And...cut

My editor was here in L.A. cutting while I was up in Calgary shooting and though we talked a lot on the phone and sent long emails back and forth during production I didn't meet him face to face until today. I had a great first day with him in the cutting room. He's a warm-hearted guy with a quick mind and excellent instincts, plus he's easy to work with, I.E.: he'll work an idea of mine until either we get it right or it turns out to have been a dead end.

Except I don't like the cutting in the first assembly of the film.

Strange ineffective ideas, odd pacing, a few things that make no sense at all. (I'm saying this apart from the errors I made on the set, which have become glaringly clear in the cutting room: that's another topic.) So basically as we work together I'm more or less completely re-cutting 80% of the scenes. I can only imagine how I'd feel if an executive sat in my office and directed me line by line through an 80% rewrite of a script. Auggghhh!!! I hope I'm handling this okay. Actually the nature of the set up, the hierarchy, the process, is that I don't really have to worry about how I'm handling it. I just have to say what I'd like to see. So why can't I move forward without worrying about his feelings? Am I afraid he'll do less good work if he feels offended? Not usually the case: people work extra hard to please if you tell them clearly what isn't working. Why do I so often forget that? Some of my own errors, mentioned above, came from not wanting to offend, I think--I could have been tougher on my actors in many moments. Well, live and learn.

On somebody else's nickel.

Make that somebody else's eight hundred thousand nickels.

De-Snarkification

With the stress and noise of production fading away in the quiet and calm of my own tree-shaded office I felt I had to briefly set the record straight on a couple of things.

I had fun posting about La Starlet's temper tantrum on the set but the fact is from that day on she was unassailably professional and hard working and turned in a brilliant performance and I will love her forever. I know that makes for a much less fun post, but there you are.

After Le Star's day of forgetting his lines and giving the appearance of being generally uncommitted he snapped into focus, kept the crew and all of us laughing at the toughest of times, and in the assembled film he is solid, charming and true in every moment. I can't wait to work with him again.

By the end of La International Star's last day she was not only no longer insisting on that special halo of light, she was being positively aggressive in charting an unpredictable and dyanamic path through the scene. It was all a matter of trust, like so many things.

Okay. End of boring post. Have a nice day.

Re-entry

As it happened I flew back home with Le Star and La #2 Startlet, which made the return something of a party and softened the post partum blues. What was even better was that Gary Busey, an actor I've been a fan of since The Buddy Holly Story, was in the row in front of us and instantly took over the business class cabin (oh the perks of a union contract), delivering what was basically a ninety minute revival meeting on spiritualism, AA and what he learned about life from crossing over to the Other Side after a this-close-to-fatal motorcycle accident (without a helmet) in 1988. He started rattling off 12 Step acronyms, including FEAR=False Evidence Appearing Real, and a flood of others that went by too quickly for me to remember but which were just want I needed to hear as I sail on into the cutting room. Thank you Gary Busey for the sermon against the power of fear.

And I'm needing a lot of help today with one little detail. One of the executive producers of the project, a man known for nearly sinking a major studio and walking away with a fifty million dollar severance fee for his troubles in the late 80's, decided who my composer was going to be and made a deal with him and that's that. No director I know has ever ever been handed a composer without input. It doesn't happen. It's completely outrageous. And the composer he chose is best known as the writer of brain-eatingly sappy 80's pop/rock songs. He's also an extreeeeeemly rich guy and that always scares me: how much is he going to be willing to role up his sleeves? How collaborative? How open to my extremely specific musical ideas? Well, at the moment all of my projections are just False Evidence Appearing Real. And he has among his credits scores for film directors I admire, so--I could be all right.

The fact is, on this first morning back home with my wife and kids--who polished the house top to bottom and filled it with flowers and wine and hugs for my homecoming--if I didn't have the composer issue to gnaw on I'm sure I'd be digging up something else.

Oh, by the way. I watched a cut of 85% of the movie last night. Billy Wilder, the greatest American filmmaker (Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17) once said that a director should never bring arsenic or razor blades to a rough cut screening. But you know what?

