Today is the day I dreaded and hoped for: the first day of shooting. I had an apocalyptic dream last night in which we were shooting the film in China. We were supposed to catch a train to Shanghai but Laszlo got distracted by an androgynous prostitute who was gripping two large, home-made grenades, one in each hand. Everyone was clutching some sort of crude weapon or grenade as the world had descended into anarchy. Then a huge explosion blew up an enormous building in the background and big slabs of concrete came hurtling down on everybody. So that’s where my subconscious is at.
This morning we shoot our first scene of the production, with Francois in homeless person attire. The location is beside a freeway entrance on Silverlake Blvd where a homeless person has made his home, a collection of eight or ten shopping carts in a line right beside the busy street. I have driven by the site quite a few times since I’ve been here and it struck me how it looks like a pre-made movie set. Sometimes the homeless black man is guarding his carts, so we must be sensitive to his domain. He lives nearby under the freeway overpass.
We do a couple of takes of Francois from across the street as he gleans the carts before the homeless man shows up. His name is Nas.a, and as it turns out he’s very nice and he says if we pay him he’ll be in the movie, so we do and he is. This is good, since the movie is really about the homeless, even if it is a porno. He tells me his life story, how he got colon cancer in his home state of Oklahoma and was forced to come to LA to get proper treatment, but he couldn’t afford to go back so he ended up homeless. Displaying his two remaining teeth, he says he’s glad it was colon cancer (it’s in remission) and not prostate cancer because that means he can still fuck. He wears an RCA patch cord as a belt with broken camouflage binoculars slung around his hip. We also shoot at the Ms. Donut shop in Echo Park, but that’s another story.
The rest of the day is chaotic at best, but not too abnormally so for the first day of a shoot. It seems that we’ve lost the Angeles Crest location because now they say we would have had to have a marshal monitoring the shoot, which would add another big expense plus the porn aspect might not go over too well with the law. I’m relieved as I had a bad feeling about the location, but now we have to find a new one pronto. Trying to push that reality out of my mind, we forge ahead with Joe Castro’s F/X look for the zombie. He’s playing around with a hand-drawn look, but I have to insist on the air-brushing that we experimented with at Peres Projects, so I make Joe drive all the way back to Van Nuys to get his air-brushing gun and paints.
Delays, delays. Meanwhile Laszlo is looking for one little screw, an adaptor to put his 35mm still Canon SLR camera, which we are shooting most of the movie with, on a big movie tripod. He tries three different stores but no one has it. So we’re an hour and a half late to our afternoon location, which is the same homeless enclave we shot in the morning, but this time with Francois in zombie make-up. Our old friend Nas.a is still there, of course – it’s his home – and as we paid him handsomely earlier, he agrees to perform again. Francois looks great as the alien zombie, and even better when we put in the big gruesome canine teeth smeared with blood that Joe has created from a cast of Francois’ teeth.
Now we are really late for our next location, a graveyard way out in Pasadena. It’s the only bone orchard we could find that we could find for a reasonable rate. By the time we get out there it’s 7pm and we only have about an hour and a quarter of magic hour before it gets too dark to shoot. As opposed to the other night when we visited the location, when the place was empty, this time the cemetery seems to be full of cars. It appears there has just been a funeral, and one of the people who works there isn’t so pleased when Francois jumps out of the car in the parking lot looking like a blood-thirsty zombie. We have to quickly shuttle him out of the area before someone freaks out.
Our cube truck and generator are already there, as is Johnny Law, our dreamboat art director Steve Hall’s dreamboat assistant. He quickly whips us up a fresh grave, coincidentally under a stone with his own name, Law, engraved on it! Lazslo shoots a bloodied Francois in his bloody white wife beater, bloody white trainers, and bloody white socks, and in his hot black wetsuit, walking across the graveyard to the fresh grave where he starts to dig. It really looks awesome, so I guess the first day of shooting wasn’t a total waste. I don’t hate filmmaking as much as I did yesterday.
