Random Pics from the set

Random Pics, compliments of a disc that Rob Long sent me a long time ago(and I just re-found!). Check out his cool site at: http://smashortrashindiefilmmaking.com/

Zig, Jamie, Jacky and Mun--probably waiting for me to tell them what to do.

Breasty McGee(that's the name she does porn under)

Frank being Action Hero Guy

Clarence McNatt and Lars Stevens

Tom probably telling me to go fuck myself. 

And when Tom tells you something, you do it.

Frank, striking a pose

June 1st, 2006: Day 12

June 1

Late day again. Got a few hours sleep, then got to Tuckahoe early to back up my pics and try to organize the pickup for 76b—the final scene of the film that features Peters versus Shivers.  We shot a wide master the night before, but my shooting script is all fucked up so I tried to clean it up.

Plus, we don't have the bigger lights that we shot the master with--had to return them today. 

We decided to push back the motel scene to another night to finish the 76b—we’re not sure how much longer we’ll be able to shoot at Tuckahoe. The owners are giving us shit.

So first Stull got a trailer to tow the car around in so we could shoot the Jacky/Frank chat in the car. Mun rigged it up, and then I got bad news. A storm was coming—the wind was picking up and a dark cloud was coming. We double timed it, but we couldn’t shoot until night fell since that's when the scene takes place.

We started filming, with Mun riding the front of the car, the camera suction cup mounted to the front. I was inside the car in the back seat making sure the line readings were okay. With the windows up(for good audio) it was hot as shit in there. Turns out that they didn’t even hit record on the first take(which ran about ten minutes)—I was pretty pissed about that.

It started raining during that scene. So much for 76b pickup.

We finished what we could there, but the next scene was at a public payphone. Not in the rain. So I figure we’ll go shoot the motel scene while we can, then go to try to pickup the payphone scene if it stops raining.

We take a skeleton crew to my hotel room and set up. We get the scene and it should look decent—hopefully. Took a while. The other crew get drunk at Tuckahoe, which makes things dicey when it turns out we forgot some equipment and wanted one of them to run it up.

 Only 1 picture for this post, but it's a good one.

I’m sure anyone walking by the room, seeing six guys with a camera, and one woman in a towel—well, you figure out what we looked like we were doing. (rhymes with TORN)

It was still raining, but not too bad so we headed out to a payphone. Set up  one very unmotivated light source(we had no power, so we had to use the inverter) We forgot we needed Peters car—Frank had to go get it. Meanwhile it started pouring.

Frank got back and we shot it real fast. Just said fuck it to my shooting script and shot what we had. Sound is horseshit, so it's gonna need to be looped.

Then we went out to get some other shots that take place in the next scene so the rain shots would match. Peters’ car driving down the deserted road. Set up the camera, wait until no other cars are on the road, and have Frank haul ass toward us.

Then over to Denny’s. An early finish—5:15am. Time to go to sleep.

A little video treat

Here's a brief clip from the "Making Of" FOC2. Enjoy.

May 31st, 2006: Day 11

You know, it's funny to read what I wrote back then.  When you're exhausted and the only thing you want to do is go to bed, it makes for surprisingly candid writing.

The eyes, and then the paint...

May 31

Another day of night shoots. Train shots.

Lot of lighting. Lot of compromise due to the fact that the train is so close to the camp—we had to cheat it all like it’s out in the middle of nowhere. The crew has been slacking the past couple of days. Jaimie doesn’t do much; Mike’s decent if you keep on him. Jared’s the only clear winner—he knows what he’s doing and is assertive.

Luke and Jamie almost get in a fistfight. Jamie says Luke threw a rock at him. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing them both punch each other for a while.

Jared Noe, almost worth a shit

The train stuff runs late because we have to mount the crane on the back of Rob Stull’s pickup truck to get it high enough that it can go in the train’s window. Then a lot of lighting and coordinating.

Then the woods stuff runs late. Getting power out to all these woods locations takes a ton of time, then we have to run through the blocking. It’s the scene where Jacky runs full speed and falls. We used a large sofa cushion for her to fall into, and it looked great. I just have to digitally take the cushion out later.

