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.

At about 11 this morning Damon, our long suffering assistant editor, sent off the first proper assembly of the movie for all the big knobs to watch. What will they all think? Will I ever work in this town again? It was a tough job getting the assembly done in time and that was with an extra days grace kindly supplied to us by Maggie. Johnathan put in an absolutely Herculean effort last yesterday and worked for 20 hours straight on the cut. We left the edit at 530 this morning absolutely destroyed. I supplied moral support to Johnathan by reading Q magazine, playing Freecell on my laptop and dozing on the couch in the back of the edit room. Johnathan struggled gamely onwards while my ability to make any sensible decision was seriously affected by wanting desperately to go home and get some sleep. And all the while Damon slept on the couch in the edit room next door waiting for us to finish so he could slug it all together for us.

These guys are amazing, they have put their trust and loyalty in me so we can do the best possible job and have something on our resumé of which we are all proud. But the sight of us wandering through the dimly lit corridors of the editing rooms at 5am looking for sustenace was not a pretty sight.

Today we met the music editors, a happy couple, named Sienna and John. It will be their job to slug in various compositions and musical ideas so that we and Camara, our fine composer, can have a clear idea of the musical approach for each scene. I feel very strongly that the tone of the movie will be heralded by the music and hope that we can discover something that is both hip and funny. In my minds ear I imagine a combination of Y2K beats with tubas, accordians and kazoos playing over the top…

You might not believe this is possible but the concept of releasing a soundtrack album from a movie full of music has only just started to become a reality. I first brought up the idea of a soundtrack album in November and was quickly told: “Why don’t you just direct the film instead of meddling in something you know nothing about!” Well all of a sudden it seems we have at last found someone who wants to release a CD so this morning we all sat in a small office in West Hollywood and tried to stir up half a dozen new songs so we can transform an EP into a full length CD. If the album can be released in time for the movie’s appearance on your screen we have to start and finish another half album in the next seven days! Perhaps we can re-record this demo, perhaps we can borrow that song from there, perhaps we can fill out “You’re My Baby Girl”, perhaps I can come up with a bad metal tune for Pegasus (Doug’s defunct heavy metal outfit).

After a hard day in the editing room I raced home to pick up my guitar and start riffing. “When Medusa was slain by that greek guy Perseus / that’s when I was born and my name is Pegasus…” I needed ideas for some truly awful lyrics and an old Whitesnake album gave me just the inspiration I needed. Four hours later, and with my long suffering neighbours probably stuffing cotton wool in their ears, I think I’ve cracked it…

Technically speaking post production started at the end of our first day of shooting when the first cans of dailies were sent to the lab. Johnathan, the editor, started viewing dailies the minute they arrived in LA and has been working in a vacuum (i.e. without me) ever since. Despite pulling 12 hour days and 6 and 7 day weeks (3 days off to be with his family over the holiday) he is still assembling the last few scenes of the movie. A well known poster in post circles here in LA has a warning for all single people of a certain age. Underneath a picture of a tired editor hard at work is the salutary caption: NEVER MARRY AN EDITOR.

With the assembly complete we will sit back and look at the movie and start to make it work. Whatever we intended to acheive with the script we now have a new master to serve – the footage in the cans of film we have shot. Inside these cans is hidden the movie you will see on your screens in less than seven weeks time. We are already sending cuts out – the promo people in New York need something to vibe up the troops – but this baby is not even partially formed in the womb and I hope desperately that these people, whom I’ve never met, understand that we do know what we are doing and we know that our child is imperfectly formed and needs further gestation before we can push it into the world. Well they’ve trusted me so now I must return the favour.

Spent the afternoon transferring the dailies for the video. This process is called TELECINE and the guy who operates the equipment is called a COLORIST. Colorists drive luxury cars and live in comfortable houses but they have very pale skin and squint if they go outside. I have spent so much of my life in dark rooms with colorists that some of them are now my best friends. (My last band had not one but two colorists and a telecine engineer in it). Telecine involves threading the film through what is basically a very large and accurate projector that is tilted about 15 degrees off vertical in a climate controlled machine room. By twiddling a vast array of knobs in front of the most expensive TV monitor that money can buy the colorist can then adjust the look of the exposed film. He can make it darker, lighter, give it more contrast, change the skin tone of the actors, even adjust the colour of the sweater someone is wearing. As telecine machines have become more sophisticated so the look of the footage on MTV has become more exciting. Tomorrow Declan, who has edited loads of videos for me, will start viewing the dailies and inputtting them into the computer so he can start cutting. Dec will be working in the cutting room next to Johnathan – 2gether is gradually taking over a small building in Hollywood. The video has to be finished by next Friday. No time to lose…

I’m in a land far, far away and tomorrow I fly back to LA-LA land to finish the movie. My time in Vancouver has served me well – the rain and cold I’ve encountered on my trip seemed like nothing after the Canadian South-West.

