Originally, I had asked Alicia to schedule the fights on separate days, and to have them closer to the beginning of the shoot. My feeling was that these fight scenes are exhaustive, so if we get them out of the way at the beginning, it’s all down hill from here. Alicia’s thinking was that we can shoot them towards the end and get the makeup right; and if they dirty any of the wardrobe, it won’t matter because it’ll be the end.
Well, the two fights never got scheduled because of a lot of scheduling conflicts Alicia has had to endure during the shoot. So the only available day to shoot is today, and if we want to shoot both fight scenes, they’ve got to be today.
I’m a little nervous.
The call time is for 9am at my place, and Irish and Harry show up, followed by Bill and Alicia. Bills got to book it to work at three, so after that it will just be me, Alicia, and Alicia’s friend Andrea that came and helped us out at the auditions.
Here’s a problem that we have with this shoot, and a problem we had with Desolation Row as well. All these people are way too cool, so it’s such a good time hanging out with them, you don’t want to get up to shoot. Not that shooting’s not fun, it’s just hard to move from one fun activity to another. We lose track of time easily in each other’s company.
Eventually we hit the bricks at 10; an hour after our call time, and head over to the park to shoot the first fight scene, which is also the longest. Yesterday, I spent quite a few hours watching these scenes shot by shot and trying to storyboard them accordingly. There’re a few things we obviously can’t do, mainly the suplexes, and if we’re to move quickly today, there’s multiple angles we can’t get, which applies mainly to the Deadwood fight.
The first fight is broken down into stages, consisting of about 21 setups. We start blocking out and rehearsing the first chunk, which is one of the bigger melees, after we shoot the minimum dialogue that leads up to the scene, and something is weird. It turns out Irish has never gotten into a fight before, so his punching is a little off. However, I think it still works because he’s playing a character called The Mick, who is Irish, so maybe his fighting style is more a European flavor.
So once we get the chunk rehearsed to a stage that I like, we start trying to roll. But, and this is an ongoing problem at this location, the park maintenance dude decides to come out and cut the lawn on his big riding lawn mower. We get the sound of it, in case we have to sound match later, and start shooting the scene.
Considering what we have to shoot in this scene, and 21 setups is ridiculous, we move at a brisk pace. Alicia’s on top of her game applying the makeup quickly when it’s needed, and we’re all on top of moving shit out of the shot when it’s needed. We take some breaks to get out of the sun and let Irish and Harry cool down a bit and catch their breath, but man, these guys are fucking troopers. Not one complaint out of either of them the entire time.
We’re getting towards the end of the scene, and with the lawnmower man mostly done, a new audio annoyance arrives in the form of a Dickie Dee ice cream retailer. This dude (or chick, I’m not sure) was so lazy, s/he wouldn’t even bring their bicycle ice cream cart thing into the park. It actually might’ve been a law, I don’t know for sure, but s/he would just sit there and ring the damn bell over and over again. It just so happens that right now, we’re shooting a chunk that requires some dialogue, so we can’t have an ice cream bell in the middle of this fight scene.
Harry, blood covered face and all, goes to talk to the Dickie Dee rep. This is just a sight that makes me laugh. I don’t know exactly what was said, and Harry’s the type of guy that even if he told you seriously, you would still think he’s joking, but the bell stopped. I guess the bell tolled for Harry.
We move on to the next chunk, where we face another distraction. Some kids have decided they want to play soccer at the net that is in our background. There’re two soccer fields here, and therefore three other nets they could play at, but they decide to play at the one that’s in our shot. After a couple of takes, and with the teenie boppers moving ever closer to us, I send Andrea out to ask if they could move.
These kids are around the twelve to fourteen year old range, so I figure sending a blond out there to ask them to move will do the trick. I’m sure if a blond asked you to do anything at that age you would comply. So they move and we continue shooting.
And throughout the day we’re constantly distracted by the best distraction ever. And I mean it. The Best. Distraction. Ever.
Someone points out that there’s a woman in a bikini walking back and forth along the end of one of the soccer fields. I can’t believe it and search to find her. Sure enough, there’s a woman in a bikini walking back and forth along the end of the soccer field.
We would shoot some, and then look and see if she’s still there. Yes. Still there. Maybe she dropped something and is looking for it, and that’s why she’s walking? But wait. Now there’s a dude in a speedo that was sitting down and has decided to join her on the merry frolic.