We get to the final Peters scene late and barely get 10 shots before it’s light.

We go to Bob Evans for breakfast—back at the hotel at 8am.

Slackers...

May 30th, 2006: Day 10

Clarence McNatt as Sunglasses The Clown

May 30

Caught up on some stuff—did Johnny alonso scenes at Frank’s, but the scene takes place in the van—hot as balls out. First real day scene, so we had to have the actors run inside in between takes—the clowns would sweat their makeup off.

Said by to Adam and Tom. Adam’s coming back for the wrap party.

We high tailed it to the field to do the cornfield shots—it’s a totally different location that Frank and I scouted a month earlier.

When we scouted the place it was deserted. A back road with no traffic. Today, it's busy. Figures. We have Rob Stull put on his reflective-striping County jacket and help block traffic. I'm hoping no cops stop by, because it's the wrong county.

Things are going smoother, then Mark reaches for his axe and cuts his index finger. Bad. He bends his finger and the whole slash widens like a mouth. We have no first aid gear. To top things off, some guy pulls up and asks if we have permission to shoot there. I say no. He says he knows the guy who owns the field and he’s called him; the guy’s on his way.

Meanwhile, we’re in his field trying to get a crane shot.

The guy does arrive and I go talk to him. He asks what we’re doing. I say just shooting some video. I say most of it’s from the road—looks very scenic. I tell him we just had one shot from in the field and he asks, “You’re not messing with my corn stalks?” I said no.

Even though Mark walked over about 10 on the crane shot.

Didja notice how Mun always looked bored/tired when I'm talking to him?

The guy leaves. Light is falling. Disaster strikes. Stephanie didn’t bring the rope heads. We have Frank race them up to us. But Stephanie also didn’t bring blood. The stumps of the heads should be bloody. She puts vaseline on them to make them look wet, and we just have to go with it.

We finish just in time. Johnny’s happy to have made a day of shooting.

I take the crew to Burger King as a treat(I know, big spender, right?), then we head back to Tuckahoe to finish last night’s scene where Frank gets hit with the axe.


It came out okay, but the blood effect didn’t quite work. It didn’t spurt so much as leak out onto his shirt.
We wrapped at 4:30am, so I made the trip home. It was fast, no traffic, and I went to sleep for 6 hours.

When I got up I made a dvd of dailies, backed up the files, and came back...

Make-Up Artist and FX assistant Stephanie Petagno and

Production Manager/BTS videographer Robert Ziegler.

May 29th, 2006: Day 9

Shivers does to Luke what many people wanted to do to Luke

May 29

Memorial day. Had a cookout, and it was supposed to be a day off but it turned out we had 2 pickups to do.

My wife and Luke’s wife came by and cooked burgers and dogs, while the rest of us shot the shit and threw a football around.

After the food we sat around and just chatted. Something we just haven’t had time for lately.

We can’t stop laughing about the Johnny firebar thing. We showed the videotape to everyone and they just laugh and laugh.

We hustled over to the fire area to finish the Shivers/Ogre fight. It went okay, but Doug took some of the fx we needed for the Clarence head decapitation. Still, it wasn’t too bad and only took an hour longer than I thought.

We packed up and moved to the small house for the ogre gunfight. Took a little while to set up but we rocked it out pretty quick. Clarence had a good time firing the gun, and then we did the reverse and shot zircs and dust hits at Frank, Tom and Adam.

I shot the ones at Frank and Tom, and Tom kept telling me to shoot right at him. He even got pissed when I said I wouldn’t, so finally I said I would. I even did.

Looked cool.

Adam Ciesielski, Johnny Alonso and Tom Proctor

This is the three amigos’ last night. Said bye to Tom and Adam, they said they’d stop by and say hey before they left to catch their plane.

They’re good guys. Lars took off early, but he’ll be back for tomorrow’s pickup.

I booked myself into a hotel room with my wife. Yee-haw.

May 28th, 2006: Day 7

 
May 28
Car fire day. This is gonna be rushed. We can’t afford to run over.

