11/23/22
Newletter167
The Crack of Dawn
Some of my earliest memories, which would be about 1964 when I was six, was my mother taking me to the bowling alley so could practice. My mother was a champion bowler, and actually appeared on the TV show, Beat the Champ (she didn’t). My mother averaged about 200, which is impressive, but particularly impressive for a woman. There were many bowling trophies on the bookshelves – my dad had a couple, too. But I remember being six or seven and watching my mother bowl by herself: one strike or spare after another after another. What was really cool, I thought, was seeing the guy’s legs and arms on the pin-reset. Previous to it becoming mechanical, a human being was posted at the end of each lane and sat on a little elevator. When the pins got knocked over, the elevator came down and you could only see the guy’s legs and arms as they picked up the pins and reset them.
Maybe ten years later, when all the bowling trophies had been thrown out, and my mother never bowled anymore, I asked, “Why don’t you bowl anymore? You were a champ.” My mother held up her beautifully manicured and polished fingernails and wiggled them around. I said, “You gave up bowling for your fingernails?” She nodded and said yes. I said, “Is it worth it?” And she said, “Absolutely.”
I’m sure some other filmmaker pulled this same stunt at some point, although I’ve never heard about it. I’m a big fan of cleverness. You don’t win any awards for being a clever filmmaker, but I love hearing about these things. The last day of shooting on my film, (Stan Lee’s) Harpies (2007), which was actually a night shoot, was in the main museum of Sofia, Bulgaria. These museum folks left when we arrived, leaving us unsupervised in a big building full of their most precious treasures. I had an insane amount of script to shoot in one night: the entire opening of the film; and the entire finale, which included a chase scene and a shoot-out. This was eight pages of script, which is a lot. But wait, we also had two short scenes in a locker room for which we had never found a location, and even if we had, we didn’t have any time to go there. We would never get any more time to shoot, and the two scenes were dramatically crucial to the story. Nobody could solve the problem. I asked the art director, “Can you get me some lockers? Like two banks of eight or ten lockers each?” She said yes. I said, “I’ll shoot the scene in the lobby of the museum.” Nobody – the producers, the assistant directors, the art department – had any idea what I was talking about, and somehow couldn’t understand when I explained it. I said, “Just have the lockers there, a long bench, and a bunch of cardboard boxes.”
After shooting like complete maniacs for the first half of the day, at lunch, I asked the art department to bring in the lockers. The two scenes to be shot were between Stephen Baldwin, who played a museum security guard, and another guard. I had the two banks of lockers set up in a T-configuration, with space between them. The shot was Stephen at a locker, with his back to us, taking out his uniform and weapons. The other guard entered in the space between the two banks of lockers, so when Stephen turned we were now over his shoulder facing the other guard, who had the top of the T-bank of lockers behind him. We set up the shot and it looked fine, except you could see over the top of the lockers revealing a museum lobby. Here’s the amusing part, I think. The producers, the ADs, the cameraman, and the art director all seemed kind of pleased that my clever scheme didn’t seem to work. The cameraman, Ivo, who had long gray hair, a long gray beard, and was younger than me, said with his Bulgarian accent, “This doesn’t work, I can see off the set.” The producer said, “Are you expecting to fix this in post-production? That will increase the budget.” Being a snotty prick, I smirked at all of them and asked the art director, “Did you bring boxes like I asked?” She said yes. I said, “Put them on top of the lockers.” They did and you could no longer see off the top of the set. I then reversed the T-configuration of the lockers and got the reverse shots. The two scenes worked just fine, and you’d never suspect you were anywhere but in a locker room.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Have a bloody wonderful day.