Now the post-production begins in earnest – a big sprint to the finish line at the end of the month. We’ve got to hire a composer, cut and mix the movie in about 4 weeks. No sleep till Hammersmith…

The meeting between 2gether and another band in the truck stop had been a fly in the ointment since day one and we just couldn’t find a band who could get in synch with what we were trying to acheive or even 98% as excited as we were about the movie. Then QT came up with a germ of an idea that led to the replacement scene that finally landed on our desks on Thursday night. The answer, of course, was right under our noses all the time: 2gether needed to bump into Woah! All credit must go to Maggie who had singed her right ear off with the cell-phone talking to half of New York so we get the new scene approved.

In the corner of the Bannerman Convention Centre we had built a truck stop and we rehearsed the new scene over and over trying to get ten actors to hit their marks in the tiny space we had allowed ourselves. Swimming upstream against the holiday vibe that had pervaded the set Kev, Marc and I struggled to get everyone to focus and it wasn’t going that well then, suddenly on take 3, it gelled. Everyone got it and all we had to do was get the coverage.

At about 8pm the camera was shooting a bunch of stills of Buss with the Johnson Five, the Fifth Unit and 2 Cool 4 Skool. For the final time I yelled “Check The Gate” and it was all over. I hugged Marc who has become a firm friend and blubbed like a child.

As the day had progressed little packages started appearing on my desk – gifts from the crew and cast and every gesture moved me beyond words. The Wrap Party was a fine ending to our little adventure – everyone got a present and we all danced to QT’s latest CD and raved like crazy to 2gether (the song). Having staggered from my bed at 6am to go to work I couldn’t believe I was still frugging at 3am. Within hours our party will be separated forever. Some of us will be journeying to Europe some are going to Mexico (not Tony still recovering in hospital) and Abraham, who first guided me to every location, will not be going to Venezuela as planned because of the terrible flooding there and must find a new destination for his Christmas break. I feel for him as he had been looking forward to the trip for months.

As I soaked in the bath before the wrap party I remembered a quote from Robert Bolt the screenwriter who wrote Lawrence Of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, A Man For All Seasons and Ryan’s Duaghter. He said “At a pinch all directors without exception think in all sincerity that if they put their minds to it they could write, act, design and photograph the film better than their actual colleagues.” At times I have been very guilty of that attitude, and today was no exception, but the truth of the matter is that any filmic undertaking is a team event and everybody deserves equal credit for completing the film on time and, as far as I know, on budget.

Unsung Heroes Of The Set Part Eight: The Editors. While we’ve been doing the glamorous bit up here in Vancouver Johnathan and his crew have been cutting away in a small room in Hollywood. Everyday a new batch of rushes has arrived in the office down there and one of his assistants has worked through the night inputting the footage into the Avid so that Johnathan can come in in the morning and start viewing and cutting. I’ll be sitting beside him on Monday morning and we’ll see what it looks like – I can’t wait. Principal Photography is over – we’re now officially in Post Production.

It’s dawning on me that it’s nearly all over and I’m heartsick. I’ve never seen so many happy faces on a set and a party mood has taken a hold of all of us – I’ve tried manfully to keep myself concentrated all day but it’s been hard and like the cast and crew I’m feeling light headed – Robert and Troy were wearing funny hats today and I wished I had one too. Sensing our joy the sun came out and stayed out all day – and it NEVER rained once.

We finally got to shoot Jerry and Buss driving to New York as we wrapped tonight. This scene has been hanging over us for two weeks – an unfinished piece that we tried to slot in a number of times. Some kind man in Vancouver loaned us his car as the Buss-mobile and he has been expecting it back for days. Finally the Cadillac will make its way back home. Today was also the last day the Indian was around in all its glory. It is being de-commisioned and returned to the dealer we rented it from. Some innocent couple will purchase it and take it on a trip across the country unawares of the hours of fun and drama that took place inside its walls. I can see the sign now: “For Sale, Winnebago 90,000 miles, Good runner, star of MTV movie 2gether!”

