RAZOR DAYS Countdown Begins

As of this very moment, 10:30 am on Wednesday, we have less than 48 hours until the start of production on Razor Days, our sixth feature and completely different from anything we’ve done or tried to do before. Straight, vicious drama with elements of horror.

The cast: Amy Lynn Best (and producer), Debbie Rochon, Bette Cassett (ThinkGeek's Zombie Girl), David Marancik (The Sadist), Alyssa Herron (Splatter Movie) and Jeff Monahan (John Sayles' Lone Star). Photographed by Bart Mastronardi (Vindication). Sound by Rich Conant (The Absence of Light). Special Effects by Scott Conner (Grace, The Deadliest Warrior), Jerry Gergely (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5) and Gino Crognale (Predators, The Mist). Assistant Director and Publicity Michael Varrati (Ultra-Violent Magazine, Demon Divas and the Lanes of Damnation). Produced by Alan Rowe Kelly (I'll Bury You Tomorrow). Executive Producer Bob Kuiper (Sirens of Cinema Magazine). Written and directed by…me.

The first draft of the screenplay was finished back in 2005, but its history extends slightly beyond that.

I was unemployed in 2005, but managing to scrape together a decent almost-living writing for Femme Fatales, Cinefantastique and Draculina. Right before the company's then-owner sold FF and CFQ and screwed all of her writers out of tens of thousands of dollars, collectively, but that’s a different story.

Around this time, Vertigo Comics, thanks to the best-sellers Swamp Thing, Sandman, The Preacher, etc., was at the top of the business and had opened its doors to freelance pitches. I’d written for magazines, movies, radio and newspaper at that point. Ghost-written for novelists here and there. Ghost-edited for many more. But I’d never written for comics and it’s still a dream of mine. And I loved so many of the Vertigo titles—and so many of their authors were personal deities of mine—that I started working on a treatment.

I wanted to do something Hellblazer-ish, something Preacher-ish. Fill an Alan Moore-esque world with Neil Gaiman’s grasp of storytelling and sharpened with Warren Ellis’s gleeful disregard for human safety. I wanted everything to coalesce into something that would blow editor Karen Berger out of her socks.

And it started with a Berni Wrightson cover. Twisted Tales #2 from Pacific Comics. To my knowledge, Berni only did the cover and not the interior. Still, that image haunted and excited me since my then less-distant childhood and opened up a doorway in my head, through which all the other ideas spilled and tripped all over each other.

Razor Days started as an occult mystery about modern-day cannibals—admittedly but only partially inspired by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and 3—and the question: “What happens ten minutes after those movies end? How does the victim cope with the horror and even start to put his or her life together?” Surrounding the question were hard-boiled detectives, women with survivor’s guilt and weapons-carry permits, and a fallen angel who may or may not have been documenting Earth’s history as it happened.

Pretty crowded, yeah.

I finished the treatment, outline and first issue, sent it off to Karen Berger and never, ever heard from her. Which was not a big surprise.

But the central question kept bothering me. How does someone, in real life, get over something like that?

I’ve always been fascinated by the case of Colleen Stan, who was kidnapped by a wacko named Cameron Hooker, and kept in a coffin-like box under his bed, 23 hours a day, for seven years. When she was finally freed, she went on to testify against Hooker (and his wife) and became an abuse counselor. But how did she recover? That’s the part no one ever tells you. What the hell is the aftermath of something like that?

That’s when I started to streamline Razor Days into a screenplay. I jettisoned all the fantastical elements of the script and focused on the survivors. Three women, each of whom had been the victim of horrible events in their past, and how their paths brought them to each other. And how each one had dealt—and continued to deal—with their traumatic memories.

That’s the story I wanted to tell. And the questions I wanted to try and answer.

And in less than 48 hours, that’s the story we’ll start to tell. The answers might not come so easily.

LBP'S 20TH ANNIVERSARY FAREWELL THROW DOWN

Like Brett Favre, KISS and Cher, the Low Budget Pictures consortium has announced their retirement. The brainchild of one Chris Seaver (as if there were more than one), who, at the tender age of 12, conceived, shot and completed four movies in one afternoon. Twenty years later he and his loyal compatriots have a completed catalog equal to Bollywood’s annual releasing schedule.

Seaver and the gang leave behind a legacy that will not be matched in our lifetime. Among their titles include Anal Paprika, Filthy McNasty, Terror at Bloodfart Lake, Carnage for the Destroyer, Wet Heat, Mulva: Zombie Asskicker, Mulva 2: Kill Teenape, Quest for the Egg Salad, The Destruction Kings and Heather and Puggly Cockblock the Apocalypse.

They have brought to life such characters as the titular “Teen-Ape”, the time-traveling misogynist semi-simian and heart-throb; Mulva, the titular chocolate-addicted scourge of the underworld; the dentally-challenged uber-lesbian Puggly and her sister, the intestinally-challenged Heather; the pigmentally-challenged Mr. Bonejack; and, of course, the enigmatic Stamos Configuration.

It is not hyperbole to say that no other independent film company has crafted such an elaborate world or as definitive a style as Seaver and LBP. With a character roster larger than that of The Simpsons or South Park, portrayed by Seaver, Meredith Host, the adjective-defying Indovina Brothers (and the Indovina Sister), Casey Bowker, Jesse Ames, Josh Suire, Matt and Emily Meister, Jason McCall, Lauren P. Seavage, Shawn Green, A.J. Stabone, Noel Williams and special guest stars including the likes of Billy Garberina (Feeding the Masses), Trent Haaga (Terror Firmer), Doug Sakmann (The Re-Penetrator), Henrique Couto (Demon Divas and the Lanes of Damnation), Andy Copp (The Atrocity Circle), Troma President Lloyd Kaufman and the Undisputed Queen of Independent Cinema Debbie Rochon, the LBP gang have battled sex-crazed demons, pretentious vampires, transvestite crime lords, Satan, rednecks, nerds, geeks, fools, tools, and John Hughes stereotypes with irreverence, scatology and aplomb.

Their movies have played far and wide, on screens in theaters and on TVs in hotel rooms. Fan favorites, convention favorites, VIPs and personas-non-grata. Controversial, satirical, psychotic, tasteless, brilliant, ludicrous, energetic—often in one single shot—the independent film world will not see their likes again.

Personal anecdote: It was always my dream to appear in a Low Budget Pictures’ movie.

…No, wait, not “dream”… that other thing… “dread”.

It has always been my dread to appear in a Low Budget Pictures film. And that dread/dream was fulfilled a few years ago when I was asked to portray the character “Brick Stackmeat” (or was it “Stack Brickmeat”?) in a movie that…well, never saw the light of day. But that’s okay, because by the end of the shoot, four more movies had been conceived by the feverish mind of Chris Seaver including the very-near-mystical-experience Deathbone! 

But we have come here to bury LBP not praise them (strike that, reverse it). So it is with heavy heart and dangling fortitude that I invite everyone within the sound of my typing to the afore-titled: LBP's 20th Anniversary Farewell Throw Down/ 35mm film and Video fest!

Held this coming weekend (okay, tomorrow), February 12, 2011, in the gorgeous Palace Theater in even-more gorgeous Syracuse, NY, join the likes of which you’ve never seen the like and witness pure LBP splendor (Splenda will also be provided) during this all-day, all-night and part-of-the-next-morning extravaganza. Films include:

* LBP’s Teenape Goes To Camp

* LBP’s Geek War

* AND the premiere of the TROMA/LBP Rough Cut of Teenape Vs The Monster Nazi Apocalypse starring Debbie Rochon—never before screened and unlikely ever to be screened again!

And if that weren’t enough there’s also:

* JR Bookwalter’s 80’s Zombie Classic The Dead Next Door featuring the

voice of Bruce Campbell and produced by Sam Raimi!

