Okay there’s this automatic shoulder seat belt that straps you in as soon as you turn on my assistant Jason’s car, so every time he starts up the engine and I’m not paying attention it almost strangles me. This is a good metaphor for my experience on LA Zombie.
One other thing. I still haven’t received the 1st A.D. that I’ve been begging for since the beginning of the shoot. A director without a First A.D. is like a captain without a first mate: lost at sea. The First A.D. is the glue that holds the whole shoot together, coordinating departments on set, wrangling the actors, telling everyone how long until the set-up is ready, and generally keeping the peace. He does all the yelling and runs interference for the director. The lack of a First A.D. has really been one of two factors that has caused us the most problems. The other one I can’t really talk about, pending litigation.
Today we’re back at the same location as yesterday, a very cinematic spot under an overpass in East LA. Jason and I are stuck in traffic on the way to set, and then after we stop at a McD’s drive-thru we get lost and I spill my coffee (which on this shoot is a rare commodity) all over the car floor. (For some unknown reason there are never thermoses of coffee on set. It’s almost inhumane.) I take it as a bad omen.
We’re set to shoot at magic hour, a scene involving homeless people sitting around an improvised living room beside an empty refrigerator box. Our two special guests today, Tony Ward, my co-star from Hustler White, and his best friend Santino Rice, who you will remember from Project Runway, are contributing cameos as homeless people. They arrive on set self-styled and in character, sporting the kind of homeless chic that you sometimes see in LA: the models and actors who come to Hollywood to pursue a dream, take a wrong turn at Albuquerque, and for whatever reason end up living on the street. Santino and Tony play characters who discover that their friend has O.D.d and he’s lying dead in the refrigerator box, which scares them off; enter Francois, the homeless alien zombie, who crawls into the box to fuck the poor soul back to life. We’ve dress up two members of our crew as homeless extras, and we’re good to go. The boys give it their all, adding a little extra kick to an otherwise uneventful scene.
Next I have to pick up a shot that I missed last night, wherein Wolf Hudson, dazed and confused, watches Francois leave the scene and then exits himself. Wolf is a trained dancer, so it’s too bad I can’t fit those skills into the scenario. A porn musical may be in order. (Actually I think there’s already one in production. I just saw it on Twitter.)
After the sun goes down it’s time to shoot the last scene of the day with our next victim, hot black Cuban porn star Eddie Diaz, who has come in from Miami. The scene has his body being dumped from a car in a parking lot, which the alien zombie finds and drags off to have sex with and bring back to life. I was originally planning on them having sex in the middle of the lot, but it’s been getting chilly here in LA in the evenings even in August, so we’ve decided to move it indoors in the warehouse that is our temporary base of production. Laszlo has done an amazing job with his limited resources of lighting the parking lot under the overpass. He really is a great lighting D.P.
Now is the time that the proceedings start to turn a little sour. For some reason unknown to me, Eddie is about an hour and a half late on set (definitely not his fault!), which means we’ll be rushing again with the clock to get all our shots before we have to be out of the location at 2am. There are other complications having to do with special effects that I can’t really get into, but suffice to say there are other delays over which I have no control. Our little production is definitely running out of steam, but we keep persevering. No matter how rag-tag and sketchy the shoot becomes, it’s always important to do whatever it takes to get the scene in the can. It’s my mantra: Get the scene in the can. Get the scene in the can.
Some of the obstacles we have to deal with are almost unbelievable, and very LA. For example, tonight someone who lives near the location has been complaining about the noise from our very loud generator. I ask my production manager who it could possibly be, considering the location is literally in the middle of nowhere. It turns out to be some squatters who have set up camp under the freeway overpass, which is already relentlessly noisy. These bourgeois homeless also complain when we inadvertently discard an old couch from our set on their “property”, insisting that we remove it even though there are abandoned shopping carts and old pieces of furniture all over the place. Get a condo!
Steve our art director tells me a funny story about the Topanga Canyon shoot. Well, funny in a gruesome sort of way. The day after, the crazy Frenchman picked up the wrecked truck to tow it back to the junkyard, but it was still covered in blood. He towed it all the way through LA and back to the Valley in broad daylight as the other drivers on the road recoiled in horror, thinking it was from a real accident. Imagine the crazy Frenchman chuckling maniacally while driving. Well, I thought it was funny.
The sex scene with Francois and Eddie is pretty hot, although I must confess that I always lose interest in the explicit scenes when I’m shooting a porno. I guess that probably isn’t a good sign. The mechanics of porn really aren’t very sexy at all, and it’s very difficult to shoot sex in a novel way, so it always seems like the same thing every time you do it. You’re lucky if there is real chemistry and you get a truly hot scene that gives you a hard-on while you’re watching it, which was the case the previous night with Francois and Wolf. But at least Francois and Eddie do have chemistry and they’re both hard, so I guess that’s all you can ask for. We finally get the alien zombie make-up on him just in time to complete the sex scene before the butch lesbian owner who keeps threatening to call the police if we shoot one meter off the property kicks us out of the location. It’s been a very stressful day, but what else is new?
