Wrap party tonight at the Spotlight! It’s the very location of the wrap party for Hustler White some fourteen years ago, so I anticipate it with a moist-eyed nostalgia. What more can I say about the shooting of LA Zombie? (La Zombie is probably more appropriate!)

What started out as a modest conceptual idea for an art exhibition is now a minor motion picture set to go into post-production. (I will be editing it in Berlin in the fall, so it should be done by Xmas.) I knew we were trying to do something fairly ambitious for the extremely limited funds that we had, but in some ways I think we actually pulled off the impossible in a way. Sometimes pure force of will is all you can rely on.

The project may still turn out to be a fiasco, or it may be true art, but one thing is for sure: it was an intense experience that I’ll never forget, no matter how hard I try. Summer project! At least I wasn’t sitting at home in Toronto twiddling my thumbs.

Bruce LaBruce
Los Angeles, 2009

Perhaps I spoke too soon – I mean about the “all worthwhile” part. Today starts out innocently enough, but by the end of the night I’m ready for 28 days at Betty Ford, and I’m not even an alcoholic. Is there rehab for directors? My name is Bruce LaBruce, and I’m a director. Recovering director.

The day starts off innocently enough. It’s the last day of a difficult shoot so it almost feels like Xmas. Kato picks me up as usual in his Datsun, it almost strangles me as usual, I drink my usual coffee on the way to set, and we arrive just a little late. We’re back at Peres Projects, but it’s the only location of the day so I’m deluded into thinking that things will go more smoothly. They won’t. The beef has all arrived today on schedule – three of the biggest male porn stars in the business in all their testosteronal glory: Matthew Rush, Erik Rhodes, and Francesco D’Macho, the latter hunk all the way from Madrid. I’ve never met any of them before in person, but they all seem like nice chaps. Erik in particular seems like quite a gentle giant: his proportions are so big it’s kind of hard to process. He’s the one who was dating Marc Jacobs there for a while. A fourth side order of beef, Adam Killian, has been invited to set by our producer Robert, so we have enough meat here for an Argentinian barbecue!

A complication arises, however. When it comes time to shoot the first sex scene, which is without gore, the brawny men balk, claiming that they didn’t realize they would be expected to do an explicit scene. It’s all a bit of a misunderstanding: they thought that because it was an arty Bruce LaBruce movie, they would be doing something else. They’re all totally into the blood and gore, but for me the whole point is to mix the horror/gore genre with porn. I explain to them that BLAB movies always have explicit sex – we even shot porn scenes for Otto; or, Up with Dead People, although most of them ended up only as DVD extras. Erik takes me aside and says that he’s not trying to be a demanding diva, it’s just that he wasn’t expecting to do a sex scene, but since that’s what I want he will go ahead and do it and give his all. It’s really very sweet of him and the rest of the boys. It’s a good thing too, because poor Robert, our producer, was almost in tears. We’ve been through hell and high water all week long and he’s remained remarkably calm and low key, but when this potential little mutiny came up, it’s the first time I saw him visibly upset. But it’s all good, because we shoot the sex scene, including oral, pissing, and fucking, all in the white Kubrickian dungeon that Steve has dressed, and it seems pretty hot in porn terms. I do make a big mistake by not asking them all to come there and then, however. I have the notion that I want them to come later on the bloody, gory set, the aftermath of a shooting, but by that time I will discover that they’re no longer in the mood for come shots, and who can blame them?

Since the shoot is over and it’s the last day of my diary and no one can any longer threaten to drop out every day if he isn’t paid up front in cash even though he’s consistently late by about 3 or 4 hours and is always completely unprepared for the day’s shoot, I guess I can talk a little bit more candidly about the other factor that shall we say complicated the shooting of LA Zombie. In the past I would have named names and consequences be damned, but I’ve mellowed a bit since I married a black Cuban Santeria priest and settled down, so I’m not going to go into too much into detail. Like I said earlier, it’s partly my fault anyway for being so naïve about how much time it would take to set up all the F/X, but when you are only given half or a quarter of the time you expected it does make it exponentially more difficult. When you add in the X factor – that you are also making a hardcore porn movie and you have to deal with that whole big kettle of fish sticks on top of it – then it really does become a recipe for disaster. All that, and no A.D., ever. To be honest, it really is a miracle that we actually accomplished as much as we did, not only completing every planned scene, but also adding some extra improvised stuff on top of it. So although I didn’t get in quite as many of the effects I wanted – lots of gore, but not really much splatter – I can’t really complain too much.