* 35MM 80’s action cheese fest Never Too Young To Die starring John Stamos and Gene Simmons

* 35MM 80’s slasher gem Blood Rage

* and the very special showing of “remember when Mel wasn’t a douschebag” The Road Warrior!

The evening will be hosted by a variety of famous people but more importantly Amy Lynn Best and myself, joining the fun, doing the frug, dealing the drugs, bringing in the noize and neglecting the funk.

Tickets at the door are just $15 (just less than $2 per movie, for pete’s sake!). The fun starts at 4pm, ends a little after, picks up again immediately and lasts a lifetime.

When asked “Where were you when LBP called it a day?” don’t be that guy who has to say “Drunk, crying and alone and covered in sperm”. There’s absolutely no reason for you to be alone.

Click HERE, read more, rinse, repeat and see you tomorrow. 

More words about the RAZOR DAYS shoot, Thursday past.

Thursday, November 11, Happy Cloud Pictures shot a very tiny piece of what will be our sixth feature film. Those of you who have been along the HCP ride, with its odd twists and unexpected stops for maintenance and to transfer passengers, know how long this journey has been. We don’t choose our productions lightly and don’t leap blindly into the movie chasm, so we haven’t made anything we were ashamed of in thirteen years. But this new film is different, because it’s been alive almost as long as the company. (Almost. HCP formed in 1997 and we didn’t conceive the first draft of Razor Days until 2002, but it’s been alive, in one form or another, all of this time.) And now we’re finally in a position to make it.

I don’t want to give away too many details at the moment—yesterday I presented the story of its life in fairy-tale form—but I do want to say again that this is a different animal for us. We’re trying something different: a horror movie.

I’ve been saying for years that I don’t feel like we’ve really made a horror movie yet. We’ve done hybrids— comedy/horror, science fiction/horror, something-slash-horror. Razor Days is as much a thriller as it is a horror film, truth be told, but it’s still horror at the base. Horrific things happen and not all of them of the “ooh, cool effect!” variety. So I hope you’ll all bear with both my excitement and anxiety, since this was such a long time coming.

After a few months of wrangling and ironing out legal details, HCP formed a partnership with RAK Media, the publisher of Sirens of Cinema, to make Razor Days our first feature. There are grand plans for it, but it has to be made first. That first “production” step was taken on the aforementioned Thursday.

To announce officially, Razor Days stars Debbie Rochon, Amy Lynn Best, David Marancik (The Sadist), Jeff Monahan (Lone Star) and Alan Rowe Kelly (A Far Cry from Home), with Michael Varrati, Gwendolyn and fan-favorite Bill Homan making special appearances (as well as many of our HCP family members). Alan is also taking on a goodly portion of produce-orial duties. Robert Kuiper is the exec producer. Special Make-up designed by Gino Crognale (Sorority Row, Hostel III). Special props were created by Chris Pezzano. Cinematography would be conjured from the magical realm of electromagnetism by Dominick Sivilli (The Tell-Tale Heart) and Bart Mastronardi (Vindication). The bulk of filming will take place in the Spring of 2011.

But we all really wanted to get started sooner. So we got together and worked something out.

Two years ago, I covered George A. Romero Presents Deadtime Stories for Fangoria. Jeff Monahan wrote the three stories told in that upcoming anthology and directed one of the segments. He cast Amy in a cameo for the last story and we hung out on the set for the majority of that particularly shoot. Which took place in the historic Laurel Caverns outside of Uniontown, PA. Thirteen-plus stories down and dozens of miles long, the caverns are a natural cave formation open to the public nine months of the year. Located at the bottom of a very steep mountain road, wintertime is treacherous in that area.

But the location is beautiful inside and out and I fell in love with the idea of shooting something there, and hey, our Razor Days script requires a cave setting! So what the heck, right?

We got the ball rolling back in July. First we needed to obtain permission. Then we had to make sure the partnership was in place, legally, so we could transfer our production insurance. Then came all the team building—assembling the right people with the right skills for the right time period, then figuring out how to get them down here and then what to do with them once they arrived. All the stuff I hate to deal with. Fortunately, Amy’s really good at all this stuff. So even though she’s one of the film’s stars, she undertook most of the pre-production duties.

All the big-picture stuff fell into place rather quickly, but the details started to dissolve. Our previous insurance company had restructured during the whole “economic clusterfuck” period, so we had to scramble to find new coverage. Fortunately, Alan was able to provide that solution after weeks of false starts. (This wasn’t an option—not only did we need to provide the cavern’s administrators with proof of coverage but we weren’t about to haul a dozen or so people 100 feet into the bowels of the Earth without making sure they’d be taken care of should a vicious cave troll eat their foot during filming!) But even with Alan’s guidance, we were still racing the clock and the calendar. The caverns are closed during the week after Labor Day, then close completely the weekend after Thanksgiving due to mountain snow causing untold amounts of potential death. The closer we got to Thanksgiving, the more we risked inclement weather, postponement of production and loss of mojo.

So I lit incense to Cinemagog, the God of Fillmmaking, and left out a dollar bill as an offering to Ifirs, the God of Executive Producing, in the hopes of getting these guys on our side. I also shouted to the heavens that I was not, nor could I possibly be confused with, Terry Gilliam, so they if they could see their way towards laying off, we’d be grateful.

The overall plan was to shoot as many of the little cave flashbacks as possible in as short a time as was feasible, then cobble together the footage for an extended trailer. It wasn’t a “film shoot” per ce as it was a trial run for the new family. Having met David Marancik and Dominick Sivilli socially, I’d never worked with them before. Alan had done some voice over work for me and sat for an interview for the Res. Game DVD, but we hadn’t done a project together. Heck, we’ve known Debbie for over a decade and shot five movies with her but for never more than a day or two at a time! So this was gonna be something new.

Fortunately, everyone likes everybody (and David). Plus, I had on hand the additional wonderful person of Michael Varrati, Razor Days’ publicist and HCP’s therapeutic counselor. He’s gotten through many a stressful convention and I felt confident he’d keep me from leaping off a ledge during filming.

So I don’t know if it was the incense, the begging, combined positive karma or if the universe was just in a particularly good mood last week, but the one-day shoot came off without a hitch and barely over budget! Alan, Dom and David were not killed in a horrible moose-crossing accident on their way from NY to PA. The Pittsburgh Airport did not give Debbie Ebola, the insurance company didn’t try to stick us for a dollar-per-dollar policy, the caverns did not fall in, explode or mysteriously move (though our GPS refused to actually get us there!) prior to our arrival (nor while we were there). In fact there was only one isolated bit of idiocy and that was on my end.

In the summer, I decided that HCP should upgrade its lighting kit. Perusing the wonderful digital garage sale that is Ebay, I came across a gorgeous little three-lamp halogen kit for a decent price. Ordered it, received it, looked at it, oohed, ahhed, and put the damn thing away. Without ever checking to see if the lamps had bulbs in them.

And, of course, they’re the kinds of bulbs made by Madagascan children, rolled on the thighs of plump Cuban women and only during the third full moon of the year and are not, therefore, available at Wal-Mart.

I don’t embarrass easily.

You know those dreams you have where you’re speaking in public and you realize you’re naked?

I get applause in those dreams.

But hanging out with a professional director of photography doing an equipment check and realizing that you didn’t—not once in three months—make sure you had light bulbs for your light kit—it’s a painful moment.

Dom rolled with it. Gave me a hug. Told me it would be okay. Realized that he had no way home without the other two. Told me it would be okay again. Thanks to Bill Homan and his 500 watt lighting kit, it was. But tell that to a drunk and sobbing me, crafting a noose out of old 16mm short ends!

