June 10th, 2006: Wrap Party

June 10th

The wrap party. My wife has left at 9am to decorate the place. She gets the keg, the food, the works.

I get over to the house and help set up stuff. People start arriving. I get thrown at the grill—-have to cook so I do. Hot dogs, burgers, chicken.

We all eat, then play volleyball. Eventually I show the teaser and a scene to mixed results. I don’t think some of the people understand that I only had 6 fucking hours to go through 31 tapes, import the footage, then edit it together, along with making new titles.

And that's 6 hours on a day we've been shooting...

Fuck ‘em. Next time I’ll just sleep and they’ll have nothing to watch.

Night falls and the real men head out to Fantasies strip club. That would be me, Mun, Stull, Mike and Al(my brother-in-law). We watch a fight, see Al get in trouble for fake fucking a waitress who bends over for him(and then demands a tip), and head home. Me and Mun keep drinking, trying to finish the keg, and I get home at 4am.

June 9th, 2006: Day 19

June 9th

 Carol(Leanna Chamish) plays Lynn(Jacky Reres)'s manager

After 2 hours of sleep I head over to the eastern shore.

Frank tells me we can’t shoot at the restaurant we were supposed to shoot in. So once again I can toss my shooting script in the trash.

We go over to the restaurant, but since it’s not the restaurant we were supposed to be in, the extras all showed up at the wrong location. Lucky for us the other restaurant sent them to us.

We got set up—the scene was written to be inside, but Frank makes it plain that the restaurant wants us to shoot on the outdoor patio. They also wanted us to shoot an hour earlier and be gone by noon.

So we start shooting. Things start okay—then the girl playing the waitress(Crystal) drops her tray of drinks on an extra. Whoops.

Then Frank begins missing lines. He gets flustered. Blowing lines in front of 30 extras is embarrassing.

Last but not least, Noah(a P.A.) comes over to tell me that the restaurant would like us out by 11:30am. I tell him that’s not going to happen. We’ll be out by noon.

We keep going, and sure enough, we finish by 11:40 and load up to move to the gallery for what will be the last scene shot during principle photography.

Leanna and Jacky, and  D.P. Dave Mun in the middle

At the gallery some new extras show up. It’s hot, and the gallery has no air conditioner on. We decide to say screw the lighting. We’ll bounce whatever we need.

The woman playing the Lynn fan doesn’t show up, so I designate an extra to read the line.

We shoot. Not too many problems, other than audio ones because the door is open and the street is loud. Bells from the ice cream store are VERY loud.

 The gallery peeps

Before you know it we’re done. The martini shot. Picture wrap. Congratulations all around.

We pack up, and some of us decide to meet up at Legal Spirits for dinner.

It’s just me, Mun, Jacky, Stull, Crystal, Jared, Mike, Noah and Ziegler. We eat, tell stories, crack ourselves up, and give Ziegler some food because he didn’t order anything.

Back at Frank’s afterward, we say our goodbyes, then I go search Frank’s house for anything I left. Turns out to be a lot. It takes me an hour to pack it all up by myself. Then I head home, struggling to keep my eyes open the entire way.

I get home and lay down from 9pm to midnight, then I get up to edit a quicky teaser for the next day’s wrap party. I go back to sleep from 6am to 2pm.

We Interrupt This Blog

To bring you this--we're trying to raise the last 25% of our budget on the new flick through crowd-sourcing via Indiegogo. So we're asking everybody's help!

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http://www.indiegogo.com/GOH

June 8th, 2006: Day 18

June 8th

A first. My wife wakes me at 10:20am and tells me I’m late. I’m blank. I ask, “For what?”

She tells me the movie and all of a sudden I’m back in the present.

I take a 60 second shower and race out. I get to the set—my parents’ house—at  about 11am, so immediately we’re over an hour late.

The day gets worse from there. I should have stayed home.

We have the contact problem again. Mark can’t keep them in his eyes. They’re killing him. We get two scenes done. He takes them out and his eye becomes VERY bloodshot.

One punk doesn’t show—we have to call him. Turns out nobody called to give him his shoot time. Our bad.

But then he shows up but looks more like Jesus-meets-Cousin-It than a punk. His hair completely covering his face. We did a take like that and I'm wondering, "What is he thinking?" Don't actors like for the people to see their faces?

Clayton Myers, the actor who showed up looking like Cousin It. In the end it all worked out, and he was very good in the scene. FX guy Doug Ulrich behind him.

We do Jed Weaver’s scene first. He’s a pro—comes in, bangs it out, and he’s gone. My wife stops by and fixes some burgers my mom left before she and my dad went off to Tennessee. We all eat and I try not to think about how behind we are and how the fuck I’m gonna shoot a movie about a black-eyed clown when his eyes aren’t black.

Valerie Saunders makes Johnny's hair into the punk look seen below.  She screams great as the punk girl who gets it from Ogre.

Jared, behind them, makes like he's Jamie, and watches.

We get later and later. We shoot the punk scene but end around 10pm. I order pizzas. We’re supposed to do two more scenes and then head out to do two pickups we missed because of Johnny earlier in the week.

Mark CANNOT put the lenses back in so we shoot everything reverse of him and he says he, Johnny and Clarence will come back in a couple of weeks to finish it.

Everyone says bye—the clown and crew won’t be back for the last day, and many won’t be returning for the wrap party.

This is the hair-do we're going for.

I’m in a bad mood. Two horrible days, and now I have a buttload of pickups to do. Fuck.

Spoiler alert. A lot of people die in this movie.

Monstermania 08-2010 Interlude

Taking a brief break from the log, I present to you my Monstermania day. Me and Zig headed out to NJ around 9am.

