My apologies for not blogging yesterday, but we worked a seventeen hour day on Friday, and though I could have found the strength to post, I decided to clean my bathroom instead. That may sound strange, but I'll come to that.
Day 8 - First day of a Fake Wood Wallpaper production with the fire department on set. That is a milestone we all should be proud of reaching. Both the meat and the vegan stand went up in glorious flames in the parking lot of Bill Orr's flea market. Nothing survived in the vegan stand, including Lorraine. However, two things survived the fire of the meat stand: the giant steak sign on top of the stand and our 2nd AD's cell phone. His name is Dan and he remembered he left it in there while it was on fire. Luckily, it still functions and is only cosmetically marred, which in the current cellphone climate, could be socially disastrous.
Two members of the press visited our set today and snapped photographs of Lorraine being burned alive, which is just a gag shot on a long lens. They proceeded to interview myself, Katie and Alex. I'm worthless in these situations because after any question no matter how simple, I take extremely long, thoughtful pauses in hopes of making some future Bartlett's worthy quote. At that point, the interviewer is just tired of staring at me and being uncomfortable, as if they had just asked me to summarize a 1000 page economics text. Luckily, Katie and Alex were there to bail me out of looking like a dolt.
From there we moved back to Alex's father's house and shot the scene where Archie and Lorraine ride in the blood car and flirt awkwardly. I can't imagine any picture car in the history of motion pictures to be as dirty and nasty as the blood car. As we pulled out to do the first take, I noticed a coffee mug on the floorboard of the driver's seat right side up mind you with the tiniest pool of coffee swirling inside. Since mugs won't fit in most cupholders, I guess that's the only convenient place for it. Aside from that, it is floating in trash: foamcore scraps, gum, broken CDs, partially eaten biscuits. It goes on and on and I'm not listing set dressings by the way. I shouldn't be surprised because most people's cars end up in this state eventually.
From there we moved to my apartment in Midtown, where we filmed a great FX scene of Archie cutting open his arm with a straight razor and tubing blood into an empty milk carton. Toby Sells, who created a prosthetic model of my forearm, helmed this one and it made me and most of the crew quite uneasy. Some of us even had to look away as the blood began to flow. Nice work, Toby.
We also shot the bulk of the scenes that are set in Archie's apartment, which is probably the best looking set in the film.
Our behind the scenes cameraman has the great problem of filming all of the time, even when you don't want him to. He's making up for the lack of BTS for the entire first week, which is good. Our official still photographer was also on set today. Her name is Linnea.
Oh, right, the bathroom. Well, we shot Archie's bathroom scenes in my apartment's bathroom. If you've ever opened your home to a film crew, then you know how trashed it can become. I just cannot bear showering in a tub with blood pooled up inside it.