Fortunately, the run-up to that was both relaxing and productive. After working part of the day and all of us rehearsing for the rest of Tuesday, Debbie, Amy and Michael sat down with their laptops and commenced a marathon Facebook chat, ending up with 200 posts on one thread. And if that isn’t a record… really, it should be. Meanwhile, I edited, chimed in when I had something incredibly witty to say, and endured Glee. Amy and Michael wanted to watch it, Debbie went to her happy place to avoid it; I wound up watching it. And paying attention to it. It was their “It Gets Better” episode. Meanwhile, we were all be-dogged by a quartet of canines confused by the company.

Wednesday night, prior to the humiliation brought about by lack of bulbs, Alan, David and Dom managed to reach Waynesburg unscathed and we had a production meeting over a Bob Evans dinner that was slightly less bland than not eating at all. It was then that I realized that we were lacking in specific set dressing. The cave is meant to be a cannibal lair. I had no bones. By which, I mean, external bones (x-rays have revealed me to be vertebrate, thank you).

Bill Homan to the rescue again. “How many do you need?” he asked. Which is not the first time such an ominous question was proffered to a ridiculous question. “A few,” I said. “A handful.”

“I don’t have hands,” he said. “I have legs and skulls and ribs and—”

The next morning, there was a large box waiting for me outside his house, filled to the brim with what used to be inside a small herd of Bambis. Like the cannibals in my story, however, Bill eats everything he kills, so he’s given a carnivore pass. Unlike the office bozos I’ve worked with in the past that just like to “kill stuff”.

Convinced I had left nothing else behind or unchecked, we led the caravan to the caverns. Michael and I sat in the backseat of the car, encumbered by heavy equipment, while Amy and Debbie drove in the front, less encumbered but laden with coffee. If any of you out there have ever met Amy or Debbie, you know that coffee is consumed by the oceanfuls. A week later and my house still smells like the inside of Juan Valdez’s bladder.

One grievous mistake made that cannot be solely attributed to me was the notion that we would accomplish more with a smallish crew. This was meant to be a fast, one-day shoot. Get in, get out. It was a paid shoot, all professional and everything, and we were hesitant to go too crazy over what would amount to about four minutes of footage and an ersatz trailer. So we’d all slap on our multiple hats and schlep cable, whip up craft services, provide make-up, “Hollywood” bounce boards and flags, whatever. Just the seven of us.

Do you know how long a walk 100 near-vertical feet is? You do? Are you over 30? You’re not? Then shut up, Mr. 127 Days. I’m still amazed that we met neither death-by-exhaustion nor a Minotaur during our frequent treks up and down that cavernous mountain. Because, of course, the room that wound up as everyone’s favorite was one of the furthest down from the visitor’s center and homebase. Glorious, grand, proof-of-God’s majesty, yeah, yeah, yeah. Still a long, steep fucking walk! And we all discovered our inner Indian (Cheroke, Ute or Algonquin—your preference) by getting lost at least once and following the light-kit wheel-tracks to freedom and sunlight again. Made us all feel smart and survivorish. 

 Photo by Amy Lynn Best

The temperature that deep in Laurel Caverns is about 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit year round. Which is fine in August. Coming in from 60 degrees outside to a ten-degree drop, stripping to the waist (in David’s case) or tied into limb-sleep stress positions (in Debbie’s case), and staying there for six hours well…Hey, Neil Marshall—you know what I’m talking about, right? Holla!

Anyway…

The benefit of shooting only flashbacks is that you can cheat a lot of things. Hairstyles don’t have to match precisely if there are other scenes between the shots you’re getting. The make-up can change. You can dictate the amount of time the characters are spending even if the script doesn’t spell it all out. The drawback is actually trying to figure all of that out and explaining it to everyone else when the script doesn’t spell it all out.

Actually, that was the biggest drawback of all, for me, at least: directing. I’ve joked in the past that actors are little more than “walking props”. I’ve often called the “noise bags” to the set when I’m ready to roll. And I’ve gone on and on how I much I dislike the actual production part of filmmaking. Let me write it, let me edit it, and tell me how all that middle stuff went. You know, for my blog.

But here we were, half-a-mile down in the belly of the Earth, the stars hoisting and toting along with the grips (which, that day, included Walt and Ian, two of the Caverns’ caretakers; the wonderful Doreen, who facilitated all of our desires, wisely stayed in the visitor’s center where it was saner—uh, warmer). Everyone was enduring the same chill, the same dirty conditions (the bowels of the Earth are just filthy!). And they kept asking me questions—endless questions—simply because I was the so-called director!

Now, since we started, Amy and I have always operated as a team. We’re like a married version of the Coen Brothers. Generally, even when I’m listed as “director”, Amy will work with the actors and I’ll work with the camera department. I’m just not an emotionally-giving guy. “I wrote the damned thing! It’s right there! What more do you need? Just do that!”

That’s not the best tactic, apparently.

And while the two of us had discussed the scenes ahead of time and the best way to play them, I was still, for all intents and purposes, directing the scenes. So I had to have answers. Which meant I had to know how to communicate those answers. “Act more!” would be unacceptable. 

 Photo by Amy Lynn Best

I was grateful that the first few shots we were doing were cutaways—close-ups of eyes, shoulders, props, things that formerly resided inside deer. All I had to do was say, “Great”, when Dominick asked me how I liked the framing. While he did that, Alan worked make-up and Amy did both producing and Best Boy work for Dom, I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

Like I said: there was to be no cheating on this one. I couldn’t rely on Amy taking the reins with the actors as she did on Splatter Movie because she was going to need directing as well. I couldn’t fake my way through a scene with an Irish accent, joking and calling out “Gimme an Alien 3,” as I did on A Feast of Flesh. If everyone else was going to treat this like a hardcore professional film, I would have to as well. (This is not to belittle anyone else’s contribution to previous HCP films, nor to belittle the films themselves. We’ve never made anything I was anything less than sinfully proud of. This is all meant to bespeak of my attitude towards things. I rely on others to do excellent jobs. But now I had to leave the dugout, to use a barely-understood sports term.)

 

Photo by Amy Lynn Best

  

After the first couple of shots, we broke to set up for an elaborate take. We realized that something had been left behind “upstairs” and Amy took it upon herself to go running. “Direct your actors,” she told me and gave me a big smile. It was as much a pep talk as it was a suggestion. If you’ve been together with someone for sixteen years, you don’t need an “atta boy” every couple of minutes. But a well-timed one is always welcome.

There has only ever been one other moment in my life when the meaning of the word “directing” actually dawned on me, and that was a small test shoot in a hotel room after a convention, for a movie that never came together. But I had three professional actors before me who all needed to know specific things for the scene. Their questions crystallized the concept of “motivation” for me. The word wasn’t just a tired punchline. It wasn’t a prompt for the comeback “to get through the scene so we can go home”. “Motivation” is a single-word short-hand for “what is happening and what are we doing at this moment in time?” It also implies “what came before?” And I needed to have those answers. 

Suddenly, I had them.

Everyone down in that cavern was a friend of mine; some for a very long time and some I’d only gotten close to recently. Half-a-mile beneath the surface of the Earth was a safe place then, because there was a common goal ahead of us. But if I was going to say that, for all intents and purposes, that I was the captain of this particular subterranean ship, then goddamn it, I’d better captain.

I forced myself to forget my own anxieties. I called upon what I knew of these people as both people and artists. I told them what I wanted. 

 

Frame Grab - photography Dominick Sivilli

The first couple of times, I botched it. I’m not always the clearest of communicators, so it took me a few tries to find the right expressions to convey what was in my head. I had to dictate how these people felt. It’s not enough to say “Okay, you’re scared because this guy is doing this.” Of course you are. But scared how? For life and limb? To what degree? Terror or hysteria? And what else? Grief and shock? “You’re happy”. Yeah? Happy how?

Directing isn’t a con game. Friedkin can get away with shooting off a gun mid-take to get a reaction and Norman Taurog can threaten to shoot Jackie Cooper’s dog but that’s all smoke. That isn’t building a scene, that’s manipulation. That’s control, not shared art. If I wanted David to convey happiness, I couldn’t just buy him a puppy. 