If the arsenic had been there I don't even know that I would have reached for it.

That's a Wrap

I finished shooting tonight at 1 A.M, two and a half grindingly screamingly out-of-the-question hours into overtime. Or so I was made to feel. Fact is? They probably have it in the budget.

When I look back at the first day of shooting it feels like something that happened in third grade. Like years and seasons presidencies have gone by between my first "action" before a shot of a truck passing by as seen through the spider-web draped windows of a rusted, abandoned car to my last "cut" after a shot of a menacing intruder's pov of a moonlit cabin the woods. But the whole crazy wonderful tense uncertain adventure only took four weeks. In my trailer when I went back to base camp tonight there was a package with some framed photographs of me directing, including one of me and La International Star, and one picture of me sitting on a ladder in the woods reading the script and looking very intense, and on the back of the picture were signatures and notes from the whole cast and crew--very moving and uplifting. And I need uplift because I'm feeling both good sad--that sweet nostalgia of saying good bye to great new friends who feel like family, like on the last day of summercamp--and also uneasy about the next steps of cutting, scoring, actually making it a movie. But when will I learn? When will I learn that I panicked about casting and ended up with a full house of dream actors? And on and on and on?

How about if I learn right now?

I did it, folks. I shot the movie, and it's looking good.

Onward!

Still Shuddering

We were shooting a very emotional scene between La Starlet and La International Star and we were racing to finish the day without going overtime and there was a palapable but manageable level of tension on the set and at a quiet and intense moment in the scene somebody's cell phone went off. Well, not just somebody's cell phone.

My cell phone.

I had forgotten to turn it off after lunch.

Being the director it was up to me to say call out "cut" and then, of course, I had to say "that was me." It wasn't a very big deal because I admitted it right away, turned off my phone and we got right back into the work and started another take. After that we broke for a lighting change and I turned my phone back on and made a couple of calls. Then we went back in and finished the scene. The second we were done my phone rang. I had forgotten to turn it off again.

I know this doesn't sound like a bad thing because it rang after the danger point and nobody even noticed but the fact is it could have rung during the scene again and for some reason this got to me: the fact that I could be so unconscious in a moment when consciousness -- of performance, lighting, timing, the framing of the shot -- is everything. That combined with the fact that La International Star was not doing a good job, and that we ended up going ten minutes into overtime anyway, made for a gloomy finale to the day.

The bad performance thing is rankling badly right now. It's there in the movie. Melodramatic. Forced. I can blame the rush--a few more takes and I might have broken her down. I can blame her--oh no wonder she's been famous for forty years without ever becoming a truly big star. But none of that sticks. She's done great work in other films. She's shooting an arc on a big presitigious cable series right now and will probably be brilliant. It's simple: I didn't find the key with her. I didn't think to run it with her before we shot. I didn't make it happen.

Today is the second to last day of shooting. Both days ahead are killer days. Sex, explosions, romance, emotion, night scenes. I don't see how I can do it without overtime.

It's a gloomy morning. But I'll tell you one thing about the next two days:

I'll be leaving my cell phone in my trailer.

The Power of Love: Derek Part II

When I'm directing I don't feel the cold until I'm frostbit or the heat until I have sunstroke. I also don't notice that I haven't peed for six hours until I'm walking away from the set at the end of the day and feel the knife-like pain in my kidneys. I was feeling that at the end of the massively overtime Friday described in the previous post and expressed the pain to nobody in particular as I was walking to my car, not really aware of who was or wasn't within earshot.

On Saturday morning I got a phone message from Derek. Concerned that I hadn't been feeling well the night before and he was going hiking (we're an hour from the Rockies here) and would call me later. Such warmth and affection you have never heard in a phone message. I didn't return the call because, as my wife warned me, over-friendliness can be passive aggression's ugly cousin, and I needed to decide what I was going to say to him before he called back. And I was just too damn pissed off. He called again while I was having dinner with La Starlet that evening and I didn't take the call. But I called him back after dinner and got it all out, using the magic formula for all difficult inter-human encounters:

"When you__________, I feel_____________."

