Okay you’re not going to believe this one. Today we are slated to shoot the biggest set piece of the movie, the aftermath of a car crash on a mountain road. To even attempt this is pure folly because it is a logistical nightmare and it will be difficult to pull off with our measly budget. But we’re doing it anyway. Thankfully our first remote mountain location has been replaced with a slightly less remote one in Topanga Canyon. It’s about and hour and a half drive from our Wilshire HQ by freeway, but once we get up into the mountains there will be no cell phone service so we’ll be cut off from civilization. Steve our sexy art director has rented two trucks, one for the pre-accident scene and one for post-accident; the latter wreck has been towed to the location by a crazy Frenchman who owns a wrecking company.
I ride to the location with Luis, the soft-spoken Cuban who works for Dark Alley and who is making the making-of video. In the backseat are our models, Francois, of course, and Rocco Giovanni, a cute, personable young porn star from Columbus, Ohio whom I met on Twitter. Everything seems light and gay on our way to Topanga Canyon; little do what know what horrors lie ahead.
When we get to the general location, a seventy acre spread owned by a woman who owns a nation-wide chain of restaurants, I have to choose two specific sites to shoot. The roads are a bit treacherous on the way up, but she has had her property newly paved so it’s a bit smoother. Once I’ve decided on a spot for the wreck, the army of vehicles for our shoot begins to arrive. It’s difficult to fit all the vehicles on the narrow mountain road, and the cube truck has to be left back a few hundred meters, making it a pain in the ass to access equipment.
Steve and his two hot assistants start to figure out with the crazy Frenchman how to place the truck wreck beside a telephone pole right on the side of a steep embankment to make it look like it has really crashed. The first snafu of the day – except for when Laszlo had to spend a half an hour fixing the backseat door of one of our rental cars – is that they can’t seem to figure out how to get the wrecked truck off the trailer. Steve attaches it with a chain to the hitch of his four-wheel drive truck, but it won’t slide off when he drives forward.
The crazy Frenchman is gunning his truck that’s pulling the trailer in the opposite direction, but his tire gets stuck in the soft ground dangerously close to the edge of the cliff. They try and try but it won’t budge. I have visions of the wrecked truck toppling over sideways off the trailer and down the side of the mountain, pulling the trucks of Steve and the crazy Frenchman along with them. Thankfully before this happens, and with the help of about ten members of the crew, they get the wreck off the trailer and start to finesse it into place.
Having got lost on the way to this rather obscure location, the producer and talent are about an hour late arriving on set, so we really have to get moving if we’re going to get our magic hour shots in the can. Of course the cheap car clamp we’ve rented doesn’t work – those suction jobs never do – so we are forced to rig our own little device to secure Laszlo’s little 35mm camera to the hood. We’re shooting Rocco driving the truck and picking up Francois, who is naked, wearing body paint only, on the mountain road.
Even though we told the owner of the property that we were shooting porn, she pretends to be surprised when it’s mentioned today while signing the contracts, so we have to be a little sensitive to the neighbours who have to drive through her property to get off this damn mountain. The driving truck shots are a little rushed as the sun and daylight disappear alarmingly fast this time of year in LA: magic hour is more like magic twenty minutes. We get the shots we need, but not as much coverage as I was hoping for.
After our catered dinner, it’s time for the big car crash aftermath scene, a scenario I’ve always wanted to film. The wreck is in place and the scene has been meticulously decorated by Steve and his cute crew. Now it’s time for Joe our F/X guy to do his thing. Joe has been a little edgy on set, but he has a lot to do with virtually no assistance so I just let him spin. He whips up a nasty chest wound on Rocco, laying dead in the middle of the road, in no time flat. One of our P.A.s, Deborah, the E.R. doctor, gives it her good housekeeping seal of approval for authenticity.
As the hidden smoke machine puffs out some fake steam, Francois emerges from the crashed truck, naked and ghastly, approaches Rocco’s body, and starts to make love to him. Why does such imagery come into my head instead of sugarplums? Well when I was a kid there was gruesome car accident on the highway right in front of our farm. My father and I were the first ones on the scene, and there was a man lying in the middle of the road near his wrecked truck, breathing laboriously. His shoes and one sock had been knocked off by the impact and were lying near his feet as if gently pulled off. It was so weird. He died on the way to the hospital. Why I made it into a zombie sex scene is another question entirely.
From that point on, it’s downhill all the way. We start shooting sex scenes with Francois and his big prosthetic alien dick with the scorpion stinger on the end of it, but the images are so grotesque I myself can hardly process them. I won’t go into further detail at this juncture, but suffice to say that this will not go over well between the coasts, or on them.
When it comes to trying to shoot a fuck scene with Francois using his normal dick, it doesn’t quite seem to fit, so to speak. I’m going to have to figure out some way how to make sense of all this in the next few days by adjusting the concept more toward the idea that Francois is a delusional homeless person, which is still a pretty bizarre premise for a porno. But then again, it’s a bizarre world, and we’ve already seen enough plumbers and telephone repair men in porn. It’s time for something a little more… au current. Actually one of my inspirations is the novel Mad Man by the great black gay author Samuel Delaney, about a man who goes around looking for homeless people to have sex with. So you see, it’s nothing new.
We’ve had to save the biggest special effect, involving a beating heart and a fake alien cock coming, for the last scene. The sun will start to rise in an hour, so we are really rushed again. First we were racing with the sun going down and now we are racing before the sun comes up. What gives? Why is there never enough time in the day when you’re making a movie? I’m trying not to rush Joe too much as he’s doing his best. We finally do get the shots, but only just.
Poor Rocco has been lying on the damp and clammy pavement for hours drenched in fake blood in a most uncomfortable posture. He is a complete trooper and consummate professional, never complaining and gutting it out. He’s really impressive. Francois is stoic and super-professional as usual. We have just enough time for the final shot, Francois’ exit from the scene, before a glorious, misty sunrise illuminates the canyon. Unfortunately by this time the crew is so exhausted and frazzled that it seems like a bad acid trip. After a long ride back to Silverlake, I finally get into bed by 8am and I really hate filmmaking again.
August 13th, 2009 on 12:22 pm
I must say… I wouldn’t have changed the experience for the world! (Okay… I would have, but can’t and what I took away from shooting that scene is something that I certainly have changed!)
The project was incredible and I’m humbled and grateful to be able to be a part of it!