City of Dreams - Day One

PRODUCTION JOURNAL

DAY ONE - Sunday June 12, 2005

The Dapper Man contemplates life without a spoon

The first day (night) was Sunday, filming in the transit museum for the story within the story. Period costumes, hair and make-up, a two-story underground location without air conditioning or an elevator and an extremely confined shooting location all spelled disaster, but the cast & crew (almost none of whom had ever worked together before) performed like a well-oiled machine.

All signs point to wardrobe

But, wait a second -- why start filming on a Sunday night? Excellent question. We had planned a normal Monday day shoot, but there was a last-minute SNAFU with the TA schedule and guess who had to budge? The no-budget indie film, of course. Monday is the only day the museum is closed to the public, so any other day was out of the question -- unless we were to shoot starting at 4 o'clock P.M. That couldn't work because we had day exteriors all the rest of the week and wouldn't have any cast & crew turnaround if we started the week filming nights. We also were unable to push these scenes to later in the week because we had to film the kids toward the end of the week because they weren't out of school until after Wednesday. I could go on, but you get the picture.

The Young Woman (Sarah Bloom) offers the Dapper man (Tim Bohn) a solution to his problem

A Sunday shoot was a brilliant solution because we could film all night and still have our turnaround for a Tuesday day shoot and thus finish five days' worth of material in a consecutive week. I was not entirely happy about starting the week with a complicated day from a production standpoint (see The Day from Hell in the EvenHand journal), but there seemed to be no other choice.

The day started with a two-hour load-in. It did not take a grasp of higher math to infer that this would mean a two-hour load-out at the end of the day. And the director of the museum told us that we were to be wrapped out at absolutely no later than 5 AM. All night long he would periodically ask how we were doing. My answer was invariably "Great," although there were certainly moments when my outer calm belied the turmoil within. We had a ton of work to do and between the load-in and the mysterious and extensive make-up and hair process it took quite a while before our first shot.

Jeffrey (DP), Bill (Key Grip) and Nat (Gaffer) had also devised some strange and excellent lighting rigs to simulate the movement of the Subway train, which was, in fact, sitting still in the Court Street station. The house lights were unscrewed one by one (they could not be turned off), wires were suspended between grip stands, bare light bulbs were hung on pulleys, and it was all adjusted and tweaked as necessary until it worked. The night was going awfully fast.

Grips and electrics work their magic

We also had to finish with Adrian N., who played the mysterious boy on the train, by 9 PM, so we scheduled his shots first. Fortunately, he was only featured in his brief sequence and did not appear in any other shot on the Subway, not even in the background. I think we wrapped him by nine fifteen. Close enough, apparently, as I didn't get yelled at by his parents.

Catching up on the latest news while the Dapper Man pines

As the night wore on, I became increasingly anxious about finishing all of our work on time. Over the last few hours of the shoot, I made sure that everyone knew that any sandbag, grip stand, nut or bolt that we were not using was brought back to the truck. I told Jeffrey that we would probably have to drop at least one of our last Subway scenes. Both were only one shot, but each was a brand new camera and lighting set-up on a different train altogether. Bill asked what I needed to finish the night's work. I described each of the remaining shots and he said "No problem, we'll make it happen." And by golly, between him and Nat and Jeffrey, we got every shot by 4:35 AM. I was completely impressed by the motivation of the cast & crew.

Normally, I would walk away from a wrap-out. The crew does not generally want the director to be humping sandbags up the stairs, but we were fighting the clock, so I pitched in. At the end of the day, all of our equipment was on the sidewalk by 5:10 AM. Wow.

Lolita

Back to City of Dreams

* DAY ONE * DAY TWO * DAY THREE * DAY FOUR * DAY FIVE *