Takin' It To The Streets

Haven't got much time to elucidate, pontificate, explainacate. So here's a few photos and captions.


Director of Photography Irek Hartowicz considers the situation on 46th Street.


Olenyka the Script Supervisor "listens" to the video assist operator.


The green poster in the background, the one for a production of "Waiting For Godot", that very poster is now framed and hanging in my editing room. It's not a real production. But in the movie, a couple of the main characters go to this really bad off-Broadway show. And that's it.


We cluttered the curbs and sidewalks on 46th Street.


But then the show moved to Broadway and 51st just north of Times Square.


Most film crews are single-mindedly preoccupied with one thing and one thing only; am I getting the proper number of hours off before the next call? Here, Video Assist Guy studied the "one-line" schedule in pursuit of the answer to this very question.


Meanwhile, the three male leads are doing a scene in which they stride resolutely up Broadway...


...and speak enthusiastically.


Later, Marius got the guys to record "wild" lines, lines that I will use in another scene.

Okay, gotta go.

Who Are We?

Every day when I see what the McCain campaign is saying and doing I get heartsick. They are not Americans. They do not believe in traditional American values.

To fully catalog how the Republican Party and its amoral, cynical leaders are chipping away at all the things we treasure as Americans would take volumes and volumes. The sheer, shameless contempt the right wing has for the people of this country is astonishing to consider. But it's there. It's there in the pernicious, feckless race-baiting, the whisper campaign designed to scare you away from voting for a black man, the lies, the anti-intellectualism, the base appeals to the darkest sides of our nature...

It's disgusting. And it's saddening. And it's how the right wing of this country wants to discredit rational thought and science and individual ambition. Because a plutocracy can't thrive with an educated public. And if the American public once again allows itself to be ruled by fear, dragged ever more into the shadows of fascism then we will be able to point to now -- to right now -- as the moment when we decided to sacrifice America on the altar of hate.

Never before has there been a moment of greater importance for the future of ourselves and for our country. We stand at a crossroads at which we must choose the light or choose darkness.

It really is that simple.

Shagadelic

So I'm getting new carpet. They slop on this green glop which dries clear and tacky in about .5 seconds. Then they deal out the carpet tiles like playing cards. This is the pattern:


What do you think?

In a Place As Strange As Brooklyn

Being fully caught up with the editing and having a half-day wait for new film, I decided to hang out on set. Today the show started in Times Square then moved to Brooklyn. Deep, distant, heart-of-darkness Brooklyn. I didn't go to the Times Square shoot but I did grab the 'D' train and trundled to Fort Hamilton.


Fort Hamilton has a mighty concentration of orthodox Jews. That probably explains why the hospital at which we were shooting is called Maimonides Medical Center.

This is Maimonides




The scene involves two of our principal male characters accidentally running in to each other at a sex therapist's office, each one loathe to admit the real reason why they are there. I was drafted to play one of the patients waiting in a chair outside the office. So when the two leads get in to a bit of a shouting situation, blurting out humiliating details, myself and two others have to be drawn by the commotion then pretend to be uninterested. It was fun.


Ville Haspasalo plays Sauna. In the story, Sauna owns a gym. He's a ladies' man. But not after St. Valentine puts a dispiriting curse on he and his friends. Hence their encounter at the sex therapist's office.

Below, Aleksei and Ville rehearse.


And Marius & Co. watch...


Richard Murphy is our set mixer, the guy who records the sound.


Richard recorded "Miracle at St. Anna," some "Sex in the City," and about a bajillion Laws & Orderesses.

Below is a comely extra.


Monica sits across from me in the scene. We created a mutual backstory for our characters in which we had gone out for Indian food, gotten sick, and come to the hospital. Our intention of falling to the floor and writhing in gastrointestinal distress was met with skepticism from Marius.


In spite of Marius' inability to understand quality collaboration, work proceeded...


Continuity pictures were taken...


Extras were wrangled out of their pen...


And we were off.


I'll probably cut me out of the movie.

Soup Nazi

I've found this great place across the street on 8th Avenue called Hale and Hearty. It's a soup/salad/sandwich joint. Newfangled and shiny and fantastic. Amazing, filling soups and terrific sandwiches and wraps. It's seems to be shaping up as my every day thing.

Which got me thinking about soup. I always had it in my head that somewhere in the neighborhood is the actual soup place on which SEINFELD's famous "soup Nazi" was based. So I took to the interwebs and found out.

It's right next door.


Yeah, it's literally right next to where I work, here on 55th Street. For now, it's closed and a notice in the window suggests that owner/character Ali Yeganeh is now in Argentina for the Summer. Will he be back? Or will it be "No soup for you!"

That Looks...snif...Great

What the hell is a cold anyway? I mean seriously. What is it? I'd rather fracture my tibia in three places than suffer the indignities of the common cold. Standing sheepishly on the subway platform trying to hide the snot dribbling from your nostrils... What...is...that?


So I had to drag my sniffly butt downtown, to Post Works in SoHo. Post Works is doing our telecine, our sound, AND our final lab work. But this afternoon was the first day of film transfer. So I needed to be in the room to supervise the set-up. At least the room is dark so they can't see my red nostrils.


I did have to press the colorist to properly execute an anamorphic 16x9 frame so that I can cut the movie in the Avid the way I want to. There was some resistance but eventually they agreed.

After all that wrangling, I was thirsty. They said there was water in the hall outside the suite. You can see it - right there, against the windows...


But there was no way I was gonna go back and forth with my little Dixie cup that I could swig down in one fell gulp. So I asked for something a bit more voluminous. That's what I got.


Finally after three hours the session was over and I headed out in to the drizzly twilight. I think I'm starting to connect a little bit.


I'd feel better if I felt better.

I Have A Cold

I'm suspending my campaign in order to deal with this crisis.