bloggie blog

Good morning! At the start of the second day of shooting, with the dogs barking like crazy here at the Calabasas house, I offer a frank summary of yesterday: inefficient.

Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of waiting on any set. And in almost any new endeavor in any field there are often start-up issues and time killers galore on day one. So I simply did what I could to overlook the down time. In all, I feel good about how I did my stuff yesterday, and that’s what you can do. And it helped in a sense, because Guy is laid-back, but not pleased with how the day is going at his house.

The other thing to say about yesterday is that everybody here is nice, easy to work with, and all that. A good group. Excellent!

Today is Mothers Day, and we’re back in Calabasas, shooting indoors scenes. The cast is smaller today, but the dogs are barking. They weren’t barking yesterday. But it only helps, because Guy has a couple of lines like “Damn dog,” or worse. ’Sall good.

I’m in Calabasas, at a new house in a gated community. It’s got a pool. The walls and carpet and everything are on the white side of things inside and the orange side of things outside. You know the kind of place I’m talking about. It’s Guy’s house. I’m Guy in the movie.

This morning, Guy overslept and walks outside to see a raging pool party in honor of his mother-in-law. So I’m made up as if I overslept. This is a good way to start shooting a movie! It’s good to know that for the first scene it’s okay to be tired, to look tired, to not be your best self or worry at all about forcing things. Not that I look bad at all — I’m made up today in the trusty hands of Michael, who will be with us for the duration of the shoot.

Here’s the other thing to write about this morning: names. I’ve met about 25 people so far. Please don’t quiz me on their names! But I look forward to working with the same people for many days and getting to know them quite well.

Okay, it’s almost noon. My first scene will shoot soon. The RED camera is up and running now, shooting establishing shots of all the gossipy ladies in the hot tub. So I sign off for now.

On February 2, a little over three months ago, I auditioned for an untitled feature. The truth is that I can barely remember that audition. I read the scene three times, and it went fine, but there were 4 people in the room and it’s a blur in retrospect. I guess Jason and Brian where two of them. Jason and Brian and the guys who wrote Look in the Mirror and are producing and directing it. (It went from untitled, to The Whistler to Look in the Mirror.) The two other guys in the room … will I meet them again? Our first day of shooting centers around a large house party, with pool, barbecue and Nanna’s birthday. There ought to be room for them there, and if they come, it would help me feel better about the beginning.

Anyway, after Jason expressed interest in me, I became more curious about them — I needed to learn more about them because it was a large project we were talking about! So we met at a coffee shop on Beverly Blvd, and after a lovely 2-hour talk, I felt good about the project.

And now it’s about to start. The mental preparation is there. The hair is cut. And now my work is to sleep 7 hours, awake and prep, then schlep what needs to be schlepped to Calabasas, and then it begins!

Pushing Daises is done. The final episode has aired now in the UK, even if it hasn’t aired here in the States yet. Do you miss it? In a word, I don’t.

On the good side, it was different. A lot of the top shows are so similar, and this show was different. I grant that that might be good in and of itself.

But the apparent sense of insight from listing amounts of time in accuracy up to the second; the repeated use of “The facts were these” as our narrator’s segue; and the very fact that the narrator has a British accent: all these actually give a false sense of insight. All these turn off the thoughtful viewer. And so many scenes are painfully created in a way that is very far from reality. A strange and unholy blend of attempts to be very real and yet very false in the above, in casting, in art design and color, in dialog, etc. This is why it never really worked for me. Also, it’s a little too copycat if you’ve seen a certain extremely famous French movie. Also, the cartoon voice of Ms. Chenoweth (and some guest actors) is a little too, well, cartoony. Also, the new veneers and reworked bangs that Anna Friel has started wearing strike me as contrived. Also, the preposterous setup of lovers that can never touch — that’s going nowhere unless they jump the shark.

Okay, enough. Did you love it? Tell me why. I’m listening.