 Frame Grab - photography Dominick Sivilli

Filmmaking isn’t like sex, as Peter Bogdanovich once said, because you never get to see anyone doing it, therefore you don’t know if you’re doing it right. It’s like sex because it’s different every single time. Even if you stick to the same positions, rhythm and timing, it’s still different because of chemistry, temperature and all other stimuli, internal and external. And you never really learn how to make a movie. You only learn how to make the movie you’re making. I still have some learning to come, but like a good joint, I knew right away when it hit me. Like any metaphor I’ve ever met, I found the right mix.

At least I think so. The footage looks gorgeous. We captured some amazing performances surrounded by gorgeous, natural surroundings (like in our other movies, this setting is going to be a character as well), production value you just can’t buy. And as exhausted as well all were at the end of the night, we were still friends. We’d gone through and come out the other side without egos taking the trip.

I could make the snide remark that Debbie and David had subjected us all to Tommy Wiseau’s monstrosity, The Room, the night before and if we’d left the lens cap on the camera we’d still have made a better movie than that—not to mention that if we can endure that hideousness as a family, we could survive anything.

But I won’t.

I’m just going to finish the edit of the teaser, start showing it around, get the damned thing some attention. Then in the Spring, we’ll return to work and wrap with something I have no doubt will be very special, a story worth telling. 

And I’ll remember the bulbs next time. And hopefully the bones.

The birth of RAZOR DAYS - a fairy story about survival horror.

Back in 2002, while working at Incredibly Strange Video in Dormont, I happened to have on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As it ended, I thought to myself, “Marilyn Burns’s character is going to need so much therapy.” Then came the little post-script title about how no evidence was ever found after a massive police search of the area. My wheels started turning. While no scholar of the slasher genre, I’d seen enough of them to wonder about those surviving “final girls”, what their lives would be like from that point on.

In 2002, the endless cycle of remakes hadn’t yet reached the theaters, so there hadn’t been a major Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chain Saw “type” of movie released for a while. The indie scene was filled to the brim then—and will always be—with survival horror, homages and rip-offs of the original films. In fact, later that day I watched Carnage Road, which featured a character named “Quiltface” for his impressive mask made of multiple skinned faces. The idea that there are psychotic cannibals out there, hoping to catch, kill and eat us, was always a fascinating little terror of mine. It had grown stronger in recent months as Amy and I scouted out rural farmland for our new home. Passing one back-woods house with a gaping hole in the side, while the proud owner sat on the porch skinning…something (all I remember are clumps of blood and fur as we increased speed), I turned to Amy, indicating the “For Sale” sign on the trailer next to the lot. “If I’m going to be murdered in my sleep,” I told her, “I definitely don’t want to be raped and murdered.” So we kept looking.

 

Then I rediscovered this Berni Wrightson comic cover and things started to gel in my head. 

  Survival horror always reached an end, either with triumph, rescue, succumbing to madness, or that final surprising resurrection—that dead hand springing back to life and grabbing the final girl just as the credits rolled to the sound of her echoing scream, betraying everything she’d gone through. What these types of horror movies never addressed were the scars left behind.

The first reaction to that consideration is, of course, “Who wants to see a crying victim in therapy for two hours, telling the story to her shrink?” So skip that part too. What happens after? After the survival, after the therapy, after the investigations and allegations and accusations. One person out of four survived a camping trip. Could they be to blame? Isn’t that more plausible than Leatherface and his family? Police find no evidence—how the hell hard were they looking? Or are they in on it too? (Something that was addressed in the inevitable Texas Chain Saw remake.) But most importantly, all that convolution aside, how do you put your life back together after something like that?

Having lived in the world, journeyed out amongst other people, I have met survivors of rape and molestation. I have met people who have survived moments of horrible and random violence. I’m not referring to brutal abductions or even war flashbacks. Comparatively small things like a mugging, a bar fight, or even the prolonged illness of a friend or relative, leaves behind its echo. Even if these folks seem, outwardly, to have completely recovered, the violence is still there in scarred-over memory. And it comes out. Usually rarely, but those wounds open, sometimes with a minutia of prompting. So if its particularly shattering, how do you put yourself back together?

After a couple of turns with this germ of an idea—first as a short story and then a comic book—I found the meat of this story I wanted to tell, and the first thing to go was that image of the head hunter from Wrightson’s painting. As much as I would have loved to tell that story, it wasn’t the story that wanted to be told.

The story that became Razor Days was much more intimate and introspective. But very violent. It’s about a trio of final girls and what they decide to do after the credits have rolled.

So here we are eight years later, and I’m finally getting the chance to turn this script into a movie. There were multiple fits and starts over the years, including a nasty little few weeks where we had the film ripped away from us in pre-production by a dishonest producer who promised the world then took it all away. That was a carpet-yank moment for us because this wasn’t just a movie we could make on weekends in our backyards. It required a realism that our other movies did not. It wasn’t a ____-horror movie, either. It wasn’t a comedy-horror like Severe Injuries or a semi-futuristic zombie fantasy like The Resurrection Game. We couldn’t invent our own worlds here. Razor Days required solid ground beneath our feet. Which requires money. So we put it on the back burner, turned the fire low and let it simmer.

In the meantime, Amy and I worked on the script, refined it and brought it down closer to eye-level, working out how even the most fantastic elements could have a light shone on them and still feel solid. While we’re used to not giving up—the Happy Cloud motto is “The bumblebee doesn’t know that its physically impossible for it to fly”—we had two others in our court who never gave up either: Debbie Rochon and Alan Rowe Kelly. The pair of them mentioned that movie to anyone who would listen. Then, one day, the right listener came along.

Bob Kuiper, my long-time friend and publisher of Sirens of Cinema, who has displayed more faith in me than what is surely rational, was someone I’d worked with for over five years, but had never met. Circumstances kept us from seeing each other in person. Some of this problem was caused by distance—he in Indiana, we in the nowhere-zone of PA—and was compounded by other things, chiefly bad timing. He’d been burned by partnerships before—had a movie or two collapse around him—as had we, so our initial conversations about producing a film together required a lot of circling and dancing, resembling many of the knife fights from West Side Story minus the snapping.

Then, by chance, the planets aligned and the three of us finally met, face-to-face and over beer, at Horrorhound, Indy. We discuss plans for the future and we hint that we’d love to make Razor Days. There is much nodding and smiling and great plans for the upcoming empire.

And who is one of the first people we introduce Mr. Bob to? Alan Rowe Kelly.

What’s the first thing he says to us? “What’s going on with Razor Days? I love that script!”

It was an unscripted, unpaid for moment. But it was enough proof for me that the universe isn’t constantly out to get me. Because by the end of that weekend, Bob had provided the green-light for this movie to be made. The first project for the partnership of RAK Media and Happy Cloud Pictures will be something completely different from anything we’ve attempted before.

After all the struggling and fighting and the inherent madness of the indie film industry, after all the back-stabbing, the trash-talk, the horrific allegations and the depressing dissolution of long-time friendships, we were reminded that sometimes, this business doesn’t completely suck. There are wonderful people out there. They’re tough to spot through the guarded gauze of cynicism and self-defense, but they’re there, and they’re willing to expose themselves to your dreams and desires. And the only price is: you have to live up to their trust.

Because betrayal is a violent act as well. It can leave scars just as deep and leave damage behind. Now all of a sudden, you’re on the other side. You’re not the survivor or the altruistic hero. You’re standing on the precipice of villainy. You want to be the villain of your own life story—act selfishly, lie, cheat, and fuck your way to the top. It’s actually faster—an express elevator to success.

I’m happy that, after all this time, we took the stairs and had good friends to walk with.