I used no sentences that began with "You." I told him that when he got irritated with me when I simply wanted help or information I felt scorned and hurt. I gave a couple of instances, always talking about what I felt, not condemning his actions.

Of course he had called in the first place not because he was worried about my health but because he wanted to work it out, so he was wide open to what I was saying. And work it out we did. It turns out the overpopulation of producers and production supervisors, and the frantic energy they channel through me, has been making him feel like he's being treated like a beginner or a naughty child--which has made him act like one. So he copped to his immaturity and I copped to my franticness and today on the set we were back to being the great team we started out as, he answered all my questions patiently and fully, we laughed, we devised great shots together, and we finished fifteen minutes early! The whole set felt different. Everybody was in a better mood because Derek and I were having a love fest.

Now how about that?

Rough Week aka Why I Don't Like My Director of Photography Anymore

EXT. FILM LOCATION IN THE WOODS - DAY

TOM, the director, carefuly, expecting the worst, approaches his Director of Photography. We'll call the Director of Photography DEREK. Because that's his name.

TOM
Um, Derek, do you think maybe we should shoot this scene
from this side, so we can see the sad lonely cabin behind the little boy
as he stands there sad and alone watching the little girl drive away?

DEREK
(pissy indignant tone of voice)
You want to take two extra hours to shoot this? Fine. Sure.
(shouting out to his crew in a
pissy indignant tone of voice)
Okay, everybody, move all those trucks, clear all those
lights, we're going to the other side, the rest of the crew, take
an hour break!

TOM
(desperately trying to be conciliatory)
Derek, Derek, I was just asking the question, all you have to
do is tell me it'll take two extra hours...

INT. THE CABIN - NIGHT

TOM carefully approaches Derek who has just given his lighting crew instructions that seem time consuming and not entirely logical.

TOM
Derek, I'm just asking the question, wouldn't it make more sense
to cover the whole scene in this direction before we turn everything
around and shoot the other way?

DEREK
(pissy indignant tone of voice)
Oh, well, you seem to have your own plan, so just tell me what
to do.

TOM
Derek, Derek, you've made forty movies and I've made three, I'm
just asking for your expertise.

Derek stares at Tom with quiet passive aggressive venom.

******************

And I started out loving him. And I know how things got to the point they've gotten to. The first time he started pulling this shit, very early in the shoot, I should have taken him quietly aside and said "Derek, do not pull that on me, I think you are an artist and a brilliant DP and I couldn't be happier that you are here, and the crew loves you too, we're going to make a very nice movie together, so just cut the crap, okay?"

But I didn't. Just like I did with my mom and my older brother when I was a kid, I played appeasement. I played Chamberlain at Munich over and over again thinking that would buy peace in our time. With both mom and bro I finally stood up for myself, shockingly late in life, and you know what? I now have truly great relationships with both. But with the DP on a movie you don't get a three decade learning curve. You get days to get things right. Aieeee.....

That aside it was a good week until yesterday when we went into a frightening soul-twisting HOUR AND A HALF of overtime. I think the studio is going to come and take away my house for this one. It was a grim one thirty in the morning drive away from set last night after shooting a very fast two-shot version of a scene that Derek and I (in our harmonious earlier days) had planned to do in six glorious and dramatic shots.

On top of his aliens-just-took-over-my-DP's-body personality, he routinely takes two hours to get the first shot on interiors and an hour on exteriors. Those times should be half that on a 19 day schedule and since he has done countless brilliantly shot 19-or-20-day schedule movies I don't understand why this is happening. We're getting 20 setups a day and should be getting 35.

