loads of coffee

I worked on my first ever real film set this past weekend. I have a friend named Jon Stewart. He's not the one on tv, but even he thinks it a bit strange that the first name is spelled the same. Whatever. He moved out here recently from Arkansas and has been getting work as an assistant director on various projects. So he calls me up. The converation goes something like this:

Jon: Hey, man, come be a PA this weekend.
Me: Ok.

For those who don't know and there's no reason why you'd ever be curious, a PA is like a glorified intern on a film set. Production Assistants assist production. Who'd have thought, right?

AFI(American Film Institute) sponsored eight women directors to direct eight short films they'd each submitted. The film was shot out in the desert hills of Santa Clarita, where it was easily 100 degrees in the afternoon. The PA's jobs consisted of locking down set(echoing the assistant director's commands to "roll" and "quiet on the set" and "cut"), setting up crafty(the snack table), assisting whatever crew member needed help, and most importantly, making sure everyone had a bottle of cold water in their hand at all times. We spent all of Saturday shooting an interior scene in one of the little town buildings. No fans. No AC, and for some reason the little structure sucked all the heat in and kept it. It was easily over 100 degrees inside the structure, and since it was inside, that meant no breeze, either. Most of the PA's stayed outside to be out of the way and just ran in with water whenever we weren't rolling. I'd volunteered to be on boom(hold the boom microphone), so I stayed inside with "First Team"(crew members working directly with the shot: Director, Assistant Director, Director of Photography, Gaffer, Camera, Assistant Camera, Audio Technician, and various grips). Now, if any of you know me, you know I sweat more than any breathing creature on the planet. So I was standing there, the boom mike over my head with my shirt soaked through. I felt like I was constantly bringing water up to my mouth and I truly believe I drank more than five gallons that day. Even drinking all that water, they still had to take me to the side and cool me down 'cause apparently I looked like I was gonna pass out.

That was a fourteen hour day, and it was the most fun I've had in a while.

Interesting story: the next day they sent me on an errand into Studio City(portion of LA with all the huge studio lots) to track down an actor from the day before who wouldn't answer his phone and who we forgot to get to sign his paperwork. The first thing cool about that was I got to drive the UPM's(Unit Production Manager) car. She had a french car that looked and felt like a space ship. Then the actor. As soon as I saw him on Saturday, I knew I'd seen him before. He's been all over TV as a character actor with bit parts here and there. So I'm sitting in his living room, covered in dust and sweat, and we're talking about the film while he signs the papers. He mentions that it was nice to work with the director again.

Me: Oh yeah? What else have you and Ana done together?
Him: We did a little film a couple of years ago called "Chestnut".
Me: Cool.

"Chestnut," of course would be the film I did the chapter stops for at Weinstein and is soon to be released on dvd. He plays one of the "bumbling bad guys," as he puts it. He was glad to know that it was finally bought and is going to be distributed.

I may get to work as a PA on a pilot being shot in a week or so. Jon says HBO and FX are real interested in it. It's no pay again, but another great experience, I'm sure.

Going to see an advance press screening of Clerks 2 tonight after work. Not sure how good it's gonna be. The editors at Weinstein saw an early cut and hated it. Ah well.

Free movie, right?

Grizzly Man

Timothy Treadwell lived his life with and for Grizzly bears in Alaska, and then they ate him. A strange mix of tragedy and irony, no?

It's an amazing documentary. You watch the hours and hours of footage he shot up there with the bears cut down to an hour and you don't know whether to laugh at him or cry for him when he tells the bears that he loves them over and over again. They don't even look his way unless he gets close enough to make them uncomfortable. They then start to move toward him and he steps back, apologizing profusely for getting in their way. He's definitely not celebrated in the documentary, as several people interviewed remark that he "got what he deserved" and maybe only survived as long as he did because the bears thought he was retarded or something.

He was searching for something to worship, something to devote his life to, and he found dangerous wild bears. The illusion he painted of being a protector of the bears elevated his ego to god status. He yells and rants to the camera of how he beat the government at their own game when they tried to tell him to be careful around the bears. He beat the park services, and he beat the other bear protectors, he says. His girlfriend, who died by his side after not leaving him when he was attacked, told him days before their death that he was "hell bent on destruction." She wasn't comfortable with how close he wanted to get to the bears and how he spent three to four months of the year camping out in the most dangerous part of the alaskan wilderness just to be with them. Werner Herzog, the german director who directed the documentary rebukes Treadwell in his narration, remarking of how when Treadwell looked into the eyes of the bears, he saw peace, misunderstanding, and the perfect balance of nature, but all Herzog sees is "half bored hunger." These are animals. While they're beautiful, and worth preserving in our call to be good stewards, their only motivation is to eat and to procreate.

When Treadwell gushes over the bears and calls them by name, he gets nothing in return. The bears don't return his love. He's torn apart and eaten by a starving old grizzly, and his girlfriend dies, too.