I Love New York in June (and May and July and August) – How ‘bout you? Part 1

I enjoy New York City. Probably because I don’t live there. But I love visiting. Yes, it’s crowded and hectic and often smells like the inside of my own colon, but it’s New York City. The more we visit, the more familiar I become with this Mecca and the more I can pretend I’m a native. I’m particularly fond of smacking cab hoods and shouting “I’m walking heah!” then diving for the sidewalk as the cabbies gun the engine and chase me into the nearest Tim Horton’s.

This year we’ve made multiple trips to NY for a variety of reasons. One of the summer’s first was to celebrate Justin (Skin Crawl’s) Cthulu-themed birthday party, which also afforded us the opportunity to join Scooter McCrae and Alex Kuciw for lunch at a tiny little Irish pub during one of the key World Cup games. They were on their way to see Eastern Condors, hosted by Sammo Hung. It’s difficult to discuss classics of New Wave Hong Kong cinema while drunken hooligans cheer a never-ending pass.

(And if I may be snarky here, having witnessed “football frenzy” in London during an Arsenal-Manchester U. game, I have to say American “soccer” hooligans just look nerdy. Not a Vinnie Jones among the group nearest our table in NY. The butchest among them would have been hard-pressed to pull off a Casey Siemaszko.)

A few weeks later, we were back in the Big Apple for the premiere of the Diggerfilms documentary Under the Scares. This was a special event for us for a number of reasons. It marked the first time we visited Brooklyn by ourselves and it was the first time that I realized “Tribecca” used to be called “Hell’s Kitchen”, and that they are not separate places.

While we had visited Brooklyn once before, in the company of Alan Rowe Kelly, Scooter McCrae and Mike Gingold, that had been a particularly lovely part of the Borough. A place where trees were not only reported to grow, but could be witnessed growing. For the Under the Scares weekend, we stayed in the “auto body repair shop” district of Brooklyn, making it a considerably different experience. This section, a multi-cultural area, boasted a vehicle garage approximately every twenty-six feet, run by dangerous-looking men of every nationality. Further along, we discovered a heavenly-smelling bakery from which emanated the shrieking calls of many exotic birds. Unable to locate either the birds or the entrance, we could only draw the logical conclusion that flamingos were making fresh bread somewhere within the depth of that pre-war brick bunker. And if they weren’t making the bread, certainly the self-same flamingos were being slaughtered in the horrific Asian poultry garage further down the block. Suffice to say, the smell from that location was far from heavenly. Further south, if you get my meaning.

We wiled away many a tense hour waiting for the Diggerfilms guys to arrive. We were sharing a hotel room with them and were unable to check in. Parked outside the Comfort Inn, Amy and I read, listened to the radio and daydreamed about bygone days when we were not parked outside of a Brooklyn-area Comfort Inn, waiting for our Canadian compadres. (Amigos? Hommes-boys?)

Fretting not, once Steve Villeneuve, Nancy Tellier and Dave Aubin (with Simon Geraghty making an appearance later) arrived, we whisked ourselves away to midtown Manhattan via the reliable underground, aka, “The Subway”. Possibly the “F”; I forget now.

For the unwashed masses among you who may be unaware of Under the Scares, it’s a documentary about the world of independent filmmaking, produced by the fine folks at Diggerfilms, aka “The Guys Who Shot Demon Divas and the Lanes of Damnation who speak mainly French to freak me out”. That’s how I know them, anyway. They’re very talented, stylish filmmakers in their own right, but I like to give everyone I know a “me” frame of reference. Speaking of me, Under the Scares doesn’t have enough me in it.

It does, however, have a lot of Amy, Debbie Rochon, Frank Hennenlotter, Rod Gudino, Herschel Gordon Lewis, Robert Kurtzman, Gary Jones and a ton of Happy Cloud Pictures movie clips. Some of the latter were used ironically, however. (Narrator: “Sometimes low budget filmmakers can only hire their family and friends.” Cut to basement scene from The Resurrection Game.) Still, there’s a lot of HCP love, despite the near-dearth of me time, so I can forgive.

The Diggerfilms consortium was working on Under the Scares when we first met them, years ago at Robyn Griggs’ second Twisted Nightmare Weekend in Ohio. It was at this show that Amy, Debbie and I (among others) were interviewed for the doc. Having been previously solicited via email, we walked into the reserved conference room fully expecting to find a group of reprobates, broken-down DV camera in hand, asking us the usual questions like “How did you get started in filmmaking?” and “Can I borrow some money for food?”

Instead, we found a group of very professional reprobates (from the French meaning “reprobates”), a three-point lighting set up, lavaliere microphones and a snazzy prosumer HD camera. The questions were very well-thought out and prepared specifically for each subject, which I thought was classy, even though they were delivered in accents so thick I needed them to repeat themselves several times. (Actually, I didn’t need them too, but since camera operator Hugo Bissonnet was, while neatly dressed and purple-y coiffed, obviously hung over, asking him to repeat himself—“louder, please!”—was vastly entertaining. To me.)

Over the next couple of years, the group (sometimes a quartet, sometimes a quintet, sometimes a sextet, if you can believe it) worked diligently on the doc, intercutting the interviews with footage from their first film, Stories of a Gravedigger, as well as behind-the-scenes from that very project. Also taking clips from the films of their subjects, the finished project, Under the Scares, is a very informative and insightful look at the independent horror film scene. Not afraid to poke fun at themselves, the doc puts their pitfalls up on screen alongside their successes, making it clear to the viewer that filmmaking is not only hard work, but far from an exact science, and any notion of “magic” is dispelled almost immediately. Not discouraging by any means, the message of the movie is clear: before you attempt your own project, try and have a clear idea of what you want it to be, what you expect to happen, what you have to do, and what you will do should any of those things above not come together. It’s funny and it’s realistic.

There still isn’t enough of my interview, but that’s really neither here nor there. They keep telling me that the second disc of the DVD release will be nothing but me. When have they ever lied to me?

Seeing Under the Scares for the first time in the swanky Tribeca theater with a lot of friends and plenty of colleagues was just the frosting. Prior to the showing were a number of trailers—Suzi Lorraine’s upcoming Won Ton Baby and their own nourish dark comedy short Dead Pussy—and immediately following was a trip to a local indoor/outdoor bar/restaurant where we wiled away the rest of the night, discussing film and future ambitions.

As the night wore on the attendees from both ends of North America began to hear the call of the mild. Amy, Steve, Nancy, Dave and I were among the last to leave, staggering back to the subway to whisk us back to the comfort that Brooklyn was sure to provide. It was about three AM when we reached the aromatic platform and bought our tickets, wondering who these grade-school kids were and why they were loitering in midtown Manhattan so late, or if they knew if the crackhead giggling to himself by the change machine was likely to attack and eat us.

The highlight of the evening, indeed the cherry on the sundae, was seeing the toll a night on the town can take on caution-free adults. None of us were suffering, but earlier in the day, we’d been made aware that quite a bit of our nation’s finest navy men were on leave. We witnessed many a sailor wandering through the city with arms draped over the shoulders of very decidedly non-movie hookers. These were fresh-faced men on their way to and from exotic locales, spending time with women whose normal locales were obviously less-than exotic. On the platform opposite us, two officers in their finest dress blues awaiting a train to take them to the last exit to Brooklyn. To the astonishment of our Neighbors from the North, one of the officers was heaving mightily into a horrid trash can, making appalling noises heard even above the squeal of the passing non-stop express trains. I refrained from leading them in a round of “O Canada”, as I sensed things had already reached maximum-awkward.

Dragging ourselves back to beloved Brooklyn, assuring ourselves that our car not only remained we’d left it, but was still in one piece, we collapsed into our reserved beds and allowed the highs and lows of the day to wash us away to slumber.

(Hit the official Under the Scares site to see when this awesome doc with too little of me might be playing by you.)