Back on the set, it’s time to shoot the scene in which two drug dealers, played by my friends the gay Cholo rapper Deadlee and tattooed model extraordinaire Trevor Wayne, make a drug delivery to the S and M dungeon and end up shooting the four beefy fetish freaks. I intended some not necessarily realistic but over-the-top splatter; however, splatter is not as easy as it looks, especially with no budget. Steve tries to put some chunks of raw liver and intestines into some air-pressurizer contraption that he’s rented, which has the net effect of lobbing the liver benignly across the room as if tossed by a little girl. Meanwhile, our F/X man is running around like a headless chicken trying to organize effects that we won’t possibly have time to shoot. I try to calm him down and concentrate on doing the final alien zombie effect, an extreme latex make-over of Francois’ face that makes him look like he has a face full of animal teeth. I sit patiently beside him and talk soothingly as he does his magic. He really is a genius, under better circumstances, and I have to admit that despite the pressure he is under he has come up with a spectacular looking alien. The only problem is I’ve been informed that the grip truck operator, who has been reasonably patient throughout the shoot, is now saying that he is shutting off all the lights at 11pm, end of story. That gives me two hours to have Francois camera ready, capture four come shots, do some blood and splatter effects, and shoot the creatures interaction with the four dead porn stars, whom he reanimates, including his entrance and exit scenes and his slien come shots. It all comes down to this. If I don’t get enough footage to flesh out the basic concept of the piece, the entire project comes to naught. The whole week of shooting rests on whether or not I can get the next two hours on screen. But no pressure!

The art gallery is a disaster area. There have been set visits all day by various members of the media and other interlopers, and the cast and crew have tracked blood everywhere. People start slip sliding away, and the general atmosphere becomes chaotic and disconnected. The poor porn stars have put up with a lot already, and now I expect them to do their come shots while covered in blood and gore. Two of them actually manage it, which is awesome because it will help to sell the scene. Francois, ever the trooper, is now dealing with this new face prosthetic, which has involved having toxic chemicals sprayed in his face by an unsteady hand while he is practically suffocating. He looks at me with his one remaining uncovered eye, which has a zombie contact lens on it, and gives me a wink. What an amazing man.

So in spite of the tweaky energy of the set, which is once again reminding me of a bad acid trip, I finally get the four studs of the apocalypse on the bloody set, Francois is prepared (although his teeth keep falling out), Laszlo has the three plastic-covered cameras in place, and we’re just waiting on set for the F/X alien cock which squirts black squid ink to be put in place. Somehow it all comes together at the last minute and we get the shots I need of the alien zombie coming all over the dead hunks of bloody beef just before we’re about to be tossed out. The gallery looks like an abattoir, but I can’t worry about that now. Javier Peres, the owner, has been on set all day, and he’s cool with it. We’ve been through a lot together, so nothing I do every really phases him. The crew will have to clean up as best they can. I still have to get the shots of Francois leaving the building and walking down the street. I do the set-up with James and then leave him to it. I can’t stay on the set one second longer. Santino Rice, who has been hanging around half the day keeping up the energy, generously consents to drive me home, and I make a hasty French exit, getting home just after midnight.

Just when you thought you’d reached the bottom of the barrel of dead fish, another dreadful day rears its ugly, Medusan head. Today we are on location at Peres Projects, the LA-based art gallery that represents me as an artiste, so you would think that the contained set would simplify things a bit. Dream on! Jason, my faithful Kato, the gangly, angular lad that is my assistant, picks me up on time as usual and we head west, only getting lost once or twice here and there along the way.

At the gallery my art director Steve Hall (who, incidentally, does art direction for all the biggest fashion photogs and designers, Christian Louboutin being the latest), has constructed a beautiful set inside the gallery: the absurdly huge interior of yesterday’s refrigerator box a la Snoopy’s doghouse. It looks like a great art installation all by itself. The hunky and talented artist Dan Attoe, also represented by Javier Peres, happens to be there with gallery assistant Wilson, moving some of his paintings, so it’s good to see some of the Peres family again. Steve is such a congenial and collegial presence on our schizzy set that whenever he leaves everything seems to start going south, morale-wise. The presence of his gorgeous assistants, Johnny and Milan, who, he proudly tells me, are generally hotter than the models on his fashion jobs, doesn’t hurt either.

