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.

Now I remember why I love filmmaking. What other pursuit allows you to experience despair and jubilation all in one day, and twice over? Jason picks me up in his trusty Datsun and we head for the lofts on Wilshire where the production office is. The air-conditioning there is broke and with all the guys staying there with no openable windows it’s getting pretty funky. Because the big car crash scene has been changed to a location in Topanga Canyon to be shot on Sunday night, we have the opportunity to shoot another full day of Francois in various locations in LA both dressed as a homeless person and as an alien zombie. Sometimes disaster can turn into advantage.

We did have an awesome, experienced First A.D. in place, but he dropped out about a week before shooting when he got a paying gig. A lot of the people who have volunteered to work on this project for little or no money are dropping off like flies because they just can’t afford to turn down other work if it becomes available. I suppose it has something to do with the economy. I guess the economic disaster also explains why there are so many more homeless people than I’ve ever seen in LA.

Anyway, without a real First A.D., the shoot is pretty chaotic today. Laszlo and I are basically doing it ourselves, which is a little distracting. A least we have walkie-talkies and GTS, which makes transportation and finding locations a lot easier. So we head out this morning with our little convey communicating with ten-four good buddies and copy thats.

The first location has sexy homeless Francois gleaning along a chain link fence down on a street that overlooks downtown. I was inspired to play up the homeless aspect of the character by watching Agnes Varda’s “The Gleaners and I” for the first time recently, a meditation on those who pick up waste and garbage and basically pick clean the bones of society. Actually my last film, Otto; or, Up with Dead People, was also about a homeless zombie, partly inspired by Varda’s movie “Vagabond”. So I guess I’m pretty much stuck on one idea, except this time it’s going to be a full on porno. How do you like them apples?

The next location is down at the LA River. We’re shooting guerilla style, sans permit, because it’s too expensive, but when we try to go down a tunnel on Sante Fe Ave. at 6th Street under the bridge to East LA, there are two cops sitting on bicycles at the entrance to the river. Laszlo and Robert and I go down to assess the situation, but when we pass the cops and say hello, they just warn us to be careful of the drug addicts around there! I don’t have the heart to tell them that we’re more concerned about them than of the junkies. We just tell them that we have permits to do a shoot in a few days and we’re just doing test shots. So the cops leave and we bring the whole crew down to shoot LA wandering aimlessly down by the lazy concrete river. We even have Francois with his pants down washing in the river, which looks amazing – kind of like one of those videos Farrah Fawcett (RIP) used to do for Playboy.

We head back to HQ for lunch, where Joe Castro will now apply the alien zombie make-up for the rest of the day’s shoot. We order Chinese as we only have the caterer for a late meal today, but the food takes two hours to arrive. It must have come from the mainland. Francois eats his chow mein in full zombie make-up, and we head for our next location, the backyard of my good friend and fellow Torontonian and fellow Capricorn the artist Karen Lofgren. She’s just bought a cute little place in Cypress Park with a back yard, which we need to string a clothesline across for Francois to steal some clothes off of. We are in and out so fast it’s almost frightening.

Then we head back to the same location at the LA River to shoot the same shots over again of Francois but this time in his alien zombie look. We’re racing against the setting sun for the second day in a row, but we get the shots. Next is the shot of Francois in the back of the truck going through the two tunnels that lead to downtown LA, including the pretty silver one that is featured in so many movies, Less Than Zero being the most memorable. We get the lights rigged and Laszlo and his grip take-off to get the shot (it’s Laszlo’s idea) while the rest of us drive over to our last location of the day, a place called Ms. Donut on Glendale Blvd in Echo Park, to see if it’s still open. It’s one of those great LA locations that looks like it has already been thoroughly art directed. Three different people on the crew tell me not to bother because they say when the drove by it last night at this time it was already closed, but I have a feeling we should check it out anyway. And sure enough, it’s just about to close but the Open sign is still on and the owner’s son says we can shoot as long as we want for two hundred bucks cash. On the way we had passed the pretty silver tunnel and some 40 million dollar film production had it blocked off entirely and there was a huge blimp light hanging over the entrance bigger than our cube truck. How dare they! We were going to shoot there tonight. So I just get Laszlo to shoot in the green tunnel, which looks amazing, and Laszlo and I vow to come back for the silver tunnel shot later in the week even if it kills us.