(All photos swiped from Steve Villeneuve's Facebook page. Go there. Friend him. Speak French. See if I care.)

Return from the Full Moon Tattoo and Horror Convention

Last weekend, Amy and I made the seemingly endless trek to the Full Moon Tattoo and Horror Convention in Nashville. We were accompanied two-thirds of the way by a vicious storm testing our windshield wipers to their very limits. The second we crossed into Tennessee, however, the sun took up residence in our backseat and remained there until we arrived at our hotel. The next day, a tornado touched down, swept away some visiting whiny Kansas farm girls and left the hotel without lights for a little more than hour. Not letting little things like threats to life and limb deter them, horror fans flocked from far and near to join the festivities and hobnob with the likes of Bill Moseley, Debbie Rochon, Bill Johnson, Caroline Williams, Ari Lehman and, from Repo! The Genetic Opera, the Graverobber himself, Terence Zdunich, who doesn’t care how you pronounce his name provided you’re friendly.

Except for a secluded show called ConCarolinas, this was the deepest south we’d been as guests at a convention, thanks to the support and lovely human beingness of Ben and Stacy Dixon. While horror and tattoos are universal ice breakers, I have to admit that the majority of stand-up comedians have it right: there is a difference between the Yankees and Confederates.

I’m not talking about the obvious stereotypes like self-proclaimed rednecks or white supremacists because, frankly, you’ll run into those no matter where you go. We live within spitting distance of West Virginia and from our porch you can hear the banjos. Sure, there was the guy walking around with a t-shirt emblazoned with the Pillsbury Doughboy in Nazi gear proclaiming “White Flour”, and I complimented him for the adorable racism. And there was the charming fellow who liked everything Clive Barker did, “But I heard he was gay, so I don’t know about him any more.” And the three shaved-headed gentlemen who asked me, very discreetly, if Splatter Movie had any of them “colored actors” in it. To which I responded, “No sir. Splatter Movie contains 30% fewer blacks than any other movie.” Which must not have been a high enough percentage because they left the movie sitting where it was, untouched and unloved.

No, I’m referring to the fact that, as a majority, the people who visited this show were by and large the nicest con attendees I’d ever encountered. Mayhap there’s a sarcasm shortage in the South, or maybe manners come free with tanks of gas, but I’ve never been to a show where I was called “Sir” so often I started to wonder if I’d acquired some sort of clandestine knighthood. Little kids, old people, that mishegoss of age range in between—all of them “Sir”’ed me up and down for three full days. Amy got “Miss” and “Ma’am” a lot (I only got a couple of “Ma’am”’s). People held doors for us poor emburdened vendors and guests. And even the mouth-breathing morlocks that infest every convention seemed to have their clue-free crassness under control. The nearest we got to insults (aside from the good-natured ones from George, the vendor of hockey masks next to us) was from an awkward guy who told us flat out he wouldn’t buy one of our movies because “I ain’t never heard of ‘em. They’re not from Hollywood, huh? Those always look better.” So for the first time in my long career as a merchandise-warmer, I did not have to cheerfully order a single attendee to “get the fuck away from my table”. It was a nice change of pace.

It’s still not the best economic climate to do too many shows in a year, of course. I heard a goodly number of folk complaining about varying states of unemployment and there wasn’t too much money to go around (particularly not after one certain guest’s price-gouging for autographs), which was a common complaint among the vendors. Because of the timeframes required by the tattoo artists, Full Moon is a marathon show as well—11am to 11pm on Saturday, for instance, that left most of us bug-eyed and twitchy by the day’s end—so there’s more time to kill painfully and bloodily than the average convention. But if the folks weren’t buying, they were at least talking.

Sure, we got a couple of plants here or there, yammering away about Freddy vs. Jason in the same tone-of-voice you’d discuss fiduciary dividends, until you’re ready to pepper-spray them and call for security. But for the most part we were visited by nice people who shared similar interests and wanted to pass the time by sharing thoughts and feelings about gore and horror.

Among the topics discussed:

Remakes. As inevitable as inexact change and body-odor, the remake argument was debated by more than its share of folks on either end of the spectrum including, for the first time in my recent memory, a couple of older guys (as in “close to my age”) who are actually for the darned things. I’m used to hearing the Generation Shrug crowd extolling the virtues of the new Texas Chain Saw movies over the original ones, claiming they cannot connect to any movie made prior to their recent birthdate, but very few old timers ever come down on the ‘Pro’ side of remakes or sequels. There were a number of hardcore guys who were simply beside themselves with glee over the impending release of the new Nightmare on Elm Street movie and had valid arguments for wanting to see it, slickness aside. They wanted to see the story updated, they wanted Freddy’s origin and new CGI-enhanced make-up. “The stories should be updated,” one told me. “They’re our society’s fairy tales. Everything gets adapted for the new generations. Otherwise, I guess, we’d just be running in place.”

My own feeling about remakes has been well-documented in these very virtual pages. Basically, it falls into the categories of “There’s nothing I can do about it” and “I’ve got better things to worry about”. I bristle as much as the next guy over the latest reboot or reimagining announcement, but since nobody asked my opinion in the first place, and it’ll happen with or without my approval, I’ve opted to conserve my frustration for matters of more importance. Like:

Whether or not Repo! The Genetic Opera is “good” or not. Again, another subjective argument stemming from an incredibly polarizing movie. On one side, you have the die-hard and will-die-for-it cult fans and on the other the virulent haters-of-all-things-Repo. I don’t run into too many people who are merely “meh” on the subject. Like religion and politics, each camp is sincere in its stance on the film. Of course, I unabashedly adore the film and not just because I know a couple of people in the cast. I think it’s a well-made gothic musical with a sick sense of humor and some terrific performances, not to mention a catchy soundtrack. And for every reason that I enjoy it, there is a cadre of people who hold to the opposite opinion. Except some of these opinions are simply wrong, at least in the way that they’re stated. For instance, the one person who declared that, “No one in the movie can sing!”

“Not even one of the virtuoso sopranos in the world?” Amy countered, citing Sarah Brightman, “Or the musical stage stars like Anthony Head?”

Finally, the critic conceded his point but insisted that the movie was an “interesting failure”. And to that judgment, he’s perfectly entitled. If you don’t think it works, or it’s boring, or confusing, or sloppy, or whatever, that’s all valid. But to declare a sweeping opinion as fact, that’s where the gloves seem to come off. Personally, I think it’s a literate and intelligent melding of rock opera, music hall and grand guignol, but what the hell do I know? I can’t even pronounce Terence No-Good-Nik’s name correctly. But we did buy his comic book (The Molting, which turned out to be quite good).

Getting placed in an “overflow ballroom” has its advantages. Like the rest of the folk in the “overflow” vendor’s room, Amy and I joined the party late. Booked as guests a mere month before the show began, we were placed not in the main guest and vendor ballroom but in one down the hall on the opposite side of the movie and panel rooms. It took some maneuvering and huckstering to alert attendees that the room existed, but Ben and his staff (thanks, Mark!) made sure people knew we were there. Plus, we were much, much closer to the bar. Which only mattered on Sunday when signs went up around the hotel notifying everyone that “personal outside alcohol is not permitted”. Having finished a bottle of home-bought rum and half a box of wine, all we could say in our defense was, “Oops.”

A naturally-growing herb, outlawed by the alcohol, tobacco and lumber industries, had a miraculate medicinal effect on my back. I don’t have much more to add to this except, c’mon fellas—legalize and tax the shit out of marijuana! Even after the high wore off, my back felt fine for hours! Let the pharmaceutical companies turn it into a pill if that will make everyone happy.

There can never be enough zombies in the world. As make-up guy Chris Pezzano and his sidekick Pixie demonstrated, people who dress like zombies are performance artists and endurance athletes. He stayed in that get-up long after the point of sanity, to the point where he wound up with chemical burns on several patches of skin. Dedicated to the dead!

