Release night was amazing. Kevin, Alex, Noah, Maggie and Brad came round my house with some other friends and we watched the pre-show on TV. I’d left some messages on the web that the guys would come into the chat room after the movie was over. This was 2B the first real test of the chat-room. I logged on half way through the movie and was stunned: the chat-room was full of fans waiting for the guys to come on line.

Pretty soon Noah, Alex and Kevin were taking it in turns to type in answers at the computer to questions from all over including Yvonne in Canada who hosts the first ever 2gether fan site and hadn’t seen the movie yet! While he wasn’t typing Alex played Sweet Home Alabama on my guitar and it all felt rather surreal. After the guys were gone I stayed on-line for ages chatting to fans and felt that all the hard work had been worth while.

In the days since the first broadcast web page has taken so many hits that my guest book crashed and took with it all the kind thoughts from 2GETHER fans across the country and I found 2gether stickers in the school where I shot my first non-2gether job yesterday. The reviews have been a mixture of ecstatic (Houston Chronicle) and vicious (Daily Variety). But there is no second-guessing anymore: 2gether is no longer mine or Maggie’s or Mark and Brian’s.

2gether belongs to the world now.

“New York, just like I pictured it – skyscrapers and everythang!” There we were, me and Mr. Buss, dressed up in our best whistles standing in the lobby of the MTV building at 1515 Broadway looking at the fans outside waiting for us to ‘arrive.’ We smiled and wondered how come the fans could bear to be standing out in the cold so long, it’s not like they were being paid or anything. And then they were ready for us.

We were bundled out into the cold and in 2 seconds were sitting in the limo that was going to drive us to the Premiere. The walkie-talkie was buzzing “Where’s Serena? Which car is she in?” I was disappointed to hear she’d left already – GREAT. QT gets to meet Britney but do I get to hang with Serena? No chance. The walkie sparked again. “OK, we’re ready for Nigel and Alan…go, go, go!” The car started and we drove to the Premiere – exactly 20 feet! The doors opened, we climbed out and the fans were going nuts…I mean MENTAL. They didn’t have a clue who we were but Buss could have been Brad Pitt and I could have been Jennifer Lopez and they couldn’t have made more noise. The cameras were all over us, and there we both were up on the big screen across the street! A second or two later we were standing back in the lobby we’d left about three minutes ago laughing hysterically.

(Outside the MTV Building on the night of the Premiere)

Illusion? Yes, but such fun and it’ll look great on Monday night. I hope I don’t look too much like a Dick. I met Dave Holmes and was interviewed by someone I didn’t recognise who rubbed her hand up and down my back as we talked for the camera – very nice technique – it keeps you smiling the whole time. The guys were jumpy and nervous sneaking out for ciggies (Mickey) or chugging loads of water (Jerry). They all gave me a custom-made 2gether coat with their names embroidered inside as a memento of our weeks in Vancouver and I got dewy-eyed. Chad got into trouble for calling ‘Miss USA’ ‘Miss America’ (or was it the other way around) and she said nice things about a movie she’s not seen yet! Finally the guys performed “Before We Say Goodbye” twice (first time good vocals, second time good moves) and Calculus twice. They stressed over their vocals but did a fine job. And suddenly it was all over…

Friday afternoon brought another TRL appearance and plug for the movie. A nasty storm had blown in from the West and Times Square was full of snow and miserable pedestrians. Just a few months ago the guys asked me with wide open eyes if they’d ever get to visit MTV. Today was their third appearance in the TRL studio and they’re blasé already chatting with Carson like they were old friends. We looked down on the kids outside and saw five t-shirts with YOU on one shirt, + on the next, then ME, = and finally US. We laughed as they screamed at us from the cold and were convinced they were plants from the record company: sharp marketing move we all thought.

I slipped out of the building on my own and heard screams and the sound of running feet. I looked up to see 2gether were being mobbed for the first time! (Apart from in the movie of course). The kids outside broke through the barriers and gathered round the guys taking pictures and asking for autographs. I watched and beamed. I wish Bob Buss had been here to watch his protégés doing the right thing by their fans. And the 5 t-shirts? They were for real – 5 fans from Connecticut had them made up and were standing outside in the cold wind and sleet for 2 hours just to see the guys! O lordy…

For reasons which are beyond explanation we started the final night of the mix on Friday night at 10.30 pm. I have just returned home with the mix (and therefore the movie) complete at 2.30 am on Sunday morning – 28 hours after we started! As I left the mixing stage in Burbank it all seemed too good to be true: I can finally take break till Monday morning when I start my next job, a commercial.