Meanwhile, back at Ms. Donut, a crazy lady is talking to herself and feeling old all alone in the store. She’s scribbling in her journals and putting her glasses and sunglasses, both pushed back on her head, on and off. Luis who is making the making-of video turns on his camera and has a long chat with her, and it’s clear that she is homeless and schizophrenic, as in fact a large percentage of homeless people are. We try to get her to sign a release, but it’s not registering and she won’t do it. But we certainly get a lot of great audio! She has many delusions, including that she lost her hand in a shark attack (she clearly still has both hands) and that she’s from Mongolia (she’s white). Ms. Donut’s son, behind the register, is taking everything in stride like the seasoned LA donut store employee that he is. Ms. Donut is clearly a freak magnet, which is why I was attracted to it in the first place. Laszlo is getting his lighting on seriously now, ordering around the grip who came with the truck just to prove who’s boss. Before you know it he has the whole location lit up and we shoot Francois coming in as the zombie to buy a coffee. There’s no dialogue in this picture, and the Donut store improvises the line, “Coffee? Coffee?” I guess I can edit that part out later.

On the way back to the place where I’m staying Jason and I notice that the homeless guy Nas.a’s shopping carts have disappeared from where we did the shoot yesterday on Silverlake Blvd. Either he moved on or the city swept them away. I guess that’s why they’re called transients.

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.

When I arrive at the production office this afternoon it is suspiciously quiet and laid back. This is a bad sign. In my experience, if pre-production is too smooth and uneventful, the actual shoot could be a nightmare – or at least more of a nightmare than usual. Francois has arrived, looking as internationally iconic as ever, and so has our co-producer Arno Rocca, a French fashion designer/merchandiser who lives in Jakarta and whom I first encountered on Facebook. I met him in LA a couple of months ago with Francois when we first started brainstorming the project. Arno is taking care of the fashion aspects of the film, including some donations from designer Bernhard Wilhelm and fetish company Slick It Up, both for whom Francois sometimes models. He has also invited a Japanese bondage master to participate in the proceedings, so I guess I’ll have to figure out how to fit that in somewhere. I mean, how could I refuse? Laszlo and I hop in our snazzy rented truck to check out the remaining locations with our other intrepid co-producer, Robert Felt, head of the New York based porn company Dark Alley, whom I met there last week. He’s younger and cuter than I expected, and he’s very calm.

Speaking of calm, I’m still worried that there isn’t more commotion in the office. I’m waiting for the first catastrophe to hit, but it’s really taking its time. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, it hits. Not one but two of the main locations may have fallen through, I am informed, one of them scheduled to be shot tomorrow. That’s what I’m talking about! I knew Murphy’s Law wouldn’t disappoint me. Apparently we have been informed at the eleventh hour that the LA River, where we have a permit to shoot, is owned in its entirety now by the Army Corps of Engineers, and you have to pay them a minimum of 2500 dollars for a permit plus have one of their members supervise the shoot for another fee. (As this is meant to be a full-on sex scene that might be a little embarrassing.). As for Angeles Crest, we are also informed at the last minute that we need a 10,000 gallon water truck standing by for the shoot in case there is a fire, even though we plan on using no pyrotechnics, or even smoking a joint. Perhaps I should have been a little more circumspect in my choice of exotic locations. But then how would I ever be able to experience the terror of the Terry Gilliam curse? Anyway, by the end of the day Jeremy and Robert both work out solutions and alternatives, so apparently the train hasn’t been derailed quite yet. But I have a feeling we’re not out of the woods yet, Talluh. We’ve already had to compress two nights shooting into one at Angeles Crest to cut costs, and although we have a great alternative location to the LA River, it’s dodgy.

In the midst of the chaos, Arno did manage to acquire a real wetsuit for Francois to wear as opposed to the fetish body suit that merely suggested a wetsuit. We’re keeping it really and fashion forward here on
LA Zombie!

I arrive in LA for the LA Zombie shoot on Monday after a week in sweaty, humid, stinky New York City. I thought I’d swing down through the Big Rotten Apple on my way to the City of Angels as it would be my only opportunity to visit my Gotham friends all year long. I stay with my dear friends Slava Mogutin and his sweet boyfriend Brian Kenny, who together comprise the art duo SUPERM. We go to a great party called Macho Mondays at bar Nowhere on 14th street where Blatino hustlers from all boroughs congregate to give Manhattan men a little whiff of the old raunchy midtown days of yore. I also go to see the legendary Grace Jones at the Hammerstein Ballroom, an epic show that I will not soon forget.

After a breezy, temperate two months in Toronto writing a new script, the weather is so dreadful in New York that even after a short walk you are drenched to the skin in sweat. It feels like you are swimming in a thick viral soup. Thankfully the weather in LA in August is much more civilized: hot and dry during the day and almost cool in the evening. I’m staying at the cute Silver Lake apartment of my dear longtime LA friend Billy, who has been in London the last three months working as an editor on the new Ridley Scott film Sherwood or Sherlock or whatever its called. Nottingham? Anyway, I’m proud of Billy, as he started (as Emily) as a 17 year old dyke production assistant on Hustler White fourteen years ago. He’s come a long way, baby. As much as I adore Billy it’s nice to have his apartment to myself as an escape from all the hustle and bustle of the film production office down on Wilshire Boulevard where the porn stars are being billeted. I will need time by myself to clear my head for all the chaos that will no doubt ensue on a typical Bruce LaBruce set, which is usually something like a cross between the trials of Job and David Cronenburg’s “Shivers”.

