and shoot the scene with Keith.
So now it’s lunch time.
Sue runs home to grab more sandwiches my Dad made as well as some salads he bought. We didn’t want to return home to eat in fear that when we get back, our picnic table will be gone.
We chill for a bit filling Keith in on the production and chatting a bit. The weird part comes when I have to walk across the park to go to the washroom. I’ve played soccer all my life growing up, so stepping on that field, even just to cross it, is a weird feeling. I feel like I should look up and scope for the ball. It definitely brought me back, and on this day when I’m already feeling bummed for the last day of shooting, this didn’t help. Just another thing reminding me of something that’s gone that I thoroughly enjoyed. I know I can go into a mens league if I wanted to, but I’m too fat, I smoke too much, running has never been my thing, and people in the mens league take the shit too serious.
However, if I could smoke and play while making fun of people and not have to move too much, I’m so signing up.
While we’re all relaxing, Steve calls and says that he’s going to be a half hour late or so. We continue to chill and about five minutes before Steve is to arrive, we start preparing to shoot again. Bill arrives during our lunch break as well, so now I don’t have to operate the camera and direct at the same time. Not that it’s a hard thing to do with this cast. There’s not much direction involved when it comes to them.
As we’re shooting Bulldogs arrival into the park, Steve arrives and gets ready in his car in the background of the shot. I want to keep rolling, because for some reason I find this funny. We get it done, and then we shoot Harry punching Steve in the face. Steve rigged his prop glasses to fly off his head when he gets hit. This guy is amazing. Every time he swings his head back, the glasses come flying off.
We knock it off pretty quick, and then move over and set up the camera for the Bulldog/ Chiles scene while Alicia applies the wound to Harry.
Harry and Keith have decided, unbeknownst to me, to make a burner out of the first take. I guess a burner is when you totally flub the take on purpose in the hopes of getting laughs. Well, it wasn’t that funny but it was actually a good thing, because we decided to ad-lib another line at the end that came out of the burner.
We bang out the scene pretty quickly, and wrap Keith. Another production where we shoot all of his scenes in one day. Since we’re running behind, everyone came back to the park to meet up with us. We grab the voice over from earlier that we couldn’t do because we couldn’t get audio while the camera was on the Glidecam.
Our goodbyes are said to Keith and we’re off to the bank for the final sequence we’ll shoot on this show.
We get to the bank and quickly shoot the first shot, which is Ajax now coming out of the bank. Then we head to the back of the parking lot to shoot The Mick and Bulldog watching Ajax leave the bank. We bang it out, then move to the back of the bank to wrap the show.
The scene at the back of the bank is fairly short, but there’s a lot of people in it, and quite a bit going on. This is one of the scenes that I didn’t storyboard and now wish I did. I get everyone to walk through the scene, and I’ll figure out camera positions as we go through it.
This is how often I don’t have storyboards for a scene: I’m trying to figure out a way to shoot, and I’m told constantly by three or more people to grab my binder and look in there. Even after I tell him I don’t have storyboards for this scene, and my production book is useless to me right now, I’m still told to grab the binder and look at my notes. It just wasn’t sinking in that for once, I haven’t storyboarded.
I decide to record a master shot, which I haven’t done in awhile, and we eventually get everyone into marks where we can see them all, and roll through that shot. Then we go and get some pickups. This scene, as well as the last scene we shot back here involving Nigel, is really two scenes in one, which makes it tricky.
Pat and Mike are standing at the back of the bank waiting for Ajax to arrive with the loot. While they’re waiting, they’re going on about the funniest shit until Ajax arrives. Here’s one example.
“See you have to kick, just keep kicking like this.”
“Wow, that’s impressive, do you do yoga?”
“No, I just do lots of kicks.”
The one that Mac couldn’t handle though, was the “scalp pull.” Apparently, it’s when you grab someone’s scalp and pull it off using your teeth.
We roll through the scene, with only one interruption from a fat woman walking her cat on a leash telling us to keep it down. Yeah, fat women walking cats on a leash telling you to keep it down at six or seven pm is really an intimidating factor. She rumbles off, we finish off our last few shots and wrap the Boppers and Irish.
We have one last thing to do, which is to catch Harry’s voice over that we missed from the third day of shooting. We roll it out and I give Bill the honors. Bill likes to wrap everything “for production.” I’d say that we’re wrapping the dolly for the day, and Bill would pipe up “for production.”
I give him a chance to wrap the production and the fucker chokes. I say, “go ahead Bill,” and a look of confusion crosses his face. I tell him to wrap the production, and he doesn’t know what to say. Eventually he spits out that the production is wrapped for production. Definitely an anti-climactic moment.
The Boppers jet, as well as Irish, and we pack up our shit and jet for the part of the day Harry’s been looking forward to the most: my Dad’s Sloppy Joes. Writing that, it seems incredibly dirty. Fuck it, it’s not my Sloppy Joe that Harry’s going to eat.