As a certain key crewmember is late, as usual, I change the schedule and start shooting some other stuff. First I do a pick up of the scene from the previous evening, with Francois crawling out of the refrigerator box he had gone down the rabbit hole into, which we shoot in the Peres parking lot. Then we go right into the sex scene between Francois and the porn actor playing the dead junkie in Steve’s interior fridge box, whose name escapes me at the moment. I cast him because he’s an older model, in his forties, with grey hair and a weather-beaten look.

I’ve been asking Robert Felt of Dark Alley, our solid and steadfast (and cute) producer, to help direct the sex scenes, as he is more experienced at it than I, and as I said, I tend to lose interest. He does his best, but unfortunately we’re having some trouble in the wood department – if you know what I mean – on set today (not Francois – he’s always hard as a rock!), so we have to stop and start several times to try to “erectify” the situation, but to no avail. But that’s okay because Francois comes in a glorious Technicolor fountain, without special effects, and that’s good enough for me.

Now it’s time for our F/X man, who has just arrived on set, to do up Francois in his zombie look. We are racing with the clock again as we are supposed to be at the ocean at 5pm to shoot the very first scene of the movie: the alien zombie emerging from the Pacific. I must admit that going into this project I had no clue about the F/X process at all, and we definitely didn’t factor in enough time in the schedule for them. That’s why we are perpetually late and always hurrying to finish in time. There are also other issues with the F/X department that I can’t get into, but together it’s a kind of perfect storm of frustrations and delays. It doesn’t help that catering is also two hours late on set today, for god knows what reason. Maybe I should check my horrorscope!

I’ve started to chill a little on set in terms of not getting so anxious about things over which I have no control, so I just sit and tap away at my shooting diary and let the clouds roll by. Finally Francois is ready for his alien zombie close-up and we shoot him coming as the creature with his big, scorpion-tipped cock in the same positions as he fucked the homeless porn star before. I have no idea if the shots will match, and furthermore, I don’t care. As I’ve recently stated, in print, and for the record, continuity is bourgeois.

It’s already 6pm, so we’re frighteningly late for our next location: El Matador Beach, the exact same spot where we filmed the final scene of my movie Hustler White. In that scenario, my character, Jurgen Anger, thought that Mr. Ward was dead, so he was going to throw his body in the ocean, but Tony regains consciousness and we make out. In this scene, Francois Sagat as the alien zombie emerges from the ocean and sets off in search of dead bodies to fuck back to life. You see how it all connects.

A minimal crew of five – me, Laszlo, Robert, our assistant cameraman John, and Francois – drive in our rented truck from Century City all the way out to the location north of Malibu in rush hour traffic, arriving at precisely 7:06 pm. As it is dark by just after 8pm these days, we better get the lead out. We rush down the steep path to the beach with our equipment and set up as Francois puts in his fake teeth and I bloody them up. The water is freezing, but Francois gamely wades in and we shoot the scene as dolphins frolic by in the BG (unfortunately I don’t think we get them in the shot). We manage to get our coverage just in time, finishing as darkness falls at precisely 8:06pm.

It feels so strange to be back in the same place where Laszlo filmed Tony and I executing what probably remains the longest kiss – or at least gay kiss – in screen history fourteen years ago, but life’s funny that way. Despite all the hardships and pain and suffering we’ve all endured this past week, this moment somehow makes it seem all worthwhile. But there’s always tomorrow …

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?

As the shoot of the car crash aftermath was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory on Sunday night – we got the scene, but it almost killed us – we’ve decided to postpone the Monday magic hour shoot of Francois coming out of the ocean and start up again on Tuesday morning. The horrible feeling I experienced at Topanga Canyon that I know very well – that psychotic, disconnected, negative feeling you get when you’ve been shooting all night and the morning sun bares down on you like an angry giant – has dissipated, and I’m ready and raring to go again this morning.

It isn’t going to be easy, however. We’re shooting at the LA River location without permits this morning, and the tunnel entrance, as we experienced the other day, is like Grand Central Station. How we’re going to pull this off I will never know. But I’m a big believer in what Jimmy Stewart says to Kim Novak in Vertigo: “You see! There’s an answer for everything!” Of course she ended up dead and he a broken man, but at least they had answers!

As you can imagine, there are things, candid as I am, that I cannot talk about in this shooting diary. Things… you wouldn’t understand. Things… you couldn’t understand. Things… you shouldn’t understand! But as the picture develops, the details will become clearer. That’s all I’m going to say for now.