When I first started on the movie all we had was a script: an 11”x 8”x 1” package that weighed about two pounds. At its height the movie employed about 80 people, had around 300 extras on set and involved the daily movement of maybe 20 vehicles and tons of equipment. By tomorrow night, when it’s all assembled, the movie will be contained in a tape box a little narrower, deeper and longer than the original script but about the same weight. And that’s in a way what this has all been about – turning words into pictures, turning paper into video-tape. But what a wonderful experience it has been and I have completed a piece of work of which I am truthfully proud. I hope it makes you laugh…

We have three mixers on the show: Rick, Rick and (just so we don’t confuse him with the other two) Rich. Over the last two nights a dozen of us have been sitting in a large darkened room in Burbank as Rick, Rick & Rich have shuttled the tapes to and fro as they massaged the sound to aural perfection. Rick The Music mixed ‘The Wall’ tour and has worked with Alice, Bob Ezrin and other artists that also appear on my resumé. Rick The Dialogue has worked with Paula, Andrea and her late Dad. Rich (effects, backgrounds, foley) mixed Dead Connection for me and Jonathan over 7 years ago and still greets us with a happy face. As is the nature of our business we have discovered many things in common as we have toiled through till dawn making sure Buss’s charges sound at their best on their way down the Eastern Seaboard.

Our mixing stage is in the process of being re-modelled so the loos aren’t working. Every now and again one of us gets up and sidles outside to where two lonely portapotties stand in the gloom bathed in the late-night sodium. I pondered upon the ‘glamour’ of Hollywood last night as I returned to the stage and finally succumbed to the fatigue that raged like a fever through my bones. I lay down on the floor of the stage and slept like a dog for an hour while Jonathan covered for me. He is remarkably resilient and keeps his eye on every moment determined to make sure the picture is as good as it can be. I confess the process has ground me down and all I wish for is to see that master tape slipped inside its Fed-Ex envelope and shipped to New York.

Unsung heroes of the set # 976: the sound crew. Paula (sound effects), Andrea (ADR), David (dialogue) John & Sienna (music editors) have squeezed three weeks of work into the last 10 days. It’s been their job to identify every sound cue in the movie and provide me with an abundance of aural options.

Making this film has been like running the Marathon. I started out full of enthusiasm in October pacing myself, ran the race I’d planned till Christmas and then found myself in difficulties and short of breath in January. About two weeks ago I hit the wall. Today we came through the tunnel and found ourselves in the stadium at last. The roar of the crowd is going to help us over these last few hundred metres but, though the finishing line is in sight, my legs are feeling wobbly and I just want to sit down right here…

What have we unleashed on the world? I’ve now found “The First Unofficial Evan Farmer Fan Site” It features such items as: “what makes Evan so hot” …”the art corner”…”evan greeting cards.” Buss was right. “They’re going to blow up like Chernobyl!” OK so he was talking about someone else but how long will it be before Pegasus gets its own web page?

4am Monday morning (the 7th) and it’s been a weekend of dramas. 7 frames went missing from act 7 on Friday night, Jonathan and Celia (post production guru) found them on Saturday morning but there’s a question as to where they might be again tonight. In the scheme of things we’re talking 7/25 of a second in an 82 minute show which is an inaccuracy of (if my maths is correct at this time of night) 1 / 1,377th of the length of the show. It’s not much to be worried about but we fixate on such details at this stage.

A week from now…it will be a week from now and the movie will be complete, but tonight is the first time I’ve seen some of the scenes with music and sound effects – we’ve been doing the temp dub (a temporary mix of all the sounds) so we can send copies of the tape out tomorrow for the reviewers. There’s so much I’d like to re-shoot, look at again but I’m always like that at this stage – whingeing, whining and refining. The important thing is – the movie rocks. The characters are alive and people laugh when they watch it – they become involved. We’ll track down those seven missing frames and ignore the little blemishes that only a few of us will notice. By Friday night the die will be cast and the next step in the chain will be you, the most important person in the whole process, the viewer.

I remember going to see a truly bad movie when I was a kid which was a ‘Raiders Of The Lost Arc’ kind of deal. You know the kind of thing – a bunch of ‘intelligent western historians’ travel to some far off land to plunder the burial mound of some ‘uncivilized native’ race and come back home dripping with diamonds and gold. It was all about greed basically. Anyway, in the middle of the film was a sequence which was supposed to represent an endless march across some huge Sahara-like desert. The film-makers created the impression of time passing by making the film go from night to day to night to day over and over in the same shot as the leads plodded across the rolling sands. Well this is what the post-production process has come to feel like for me on this project. My desert has become an endless chain of ADR sessions, edit bays, spotting sessions and transfer rooms. I am sleeping on the floor wherever possible and playing Johnny Guitar Watson as loud as I can in the car to keep myself awake as I drive from Burbank to Santa Monica in the darkness every night. It’s all become a bit of a grind…and then…as I’m waiting for the paint to dry in another darkened room I see a ray of light. I’m surfing the web and find that there is already an unofficial 2gether web-site!

