The idea was to shoot at the Sea Grill, at Rockefeller Center. Somehow
this busy restaurant had been able to clear a room that looked out over the skating rink.
Monday, it seemed, Cherry was going uptown.
I was excited because just a few days before the scheduled shoot the man
who had posed for the giant golden statue of Prometheus that stands at rinkside, a man who
had posed some 60 years earlier, had died. And now, in the paper, there was an extensive
obituary about him. He'd otherwise led a normal sort of interesting life, nothing
extraordinary except the posing. A nice story, I thought, and an amazing obituary.
Problem was that on Sunday night the forecast called for rain on Monday,
and while the restaurant itself was an interior, the whole idea of shooting there was to
get people figure skating in the background. There would be no skating if it was raining
outside. The restaurant was not available on Tuesday.
With only three days remaining there was no way to wait until morning to
decide. The decision had to be made Sunday. That night, after wrap, the Leadership Team
met. Sevey and Sherri said
they had found a vacant space in Soho, in downtown New York that they thought could work
as both the restaurant and a gallery, the location for Scene #15.
Sherri said she could get the location dressed. The decision was made to
go with the new location, to scratch the Sea Grill, and let Sherri do her thing, which
meant designing and outfitting a big space to serve as two locations.
Everyone knew it would be a big job, there was nothing in the space but
more space. But what Sherri and Allyn and Melissa did was extraordinary.
Of course, nobody saw it happen. While the three were up all day and all
night, getting the job done, the others worked, wrapping the Hoboken location.
Meanwhile the big wall on the east front of the room was painted in large
checkerboxes, and accented with silver sconces.
Tables and sideboards were brought in and arranged.
 
In the north end of the big room a gallery was created with paintings from
Allyn and two of her friends, and with sculptures made by Melissa. "Artilingus,"
they called the exhibition. It was a big success.
These pictures don't come close to doing the job. The pictures I made of
the gallery are a disaster. Maybe you'll have to see the movie to be as amazed as we all
were today. Or, maybe by then you will have forgotten and you won't even realize that the
restaurant and gallery, just 24 hours before, had been a plain raw space.
As for Monday's weather, it did rain. In fact Monday, went down in history
as the rainiest March 9th in history. But oddly, all the rain came before dawn. It would
have been messy, but the Sea Grill probably would have worked.
But then we would have missed the amazing work that Sherri and the Art and
Props Departments did.
As Jon said, "Hey, this worked out just fine."
Peter Kreutzer
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