Caroline Williams liked Europa’s Cry. I don’t have anything else to really expound on this but it was really nice to hear. Oh, and Bill Johnson said such nice things to me at one point, I almost cried. Almost. Manly tears. Again, that’s all I have to really say about either experience. These horror people are good friends.

Blackouts at conventions are neat. Having experienced the infamous Cinema Wasteland Blackout of 2006, I’ve become a fan of such occurrences. While there was a modicum of tornado panic as the lights started to flicker before extinguishing altogether, there was a strange energy present in the room when we were thrust into the dim glow of laptop screens and emergency overheads. It was a shared experience we could all tell our grandchildren. And I’m proud to announce that, despite lasting for 72 minutes, the blackout did not cause any of us to go instantly feral or cannibal.

It takes less time to go from PA to Tennessee than it does to return. I’m not sure if there was some sort of time-space distortion or if someone deliberately picked up Pennsylvania and moved it further away during our absence but even with the time-difference, it still took us longer to get back home than it did to get there.

So, should next year come around and we’re not all living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, wearing animal fur and fighting rabid weasels for scraps of carrion (which is apparently what is going to happen during our first year of “Obamacare”), I would recommend that everyone within shouting distance make your way down to next year’s Full Moon show, get a tattoo, get liquored up to dull the pain, and then spend your last bit of money on something gory and independent, be that DVDs, artwork or free drinks for hard-working horror folks. We also accept checks or medicinal herbology. Oh, and pharmaceuticals. No livestock, please.

 

Shooting "Coventry Lanes" part 2

Looking back at the shoot—which seems like having taken place months ago, rather than just a few short weeks—I'm having the same feeling as I did when it was happening: it was hectic, it was rushed and it was too short. Unlike Splatter Movie and A Feast of Flesh, where we had more time and less money, this time around, time was the precious commodity. Most of the problem was our own dumb fault. We completely misjudged the amount of time we had to shoot at King Lanes, thinking we had the entire month of August, where, in reality, where the rest of the world resides, we only had the first two weeks. So the entire script had to be boiled down to a lean eight-day shoot.

Our budget being what it was, we could only afford to bring our out-of-town people in for a single weekend. This meant that all of the "group diva" stuff, with Amy, Brinke Stevens, Debbie Rochon, Lilith Stabs and Robyn Griggs had to be shot during the first three days. With everyone involved having their own hectic schedules, we could only shoot with Debbie Saturday to Monday, Robyn had to be out at a certain time each day to accommodate a different shoot, and then there were all the other performers to think about, with their own jobs and lives to juggle around.

None of the above would have been much of a problem, truthfully, if it weren't for the fact that the five Divas (and the two main characters, Lisa (Nikki McCrea) and Taffy (Sofiya Smirnova)) had multiple costume and make-up changes to deal with. Gwendolyn, my more-or-less "sister in law" (in that she's married to Bill Homan, my closest friend in the world), had only a few days to create essentially six costumes. Eric Molinaris and his team were providing the extensive demon make-up. I had originally hoped that Don Bumgarner would be on hand to create teeth for the Divas on set, as he had done for A Feast of Flesh, but his duties at Scarehouse precluded his involvement this time around. Ultimately, as far as teeth went, Luke Miller (Splatter Movie) came through with upper and lower dentures that, in the end, just didn't fit anyone quite right. Through no fault of his own. Truth be told, had we used the teeth he'd created, we'd have had to do multiple takes and ADR so the actresses wouldn't be slurring their words. Which would have required more time that we didn't have.

Add to all this the fact that Amy and I were working with a crew entirely new to us. While we know Steve and Hugo socially, we've never worked with them or even seen them work before. And their D.P., Simon Garrity, was a complete wild card for us as we'd never even met him before. And has it been mentioned ad nauseum yet that their primary language is French, while ours isn't even English, it's "American"? This led to constant amounts of fun. They'd ask me what I wanted for the next shot, I'd tell them, then they'd go and confer in French and completely freak me out. By the end of the shoot, I was almost able to understand them. I pay attention to tone and body language, at least, so I could interpret what they were saying without actually knowing. And, apparently, I had caught on more than I knew because, in at least two instances, Steve would ask Simon or Hugo something in French and I, passing by, would answer in English. Took me by surprise too.

There were other "first time" things for us to contend with. I'm a complete novice when it comes to High Definition video, so I had to learn as I went along what their capacity was with Firestore Hard Drives versus "P2" cards, what the camera capabilities were, etc.

Amy and I are used to being the crew, along with Jeff Waltrowski, so watching these guys in motion was something to behold. For one thing, they lit like pros. So the backgrounds were always lit, multiple characters had their own key lights, etc. Now, in our defense, we were shooting on a much wider space than we're used to. On Feast and Splatter, we were usually cramming a dozen people into one tiny room. King Lanes is, of course, the size of a bowling alley! So we needed more light. Fortunately, we had more lights, including two I rented from Performance Lighting, the very place I used to rent lights from in film school.

One thing I knew right off the bat—while it would take us a while to get used to the Canadians, it would likely take longer for them to get used to us. Or, rather, the way we like to shoot. We like to call what we do, alternatively, "The McGyver School of Filmmaking" and "run and gun". When Jeff or I are behind camera, we concentrate on one thing: "get the shot". And since I do the editing, I know what I need. I'm not big on master shots and I'm not a big believer of multiple takes. It took me a while to analyze what I do. It seems lazy, but at the same time, I don't see a lot of benefit from the Stanley Kubrick school. Why do you need 187 takes of Tom Cruise rounding a corner? And while I like running lines with actors, I'm not big on rehearsal. I usually like what's invented in the moment than in the rote repetition of the lines. I like to be surprised. On the flip side of that, since I usually write the scripts, I know how they sound in my head, so I became, on this shoot at least, a "line reading director". (But as Brinke told me on the last day, "Most actors will tell you that they like getting line readings—they want to know how the director wants the line to sound." So that was comforting.)

So it was likely agony for Simon, at least, when I would veto multiple takes. "We need to make another," he'd say after every take, and, invariably, I'd ask why. Eventually, he caught on and would reply, "For sound. To make sure." Which was vague and the one thing I was most afraid of. So, inevitably, we'd "make another one." Which was fine on day one. By Day Four, we didn't really have time to "make another one." We barely had the time to make the first one!

We were also working with a lot of people who were good friends, but were first time actors. And a couple of folks we didn't know at all! It always takes me a while to find an actor's rhythm. Mostly, because I'm not that good of a director when it comes to actors. Actors frustrate me and I don't usually know how to communicate with them. Dust on a lens? I know what to do. Blown fuse or bad lamp. I know what to do or how to get around it. 'What's my motivation?' No clue how to answer. Not a lot of patience with that question either. But I forced myself. I had fifteen-plus people who needed to know what the hell was going on in front of the camera, and another dozen more who wanted to know what was going on behind it. The people in front were the scarier group for me.

Tara Cooper and Tabatha Carrick, two wonderful ladies and very good friends, were acting for more or less the first time. And both had confessed that they were terrified. Michael Barton, Gary _____ and Stephanie Bertoni were veteran actors, but we'd never worked with them before. Okay, Steph was the script supervisor on The Screening, but I didn't have that much contact with her on that show. And everybody in the movie was playing a character that could become a cartoon without much nudging. Steph's "Rochelle", in particular, is so over the top that finding a balance for her was vital. So I was learning about them as they learned about me.

In the meantime, Amy was doing her producer duties by solving an endless amount of problems beyond the camera perimeter. She was juggling travel and sleep arrangements with the make-up and costume departments, figuring out with Sandy Hall what food would be served and when, and dealing with multiple emotional breakdowns. It should be said that I love all of my female friends. I understand women a lot better, in a lot of ways, than I do men. Which is one of the reasons my scripts are so unbalanced with the amount of female-to-male characters. But I swear to god, once our ten-plus female cast got on set together, their cycles all synched simultaneously. Hell, by the end of the first weekend, I was menstrual.