This is a truly great moment for me, like the grizzled actor in his battered kahki shorts, with his water bottle virtually empty after his long trek across the desert, I have found something that reminds me of the joy I get from doing all this work – a fan. 2gether, just a few months back a figment of Mark, Brian and Maggie’s imaginations, are inspiring people. The band appeared on TRL yesterday with Carson and already people are talking. Tonight I got home and there was a copy of the 2gether CD on my doorstep! Maybe the journey across the wastes has been worth it after all.

I visited Paula, our sound effects lady, in Burbank this morning. With every other room in her building locked up for the weekend she was working hard cutting in sound effects (SFX) for the movie – trying jet noises and space effects for the band’s van as it drives down the Eastern Seaboard. All this hard work will hopefully get us some extra laughs and helps all those drive-bys work. (Remember the Sphincter Unit Day 2?)

Next stop ADR. While the ADR session the other day was for stuff we hadn’t recorded today we shot ADR on stuff we had recorded. Doug and Jerry both came in to re-record lines that were messed up by trucks driving by or by noisy Englishmen shouting directions in the background. This is where the AUTOMATIC of Automatic Dialogue Replacement comes in though it’s not frankly very automatic and a real pain in the butt for the actors who (rightly) would prefer to stick with what they said on the day. Some directors make actors re-shoot their dialogue for the whole movie – they say Jackie Chan even has a sound-alike! But 2gether don’t need stunt-voices they do their own stuff!

ADR stands for Automatic Dialogue Replacement and that’s what we started doing this morning…(another term for it is looping). What is it? Well, for instance, when Buss finds Mickey in the skateboard park there are loads of other kids in the background hanging out but we can’t hear their voices. All we recorded on the day was the sound of Buss and Mickey talking – everyone else was miming so that we would get a clean sound track. Today we had a room full of young actors going through every scene in the movie putting words into the mouths of those folk in the background. Andrea, our ADR lady, had made a note of every shot in the movie which needed ADR and given cues to the sound guys who placed three beeps (the countdown to start talking) before every scene that needs this background chatter…which is also called WALLAH.

Meanwhile I’ve been watching the on-line take place. Now picture is locked we have taken the off-line (the edit which is inside the computer) into the video editing bay and we are matching every picture in the off-line with the perfect quality pictures you will see on your screens in just a few weeks. As each reel has been completed I’ve taken it across town to a small dark room in Santa Monica where Marc (the DP who shot the movie for us in Canada) and I have graded the movie picture by picture. Actually that’s a huge fib. Marc & I sit in the back and watch while Brian (the bass player in Doug’s band Pegasus) twiddles the knobs so that Chad’s close up matches his wide shot.

And at last 2gether have a web site! Just four months after we first suggested it I found it on the MTV web-page today.

The 2gether family grows daily. Today we ran through the movie and pointed out every sound effect, noise of a passing truck, dialogue imperfection out to the sound crew. This afternoon we repeated the process all over again for the music team. We looked at sections where we hope Camara will create musical score for us and tried musical pieces as disparate as Gerry And The Pacemakers and Trent Reznor to set the right mood.

Damon worked all through the night AGAIN last night…I think it is likely that when this movie airs no-one, and I mean no-one, will have worked more hours on this movie than Damon.

I think we may be close to locking picture! Tomorrow morning we show Maggie the final cut for her approval. If she’s OK with it we “lock picture”. This means that all the images in the movie have been irrevocably chosen and the sound guys can finally go to work. They have an enormous task ahead of them – with so many cuts and so many songs in the film they will be ordering food through the middle of the night just like we have for the last two or three weeks.

Having survived on a diet of fried egg sandwiches for weeks Bill, our esteemed producer, came in last week and told us that we should turn in all receipts for meals because we’ve been working such long hours. So we’ve raised the calibre of our comestibles a notch or two and had sushi two nights running. The result has been a new slogan echoing round Shaw’s editing hut: “Dining like Kings, working like slaves!” Maggie and Bill have been very generous over the last few days having laid on a big spread the other night and today they sent over a masseuse to rub our aching backs. Very nice gesture only we all felt like crashing about half an hour after our backrubs. What we probably needed more was some of that stuff they make out in the valley that you always see cops hauling away bags of on the 11 o’clock news!

