Before I moved to the Hudson Valley, I was a location manager for films and television shows in New York City. For most of my jobs, I was just a locations assistant, taking orders from my boss, telling pedestrians to clear the shot (walk on the other side of the street) and ask anyone in the vicinity who is making noise (lawn mowers, ice cream trucks, veterans playing billiards on the floor above) to cut it out. As a shy quiet person, you can imagine how much I loved doing that.
After working in that arena for about two and a half years, I was offered my first (and last) job as a full-fledged location manager, which would mean I got to tell other people to go tell the civilians to be quiet, and in excahnge for that, I would be part of the original pre-production team and be soley resonsable for the budget and hiring of my crew. Also, they offered me a boatload of money. Because it was October, the most active production period in New York, literally every other location manager in the city was working on some other job, so I got bumped up.
To say I was unqualified for the position is an understatement. To say that the director and production crew were way over their head with a super-small budget for a mostly on-location shoot is also a major understatement.
Working on the movie literally broke me. I had to learn to write New York City permits on the job, and if those things aren’t perfect and on time, you don’t get to shoot on the streets or police assistance you need (which happened once during production). We didn’t find the location for the main character’s apartment until two weeks into filming. Every day we went over time and over budget, and while we were shooting, I was scavenging and scrambling to get the next day’s locations firmed up and set in time to write the permits, create directions for the entire crew, and let the assistant directors know if they would be able to shoot the scenes they wanted or not.
On top of all that, the movie was not very good. The production company had some lofty goals, and considered their film groundbreaking. We had two young stars who are getting well known. (Although the male lead keeps losing parts to certain young actor, and did not much appreciate it when I off-handidly mentioned I was looking forward to seeing the gay cowboy movie.) However, the plot of the movie just made no sense at all, and was trying to do too much with too little.
So now it’s been almost three years since the day that I collapsed in a heap on the production company floor, shaken so badly that I couldn’t even cry. (That day I had mis-labeled a permit, and we had to move all of our production trucks off of a main avenue, and this came on the heels of a neighborhood block association complaining about our presense earlier in the day meant that we had to move about 20 bags of garbage (that wasn’t ours!) to a trash receptical five blocks away, and after I spent the night at the production office making maps and directions for the next day’s shoot.)
Directly after the production ended, Birmingham and I took a trip to California where he hid my phone so I couldn’t take stray calls from the production office while they worked on some post stuff. I had to change my cell phone ring, because just the sound of it sent shivers up my spine. (Is that the city office guy calling to say that he’s changed his mind and we can’t use his building after all? Or is that the mayor’s office calling to say my permits are denied and I can’t get a police unit on the scene? Maybe just the head of production telling me that I messed up again, but they’re not going to just take pity on me and fire me?)
It was bad. But after all these years, the movie finally came out. Almost direct to DVD, but for a few festivals they played, and the one week it was in general release. I had it on my Netflix queue for a while, but I was afraid that watching it would send me into a spiral of depression or something. Because this weekend was pretty great (saw friends in the city on Friday, went to a swim party on Saturday, helped friends move) I felt ready to bear down and watch the movie, and I’ve emergen unbroken, but annoyed that I put so much into that thing.
Some thoughts:
- The story makes even less sense when you haven’t throughly studied the script.
- They cut the scene of the car crash! That was our first day of shooting, and we had to go all the way out to the middle of nowhere in New Jersey and trucked in a crashed car. They just showed some driving shots that could have been filmed anywhere.
- The Chinese restaurant scene was only a minute long, and it took us about three days just to get permission to shoot in Chinatown, and then a whole day to shoot. You can’t even tell that the scene was in Chinatown.
- The scene in the Bronxville mansion was cut! Arg, it was so hard to find that location, I actually hired Birmingham for a day to scout for it.
- The scene with [Holling from Northern Exposure] was cut! And we spent an entire day cleaning out the office of this church pastor so we could turn it into a doctor’s office!
- Come to think of it, everything we shot in that church was re-shot after principal production, and re-cast.
- They cut the final scene! WTF? That was our last day of principal photography, and we shot it at the park near my old apartment. I got up at 4:00am that morning, and lied through my teeth to the city park official as we brought in cranes and trucks that we were not permitted to have.
- The scenes we shot at the Brooklyn Museum were pretty damn beautiful. Maybe it was worth spending half my budget on that location.
- But it was not worth moving the garbage, because that scene did no look good.
- Writing this post is making me remiss too much about those two months of my life.
On one hand, I should have never taken the job. On the other, I needed something that truamatic to shake me up and get me out of the business where I had no business. I interviewed for my current job the day I got back from California, moved up here a few months later, and do not regret it at all. I don’t want to leave a hyperlink trail to the actual movie, but if you want to ever watch it, you’ve got all the info you need from the post title. And if you watch the whole movie including the credits, after names of the gaffers, post production assistants, key grips, casting associates and caterers, you’ll see my name go by, in really small print.
