Preface
I’m a dreamer and sometimes unrealistic about what I can and can’t do. If I am anything, I am stupidly fearless. My answer to most that ask something of me is, “yes I can.” This problem sometimes gets me in trouble. Sometimes it brings opportunity I could never imagine. If you know me, with the exception of my children’s well being, I am a high risk low reward kind of guy. BAD A$$ KILLERS, I knew was one of these opportunities. The closer we got to Principle Photography, the more I was worried we had bitten off more than we could chew. The budget I laid out for BAK was as bare bones as it could possibly be. (Maybe too little for what we were about to embark on.) During the “crewing up” process we had met with many people that had several years of experience on film productions, the only problem was they would work for our “rock bottom” rate but we couldn’t afford to put them up for the two week schedule which meant, if they weren’t within forty five minutes of the locations, we couldn’t use them. Now if you know where we were “casting” and “crewing” from then you know our “pickens were slim.”
On top of this, the Director and my schedule were completely opposite making it hard to really location scout. We more stumbled across, and then settled with the locations we decided on. (This problem will come into play later on in the story.) With a week before Principle Photography began I had simply adopted the theory, “the more people we have, the better off we are.” So flyers went out trying to recruit anybody that was sitting at home wanting to do something. I targeted out of work people who had been home collecting unemployment checks and were just bored out of their skull. At this point in time, I thought we could spend a day showing them what we needed them to do and it would be better than not having anybody there at all. Should have known we were in trouble when none of them showed for Production Meeting 3 days before shooting began. From there, it would be up to our 1st Assistant Director to keep them busy during shooting.
The 1st AD hired, was hired soley on his performance on Jeopardy. Jeopardy was a whole different monster than BAK entirely. Jeopardy was a 4 day non-stop shooting schedule that was very contained within a 7 man crew and a couple mile radius. (Not to mention everybody including myself were stuck in 3 hotel rooms for the duration of the shoot, so it wasn’t hard to keep up with everybody and the needs of the production. With Jeopardy we needed things fast and on the fly. BAK, wasn’t so fast and furious. It was more planning a day ahead of time. I was a little weary, but he had done a lot of pre-production work with the Director so I figure things would be fine despite the little reasons I worried. **The 1st AD is basically the first guy on the set and the last guy to leave. He keeps the whole production running smoothly and knows where everybody is at all times.
As we came within 72 hours of Principle Photography I got a terrible feeling. It was so bad I actually had my phone in my hand with the Director’s number keyed in to call him and tell him we needed to push the shoot a couple of weeks to give us a little more time to ASSURE we had everything covered. I held that phone to my mouth for nearly ten minutes, thinking it over. All the schedules had been sent and since we were doing the old school production board way of scheduling, rescheduling would have been an undertaking. “What if one of the actor’s schedule didn’t mesh?” “What if one of our Day Labor guys found a job in that week we had pushed the film back?” “What if the delay took faith away from us?” I hung the phone up. All the equipment from Camera, to Editing, to Lighting was mine. We weren’t renting nor did we have production insurance which was ultimately my biggest worry. If something would happen to my computers, camera, anything, I would pay out of pocket to have it fixed because the pay check I was getting wasn’t enough to clear a button on my HD camera. I couldn’t back out. I had given my word. I could only hope I had enough time to police my gear all over the production. So I committed, never expressing my worry to the Director, deciding to go with the original schedule, knowing we had short cutted way too many little details but said, “We’ll figure it out as we go.” That was not a good theory to have for filmmaking, but, trying to do a feature film in two weeks on a $15,000 budget wasn’t such a good idea either....
To Be Continued in...
....Chapter 1 - A White Walled Basement
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