There was one day in particular that blew my mind. Gwen had just gotten all the Divas and Lisa fitted into their glamour costumes and the Canadians and I were just finishing up with the "strip bowling" section (which came with its own calamities). Amy comes up to me in between set ups and tells me that she and Nikki have to run out. Suddenly, half the cast was gone! Nikki and Amy had also taken Tara and Aaron and Sandy with them. And I had no idea why.

Steve comes up, "What's next."

"Nothing."

"Sorry?"

"Amy and Nikki went shopping."

Long pause. "What?"

As it turns out, Nikki's glamour dress didn't work on her. Again – nobody's fault. Gwen didn't have enough time to fit it to her properly, so it didn't quite hang on her correctly. And since Nikki is twice Sofiya's height, she felt like a giant next to the tiny Asian girl. So, in a bout of producer professionalism, Amy took her out to get a replacement costume that would fit her and allow her to look and feel sexy. Fine. Aaron went for Nikki's emotional support. Tara went for Amy's. And Sandy drove, knowing the quickest route to the stores. Fine.

Except, none of this was explained to me. Just all of the sudden, I had no cast.

"So what do you want to do?" Steve asked me, clearly enjoying my misery as I flipped through the script, trying to find anything we could shoot so we could move on.

"Send everyone home and get drunk," I responded.

"Works for me," Steve replied.

There were a lot of little things like that. Maybe not as dire, but dump them all into a heap…

One day was like ten minutes before a first-grade play. This person didn't have the right pants, another didn't have the right underwear, another had forgotten their hat, one of the aprons was missing, another was lost. All of this, Amy had to deal with, as I tore pages out of the script haphazardly to make sure we'd be able to finish before Sunday morning.

To everyone's credit, nobody else seemed out of sorts or stressed out. I felt bad for the people who were just sitting around, waiting for us to get to them. That was always a source of pride with us—we didn't keep people waiting around. But then there'd be Steph or Brinke reading their books and waiting for their scenes. And then there was Mike Barton who spent about an hour lying half-naked on the floor, covered with fake gore, because no one told me he was ready (or if they had, I didn't listen).

Right off the bat, things went weird. Not just with the language barrier and the idea that I was somehow in over my head—all of these things contributed to our running behind schedule, continuously. The first Saturday, Jeff, playing "Brad" and also A.D., informed me: "We've got to start moving faster."

Which pissed me off. "What would you suggest?"

"I don't know. Going faster."

I didn't hit him. He was doing his job.

Strangely, the more I felt compelled to apologize for time and delay, the more people seemed to console me and tell me things were fine. Brinke was happy and said she was relaxed. Stephanie was used to much longer days on the "bigger" sets. Others were just hanging out and having a good time in between sets. The Canadians were happy because people were helping them, particularly David Cooper who was gripping in between all the set photography he was conducting. Every now and then, Amy would send someone over to make sure I was hydrating or eating. I had three people, including Amy, prepare me a plate for dinner on Sunday. So maybe this is what directing is: watching time sift away while everyone else orbits around you. Amy, as producer, had the unenviable task of existing in the middle of this sea of stress, though. And she kept as much of it as possible away from me.

For perhaps the first occasion since filming The Resurrection Game I felt the time-crunch. In Res Game, we had to shoot the 15-page climax and fight over a period of four different weekends at the American Mattress Factory because of the owner's time limits. We could only shoot while he was open, which meant six hours start to finish. The last hour of every shoot was maddening, but we knew we had free reign to return. This time around, we had to get everything done by Saturday the 9^th.

Our first Saturday, the 2^nd, was hectic and ran long. We didn't get out of there until after 10pm, shooting out the people with the least amount of time first. Sunday wasn't much better, but we did manage to wrap before 9pm that time around. Sunday was particularly stressful because of the costume changes. The Divas all start in their bowling outfits (their "white trash" costumes, as we dubbed them), moved to their glamour outfits for a couple of sections, then had to all throw themselves at our make-up department for their prosthetics, detailing, contacts and tattoos. Each stage per woman took about an hour, including the "plain" make up and particularly the glamour.

Because of limitations, we only managed to get all the Divas in a group for about four shots. Robyn was the first who had to leave, so we ended up framing her out of other sequences. My thinking was that she could be included in either a single, or a two-shot with Amy later. As we got more and more crunched for time and people started to burn out, we had to radically rethink the end fight. Nikki, as Lisa, had different stages of make up she had to go through, which would have meant more time and more delay. Ultimately, Amy, Simon and I came up with a way to keep the spirit of the Divas acting as one entity but separate characters, while still retaining the high-energy of the action that, hopefully, will work in editing. We'll see soon, won't we? By the time we started shooting that stuff, I could barely think straight.

The following weekend made the first weekend look like a vacation. We were without Tabatha, Brinke, Debbie, Henrique and Lilith and were only praying that the coverage we'd gotten with them the previous weekend would be enough. I was fairly confident, editing in my head, but I've gotten burned by myself before.

The second weekend was made doubly-complicated because it also included gore sequences. This was going to be even trickier because we couldn't get blood anywhere near the actual lanes for fear of staining the wood. I'd already talked to some digital effects artists about the possibility of digital blood in post, so I wasn't overtly worried about this restriction. But gore also equals time, particularly if you want it to look, you know, good. So a quick panic-stricken perusal of the script gave us the vital effects verses stuff we could shoot later on one of our ever-popular "garage gore days".

Things were going well Saturday. Crew call was 9am and we got our first shot off at 10:30 (which I was determined to do, even if I had to keep setting the clocks back!). Our first sequences involved two of our regulars: Bill Homan (who had to be at work by four, which meant out by two) and Stacy Bartlebaugh-Gmys (who was starring in a play and had to be out by also two). Their companion was "Mrs. Homan", Gwendolyn, who had no time constraints beyond having to take Bill to work. So, okay, say about two. We got all of their scenes done and wrapped, including a quick prosthetic, by 12:25. I was feeling pretty good about the day.

That rapidly vanished by about 10pm that night. As we were still going.

Around 8:30, Amy and I sat down with the script while everyone else ate dinner and started crossing out sequences the movie could do without. There were a number of short sequences with Nikki and Aaron's characters that were either redundant or didn't do much to forward the plot or, because of the way we had to stage scenes before and after them, just couldn't be logically blocked. I started condensing longer sequences, too, including an extended fight between Nikki and Sofiya that would not have worked either practically or, ultimately, thematically.

Then we started eliminating and redistributing lines. Then trying to figure out how to shoot action with only one of the involved parties.

By midnight, there wasn't a single person on set who wasn't fried beyond salvation. I had long since lost the ability to communicate with anyone, in English or French. At one point, I sat down with the Canadians and explained something, "Look, I'm going to ask you to shoot things a certain way and you're not going to understand why. How do you say 'trust me' in French?"

They told me. I never did say it correctly, but at least they never argued. Of course, I'd catch Hugo or Simon shooting cutaways of this or that while I was doing something else, for which I'm sure I'll be eternally grateful.

We shot the penultimate "Abby Singer" shot—an effects shot with Sofiya—and the Martini Shot with Amy and wrapped just shy of 1 am. Since my iMac cannot currently display the footage, I have no idea if we got everything we needed and will, doubtlessly, have to either return to the alley at a later date or do a very long "garage gore day" before the end of the year.

As we dragged ourselves out of the alley that night, triumphant in knowing that none of us would have to return to Kittanning on Sunday—which was a blessing for Bob and Sandy, who had to ready the alley for league inspection by 6pm that day—we retired for the evening. Or, at least, went back to Sandy's for sleep.

Coming next: what we did in between those two weekends and how the movie actually wrapped!