Yeah, did not know how bad this was gonna go. Johnny Firebar as I called him showed up late. Was supposed to set up at 7:30pm so we were ready at 9:00 to shoot. He arrived around 8:00 and said his car broke down and he had to leave his propane stuff behind, and only brought his gas rig. Ohhhhh-kay.

Then he sets up. Takes forever. We’re supposed to be done our first scene by 10ish and he just finished setting up by then.

Then we get the safety lecture from him. We already had fire department guys there—very nice guys. So Johnny Firebar lectures us on the safety. The car is filled with gasoline and fire bars. The windows are halfway down.

And Johnny Firebar marches out with a wooden shovel handle, wrapped in a now-flaming towel. He walks out to the car, inserts the flaming towel end, and the fucking side of the car explodes. I shit you not.

Glass explodes, sending pieces everywhere. The door panel actually hits Johnny Firebar.

The car burns waaaay too fast. Too hot. Doesn’t fit the scene. We shoot masters, two of them, and I ask if they can put it out and relight it in a couple of minutes. I’m told sure.

The fire guys put it out. Then Johnny fire bar tries to relight it. No go. Can’t make it light very much. He gets frustrated and tosses a plastic can of gasoline in the car. Very professional.

The rest of the night is spent trying to cover it—Mun cheating a fire bar held on a C-stand in front of camera. We get way behind and don’t get the section where Shivers and Ogre fight. We have a 2nd camera—it’s interesting.

Either way, we had three cameras rolling on the explosion. Niiiice. And wait 'til you hear about what happened later that night to Johnny...

But we continue to fall farther and farther behind.

May 27th: Day Six

Blocking out the scene where Bullet gets killed.

May 27th

Got some rest again. Well needed, but I still feel very tired when I get up. I shower and bolt over to Tuckahoe so I can back up my picture files—publicity stills are worth their weight in gold.

Hung out, finally got to take a decent crap. People started showing up. Things felt pretty relaxed even though we had to pick up a scene before our regularly scheduled shots.

We did the pickup of Shivers killing Old Man Horner. Came off nice, with some decent coverage so I can make it work either way.

Then over to the meeting hall. It’s our headquarters, so it was packed with food, drinks, equipment, props. Everything. So we had to hide all that stuff. In the story it’s a place that hasn’t been stepped in for years.

Again with the falling behind. Not terribly, but it gets worse and worse.

We got almost all of the inside shots, but Mun wanted to break for dinner, that minute. So we did. It was ham so I went out and had a dinner of iced animal crackers.

You will believe a clown can fly...

Back in to finish, then they set up the lighting outside. We filmed some more shots and really picked up speed.


Jackknifed when we had to do the stunt where Shivers drops off the roof of the building onto Hot Rod. We piled up the mattresses, but it still looked dangerous. Lars, the guy playing Stoltz, offered to drop down and test it. He did, no problem.

Hey, I don’t ask my actors to do anything I wouldn’t do, besides act, so I went up and dropped off. I landed awkwardly so my forearm hit my knee. It was painful, but I sucked it up and laughed like it was cool.

Mark jumped off the roof a couple of times--it was awkward timing the jump with the camera movement, and on one drop Mark rolled and kicked Jared in the face. It was pretty funny, unless you ask Jared.

Setting up the dolly for a shot

We only had about an hour of sunlight, so we tried to shoot some of the end scene but we really couldn’t do much before the sun came up.

Another problem with falling behind is that actors know when it’s happening, and they start rushing through their performance. They may not even realize they’re doing it—they’re trying to help you out. But you gotta slow them down, or their performance won’t sell.

So we missed a HUGE scene—a big pickup now. I come back to Frank’s and revise the schedule. We had a light day after Memorial day, but now I’ve thrown everything there but one missed scene. Gonna be tight.

Gonna try to go to sleep again. 7:17am. Hard to sleep in someone else’s house, especially during the day. Curtains are see through, it’s hot, and uncomfortable.

"Hot Rod"(Adam Ciesielski) is about to get a headache...

May 26th, 2006: Day Five

Shivers wants to give you Lasik, Bullet.