We get back to my place, unload the gear and put it in its proper place once again, and kick it on my back deck for awhile. Leanne drops by as well to sample my Dads Joes. We all sit around and talk for awhile and I really don’t want the day, or I guess you could say night now, to end. While we’re chowing down, we start talking about what exactly makes you gay, and start trying to make rules. It turns out that the line isn’t as bright as you would think.
Obviously we all talk about the production too and how great of a time we all had. I really can’t believe it’s all over. I’m trying to keep everyone here as long as I can, but I know Alicia has to jet to go camping for a few days, and I know Harry can’t stay here forever, no matter how bad he or I would like him to.
Eventually, Bill and Leanne bounce, leaving Sue, myself, Alicia and Harry. I’m feeling downright retarded about now, and I think me and Harry are doing a good job of acting that way. Sue and Alicia just sit back and watch the show.
We decide to play another game of Scene-It, which has seemed to have become the thing to do since Logan came down. During the first round, I get a call from Bill who’s designing the poster. He sends me a pic of the actual replica guitar to see if it’s the right one, and it is. As a result of this conversation, I miss playing the entire first round.
It’s a tight race for the first place position between me and Alicia, but during the Final Cut round, I end up pulling it out by six hundred points. Victory.
We head out onto the deck again and chill for longer, all the while Alicia is getting calls and texts from her camping partners. It turns out the plan is to leave at 4am, go grocery shopping for a couple of hours, drive the three hours to the place, then sleep for three hours at the camp grounds, then they can start the “vacation.”
First of all, I don’t think I could even go camping this soon after wrapping. I’m pretty sure I would need a day or two to decompress. Actually, maybe I could go camping to get my mind off the vast nothingness my life is about to become once again. I don’t know, but I know that with these timelines and the constant check-ins, it don’t sound like much of a vacation to me. Call me crazy, but my version of a vacation doesn’t have an itinerary.
Actually, I’m not sure when the last time I went on a vacation is. I don’t think I need one to tell you the truth. I never felt the need to go away somewhere and escape, but like I said, I’m pretty weird that way. I mean, who else laughs when other people get hurt and when they puke?
Regardless of my self inflection just then, Alicia keeps getting calls, and it seems that the plan keeps changing. Being in the mood I’m in, I can’t help it but laugh uncontrollably when the last call comes in. Both Harry and I crack up but try to stifle the hilarity. Alicia gets off the phone and tells us we didn’t do a good job, because Andrea thinks that we’re laughing at her.
Andrea, we weren’t laughing at you at all. The stupidest things are making us laugh right now. It’s been a long ride and there’s a lot of shit going through our heads right now. We’re downright retarded, so please don’t take any offense to us. I blew smoke into a coke bottle then laughed hysterically when I squeezed the bottle and the smoke came out. Really, you’re going to get offended by someone who laughs at something as stupid as that?
That’s like being offended because the dog chose your lawn on the street to drop bricks on. The dog just has to go and your lawn looked good.
Harry and I joke around that we should go crash their camp site. We’re convinced that we would be the life of the whole campground and people would travel from their lots to come and watch us regale them with awesomeness. We would be Gods in that campground. I’m actually half tempted to do it. Yeah, I’m that retarded right now.
Eventually, Alicia and Harry take off and I start trying to capture the footage from the past little while that I haven’t been able to do. I decide to call it a night when I pass out in front of the computer.
The last day of principle photography for the Van Halen Guitar is officially over. However, we do still have one more thing to shoot for it. Something no one except the Rebels know about.
Now that the show’s over, onto the nostalgia.
I can’t believe it’s all over. I can’t remember a better summer that I’ve ever had. I’m having a hard time actually putting it into words. Not only did I get to do what I love to do all summer long, but I’ve also met a lot of really good people, and bonded more with others that I knew for years.
Harry and I first met on the set of Wonderland, my first feature film, which we shot in 2004, so I’ve known this cat for four years now. I think we really ended up getting a lot closer this summer than we have in the past four years. Irish, I also met on Wonderland, and it was great to have him involved again, and again, I think we had a lot of fun together on this show.
Alicia and Steve I met only early this year or so, and I can’t believe how close we’ve all gotten with each other. Well, I don’t know if they feel the same way, but fuck ‘em, this is my diary.
The cast on Desolation Row, as well as Episode 4 feel like a big family to me. Maybe a family I like more than my real one. Speaking of vacation, to me, shooting this summer has felt like a vacation. It was way too much fun. More fun than people should be allowed. Yeah, sure, we’ve had problems, but the good definitely outweighs the bad. The juice was worth the squeeze.
I really can’t believe everything we’ve pulled off this summer either. Sure, I guess you can classify these flicks as “shorts” but they’ll be around 40- 50 minutes. They’re not very short. You also throw in a concert that we prepped for while knee deep in production on another show, as well as all the challenges and obstacles we’ve had to overcome and the situations we put ourselves in…. well, it was just quite the experience, let’s put it that way.
I’m having a hard time accepting that it’s over. I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but it’s not going to be nearly as much fun, because all that work will be in solitary. Like I said before, the fun part of shooting is hanging out with some really cool people you don’t get to see enough.
So, as cliché as it sounds, that’s a wrap.
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