So go watch it. It was an absolute farce that it wasn't even nominated for best documentary at the oscars.

it's 11pm my time

i made a pot of coffee and hand-delivered it to my boss today.

i felt like a real intern.

i was in the dub room with dave the dub room guy when i got a call from my boss' assistant, asking me to make a new pot of coffee because shannon(boss and evp of broadcast video production and post production) wanted some fresh coffee.

all in a day's work, i guess.

i also saw a rough cut of the new sienna miller movie about the life of edie sedgewick, andy warhol's muse. i read about half of the script and i liked what i read, but the movie was awful. i heard they were reshooting a bunch of it. whatever.

i also saw the documentary "grizzly man" this past weekend. stay tuned for more on that.

come just as thou art with thy woe

i sometimes get emotional when i hear this song, especially this verse:

The soul that on Jesus relies
He'll never, no never deceive.
He freely and faithfully gives
More blessings than we can conceive.
Yea, down to old age He will keep,
Nor will He forsake us at last.
He knows and is known by His sheep.
They're His, and He will hold, hold them fast.

it's called "poor sinner dejected with fear," and at first glance at the title, who wants to sing that? or "in thy wrath and hotness pleasure" for that matter. but when you hear the rest of the words of the song, it's clearly about grace, and the fact that His hand, once He has you, will always have you in His grasp. i guess it was titled that way because it's the first line of the song. a lot of hymns use the first line as the title.

in other news, i'm an idiot. it's called "june gloom" not "blue june." which makes more sense, i guess.

in still other news, i got to read the robert rodriguez half of "grindhouse." man. talk about gory. if they shoot the script, then it may be the most gory zombie movie of all time. i may not even go see it.

wait. that was a lie. of course i'm gonna see it.

chapter stops and such and so

so you know how on a dvd there are different chapters? ever wonder who gets to decide how to break up the movie into how many chapters and when to break them up, and what to title them?

enter the guy in the dub room. which happened to be me today.

i got to break up the movie chestnut today. it's a kids movie about two little girls who try to hide their pet dog from their adoptive parents. what a blessing.

so i kept joking with the dub room guy, dave, about how i was thinking of making all the chapter titles start with "the" and be one word. i.e. "The Arrival", "The Rejuvenation", "The Betrayal" and whatnot. i thought it'd be funny. he thought it was funny, too, but the producer in the room didn't share in our joy, so i decided to go with the good ol' "A Newcomer," and "An Accident," and to finish with "An Unlikely Hero." so if you happen to rent chestnut when it comes out on dvd and flip through the chapter titles, you'll see that chestnut the great dane becomes an unlikely hero in the last chapter, and it'll add to your movie watching joy because you'll think to yourself, "golly, he really IS an unlikely hero, isn't he? lol!"

i also think it'd be funny to name a chapter near the end of the movie "A Fight to the Finish" or something like that. i mean, what movie doesn't have a chapter titled "A Fight to the Finish"?

you tell me.

blue sky

they call it blue june. apparently most of june is usually particularly downcast in los angeles. i can attest to this. the last few days of may were scorching hot, but the past five or six days have been very overcast without much sun. weird, no? although the sky's more of a gray than blue, but whatever.

so i walked into work today, and decided to skip my usual cup-of-coffee-in-the-breakroom-to-start-the-day and get to work. my boss wasn't around, so i sat at his desk and picked up one of the many trade publications we have lying around the office. i think it was variety. so i was absent-mindedly flipping through it, wondering if i should have gotten coffee, when i heard a screech from the cubicle around the corner. apparently the four or five girls from publicity had found a treasure precious enough to share with the entire office in loud voices:

pictures of brad and angelina's baby.

here are a few things i heard:
"omg, i want to MAKE OUT with that baby!"
"omg, look at her boobs!"(i assume talking about angelina)
"omg, it has brad's eyes and angelina's lips!"
"omg, my womb is throbbing!"

the last one really disturbed me, so i decided i needed my cup of coffee from the break room afterall.

i spent about an hour typing up purchase orders and faxing them to random people in the morning, when my boss tossed me the script for the new tarantino movie. i love this place.

here's the deal: weinstein co. is producing a double feature with robert rodriguez and quentin tarantino called "grindhouse." rodriguez does one, tarantino does the other, and they create a ten minute intermission of fake trailers they make. it's supposed to mimic the cheaply done 70's drive-in movies. rodriguez's is called "planet terror" or something like that. it's shooting right now in texas, and i got to see some of the dailies back in the dub room. tarantino's hasn't begun shooting yet. it's a lot like his others: a ton of dialogue followed by a ton of violence. what i liked about it was how long he spent building up the tension. i think i was on page 54 or so before the action started. it's a pretty insane premise. i won't give it away.

in other news, a pipe broke under our apartment complex yesterday, so we didn't have any water for about 24 hours. so no shower today.

whatev. it's fixed now.

andersen and van gogh

"Never had she danced so beautifully; the sharp knives cut her feet, but she did not feel it, for the pain in her heart was far greater. She knew that this was the last evening that she would see him for whose sake she had given away her lovely voice and left her home and her family; and he would never know of her sacrifice. It was the last night that she would breathe the same air as he, or look out over the deep sea and up into the star-blue heaven. A dreamless, eternal night awaited her, for she had no soul and not been able to win one."