So anyway the Derek thing built up and built up and last night I lost it on a portion of the crew. At least I did it quietly so the actors wouldn't hear. I was bad, gentle reader. I used the F word more than once. It happened because I suddenly realized a scene that we should have been shooting wasn't on the schedule--not Derek's goof, of course--and that if we didn't get it right now we simply wouldn't get it. So God sent me an instant and really very nice solution to the problem that could be implemented right in the scene we were shooting without changing hair, makeup, wardrobe, lighting or anything. I ran and got the page from the script, put it in front of my two wonderful actors, quickly told the camera operator to just start shooting, no time or desire to run to the camera tent and consult with Derek, and the actors pulled it off brilliantly and just as I was going for take 2, to make sure it was absolutely right, I get sternly called to the camera tent by the producer and various department heads wanting to know what I was doing, how could I do this, nothing would match, yadda yadda yadda, and when I tried to say, "come on, we're getting two hours worth of work done in five minutes", they kept going at me with questions and "calm down" (those words are Bic lighter to gasoline for me) and... well... I had a lot of apologizing to do after wrap.

Interestingly, Derek had vanished from the camera tent before I got there, though I had heard him on the walkies a second before saying "I have no idea what he's doing" in a "don't come complaining to ME about this debacle" tone of voice a second before.

But I got my scene. I got my scene.

Broken Promise

Long ago I promised myself I would never shoot a rape scene.

Now I'm making a movie which concerns, partially, a rapist and murder, and at one point we see into his mind and are treated to a flood of incredibly fast images of the many crimes he has committed. So over the last couple of days we have been grabbing, alongside our main scenes, shots of a woman screaming as she is dragged down a gloomy flight of stairs, a woman having her head bashed against exposed framing in a construction site, a woman clawing at the gravel in an alleyway, a woman sobbing into her pillow as hands close around her neck, a knife tearing through the cloth of a woman's jeans. The movie isn't exploitive. Honest. And these are very fast pieces. But still. What happened to my allegiance to Gandhi's command to be the change you want to see in the world?

Meanwhile on the set, Le Star and La Starlet have decided that it's FUNTIME! and several takes were wrecked today by uncontrollable fits of giggles, sometimes--and worst of all--while they were off camera and other actors were on. Then La Startlet suddenly explodes at the crew that she is fucking working herself into tears seven times today and fucking going out on this huge emotional limb and how is she supposed to do that when people are fucking talking to her yatta yatta yatta before every take! When asked later who the offending parties are, so that their heads could be chopped off and shipped to Argentina to be sold as cattle food, she declined to name names--not suprisingly because there really weren't any names to name, just the crew going about its business around her. Recently I suggested to Barista Brat that she might actually, if she does it simply and calmly enough, tell her annoying customers what she really wants to say to them. Ha! Do you know what would happen to me if I told a tantrumizing actor what I really wanted to say them? If I said, simply and calmly, "Well I don't know, I'm paying you FOUR HUNDRED FUCKING THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR NINETEEN DAYS WORK, do you think maybe you could suck it up FOR ONE FUCKING SECOND!?"

Muggles

My wife is the Harry Potter person in the family but I have overheard enough of the books on tape to know that in Rowling's universe there are the people with magical powers and then there are the prosaic unmagical masses out there, the normal people, us: the muggles. Today we were shooting on a public road and a car came through and one of the AD's (assistant directors) wanted to know if it was a car and driver hired for background to the scene or if it was just a passerby, and to find out she asked "Is that us, or is that a real person?" In the same location a bicyclist started biking lazily and without hurry down a road we were about to shoot on, at which another AD announced "We have a bogey in the shot." Real people. Bogeys. Lookey-loos. The normal people out there living their humdrum everyday nine to five lives while we, the crew, the moviemakers, willingly spend insanely long hours fighting time, the elements, the budgets and the utmost limits of our energy and abilities to maybe, hopefully, bottle a few ounces of magic. We were in a very stressful moment today--and it was a stressful and not entirely succesful day--and a veteran local producer who I like a lot said to me "Every time I ask 'why do I put myself through this,' all I have to do is drive by downtown and think of all the people working in those little cubicles in all those towers..." And I feel the same way. It's part of the reason I gave up architecture. Couldn't deal with nine to five under flourescent light. Couldn't deal with being normal.

Yesterday when I was high and happy it felt great to exist outside the grey reality of the muggles. But today when a rain shower cut short my time on a crucial shot, leaving me with only one very approximate take, and when a series of miscommunications and miscalculations put me into another half hour of overtime and left me with another scene pulled off in at best an approximate manner, I realized something critical:

The muggles have the last word.

