Today all of us at 2gether Industries were excited because the Right Honourable Carson Daly from TRL flew in to take part in a bunch of scenes which will pepper the movie and show Whoa! on the way to their ultimate demise. Mickey and Chad were particularly excited to meet Carson, as was I. Somehow having a bona fide star presence around for the day has legitimized what we have been working so hard on for so long. “If Carson’s here this really must be happening.” And I’m glad to report he’s a real stand-up guy and seems very grounded for a man who’s on TV screens all over the USA at 3 o’clock every day. Did you know he used to be a golf pro?

We were also visted today by a reporter from Rolling Stone and by a crew from Entertainment Tonight. I watched with delight as Chad, Doug, Jerry, Mickey & QT took to the interview process like ducks to water. Those hours of drilling by Bob Buss in the conference room paid off in spades, but I’m glad nobody asked Jerry or QT what their favourite colours were!

We started the day with the guys performing their 2gether theme song in the local Virgin Megastore who opened their doors specially for us at 7am. Somehow fact and fiction started blurring right in front of my eyes as we covered the store with 2gether flyers and gave their ‘fans’ CD’s for an album that doesn’t exist. If all goes according to plan, and I sincerely hope that it does, REAL copies of a 2gether album will be available in this very emporium in less than three months. It’s like that Andre Gide book which is about a man writing a diary about a book he’s writing.

With the Megastore complete we made our final company move. Everything we shoot from now on will be at the same location and it’s close to the hotel too. Even more importantly we will be sheltered from the elements – I’m ashamed to admit that the weather was definitely starting to effect morale. I’m grateful that we’ll be warm and dry for the remainder of the shoot. By the way could someone explain to me why, in a city which has such consistent rain, it is necessary to send out trucks to water down the streets at midnight? It’s a bit like semis driving through Cairo in the dead of night distributing sand.

And finally tonight Unsung Heroes of The Set Part 3: Grips and Electrical. These guys are kind of like the roadies of a film set. Every night they take their very heavy stuff (dollies, sand bags, 5K’s, 10K’s, cables etc.) put it in the truck and go home. Every morning they have to unload the whole caboodle and rebuild it all over again. But it’s not just a job for some guys with large shoulders, there’s a lot of skill in lighting a set up or building a dance floor for the dolly in ten minutes. What’s more Ian and Dean’s crew are quiet and hard working. Go guys go – enjoy your weekend!

Today was our last day in New Westminster. Despite its difficulties it has served us well and I am sad to leave. We departed in fine style with Chad and his other Teen Pageant contestant buddies lining up in their speedos for a bit of teutonic marching practice. In most movies I suppose it would have been a line of bikini-ed babes but the girls had the last laugh this time and got to watch Mr. Rochester, Mr Utica & co. strut their stuff.

Unsung heroes of the set part 2: Transpo’. Last night we left a bunch of trailers and trucks outside the Turf Motel at 9pm in the pouring rain. Lights were burning, heaters were heating and it looked like a small town on its own in the parking lot complete with flush toilets, televisions, video cassette players, fold out beds, photocopiers, clothing racks etc. This morning at 730 the whole ‘circus’ (as we call it) had magically re-appeared outside the Massey Theater. How did it get there? Where did it spend the night? None of us seems to know or care – unless it’s late. When they made African Queen they were miles down a river in the midst of the jungle and Katherine Hepburn did her own wardrobe and changed behind a tree with a mirror hanging from it. Movies aren’t made like that anymore and the inside of these trucks are more plushly furnished than many people’s homes. As I write this in my comfortable hotel room John, Brian, Chuck and co. are shifting the circus to a new location so that when we arrive in the morning we’ll all feel at home and ready for a day’s work.

Rain, rain go away, come back on Mother’s Washing Day…some chance. So it rained all day – big surprise and we got behind. The poor actor who turned up to play the Sea.Doo dude hung around and never got to work. I hate it when that happens.