May 26th

A little better on the sleep front. Shower and head over to Tuckahoe. Chris O’brocki is there already.

We’re going to do the Horner family slaughter. Only, Frank informs me there’s a “problem…but with a solution.” Problem being that the house we were going to shoot in is no longer available; solution being, drive 18 miles to shoot in another house, then drive back to shoot the barn sequence.

Did I mention it’s the Friday before Memorial Day, and the road to the other town is route 50? (a major artery to Ocean City)

I know it’s not gonna work. So we start trying to improv. Maybe we can make part of the meeting house look like a house. Or maybe they can get killed on the porch, or be eating on the porch, or what the fuck ever.

I look at Bullet’s house—he’s the actor playing Old Man Horner. It’s small—a mobile home, but it may work. Then I see inside. It’s messy. Like VERY messy. And small.

But in my mind I think we can make it work, and it’s right here on the grounds.

So, another shooting script goes out the window as this house is not layed out AT ALL like the one we were going to shoot in.

Checkin' out the trailer.

Anyway, we do it. Unfortunately, we get a downpour. We shoot everything but the shots where the door is open and Shivers jabs his axe in. Not bad.

We’re losing light and we need some shots of Ogre in near-dark, but not total dark. So we fly across to the farm to shoot those, trying not to pay attention to the guy on the porch who owns the land. Frank tells me he’s a little crazy. He sits on his porch and doesn’t move even when our shot faces that direction.

We book back to finish the Horner’s wife scene—She gets an axe to the skull. It goes well, we get a good blood spurt. Michelle Trout does great.

Then back to the barn with Savannah and the boys. First problem is that the barn has no power. It’s pitch black out, because by now it’s 11pm. The scene takes place in daylight. We rig long stingers(extension cords) across from the other barn(no loft there) and get a decent setup. Still a little dark to be daytime, but it’s all we have.

It’s a confusing shoot for a director, because there’s so much FX—three deaths, and I’m not sure exactly how Doug is planning to do them. So we end up moving through the entire scene shooting one side(we have to stop before the deaths though, because to shoot those would bloody up the clothes, of which we don’t have duplicates) and then we move the lights and shoot another side.

It all works pretty well though. We get some good stuff. Savannah is good and is just as natural naked as she is clothed. Very nice.

We bolt out, but this time it’s 7am when we leave. We unload at Tuckahoe and are back here for an 8:00am nap time.

Turns out Frank’s wife is having a yard sale, so there’s no where to park the van. I park it on Frank’s back lawn.

I know, this is a Jacky-less post, so let me give you a little early Christmas present.

I call this picture E-Jacky-lation.

May 25th, 2006: Day 4

Yes, we got a lot of strange looks driving around.

Note the truck right behind has Shivers and Ogre in it.

May 25th

Not much sleep, but I’m so wired when I wake up that it doesn’t seem to matter. I hear people are meeting at a pub for lunch, so I head down with Stewie and meet Mun, his buddy, Jacky and Lars at the Washington Street Pub. Fish and chips, not bad.

We talk all sorts of shit. The blow up with Frank.  How Mun dry-heaves at the sight of a public toilet(and when you watch him demonstrate it…hysterical).

I bug out of there and head over to Tuckahoe. I’m first one there. I start burning backups of the audio from the night before, while I copy audio from the backups to a separate hard drive. The audio is now backed up twice.  Wish I could back up the video.

I also contemplate that if I do a Fangoria article for this flick like I did for “Hunting Humans” and “Fear of Clowns”, I will start it with the sentence: “Three days in and I still can’t take a crap.”

I decide that we can make up one of the scenes we missed from the night before—we have to cheat, but it’s an inside shot that we can make look like night so we do. We get it done and STILL start on time.

We setup the small house for the scene where Lynn is sketching when the large clown walks by.

Goofing off at the card came scene in the kitchen

We jump ahead and do a scene where Peters comes in to find Lynn gone. Then back to that scene. Lighting takes a while. I shoot some publicity stills. We have Rob Ziegler shooting behind the scenes stuff, which is very cool. Normally I shoot most of the behind the scenes stuff, so I’m never in it.