Right now we the wizards are reveling in the magic making but come a few months from now the muggles get to turn on their TV's, take a quick look at a couple of scenes, say "oh give me a break" and move on.

And that includes you, gentle reader.

So when the day comes, be kind, okay?

The Best Job In The World

After coming off Wednesday when I went one full hour plus five minutes into double-plus-extra-forbidden overtime due to an inordinate amount of trouble getting a fake bleeding wound on a real dog leg to bleed convincingly on camera I knew that today I had to nail everything within my duly appointed eleven hours or risk slipping into the "you're fucking up" zone. The day started out well enough until it started to rain which would have been fine, it was a funeral scene and what could be better, but because of actress availability we had shot one part of this scene already last week in brilliant shining golden sunlight and there was no way it was going to match but we were able to crank in some astonishingly convincing artificial sunlight for the relevant moment and as we were moving on to the next piece the heavens opened and a storm right out of the Bible came down upon us, hail the size of I kid you not robin's eggs blanketing the entire cemetery in white, and we all sat shivering under little plastic tent shelters for an hour contemplating the majesty of God's awesome power to wreck our shooting day and feeling actually quite calm because really, what the fuck are you going to do? Finally the rain slacked off a bit and we got all the prop guys out with rakes raking up robin's egg sized hail and we got our shot, once we got the strange swarms of pit flies to stop swarming strangely in front of the actors, and then had to scramble up the rest of the schedule to move all our shots inside for the rest of the day and my ace locations department made a deal with a nearby coffee house in about six minutes--normally this takes weeks of negotiatons-- to shoot our big first date scene there instead of the outside cafe the art department had spent the last week creating out of nothing and the actors jumped into scenes they had been intending to shoot next week and the art department magically turned the coffee house into an Italian restaurant seemingly in one magic poof and everybody scrambled and improvised and reconceived every possible part of a carefully worked out plan and I did two more big scenes, scenes of confrontation and love and suspicion and eating burgers and we shot 5 and a half pages of script and finished barely fifteen minutes over schedule. And the best news? This was the day the network executive flew in from L.A. and got to see me being superman (actually relying on an ace producing and assistant directing team) and the whole thing was just absolutely wonderful. Especially sitting cross legged on the floor behind the camera watching actors be intimate, close and real with each other under the glow of my genius cinematographer's illumination.

Peeking Between My Fingers

Carol Littleton, the great film editor who cut E.T. and The Big Chill among other movies, once said to Lawrence Kasdan, "Before me, everything is theory." Meaning: you can write whatever you want in the script, you can shoot whatever you want on the set, but until an editor starts putting pieces of pieces of film together and seeing if there are actual scenes in it, and a story, it's all wishing, praying and guessing. Which leads me to:

I just got, from my editor in L.A., a DVD of the cut-together scenes from the first three days of shooting. I've been putting off taking a look at them but it's time to act, I'm going to do it now. It's a scary moment. Is he any good as an editor? Is this movie coming together? How will I be able to tell what's him and what's what I'm doing? Well: hang on for a few minutes and we'll have some answers.

*********************************

Okay I watched it and the editor knows what he's doing. It's not too bad. I let one performance on the first day go way out of control but the character is kind of off her nut so in the context it'll work. I hope. Well, let's face it, I let her go over the top and there you are. Other than that, in terms of reaching my goal of a nice effective melodrama that will make its inteded audience happy, I'm on the way.

Or am I just saying that because I know none of you want to hear any more "oh woe is me why aren't I making The Godfather or at least Sideways" handwringing?