Unsung heroes of the set – Part One. Script Supervisors. What do they do? (They used to be called continuity ladies at one time but of course you could never do that now – though I’ve never met a continuity ‘chap’). Ours is called Pam and she’s the best. She takes a note of every take, which are my favourites, which lens we used, focal distance, f-stop, footage count etc. She then keeps a note of which hand the actor was using to hold the door when he climbed into the Indian, which person entered first, which lines were missed, which lines were stepped on etc. It’s an endless, thankless task. She tells the actors what they did in the last take and actors aren’t always ready to ‘hear’ what she has to say so it takes great tact and patience. She’s also the only person on the set in a ‘one person’ department. No-one around to take over for half an hour, cover for her if she oversleeps and without her we’d be lost. Every movie has one and every shot you see on your TV or movie screen has been watched over painstakingly by someone like Pam. As you settle-in in front of the TV this evening give yourself a test. After 5 minutes ask yourself which hand the bad guy was holding the gun in when he raced out from behind the building? Which hand did the good guy hold his drink in when he started the speech, which hand did he have the cigarette in at the end of the speech? Bet you get it wrong.

Say a thank-you to all the Pam’s of the world. Without them you’d notice all these stupid things that would take you out of the movie and destroy your enjoyment of it.

I can see it in their faces as they drive by – they think we’re nuts. 30 grown people sitting outside wrapped in a variety of thermal clothes, huddled around portable gas heaters while one individual in a particularly bright thermal outfit (me) watches TV and barks orders and waves his arms around a lot. That’s what happened today for 13 hours and NO RAIN! (OK a few drops just before lunch).

Buss discovered Jerry right across the street from where we shot the last scene two weeks ago on the first day of the Sphincter Unit. Not my original intention but a location SNAFU (not Abraham’s fault I hasten to add) meant I had to pick a new location and fast last week sometime. And you know what – in the end this compromise paid off. It was probably the right choice all along and served our purposes nicely.

Lunchtime brought a package from the Fedex man: my first look at some of the scenes cut together…and wow – we’re actually making a movie. It works. I can’t wait for Maggie, our exec, to come back tomorrow so I can show her some stuff.

We finished the day at the strip club where QT races inside to find some girls. However the “GIRLS” sign was not doing it for me so Kev despatched his trusty second, David Footman, to hoof it over to the Paramount (the emporium down the street where young women divest themselves of their fine apparel) to enlist one of their young employees to provide the necessary incentive for QT to make his dash inside and voila we were in business. Yes folks…that’s what a Second Assistant Director does for a living.

Let’s talk about coverage shall we? Coverage is the different angles you employ to ‘cover’ a scene; the different cuts, the close-ups, the wides etc. So, we started the day with a scene that is 4 and 2/8 pages long which means it will be in the movie for about 4 minutes. (Quick movie rule of thumb: one page equals one minute). And this is all one scene so you want everything to look like it’s being shot at the same time right?

Well try this. You arrive in the morning and it’s pouring with rain and it’s dark and you know that you have (after lunchbreak has been subtracted) about 7 hours of usable light. As it gets brighter the rain lessens off and it looks kind of grey so you figure you can make that work. About 11am it starts raining again, hard. So now you have two looks and the actors are wet as well as cold. Before we reach lunch the sun comes out so Marc (our DP) is trying to match the close-ups to the rainy, grey stuff we had earlier. Then it starts hailing! And of course the sun comes out for a final burst before it races away at 4pm.

Mickey and Jerry just before lunch when the sun came out!

I watched a movie last night, which wasn’t very good, but the sun was out constantly and everything matched. Why not us? Everyone is working so hard and this is the stuff which just gets in your way and messes with your day. I’m trying to make sure I’m sending great performances to my editor and there we all are under a snap-up sheltering from the hailstones! Here’s the good news: it happens to everyone – even the greats. There’s a moment in North By North West when they get to Mount Rushmore and you can see that the sun went down between two of the shots and, you know what, it’s still a great movie…perhaps no-one will notice.

Act Three is complete.

We were shooting in Buss’s 9th floor hotel room and I wanted to have his Rolodex in the opening shot but it had mysteriously made its way back to the props house which was 45 minutes away. It was an important little detail that represented all the contacts and years of work that Buss had put in with the Fifth Unit etc. Not having it in the shot was a disappointment but I was going to be a big boy and do without it. Then the fire alarm went off! Buss got dressed (he was in his plaid boxers) and we all trekked down 9 flights out into the bitter wind, back to the front of the hotel only to find it was a false alarm. We all returned to the set for our final rehearsal and by the time we were ready to shoot the Rolodex had arrived! Serendipity? Who knows.