Steph has gone back to painting with the stuff Paul used and the clowns look  good. She even did something Paul never did, which is to use a sealant—helps keep the makeup nice longer. Shivers looks badass again.

Wow, we fall behind again. Way behind. We forgot to get the prop belt of heads from Doug, our FX guy. I have to improvise.

 Johnny Alonso shows up for his scene and we start two hours late. It’s his decapitation scene. We set up for all that and work on the fx. It involves a second head attached to his shoulders, which Mark actually hits off with the wooden axe.

In retrospect it’s probably pretty dangerous. "Johnny, run at Mark but keep your chin tucked to your chest. He's gonna swing the wooden axe at the dummy head as you get near him, and as long as he doesn't swing six inches lower than he should, he won't hit you in the face."

Take after take, Mark hits nothing but the fake head. He was probably a pretty good hitter in baseball.

The deal works pretty good. We get a lot of coverage.

Johnny fitted for his 2nd head by Stephanie as Zig rolls camera and Shivers watches

Then we set up for the zirc hits—they’re paintball balls filled with zirconium that spark when they hit stuff, like a bullet ricochet. It worked well. My first time. Tom Proctor shot them—he’s a pro. Hit the mark every time.
Looks awesome.

We try to turn around and finish the scenes, but we miss—it’s getting light. We wrap at 6am again. It’s 7am—another good night in the morning.

May 24th, 2006: Day 3

Shivers approaches.  Lock up your balloons.

----------------------------------

So this was "the fight". Frank and I got into it a bit, and it's a shame my behind-the-scenes guy wasn't there, because arguments always make the best stuff to watch, right?


It's no big deal now. Frank probably doesn't even remember it. Shit like this happens on low-budget shoots.


May 24

At the grip house in the afternoon Mun and I pick up stuff fast. My wife has ordered cast/crew T-shirts which she gives me to hand out, and we bolt across bridge.I also treat Mun to a snowball, which he doesn't seem to be familiar with.

We start on time, shooting Shivers approaching Tuckahoe from the direction of the farm next store(where, scriptwise, he has dispatched a family and their naked neighbor). Looks good. We do a number of takes plus the POV shot we owe of the field/barn, but I don’t think that it’s going to match the other side of the shot that we shot last night.

We move to the exterior of the kitchen house. It takes a while to set up but it looks very good. We start shooting but fall behind quickly. Lighting very nice takes time.

We shoot the Lynn/Peters conversation and man, Frank and Jacky are really pouring it on. I actually get a little lost watching them. It’s no longer actors saying my lines, they’re people talking about their past and their wants. It’s cool.

We then get some money shots of Shivers melting into the darkness of a barn and it reminds me of Alien when the aliens fade away into darkness. Mun knows his shit.

We get way behind. We miss dinner. Next thing I know it’s 2am and Mun wants a break—I don’ t blame him. We take a break, trying to get the scenes done. We miss a couple of shots and time flies by. We wrap at 6am—we missed a scene and owe a couple of shots from another. It’s a nightmare.

The reason you need to put your day job on hold while you shoot a movie

Then I hear from Frank that he has to drive back to the other side of the bridge to do auditions for his regular job in two hours. The regular job that he said would be completely on hold while we shot this movie. I mention that he’s not supposed to be doing that. He says it’s only this and “I’ll be fine”.

I'm thinking: He's already tired. He's gonna go do this, and come back and be worthless when we need him to remember his lines tonight. This is WHY I stressed that he would not be able to do his regular job during the filming.

We drive home and I find him there. I remind him again that he’s supposed to be on this exclusively. He blows me off—then we situate everyone’s sleeping arrangements. And Frank tells me there’s only one little hangup-we have to be out of the house by 3pm. The new owners of the house are coming over to paint.

Let me backtrack: This was Frank’s house that was the set for Lynn’s house in the film. I wrote a portion of the movie around it. But three weeks before we were to shoot, Frank tells me he sold the house. It’s okay, he said, because he made a deal so we could still shoot there and use the house as a basecamp on the eastern shore. He assured me many times there’d be no problems.

