August 8th, 1999

Dave Gil goofing off as Mun holds the China Ball lamp that we've taped to a boom pole. This was our primary light on HH. And no, I'm not kidding.
-----------

Man, running around doing things with NO permission is quite the rush. You never know what bullshit story you're going to have to make up on the spot to convince someone to let you shoot there.

Cop come by? You're a student shooting a film.

Nosy neighbors? You're shooting something for your son's school's project.

Inquisitive people? You're shooting a video for a movie you wanna get into Sundance. Can they help?

It's like that 80's song. Lies lies lies...yeah.

August 8th

Started late afternoon, so I finally caught up on some of my sleep. Our first shot was guerilla filmmaking at the Super Fresh.

No permit. No insurance. No permission.

No problems, either, it turned out. Not one person bothered us, not even the two cops who pulled up near us. They went in to get a pizza. I mentioned how well that went and that we were ahead of schedule and everyone told me to shut up; I'd curse us.

We were about 45 minutes ahead of schedule, but it was raining and the later scenes involved outside stuff. We shot anyway. It went well. We even got to use a restaurant called Granny's, got permission and all. I forgot to get a location release signed, but I'll do that the minute we're done shooting. I promise.

On to my brother Paul's. He plays an artist who is stalked and killed by Aric.

He was a real sport. We shot his death scene and all, even splashed water(doubling for gas) all over his room and he didn't mind. He was late for a family reunion, which I was AWOL for. Hey, gotta have priorities.

Went on to Rick Shipley's death scene. Got the locals to cooperate with us and they even let us run a power cord into the building. Went off good, should look really nice when color corrected.
Our next scene was in Aric's car, which was Rick Ganz's car. It was full of stuff though, since he was moving. We had to go move him to Frederick before we could shoot the next scene. We were ahead of schedule, but that would set us back.

After dropping Rick's stuff off, we went to Annapolis to look for well-lit roads. We stopped at Denny's for a healthy breakfast. For some reason, they had the A.C. set at about Absolute Zero.

Dave Mun told a funny story about how he lost his finger(he's missing one, in case you didn't hear). Anyway, when he was younger, he was in a class to learn how to catch throwing stars. His master threw one and Mun reached up to catch it. "Did I get it?" he asked. Say this like you're an ancient Oriental Martial Arts Teacher: "You failed".

Cracked us up, anyway. All any of us had to say to get the group cracking up was "You failed".

We found the Annapolis Mall to be pretty lit, so we figured we'd drive around in the parking lot, in the road that goes in a huge circle around it. You wouldn't be able to tell, since the focus was on Rick.

Anyway, we'd just started shooting and security drove up and asked what we were doing. I told him we were shooting something for class. Did we have permission, he wanted to know. I told him no, but we'd be gone in five minutes.

Not good enough, apparently. He kicked us out.

What an asshole. Annapolis is like that. I think it must be a huge city full of closet cannibals or something, because I've never seen a town so afraid of cameras.

Later, Rick started to question whether he wore the right wardrobe in the right shots. Just what I needed. We didn't have anyone in charge of continuity, so I'd asked him to go through his script and make a note of what outfits he wore and when. So much for that.

We ended up shooting until 4am in the morning, but it wasn't that big a deal since we had a late start the next day.