We finished the weeks work at the 50’s drive-in where Mickey went head to head with a fibre-glass pig. I think we’d all been secretly waiting for this scene and Mickey didn’t let us down. “Rodney King!” he cried over and over as the Georgia State troopers lead him away to their car.

Somehow we are already half way through the shoot. How did this happen? I’m realizing that I must concentrate even harder now than I did at the start. The sense that it’s all going well is an insidious little demon that can lead to complacency on my behalf and now I’m responsible for turning all the hours of hard work by everyone else into something truly entertaining. Besides we have to get 2gether to Florida to see if they can whup Woah! butt. My gut feeling is they can do it.

A day of weather ironies. At 7am I find myself scouting a location in the dark and in the pouring rain for a scene that will be shot in daylight and with the sun up (I hope)…Then in the afternoon we go outside (where at last the sun has appeared) throw a tent over The Indian and pretend the boys are driving down the highway at night! Go figure…

This last gag is called “Poor man’s process” or PMP for short. What we do is cover the band’s van with huge and heavy black drapes provided by Dean and his merry bunch of grips, then light the van as if it were travelling down a highway at night. Finally we put the actors in their seats and film a scene as we rock the van to and fro. ‘Why not drive the van down the road and shoot?’ I hear you ask. Well you can do that but you get lots of road noise, you don’t get the same angles, it takes up loads of time and it’s not always sensible to ask an actor to drive and act at the same time. (No offence Doug). There is another way which is to put the vehicle on a huge trailer and drag it down the road with the crew riding on the trailer and shooting inside the van. This is called a Process Trailer shot but is much more costly and also very time consuming. I used a process trailer on the C-Note video I shot earlier this year and the Cadillac the band were riding in fell through the trailer: waste of an afternoon!

This morning we dressed up teams of innocent extras to represent the three decades of Buss’s remarkable career: The Fifth Unit (60’s), The Johnson 5 (70’s) and 2 Kool 4 Skool (80’s). The wardrobe, hair and make-up departments (Lorraine, Monique and Adina) excelled themselves with mutton chops, fros, wide lapels and instant tans.

I made the mistake of imbibing a popular night-time cold remedy last night and stumbled out of bed this morning feeling like a man with a rotting blanket for a head. As I stood in the shower thoughts tumbled through my brain along the lines of “if I collapse in the middle of a take will they find someone to yell cut?” Nevertheless Meredith my trusty assitant (and very popular amongst the lads I can tell you) was waiting for me down in the lobby with the Beast and shuttled me off to set ignoring my grumblings and whingeings like the lady she is.

The morning was filled with various dramas which I shall report on another occasion and the afternoon was spent watching Jerry, QT, Mickey, Doug and Chad try on a variety of stunning dancing outfits the like of which only Mr Buss could conjure up. The Firemen’s suits made me think of Village People, the catcher’s outfits made me think of Tom Hanks spitting chewing tobacco and the Tarzan outfits reminded me of an old Was Not Was video that I made back in the 80’s. 2gether – I’m so proud of them: they worked hard all day and nary a grumble between them.

And of course it rained from dawn till dusk.

Today was very special for us all as Mark Gunn and Brian Gunn (“we’re cousins not brothers”), our trusty scribes, were in Vancouver to watch us bring their words to life. I am happy to report that they were still talking to me after Maggie played them a bunch of dailies. Brian then changed into a Bellhop outfit and lead the guys to the bunker where Buss will turn them from raw recruits into finely tuned teen machines. Today’s Buss jacket was for the Transatlantic Rhythm Kings – another of my old bands. Hopefully my old band mates will have a snigger when they see this on MTV next year.

I checked my guestbook today and noticed that Erin had checked out the web site. She misses us and I’m sure Jerry and the lads are thinking about her too…

It was just like shooting that Backstreet Boys commercial in NYC all over again: 150 screaming girls and thick grey skies only this time my luck held out and it didn’t rain till we went inside where Chad and Mickey were giving Woah! lots of stick – “don’t dance so good,” they begged, “you make us look bad!”

After my plea for Chilliwack discs Tony (production designer) and Abraham (location man) both appeared with different Chilliwack albums for my collection. Nearly all my dreams on this job are coming true!