Okay, so now we have two bikini clad people in a park with a children’s splash pad and playground equipment walking along the back of one of the soccer fields and doing a diagonal across the other. Not once. Not twice, but all damn day.
Why am I making such a big deal out of this? Because it’s two people in a bikini walking along a soccer field. Because I don’t understand it. Irish and I would later talk, and I said, “okay, I understand maybe sun tanning at a park in a bikini, and walking makes sense, everyone does it…” when Irish finishes my thought “but you put them both together and it doesn’t make sense.”
You do that shit at a beach and that shit’ll fly. You do it at a park, and that’s going to get noticed, and not winning a medal kind of noticed. More like a two heads and a penis tattoo on your chest noticed.
So as we’re finishing up, Bills phone beeps telling him it’s three and he should book. We’re almost done the scene so he finishes with us and takes off. A sense of accomplishment with us, we set off back to my place to grab a bite.
My Dad has made sandwiches for us, and it seems like just now, with only a few shooting days left on the second consecutive project, he now cares about my money situation. He has made sandwiches for us, and will have dinner ready when we’re done, so I don’t have to spend more money. My Dad, if you haven’t had his cooking, is an amazing cook, so this shit would’ve came in real handy a couple of months ago. I’m also glad that now that I’m more than tapped, he steps in to help me out.
Oh well. Free food. I’ll take it.
So we eat and head off to shoot the second fight scene at another park at around five.
We get to the park and do a couple of shots of Bulldogs truck pulling into the parking lot. They start another fight here, so we bang those out. This is a quieter park, so we’re not expecting any distractions. Again, I’ll be wrong.
Alicia applies the makeup to them, and The Mick and Bulldog exchange a few words in the truck, followed by a punch with a pistol. Then they both get out and the fight turns up.
As we’re shooting, a woman wants to take her kid to the park and asks us permission to pass. Sure, go ahead, I don’t own the park. She pulls in, and apparently her little kid is so frightened by the makeup and it’s so good, something happens that makes it a real Backlot Rebels shoot.
The cops show up.
We’re thinking it’s the woman with the kid that called the cops, but it could’ve been anyone I guess; passerby, neighbors etc. The lady cop who shows up thinks we’re really going to brawl, and we haven’t even started anything outside Harry’s truck yet. We haven’t even started the good part of the scene.
She sees all the blood on both their faces and is skeptical. She doesn’t believe it when we tell her its makeup. This is pretty much awesome proof on how good Alicia is at her shit.
Another cruiser pulls up and both of those cops are laughing. We tell them we’re shooting an episode for our online series, and the part that is really confusing me is that we’re all laughing and joking around. I guess we run some kind of outside in parks fight club where we’re all happy shit-kickers.
That’s cool though. We all have a good laugh about it, and the cops take off, leaving us to film our scene. The They Live fight was five pages, and this one is two, which is still fairly big, but small compared to what we did this morning.
I’m guessing it took around five hours to shoot the first fight scene, so I’m a little worried about running out of daylight for this one. It’s getting darker earlier and earlier now, so we don’t have any breaks during this fight scene as we shoot it.
Irish and Harry are fucking awesome people. They are both exhausted, especially Irish who has to get up and down more and fall more, but neither one of them complained once. Both of them knew what they had to do and they did it awesomely. Harry actually said he’d do the whole thing again after we wrapped the day.
We end the scene with about twenty minutes of daylight left and head back to my joint for some grub.
We get back and Irish “cleans up” in the washroom. When I say “cleans up,” I mean, he just transferred all the blood from his face and body into and around my sink. His ride arrives and he jets.
Harry, Andrea, Alicia, Sue and I chat it up for awhile talking about the day and other things. Harry decides to take a shower, and I’ve had enough, I need to eat. My Dad has left spaghetti sauce in a slow cooker for us and I lead the charge on it. The old man is so cool, he even left out some vegetarian sauce for Alicia. I still don’t understand “those” people.
We all chow down, reveling about the awesome cooking skills of my old man, until we eventually call it a night. I drive Alicia and Andrea back to Alicia’s joint, then head back to put the days footage into my computer.
A really great day today. We got a lot of work done, and there were no major injuries. Some junk got hurt, and Irish got cut, but he did it to himself so it doesn’t count.
Tomorrow I have to get up fairly early, which I’m not apt to do, and head to the Dunner and peep in on the rehearsal, and figure out a way to light this thing. I’m also hoping to get some cues down, and maybe storyboard the scenes we’re shooting on Saturday.
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