We got there around noon. The parking lot was jammed full. The road was jammed full. We parked about a quarter mile away and walked.

First thing we saw was a line out the door and around the hotel. Turned out to be for John Carpenter. The Batmobile was out front.

We headed inside where I dropped off some stuff for Rob Dimension of Late Night At The Horror Hotel. That's him and me in the pic below.

Then I followed Zig around and snapped some pics of him and some celebs. This is Zig.

This is Zig with Herschell Gordon Lewis. Tell you the truth, I've heard the name, but didn't know who he was.
Added by Zig: H.G. Lewis directed 2000 MANIACS, BLOOD FEAST, GORE GORE GIRLS, THE WIZARD OF GORE and many others. First gore-hound.

I don't know who this is, but Zig got her autograph. He'll tell me later who she was.
Added by Zig: TIFFANY HELM (robot-dancing new wave girl from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART V)

This is Betsy Russell(Private School, the Saw movies). She has no business still being this hot. I mean, we saw her walking across the room before we knew who she was in this skin-tight dress, and she is SMOKING.

 We figured we'd hit the regular rooms and then wait in line for Carpenter. I took some random pics. This is some zombie statue that was pretty cool. Then there were these dolls--very cool, but they were like $195 apiece...

The place was pretty packed. Isn't it funny, though, how all these cons look the same?

I'm not sure who this is, but I called her Boobs McGee. No reason.

I don't know who this is below. Zig will tell me.
Added by Zig: BILL RANDOLPH (the stabbed with a spear while having sex in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2)

Amy Steel(Friday the 13th Pt 1 &2)

Barbara Steele of Dark Shadows.

Denise Crosby(Pet Sematary, STNG)

Julian Sands(Warlock, Arachnophobia) had nobody at his table. I felt a little sorry for him.

Kelly Jo Minter(Summer School, Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Child) with something scary

We stopped by Lloyd Kaufman's Troma Booth so Zig could talk to him. Zig's movie "Blood Oath" just got picked up by Troma! btw: Lloyd was mobbed every time you went by him even though they stuck him in a dark corner.

This is Andy from Child's Play 1&2. I can't remember his real name. He'll always be Andy to me.

These are chicks. Sometimes I take pictures of them. It's a hormone thing.

A cool Krueger bust.

Ok, this isn't the chick thing. I used to work at a restaurant, so I respect waitresses. That's all. 
And no, the neck would not be a deal breaker, if you know what I mean.

So anyway, we were gonna bite the bullet and wait outside in the line for Carpenter, but someone special mentioned there might be a way around that. We gave it a shot--and I kid you not--ten minutes later we had out signed picture of Carpenter.


I don't want to say much. Maybe he was having a bad day or something. But my impression of Carpenter wasn't a great one. Leave it at that.

But I got this:

Anyway, it was a decent time. Honestly, with Carpenter being the only big guest I was a little surprised at how many people were there.


Back to the FOC2 log soon!


(Hey, look! Bonus video of Monstermania!)

June 7th, 2006: Day Off

June 7th, 2006

A day off. I wake at 5:30pm to my wife telling me she brought me Chick-fil-a if I wanted to get up. She read my mind. I eat, watch the Lost Season finale, and then go downstairs to take a look at my stuff.

I start editing stuff and making the graphic for the cake. I work until 2:30am, and do a rough cut of a scene.

June 6th, 2006: Day 17

The irony of this entry is that actually, once Chad's score was in, this scene turned out pretty well. You can see the scene almost entirely at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC8TXjBOEuA

And the fun stuff to watch is when Jacky locks the door--you hear a lock, but there's no lock there. I was gonna attach one and just didn't get around to it. The angle makes it hard to tell, so I just said fuck it.


But she sells it, right? That's why we pay her the big bucks.

Stephanie painting Mark up

June 6th

A disaster. We start, and here we go late again. I don’t know how it happens but the time start flying by. It takes us most of the night to do the first scene. We break a window, which looks decent, but a lot of other stuff starts going wrong.

We have a gore scene with spurting blood and we have to put plastic everywhere so that there's no way we'll get any on the wood floors. We have to figure a way to get the dummy figure to stand on its own so Mark can swing an axe into it. We finally put it on a C-stand, and after a couple of tries we get it to work.


We can’t make the new basement door fit right, no matter what we try. I personally spend an hour cutting, sanding, and fitting the door. If you pull up hard it will shut, but there’s no handle to keep it shut.(I do all this carpentry when I get there while the crew is futzing around; don't ask me why)

We get done the first two scenes and it’s around 4am. We were set to finish them at 1am. We now have an hour and a half of nighttime to finish.

We get a shot where Steve Carson gets thrown through the front screen door. He tells Clarence--six foot eight ex-wrestler to throw him through hard, don’t worry about hurting him.

Clarence does. Steve goes flying like a mannequin. It looks great, but Steve doesn’t respond the first two times I call his name. I’m worried. Then he looks up like, no problem. I’m thinking he was out for a second or two. He denies it.

We start rushing. Half-ass time, folks. A lot of ugly shots. The light starts coming up. We visqueen(I think that's what Mun called it) the windows to stop the sunlight. We shoot toward the doors first, and even fire a few live rounds at 4:30am. Here’s your wake up call, neighbors.

Then we do the door chop. We have to do it right away because of the angle we’re shooting, but now that we broke the door we can’t shoot that direction without seeing a giant hole in the door.

Phil, ready to get into his costume.

We half ass our way through some more shots. It’s gonna be an ugly scene, I can tell you that. Exhausted, I let Mun have my room at the hotel and then I drive home with Ziegler and Carson. I get there at 8:30am and go to sleep.