Our guest cameo today is being essayed by none other than Tim Kuzma (not his real name – he does have a career to pursue!), the great character actor whose face you would recognize from such movies as Fight Club and Halloween. He is playing a fugitive from the IAG bailout that is trying to abscond with a briefcase full of cash until Wolf Hudson, dressed in identical Wall Street attire, tries to stop him. The location, the tunnel to the LA River between 4th and 7th Streets at Santa Fe, seems to be an access to the mighty concrete waterway that everyone uses, and I do mean everyone. As it is a day shoot we are just using reflectors and filming under the shade of the Fourth Street Bridge, but we are still a very obvious crew of about a dozen people and two actors using the location without a permit.

As we begin to shoot the action in front of the tunnel, a variety of vehicles come through to interrupt us, everything from civilian joy riders to utilities workers to huge tractor-trailers moving heavy equipment. Every ten minutes or so someone on the crew yells “Car”, like in a street hockey match, and we have to clear the cameras, tripods, and equipment to let them pass. To add to the absurdity, next out of the tunnel emerges a group of about three dozen tourists on foot – many of them Japanese – led by a tour guide. What next, a marching band? A ticker-tape parade? We shoot at break-next speed and even do some modest special effects, accomplishing a pretty cute little scene. Francois arrives in full zombie and we get his reaction shots, plus we improvise a scene in which he drags the body of one of the AIG crooks into his homeless lair for his nefarious purposes. When we’re done I can’t believe we actually did pull it off.

The shoot in the evening is at another downtown location over the bridge in East LA. It’s a warehouse district, where apparently we have permission to shoot and some sort of permit, but the permit system here is so convoluted that it’s hard to figure out what we have access to and what we don’t. Here, in a little cubby-hole in the parking lot, in front of a big fat graffiti tag, we shoot our first full on zombie sex scene, replete with Viagra, big hard dicks, and glorious come shots. As we are working with two porn veterans, I shouldn’t be amazed at how well they can perform sex under such difficult and rushed circumstances. Milan, our cute Peruvian prop guy, has gleaned an old mattress from the vicinity for them to fuck on, and I must say Francois in full alien zombie manhood in front of the graffiti that matches the colour of his alien skin looks quite spectacular. We do both alien come shots (he comes black ink) and regular human ones. It feels really great to get a full on hot porn scene in the can. We’re also over the hump now – four days of shooting completed, three to go – so I feel much better. But many obstacles still lay ahead, as you will soon see.

I have to say how proud I am of Robert, our on-set producer, Jeremy, our production manager, and Laszlo, our intrepid D.P. (When Laszlo asks Wolf Hudson about the character of D.P.s – meaning Directors of Photography – in the porn world, Wolf thinks he’s talking about another kind of D.P. – double penetration! So on set from now on I am threatening to call Laszlo “Double Penetration.”) They’ve really stayed pretty calm and collected under extraordinarily difficult Labrucian circumstances, so kudos to them all.

In the warehouse this evening where we’ve set up our base, John, one of our dedicated P.A.s, discovers a black widow spider! They aren’t very big, but they’re deadly! I ask him not to kill it – she can’t help it if she’s venomous – so he puts her in am empty water bottle and frees her outside. That’s all we need, for one of the cast or crew to get a deadly spider bite. Luis, our making-of guy, already stepped on a nail that went through his shoe into his foot at the LA River this morning. Fortunately we have Deborah, our E.R. doctor P.A., on set, who administers to all our victims. Low-budget film locations often operate somewhat like triage anyway, so it’s no biggie.

Our last scene of the day is the one that Laszlo and I missed the other night because we got cock-blocked by a big budget Hollywood movie – our shot going through the silvery downtown tunnel. It’s the same rigging as before, so I just let Laszlo do it himself as second unit. Jason and I drop some cast, crew and equipment off at the production office, and then we head off to get some food. By chance we find ourselves in Hollywood near the Spotlight, one of the last remaining hustler bars in town, so we have to stop off for a well-deserved cocktail. Then we grab some Popeye’s – it’s 99-cent night, a breast and a drumstick for 99 cents! – and head home. Since shooting began I’ve really become hyperaware of the number of homeless people in LA, and here in Hollywood tonight I notice an alarming number of them again, usually with shopping carts or sleeping right on the sidewalk. I also saw a number of them out near our Topanga Canyon location on the west side. It almost seems like some kind of epidemic.