So that's why at that particular moment after coming back from filming that I blow up. I tell him that wasn’t the deal—we can’t work 12-14 hour days and come home to sleep for 5 hours. I can see the rest of the crew slinking away from the argument we’re having.

The argument doesn't last long but it’s pretty harsh.

It’s 7am--good night.

May 23rd: Day Two

Yeah, this is how it looks the first week...but it's a different story by week 2.

May 23rd

Awake at 8am. I make the hour drive to the location.

First day at Tuckahoe. It’s a park that’s pretty much Camp Crystal Lake without the lake. Woods, some old buildings, a lone train car. It’s WAY out on the eastern shore.

First scene is where Peters takes Lynn to Tuckahoe—they pull up and chat. It starts with two shots, both dollying shots. But it takes a while to set up the dolly tracks and level them, so we only do a dolly on one side, and use the steadicam on the other. The dolly is obviously superior on slow moving shots.

It’s funny, but I haven’t seen Jacky in over a year. We did no rehearsal and I had just assumed she’d slip back into Lynn Blodgett with no problem.(she now lived in L.A., so there was no way to get her in early enough for rehearsal)

But she’s a little cold. Comes off kind of bitchy, so I pull her aside and tell her to warm it up. She’s not aware she was cold, but that’s just how she is. Ice queen.

I’m actually lying about the Ice Queen part, because I think she’s reading this and I like to make fun of her.

Jared Noe messing with sound, Jamie Bender shows his backside, 

Luke Theriault looks clueless, and Dave Mun already looks bored.

The scene comes out okay but we’re running behind fast. Finally we bring Adam Ciesielski in and shoot that stuff. He drives in, skids the truck, and hops out. He’s been a stunt driver so it’s no problem for him.

The scene’s good except there’s a giant lumber mill behind the trees that’s fucking the sound to hell.

It’s like the monster from Lost—you can’t see it, but it’s this gigantic roar behind the trees. Not sure how I’m gonna fix it in post.

We moved to the Tuckahoe kitchen house and set up the interior. We get some nice shots of them playing cards, some exposition talk, and then we break for dinner, still running late.

The final scene of the night has us running to the field on the outskirts of Tuckahoe. Frank and Adam stare off with their binoculars in the distance.

Rigging up lights in the pitch black takes longer than expected. This is the country, man, so there is ZERO light. You can see every star in the sky. But you would not be able to see an albino if he was two inches away from you.

Mun comes up with a neat way to make the barn looks like it has a light hanging off of it, and it looks natural. I communicated a number of times(he tells me) that I don’t want crazy artificial lighting, so he lights it very dimly on the actors. It looks very realistic, but it’s not too pretty.

We both like it though. Now we just have to get a reverse of their pov at the other farm, but it’s pitch black. We may day4night it, but I’m not a big fan of day for night, so we’ll see what we can do.

We finish about 12:30am and mun and I decide to make the drive back across the bridge; we need to pick up some gear for the next day over there. We get there and my wife fixes us steak sandwiches at 2am(it’s over an hour drive).

I try to get some sleep but I get a migraine and my stomach freaks out. Not too great. We have a late start though, so that’s good.

May 22nd, 2006: DAY ONE

Stephanie Petagno turns Phillip Levine into Giggles The Clown.

--------------------------

So here it is, the beginning of the actual FOC2 log. This was, hands down, the worst shooting day I have experienced in my years of shooting. I'm only glad it wasn't an omen...


And to qualify something--this is what I was typing at the time, so these are gut reactions. For instance, I kinda bash Stephanie Petagno, our Makeup Fx person and clown painter but we found out the lackluster performance of the paint was not her fault. We changed paints after the first day, and from then on it was great.


Clarence McNatt is Ogre The Clown

-------------------------------

May 22nd Day 1

Started rough—one of Mark’s contacts doesn’t fit right--the painter starts on Giggles first instead. We work on Mark’s contact, but it's a no go. I decide that we're gonna try to insert it on scene, then paint, then he'll take out the contact when we're done the scene, and we'll move on to the next scene.