I never knew the tale of the little mermaid could be so incredibly depressing. As Andersen describes her sighing "as if her heart would break with sorrow," I can't help but think that it was meant to be a reflection of him. This is the same Andersen who was largely rejected by the "normal" world for his odd appearance and irregular characteristics. He was described as being too tall and gawky, with a long nose and close-set eyes. I read somewhere that his little mermaid's quest for the normal world of humans reflected his own yearning for a normal life and normal love. His life seemed to be one unrequited love after another, and he was said to have frequently visited brothels in his later years, and died alone.

He used misfits and children in his stories as the voices of reason. It was the little boy who pointed out to everyone that the emperor didn't have any clothes, and it was the poor young traveler who answered the three questions correctly to win the hot princess and cut off the troll's head(great story, btw, check out "the tinderbox").

Somehow I can't help but think of Van Gogh when I'm reading about Andersen. While Andersen was largely rejected by the women he admired, Van Gogh not only found rejection in women, but in the church. This is what saddens me the most. He was originally planning to be a preacher/pastor, but found that he was horrible at it. He was a terrible pastor and terrible preacher because he was prone to depression and mental illness, so the church threw him out and turned their back on him. In his sorrow he found refuge in God's true calling for him: art. All the church recogized was his lack of talents in the ministry, and because of this, he was useless to them. You know the rest. He threatened his best friend with a gun and then later felt such remorse that he cut off his ear and sent it to him. Then he committed suicide. What's a believer to do when other believers don't gather around him, lifting him up, and encouraging him in his true talents and calling? It's bound to be a pretty lonely life.

Not that I'm any super encourager. If anything, I tend to be the most self-centered person I know, only intrigued by my own talents and wrapped up in my little life of anxious nothings. It's only when we're found out to be naked and sinful by the clever little boy in the crowd, who shouts that we don't have any clothes on, and our facades of wealth and physical beauty don't hide our nakedness. Then the whole crowd will know, and they'll shout "He has nothing on!" And it'll be the best thing that happened to us, 'cause then we'll be vulnerable and able to receive love.

hello weekend

so i made it through the first week, which happened to only be thursday and friday. on thursday, i did some intern stuff like inputting titles, release dates, and street dates for upcoming film projects in an excel document. then i got to know the shredder for about two hours, destroying old paperwork and that kind of thing. then i watched a movie. that's right. i watched a movie. my boss was like, "ok, now, we need to get you something to watch." so i sat at his desk and watched an early cut of a film they bought called "DOA." it's based on a videogame or something. probably the most ridiculous movie i've ever seen. i can't remember what i did after that, but friday was a lot more fun.

i was assigned to this guy named Dave's office. and when i say office, i mean closet-like tape and dub room. this is the guy who everyone comes to for copies and titles of new trailers, tv spots, and rough cuts of new films. for the first part of the day, i did his grunt work, making copies of various dvds for people who requested them throughout the office. apparently, Dimension Films, a daughter company of Weinstein, is producing a remake of Porky's, and they needed about fifteen copies of the original. Dimension is the one responsible for most of the Scary Movie franchise and some of the new cheesy horror films. they're a genre studio, almost exclusively specializing in horror and gross comedy. what a blessing.

one of the scripts i read earlier in the week, the one without a title, is called Quebec. it's in the early stages of pre-production and the big man harvey weinstein wanted a taped read through of the script because he was concerned about the flow. enter dave, isaac the dvd extras main producer at weinstein, and ethan the lowly intern. none of the actors who were actually cast were able to make it for the read through, so they got subs to fill in and read through it. all of this was just so the big man harvey could hear how it flowed, so it didn't matter that they weren't cast.

so we set up a camera and boom mikes in one of the nice conference rooms and some of the actors started to show. most of them i swear i recognized but had no idea who they were. one of them was in super troopers. i realized it several minutes into the reading. he was one of the "bad cops" who has this hilarious scene where he taunts the girl at the desk, and she makes fun of him because he has toilet paper stuck to his shoe. it doesn't sound funny, but it was in the movie. i actually had to keep myself from laughing during the screening, 'cause i kept remembering that scene. the only one who i recognized AND knew their name was ginnifer goodwin. she was absolutely gorgeous. when she came into the room and introduced herself to everyone, i'm sure i looked like a stupid star-struck intern, which i was. for those who don't know her, she played johnny cash's first wife in Walk the Line, and she also plays bill paxton's youngest wife in the HBO show Big Love. she's really talented, not to mention amazingly beautiful. it was a fun hour and a half, watching the read through. i got off at 5 and Ben(my cousin) and I drove down to Santa Monica and had a burger and caught a late showing of The Davinci Code. I haven't read the book, and never really had much interest, but I thought I should atleast see the movie, so I can be more knowledgeable-it's so controversial and all. It was fine. It didn't hold my attention well enough to be three hours, though. Maybe if I'd read the book.

I also bought a complete collection of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, translated from Danish into English by a contemporary and friend of his. I needed some good reading, and couldn't find a cheap enough copy of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Maybe I'll get a library card or something.