Unsung heroes of the set # 975…assistant editors. Damon Fecht is our assistant editor and Damon has been working like a dog. During production he’d stay up every night digitizing the dailies and over the last few weeks he’s taken a beating that even Mr. Hussein and his most able torturers would be hard pressed to improve upon. It’s Damon’s job to know where all the dailies are, do all the dubs, maintain the avids, take the phone calls, make Jonathan his tea, arrive before us and leave after us. And believe me that last bit takes some doing all on its own. He’s been wearing an old Yessongs T-shirt today (a bootleg valued at $15) and yesterday came to work in collapsed sandals and no socks because we’ve been working him so hard that he hasn’t had time to do any washing! And he never complains, takes a load of stick from the lads in master control and has to listen to me playing my guitar all day long to boot. I’ve been home and writing this for 30 minutes already and I bet he’s still in the edit room backing up the avids. Damon please go home and drive safe. WE NEED YOU.

Last week Maggie said to me, “The end of the tunnel is in sight and I don’t think there’s a train coming!” Today I see that glimpse for the first time. We showed her the movie this morning and she laughed, I laughed, Jonathan laughed and Damon laughed. We’re locked! I can’t believe it – just some picture tweaks, two weeks of sound, colouring, on-lining and mixing and we’ll be done! You’ll be watching the movie in less than 4 weeks time.

Best of all I nearly made it home before dark. Jonathan will have dinner with his wife and kids tonight for the first time in weeks and I came home, sat in the bath and listened to the Isleys sing “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.” Bliss.

And while we relax Damon is still at it – cutting lists for the first four reels so that the sound editors can get to work in the morning. Our little film factory continues to churn away…

Back in October I a friend of mine called me. He said: “I was speaking to Linda today who said she’d heard that the movie you’re making really sucks.” Now this Linda (name changed) happened to be an old friend of mine so her words really upset me. But what upset me more was that she was judging a) a film that she hadn’t seen and, more importantly, b) a film that hadn’t been shot! With friends like that etc…

Today the phone started ringing once more. The rumour mill has started up again only now the rumours are along the lines of “apparently the movie Nigel’s made is really good.” I confess that it’s great that the town has decided to like my work but what’s confusing to me is that only about ten people have seen it in anything like its finished form. I’m really proud of this film and want it and 2gether to do fantastically well but would trade this early buzz for some reason in the world. Dear reader, please be kind to my little film after I’ve spent so much effort on it but also be kind to every other film you might wish to see no matter what anybody says and remember these words from Richard E. Grant’s funny book ‘Withnails’: “I ponder the question that’s always asked, ‘Did you know at the time (you were filming) you were destined to be in a hit or a howler?’…Three answers spring forth. Casablanca was considered ‘unreleasable,’ the Dakota plane was considered ‘unflyable’ and the Titanic ‘unsinkable.’”

Have the courage to form your own opinions and don’t give two figs what a movie does at the box office in its opening weekend.

Bill finally arrived at noon yesterday but not before more dramas had delayed his arrival. We set to immediately on the new footage. By 1 this morning we were looking in really good shape so I ordered Jonathan home for four hours much needed sleep. We were back in the cutting room by 6 this morning.

It was quiet as the grave on Seward, Damon was fast asleep on the sofa in Declan’s room, we were getting loads done and the dawn was breaking over the Griffith Park Observatory when it happened….the computer crashed. After two hours of frantic calls to tech support we realized we had lost hours of footage from the avid – the complex computer system we use for editing nowadays. After an 8 hour delay we were finally back in business but there was no hope of finishing all the fixes we had hoped to include in the cut for the execs. Depressed and frustrated we pressed on delivering a cut we knew could have been close to perfect if the Gods had been with us.

And in the middle of the temp mix the band rang up – they’d just seen the vid and were full of happiness and joy. If no-one ever sees the film it would have been all worth while just for that phone call. Tomorrow we can finish a cut…I’m sure of it.

The post team send out their thanks tonight to an unknown man somewhere in Vancouver who managed to stop our resourceful producer from getting on a plane today. I’m not happy that this Jobsworth stopped Bill from flying down here, far from it, we all wanted to receive his precious cargo but the ramifications of his actions have resulted in us getting a little more sleep and another 24 hours to deliver our next cut. Let me explain.

Maggie and Bill went up to Vancouver Saturday to shoot some extra footage we felt necessary to hype up the rivalry between Woah! and 2gether. Meanwhile as Jonathan sweated over his Avid we hired Howard and his lads to start on the graphics and John and Sienna were working hard to deliver their sound bytes all for inclusion in a cut that was to be delivered by 7pm tomorrow night. Needless to say we all were running behind schedule.