Director to Director

I had dinner last night with a director who is in town to direct another one of the movies in the set of four of which I am doing the first--all adaptations of books in the same genre. He has directed thirty movies to my three, he's good at it, and I look up to him a lot. He wanted to ask me about the local crews, who was good, who wasn't, and where the good places to eat were. I wanted to ask him why he was doing one of these movies, given, as I had heard, that he didn't like the novel or the script and was furiously rewriting it himself. He told me it was a good question and the answer, basically, was that there isn't a lot out there. Then it hit me: I am unbelievably lucky to be working. This guy who is an A+ TV director is getting the same level of job that I'm getting. The TV movie business, cable and broadcast, has shrunk to a shadow. CBS no longer makes movies regularly, NBC almost not at all, ABC a couple a year, etc. The director told me that as he called various other directors to get references on potential crew he could hear in their voices the unasked question: How the hell did you get a movie?

Then the director knocked me over with this statement: At this point I'm just hoping to make something I'm not ashamed of. Which is really several steps below what the great French director Francois Truffaut said: Making a movie is like riding a stagecoach. You start out hoping to have a great ride. You end up just hoping you get to your destination.

And what am I hoping for? A well-made entertaining romance that delivers the goods to its intended audience. Am I pulling that off? I watched all my dailies today and it was a pin in the bicycle tire of my end-of-the-first-week high. So much slow pace, so many camera moves that don't deliver as I'd hoped they would, so much acting that is overwrought, so much that is prosaic and just there. Sometimes when we're on the set the actors and the crew and I talk about our favorite movies, particular scenes and moments that we love, and I think: nobody here, me included, thinks that what we are making will ever be a movie that people talk about that way.

All of that said, the big truth is that only a quarter of the movie is in the can. I have three more weeks to pick up the pace, move the camera in more dynamic and effective ways, tone down the overwrought performances, coax the poetry out of the moments.

Onward!

At The End of Week One

This will probably be a very boring post because all I have to say right now is that I just had the most wonderful couple of days. We were shooting in a massive--I mean like 14 bedroom--mansion, probably the largest and grandest in Calgary, which is standing in for the ancestral North Carolina plantation home of one of the families in the story. (Why people as wealthy as the homeowners want to allow the trampling army of marauders that is a film crew into their art and antique filled home is a question I can't answer.) We moved fast, the lighting was great, the actors were having a great time, there were no more costume disapprovals from the network (actually the producers have wisely told the network "we will accept no more such calls"), and even thunder, hail, sound-wrecking airplanes, power problems and too much work to get done didn't dampen anybody's spirits. Which is not say that every second of it wasn't tense. It's just that way on the set. Time is speeding by, the physical world generally refuses to fall in line the way I want it to, and there's always the question "am I doing this right?"--but like I said, it's just that way.

Here, possibly, is why the days felt so good to me. I was looking at the referrals on my site meter--always curious how people find their way to places in blogland--and one of them was a google search for the phrase "director's prayer." I saw that something from Shekhar Kapur's blog had also turned up in that search. Kapur directed "Elizabeth", the one that starred Cate Blanchett, which I thought was directed about as well as a movie can be directed. Masterful. So I clicked on the link and discovered that he's writing a blog about a movie he's shooting, too--the sequel to Elizabeth--and that he is feeling just as squeezed by his schedule (80 days) as I am by mine (19.) It's a terrific blog but the best part of it is this prayer that he wrote, which has now become my anthem. It is titled "At The End of Week 2", and it goes like this:

Hanging on,
to the slim thread of instinct
which is lost so easily
if cut by arrogance

for in this punishing schedule
where there is not a moment to think
like a soldier in the middle of battle
dodging bullets and moving blindly forward

Be one with the bullet

live by pure instinct
no time for logical thought
tap into something that is more immense
than yourself

do it quickly
impulsively

listen to your heart
amid all the fear of
that pervades the set,
be in love

never, never
not be in love

trust
that somehow,
you are loved
by God

and be pure of heart,

shekhar

Is that great or what? "Be one with the bullet." I should have that tattoed on my arm so I can look at it whenever things get crazy.

Maybe I actually will.

The Man In The Mirror

Today was, well, not a train wreck, but we fell two ENTIRE SCENES behind (on a 19 day shoot for a cable movie this is fairly serious.) Here were the highlights of what was conveniently at hand for me to blame for the delay:

1. The middle aged actress who in her youth was routinely named as one of the most beautiful women in the world today would not shoot any scene until she had been lit directly from the front by a huge soft light that took the DP thirty minutes to rig up. Plus she wouldn't do any moving-around blocking: she basically had to stay in one place where the beauty light was.

