DAY 5

Making movies is the art of compromise. Or, as Mike says, "One motherfucking compromise after another."

We spend the day shooting a series of relatively easy shots of the main characters running, walking, hurrying, meandering, through the woods. The storyboards have been the Godsend of the shoot. Mike, the director, spent a considerable amount of time with an artist friend of his by the name of Mike Zittel storyboarding the entire script. For those who don't know (I really didn't when I began), the storyboards are a visual aid that depicts each shot in a scene, detailed to movement, angle and distance. Mike has the whole movie in his head already, but his head is being messed with.

Production designer Jay Hollinsworth hosing down the street for an upcoming scene. (Photo by David Zajac.)

Once again, the ugly masters of time, film stock and money come into play. Add the lack of cooperation by something so stubborn as the sun, or lack of it, and you look at your feet and find the scenes you wanted to shoot, planned to shoot, needed to shoot, but couldn't get. The picture in Mike's head starts to take on a jumbled look.

I keep hearing: "Well, if we have to lose this, we can't, we absolutely can't lose that." Or "To hell with it; I can live without that one."

To quote 1st assistant director Neil Kinsella, "Filmmaking is a litany of losses." It is from a poem he once read. How will the heart survive life's litany of losses?

I don't think it does, Neil. I don't think it does.

DAY 6

Today we contend with two major forces in the universe: The sun and the teamsters. Somehow word has gotten out that we are shooting a film without a union crew. No one is really sure how this information was passed along, but everyone, being Hollywood-minded, of course, has images of the guys running into the church basement in On The Waterfront, wielding baseball bats and generally beating the crap out of everyone. We hear that a group of men such as these waits at the end of the street and plan to somehow disrupt our production. Someone goes and looks, but reports seeing nothing.

Taylor Warren (left), who did the editing and sound design for The Wind, was also the film's location sound recordist. Pictured with Wareen is gaffer Jeffrey Hoyt (center) and boom operator Wayne Kirchstein.(Photo by David Zajac.)

The other force and true main concern is the weather. Rain has been forecast. This, for an outdoor shoot, means doom. Schedules, so finely tuned and worked out, have to be rearranged. Do the indoor shots today and hope, as Annie said, "The sun will come out tomorrow."

Mike, Neil and all the crew stare at the sky and try to force a cloud breakup. It doesn't work and at seven o'clock in the morning we are moving. All of our mental preparations for another outdoor shoot have to be shifted to an indoor shoot.

I don't really know what that means for me until I get there. I find out quickly enough. The shoot is in a living room that only holds so many actors, cameras, lights, and necessary people like the director, cinematographer, and assistant director. Everyone else, myself included, has to wait outside in the heat, now actually hoping it will rain to cool things off.

I read, I write, I talk to people. One of the great things about the hurry-up-and-wait time on a movie set is that everyone waiting with you is into movies, and the conversations you have about films you've seen and haven't seen can rarely be had anywhere else. As Mark, one of the PAs said, "Sometimes when I talk to my friends about this kind of stuff, they look at me funny and change the subject."

Oh, it never rained.

Continue to DAY 7