Today is dedicated to scoping out the locations that have already been scouted for the movie. Our dedicated production manager, Jeremy B. Warner, has been essaying pre-production virtually by himself over the last couple of months in LA, securing housing, locations, and permits and securing a rag-tag crew willing to work on a micro-budget film for very little compensation save for bragging rights about having survived a Bruce LaBruce shoot. Things have changed considerably in LA since the last time I shot here in 1995. On Hustler White, a guerilla-style film if there ever was one, we were able to get away with shooting entirely without permits on Santa Monica Boulevard and at various other central locations, a feat that would be virtually impossible in the current clamped down and controlled LA where it is said that people shooting even in private interiors have been busted for not having the proper paperwork. How we ever shot that film on 16mm for a grand total of 50K – including post! – remains a mystery to me to this day, and gives me a little bit of confidence that I can pull the same thing off again now in the digital age – but not that much confidence, actually, to tell you the truth.

LA Zombie is a whole different beast. It’s a summer project, something I wanted to do partly to keep in practice shooting, and partly as a good excuse to work with Francois Sagat, the supersexy porn superstar du moment. I almost cast him for a fashion story I did for Tetu magazine four or five years ago when he was represented by Citibeur, a porn company with a stable of Arab models, but I decided not to at the last minute because I didn’t think his signature head tattoo was right for the concept. (It was a gay tribute to Godard’s Breathless, using the same locations in Paris where the movie was shot. Francois would have been cast in the Jean Seberg role, obviously.) I’ve been kicking myself for not casting him ever since, particularly as he has become an international icon. Lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place, so when a second opportunity arises, you should always grab on to it. Even though we have an extremely modest budget (tiny for an indie film, that is, albeit huge for a porno), I figured I better go for the gusto.

Actually, if you want to know the truth, I had originally intended to make it a cheap art project for a solo show I had a couple of months ago at my gallery Peres Projects in Culver City. The idea was to make artifacts from a hardcore alien zombie splatter porn movie – production stills, props, screen tests, etc. – entitled LA Zombie starring Francois Sagat, and make it seem like it all came from an actual movie which never really existed or ever would exist. But somehow when I wasn’t looking the concept turned into reality, the budget started burgeoning, and really big porn stars started to become attached to the project: Francesco D’Macho, Matthew Rush, Erik Rhodes, Wolf Hudson… Suddenly, this summer, I was embroiled in an epic porn shoot. Oh well, I usually spend August twiddling my thumbs anyway.

So today my lanky assistant Jason North – a stellar name – and my long-suffering director of photography since Hustler White – whose name apparently I can’t reveal anymore because he informs me that if he puts it on my films he can’t get work for a year afterwards! (but you can look him up on IMDB) – I’ll call him Laszlo Kovaks – intrepidly venture forth to look at the assigned locations. First, though, we have to make a trip to the Valley – in Jason’s unairconditioned Datsun (“it has nature’s airconditioning,” he says as he rolls down his window) to visit our mad genius special effects guru, Joe Castro. Now Joe is worthy of an entire chapter, if not a novella, in and of himself, but suffice to say that he’s the other factor, besides Francois, that inspired me to essay an alien zombie splatter movie in the first place, having worked with, as he has, such horror legends as Herschell Gordon Lewis. Joe shows us his works in progress – canine teeth molded to fit Francois’ mouth, a scary alien cock made from a mold of Francois’ cock, custom contact lenses, a human torso and heart – and he assures us that everything is under control, which I don’t believe for a second. But I do have faith that it will be when we get on set, because I’ve seen him whip up a creature’s grotesque hand in two seconds flat using the kind of legerdemain usually only possessed by magicians.

Jason and Laszlo and I then head for our first location look-see, which happens to be a twenty-five mile drive up into the mountains to a remote place called Angeles Crest which is actually supposed to be a gay cruising spot! It’s hard to believe that gays would actually drive this far up into the middle of nowhere just to cruise, but you know how they are. After an endless drive we choose a location and then head back to uncivilization. The Valley and the mountain behind us, we visit a nice graveyard in Pasadena, which is kind of oxymoronic, and after a nice Indian meal, drive to our final location of the day, a really cool industrial area under a huge overpass downtown. Exhausted, we head home, our heads full of establishing shots and POVs.