2. We shot two scenes with a fantastic sexy actress playing the slightly trashy rich sister of the hero in which she is wearing a tight white blouse over a bright red bra. At one point in one scene she takes off the shirt, revealing a jaw-dropping cleavage cupped in scarlet, and puts on a leather jacket, all while chatting away in front of her brother. Anyway we shoot the two scenes and suddenly one of the executive producers (a friend and somebody I love) runs in and says "The network called and they aren't approving the red bra." So we had to reshoot both scenes with a less thrilling beige bra, because there would have been a matching problem.

But screw all that. Directors routinely shoot six pages in 12 hours and I barely got through 3 today. And there are ALWAYS delays. The problem runs deep. The problem is that while all of this is going on I'm writing my excuse story in my head instead of facing the problem. The problem is that I'm not leading strongly enough on the set. I'm not demanding quick transitions, I'm not studying the plan carefully enough before it's launched, I'm not being the Captain. And while I have lots of little ideas and am working fairly well with the actors, I'm not really drawing strongly enough on vision.

And there's more than that. I did my first movie, the HBO one that did not go well, in a distracted and unspiritual state. I made my second movie, that went like a dream, in a focused and prayerful state. This time I'm somewhere in between. A director friend of mine said to me while I was making my second movie "God does not want us to make movies." To which I added "Without him."

I have to remember that now. I no longer feel the presence of a Big Guy up there watching over me. But I sure do feel the presence of Something. So right now I'm going to get down on my knees, quite literally, and pray to that Something for help and guidance in getting my movie back on the smooth track to beauty.

BTW, the network was very happy with the first day's dailies. This is good. They had a couple of notes on the over-intensity of a couple of performance beats and they were right on every count.

Fuck, what's the line?

He's young, he's handsome (in a scruffy hey dude kind of way), he's talented. The problem? Everybody in his immediate family--and I mean mom, dad, sibling, everybody--is a megastar, while he's a reasonably well-thought of actor who's been in a couple of movies and a series that was canceled in its first season. (The reason I have to be coy with his identity is that in the age of search engines if anybody is at all interested in him they'll find their way to this post and I may be eager to bare my own secrets but it's not my place to bare his.) Yesterday we shot a big romantic marriage proposal scene in a stunning location--fields of barley and wheat stretching away to forests and mountains in all directions--and he couldn't get through two sentences without breaking off--and this is on camera, mind you--and going "Fuck, what's the line." I tried to have the script supervisor throw him the line and keep the film rolling because every time you say "cut" thirty people run out and start primping hair and touching up makeup and fussing with costumes and refocussing lenses and there's seven minutes of our strangle-tight schedule down the drain. But ultimately he'd get so stuck and frustrated that he'd say "let's stop" and I'd have to cut. It all added up to about an hour and a half of accumulated delay, and having to shoot the scene in cloud instead of sun (which may actually be more interesting, I'm telling myself). Plus I'll be forced into lots of cuts when I'd rather have let the scene just flow. But beyond all that, what's the deal? Didn't his megastar clan teach him about the simplest, barest, most basic ABC's of being a professional actor?

The challenge for me goes back to third grade. He's, you know, the rich popular kid, and I'm the smart nerd from the south side of town who knows his place in the playground pecking order. It's all fine for me to go up to him and say "I think you'd hold back our feelings a little more there," because that's my assigned position in this game of handball, but to actually go up to him and say "We need to talk about the problem with the lines"--??? I can't muster it. Star to the rescue: my leading lady and I confabbed on this last night (back to third grade again: easy for me to talk to girls, terror of the wrath of boys) and she will run lines with him instead of chatting before they shoot.

To all of this I will add that I am paying this young man A QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS for four weeks of work.

No word from the network yet on the dailies but my editor down in L.A. is thrilled with the first scene we shot yesterday, says it's intense, looks great and cuts like butter. So the early returns are good.