Bill was ready in the transfer house in Vancouver this afternoon like a runner with his arm out poised at his blocks on the third leg of a 4×400 relay but the film was late. He missed 2 flights and was within seconds of reaching the third (and last) before the trusty gent in Vancouver prevented him from boarding his plane. Consequently the film will not be in Jonathan’s Avid in the morning, consequently we can’t get the cut out by the afternoon, consequently we all get the extra time which we need so badly and can make so much use of.

It must be noted here that Maggie and Bill have bent over backwards to get us extra time and help in the editing room and it will all make the film better, and God knows I’m aware of how hard Bill tried to get that film to us in LA tonight, but evenso we’re glad to have this extra moment of space. I’ve been able to speak to the graphics people and the music editors and their relief was palpable – they’ll all have much more to give us tomorrow when we assemble the edit and thus we will all have a better idea of how the film is working.

And you know what maybe Bill’s happy too. He’ll get to travel down with his luggage.

As I type I know that teams of folks are busy at their screens all over town rendering pictures and cutting sounds that will make this little film of ours breathe. All these people are like workers in Frankenstein’s lab sewing the monster’s sinews and synapses into place and as we all turn our backs momentarily to grab a coffee its eyes flicker for the first time and its muscles start to twitch. Pretty soon it will have a life of its own and we can sit back and watch it stomp across your TV screens!

I’ve never had kids but today I got a fleeting sense of what it might be like…

2gether played at the MTV conference thingy in Puerto Rico last night and word has come back to us that the place went nuts and they had a standing ovation. Suddenly I felt a tinge of regret…this is the first time they have done anything like this without ME! They exist in a world without their director (dad) unit…they have a life of their own. I feel suddenly stranded, left out, excluded but also intensely proud that all the things that Buss taught them are paying off. Even so I hope the little buggers (lying in the sun by a swimming pool today by all accounts) send us a postcard!

Maggie gave us her reaction to the assembly of the movie today. I was summoned to the MTV bunker and my knees were wobbly as I waited for the elevator. “It couldn’t be more painful than the intrusive teeth cleaning I had this morning,” I told myself. And I was right….phew!

There are many more hurdles to overcome yet but this was an important one. Maggie is the person who first heard the pitch, the first person who sat in her chair and wondered what 2gether would look like. Without her there would be no 2gether at all. And by and large she seems pretty pleased with the results but feels we need to spice up the first act. I don’t disagree. This is the bit where film-making gets really creative…how do we take the scenes we’ve got, truncate them, move them around, flesh them out and intercut them so that the movie is better, faster and funnier?

This may seem like an admission of defeat but it’s nothing of the sort. The footage is good, I’m intensely proud of the performances, it does exactly what it was supposed to do but now we can actually see and feel what was on the written page and we need to mould it so that you, the viewer, will be entertained, intrigued, amused and entranced. You’d be surprised how much of this goes on in film-making. Hey, Woody Allen has shot some of his movies twice!

P.S. They rejected “Flying Hooves Of Steel.” Time for me to remember Buss’s John Travolta Rule…

Forgot to tell you all about the weekend. On Saturday I left Johnathan cutting away so I could slip over the hill to lay down tracks for the Pegasus tune that may (or may not) make it onto the album. (The instrumental version subsequently appears as you hear Mr. Rochester & co. walk out onstage). The studio (Barry Paul Recording) is run by a guy named Barry Paul…life is full of co-incidences…who, for all you trivia hounds, used to be the guitar player in the Heavy Metal Kids. The rhythm section for the Pegasus track were my old band mates Cliff and Brian – the backbone of the Transatlantic Rhythm Kings and the name on the back of Buss’s tour jacket for ‘knuckle-down time.’ With some amazing guitar from Jeff Cardone and some BV’s from Julie, our music supervisor, we were ready for Doug to lay down his distinctive metal rapping style – watch out Fred Durst. I love the result – hope everyone else does too. I wonder if they’ll just be nice to me because I’m the director and pretend? (Woops – a moment of insecurity there.)

Meanwhile across the valley John, Julie’s husband, was producing a dance mix of U+Me=Us and Julie was watching over the recording of “You’re My Baby Girl” and another great song, a ballad, whose title I can’t remember in two SEPARATE studios miles apart! RESULT – a lot of tired children on Monday morning and DATs from all over town making their way to Julie’s place for inclusion in the album.

These are the things that need to happen so that dream I had in the Virgin Megastore on day 15 can come true.