Unsung Heroes Of The Set Part Seven: the Art Dogs. They build us sets before we arrive and can’t break them down till we wrap. They are expected to miraculously come up with dressing to cover up walls that Marc and I don’t like the look of, produce tiny props at a moments notice from Buss’s rolodex to bras and teddy bears that will be thrown at the stage. My ideas are always bigger than their budget and I could make their lives easier if only I could make up my mind. They are the first to be blamed and the last to be thanked and yet I can’t ever remember working with an art department person who didn’t have a smile on his / her face. They often have to stay up all through the night covered in paint. More than once in my life I have found the art department behind the set curled up like babies in paint-spattered overalls fast asleep on a stone cold floor, spent with exhaustion, just to make my reel look good. Is that selfless or what?

What did I tell you? 2gether made it to Jacksonville and they kicked Whoa! butt big-time. Bill, the movie’s producer, worked some magic with the numbers and we had a total of 270 extras (or thereabouts) and they ruled. They screamed their hearts out for hours and hours, learned the lyrics to three songs and the You+Me=Us arm routine. One of the girls asked me to write a letter to her boss because she was afraid he might think she was goofing off for the day. If you read this Jeff she wasn’t skiving and I hope you can find it in your heart to let her have the day off now and again to pursue her acting thing. It was a real buzz to hear all you girls singing the songs between shots. You know, I think that Bob Buss is onto something.

It was also a day of incredible ups and downs. Jerry was so sick we had to send him to the doc in the morning. Would 2gether make it? Well it takes more than a fever and exhaustion to keep Jerry O’Keefe from shaking his butt onstage – or maybe he just wanted to get back to the set in time for Mickey’s birthday cake. Happy Birthday Mickey P.

Unsung Heroes Of The Set Part Six: The Guys ‘n Gals in the production office. The two Alisons and Balazs, Richard and Suzie are the folk who receive the faxes, answer the phone calls, arrange the photocopying and so forth that keeps our day moving forward. What’s even worse is that they work in a vacuum separated from the set by half a city. Like Don, Laurie and Nancy in the accounts department we couldn’t survive without their work but when they come down to the set I’m sure most of the crew wonder who they are. Our crew is like a little city – there are people who toil away through the night and the day to keep our factory churning out film. Not everyone will get to be a star, a producer or whatever but everyone can contribute something worthy to the final film. It’s a bit like life isn’t it?

And on that note 2gether Industries wants to send best wishes to Tony, our production designer, who got very sick at the weekend and had to be rushed to hospital. The set looked great today, Tony, and your team has pulled 2gether hard in your absence. We miss you and hope you get well soon.

Oh, the delights of being inside! It rained hard all day long and we just sat and worked and stayed dry…of course we weren’t warm because the heating makes too much noise and that would ruin the sound-track, but you can’t have everything. We not only made good time, but we caught up on three scenes we’d been carrying over. We’re virtually back on schedule.

Unsung Heroes Of The Set Part Five: The caterers! When I get to the set at 7 tomorrow morning the catering truck will already be parked there in the big puddle. Cereals will be laid out on the table, fruit will be ready-cut in the bowls, six flavours of yogurt, various nuts, dried fruit and breads will be on offer and a huge range of breakfasts are available in less than five minutes…and they’re already cooking lunch. What time to these people have to get up in the morning to make sure I can consume my bacon & tomato sandwich at 645am? My only conclusion is that these guys must be already cooking while I’m still asleep. Phew!

2gether worked hard all day and under pressure too. Jerry had bronchitis and QT had the stomach flu. But the good news is we were inside all day and free from the vagaries of the weather. Each member of the band got to live out his fantasy: Jerry & Erin got married; Chad got to ride his SEA.DOO; Doug got to go back to Pegasus and play with a real guitar; Mickey got to box in a ring and QT spent time in his harem with a bunch of girls. He even took home some phone numbers!!! I guess he wasn’t THAT sick after all.

The MTV crew were here in full force. We had David with us who is Maggie’s boss and also the guys who’ll be creating the website. I played the part of my alter ego all day, Bif Rydberg, but failed miserably at keeping up the accent – I pity the poor editor who tries to cut that stuff together.

Unsung Heroes Of The Set Part 4: Extras. We sometimes call them background and that’s what they do – they fill out the background, walk through a shot, pretend to be having a drink at the bar or talking with a friend. On this film they’ve spent hours in the cold and wet and, even worse, I’m not allowed to talk to them. So if I wanted to say “Thank-you” at the end of a take and suggest they should go inside for a cup of coffee I’m breaching the rules. If they ask me a question I have to turn away as if they are some kind of Untouchable sect. But without them we’d be lost in empty cities or stranded in customer free diners. Next time you watch a movie or TV show count how many people you see in the background never saying a word as they run from Godzilla, eat in a restaurant or dance at the prom – and wardrobe has to find clothes for everyone of them and make-up and hair has to give them all a make-over.

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!