Sunday, February 13, 2005
Here the final daily recap from the shoot.
DAY ELEVEN (Saturday, October 16)
Locations: Beach, Anna Maria Island, Florida
Our final day of shooting and we have something like 14 pages of script to cover. The long days and nights are starting to wear on the crew. That first day of summer camp attitude is long gone and folks are generally all business. Mostly the attitude is let’s just get this done. Maybe that’s just me, but I’m as ready to wrap this up as anybody. A person can be in charge of everything for only so long.
On set today is my grandmother, Theodora Viola, namesake of the lead character and the fictional band in the movie. She made a hat out of plastic vines especially for her visit to the set, so she could hide from the Skunk Ape. “Nana” to me, she has invested in the film and has been my greatest supporter in the world. I sent her a script and a picture of the actors we’d cast and she read the script over and over with the pictures of the actors. She was thrilled to meet the cast and everyone on set was immediately charmed by her. There’s a short scene in the film where Deputy Bob has to clear some old folks from the beach, which was the perfect spot for Nana’s cameo appearance. For her scene, she’s sitting in a beach chair with a transistor radio up to her ear and yelling, “What?! What?!” while Bob repeats his lines about the beach being closed. She’s really great in her role and it turns into one of my favorite moments in the film. Later she says that this was the best day of her life.
Early in pre-production, one flaw in the script was brought to my attention. My beach party rock and roll monster movie has no actually beach party in it-- the climatic party takes place at Hector’s garage. All those Frankie and Annette beach party movies were supposedly full of innocent fun, but they still had plenty of scantily clad girls dancing on the beach. It wasn’t appropriate to ask our lead actresses to don bikini and we needed to increase the “jiggle factor’ for potential marketing’s sake. The solution that Evan and I came up with was to change the scene where Bob tries to clear retirees off the beach-- add dancing bikini girls instead of old folks. It wasn’t until noon on our last day of shooting that we actually got our dancing beach girls. They are the baby-sitting friend’s of friend’s of my mom. We had to remove the belly rings and cover up a tattoo or two, but otherwise they were perfect, complete with period bikinis. We shot the dancing scene and got loads of promo pics with them and Ned Hastings in the Skunk Ape outfit. Not surprisingly, this scene also created our largest crowd of on-lookers. In the end, we shot the Deputy Bob scene with both Nana and dancing girls. Both will be in the final film.
Feb 13, 2005
Our daytime shooting is competed without much problem, but we have lots and lots to cover after it gets dark. The last scene of the entire shoot is supposed to be a sequence where Theodora is unconscious and alone in a pine grove, after being kidnapped by the Skunk Ape. The creature reappears and mends her broken ankle. She wakes up and shutters from fright, terrified of what he’s going to do, but when she opens her eyes, the Skunk Ape has vanished. Oh, and there’s supposed to be a hurricane approaching. We don’t have a pine grove or any way to make a hurricane. We solve the weather issue by adding a John line, “This is just the calm before the storm…that hurricane hits tonight!” We solve the lack of pine grove by shooting the scene all in close-ups with Theodora sitting under one lone pine tree that’s right next to the beach house. We add some branches on c-stand behind her and hope that’ll sell the “pine grove.” All the action with the Skunk Ape appearing and disappearing gets truncated to one shot, panning from the Skunk Ape’s hands on the make-shift ankle bandage up to Theodora’s face. She shutters, the Skunk Ape gently touches her hair and is gone. It turns out beautifully, thanks to more great lighting by Jon Swindall and Claire’s performance. That is if you don’t think too hard about the complete ridiculousness of what’s actually happening. We do 2 takes and Evan asks if I want to do another. It’s 4:26 AM and I say, “Hell no. Let’s all go do something else for a while.” Two weeks of shooting and I’m so tired, so brain-dead, I’m am so ready to go back to my day-job, editing for someone else. We pop open some champagne and swig from the bottle. Claire tells me that at 3:00 AM, after being on set for 13 hours, miserably cold and exhausted, she realizes that there’s nothing else she’d rather be doing. She says that she’d do it all again in a heartbeat. I tell her that’s good because this is just the first part of the Skunk Ape trilogy. Evan and I join in the after party with the crew for the first time of the shoot, but I only last about an hour before I’m bleary eyed and must go pass out.
Sunday is a complete fog of breakfast with my wife and my mom and getting to the Sarasota airport to fly home. I sleep the sleep of the dead, but I’m back to work at Cartoon Network a day later.
Here’s the totals from the final script supervisor’s report: Eleven days of shooting, 624 slates, 297 set ups, 95 completed scenes, an estimated 76 minutes of screen time. (Amazingly, Reagan is right on target, my first assembly is right at 76 minutes.) We still have to pick up two scenes, Theodora & Hector riding a roller coaster and John’s childhood flashback, but we essentially have a whole movie in the can. There’s no telling if it’s great, good or terrible, but that’s not for me to decide. I’m only in charge of done or not done. And for now we’re done.