This is the plan, at least.

We run very late—we're supposed to pick up Johnny Alonso at 12:30pm, but it ends up being 3pm—Johnny's very cool about it, but I'm already thinking this probably doesn't make us look very professional. This guy's worked on Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill...you know, actual productions.

So I'm a little nervous as it is.


P.A. Noah Schaftel and Grips Jared Noe and Jamie Bender
          


Stephanie got lost on the way to Six Flags and cost us a half hour waiting for her to show up to put Mark’s contact in and paint his eye.

Anyway, we pull into a service road next to Six Flags amusement park.

See, we're not actually allowed to shoot there. We are going with my back-up plan, which is to sneak in and get the shots. I found a portion of the fence that was down when I scouted it a few weeks earlier.

So, at the service road--within 10 minutes there are 2 security trucks watching us from the other side of the gate. That will make it tough to sneak in. We wait them out even though time's a ticking. We shoot some stuff from the service road.

Mark’s one-eyed. He cannot keep the contact in without his eye watering. It's turning red. We didn't have this problem even ONCE on the first FOC. I have no idea what to do. We’re shooting everything behind him and from the profile.

Jamie Bender, Jared Noe, and James Baldwin

The security guys leave, so we sneak the 1/8th of a mile up the field, into the woods, and through the fence. Phillip has decided his character wouldn't wear shoes. Not a problem for me, but now he has to walk through the woods with no shoes...

We start shooting, but every time a truck or car drives by we all hit the deck. Johnny's a sport, but I feel like a douche. I'm pretty sure they don't have to do this on One-Tree Hill.

Mark's not tired: He just can't open his eyes without them watering due to the contact lenses...

Meanwhile actors have come in to airport, so my phone rings constantly-—I’m moving away letting Mun direct. My wife calls about actors--where should they take them? Tom Proctor and Adam Ciesielski have come in from the airport.

Frank calls for updates and I tell him we’re running late. I don't have time to talk. In the back of my mind I know everything we're shooting now is total shit.

On the way to the "projects"

We don’t leave six flags until 5:30pm—saw a buzzard in a tree on the way out. I have a feeling he's circling my career.

Bad traffic going back. We grab script supervisor Luke Theriault and producer Rob Stull on the way to my house.

We get to my house so we can get a car that's in the scene. Two of the actors are there—Tom and Adam—I can only say a quick hi as I literally rush past them, and back out the door. They’re whisked off to a hotel on the Eastern shore.

We head out to the projects. We're losing light fast. It's windy as shit—the clowns' paint is flaking—they don’t look good. The difference between Steph and Paul is apparent.

 Shivers with Stephanie, Producer Rob Stull, actor Johnny Alonso, and Baldwin

Get to projects and we have two scenes to do in one hour—no way is it going to happen. We try it anyway.

A big crowd of gawkers comes out of their houses and gets in our shots. We ask them to move and they say okay if we give them autographs. Sure.

One woman cusses at a kid, the kid cusses back, and in five minutes a cop arrives. One cop drove by, saw our clowns, shook his head and drove off.

We totally half ass the shots—they’re not gonna cut together well. We don’t get Giggles’ shots done at all.

It’s clusterfuck city.

We head back and eat subs my wife got from Subway while I look at what we’ve done and try to reschedule pickups. Day 1 pickups are bullshit. Day 1 is supposed to be easy.

Everybody's inside so I go out on the porch and try to work while I eat. I'm pretty angry and a little scared of the rest of the schedule if this is what it's gonna be like. Demoralized.

We pack the van for the move to Easton, and we leave about 11:30pm. We were supposed to shoot a scene on the Eastern shore at like 9pm. Yeah right. Another pickup.

I get to Easton at 1am and about a mile away from Franks I’m pulled over by the police. 52 in a 35. For once I get a break—he gives me a warning. He even knows one of our local producers and wants me to tell the guy that Officer Tim stopped me.

At the house I look at the footage. I take some time to look over tomorrow's shots, type this up, and now I’m going to sleep. Total day: 8:30am – 2:55am. Good night.