Veteran's Day weekend Heidi Martinuzzi, scream queen and owner of Pretty-scary.net graced us with her amazing presence. We'd talked to her way back in June about being in our movie and playing the part of Daisy. The question was how would we get her out here and how would we pay for it all. She was one hundred percent up for it so we set out to find a way to make it happen.
The solution literally fell into our laps via the U.S. mail. One small envelope with one large check for $1000. Bill Cain whose son Sting had sponsored our last movie Forever Dead wanted to do help again. This time Sting became an Executive Producer. That's what you get for $1000. That and a weekend with hotel paid and a part in our movie as an extra.
So in addition to shooting Heidi's scenes we also had Bill and Sting with us for the weekend helping out.
I'm afraid we may be getting a reputation for putting our guest actors through hell. When Peri came down he sweated his ass of for two days while we shot his scenes. With Heidi it was just the opposite. Being from California she wasn't used to those 30 degree nights. Fortunately Cowboy Bill had his saloon well heated and we all found ourselves constantly seeking refuge there. It was very cold!
Still, I would much rather be freezing my ass off then sweating it off. It's easier to get warmed up then it is to get cooled down. Especially when Cowboy Bill has several bottles of his special "Apple Pie" readily available. But that's another story.
Saturday morning dawned clear and chilly. Of course at 4am when my alarm went off there really wasn't any dawn to be seen. But by the time I got to the airport to get Heidi I could tell it would be an excellent day. I'd bought Heidi's ticket on Priceline hoping to get the best deal, which I did.
I'm sure William Shatner was right there looking over the Delta operator's shoulder telling them to give us a break, we were struggling film makers, we couldn't afford to pay full price! And I'm sure he was snickering when we got our price except for the fact that Heidi had to take the red-eye out of L.A. arriving at 6:15 am and departing Monday evening at 7:30pm way after any hotel checkout time of 12pm so she would have a full 7 and a half hours to kill. Oh yes we could change the time but not without a fee, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of getting the cheap tickets to begin with!
I was about twenty minutes late getting there. Heidi was waiting. I apologized, she said she'd just gotten there about 5 minutes before, so I didn't have to feel too guilty. I don't know what's happened to me lately. I was always very punctual. Early even. But lately I've been late to everything. It's getting me a reputation with my crew who loves to tease me about it every chance they get. Because they're never late of course.
It was about an hour's drive to the HoJo I'd booked for the weekend in Smithfield. It was a very nice drive and the hour seemed more like half an hour. Heidi was great to talk to and even though I know she was exhausted the conversation flowed. This was her very first trip to North Carolina. I wish we'd had more time to show her the sites. But I had packed every scene we could shoot with her into that weekend so there wasn't much room to do anything else.
The Smithfield HoJo was not the classiest establishment I probably could have booked but it wasn't the worst either. Whitey's in Wilmington would be the worst. We spent a night there during the One Take Film Festival. When you're that exhausted you just don't care.
The guy at the front desk of the HoJo was very nice. I got Heidi checked in and called Bill and Sting who I'd also booked there. They had arrived the night before and met me in the lobby. As Heidi pointed out, there was no mistaking they were father and son. They were excited to get going so I got Heidi into her room and we were on our way. We went to the Shadow Hawk first to unload my car. I was actually an hour early believe it or not! After we unloaded I gave them a brief tour of the empty town then, since we had plenty of time, we all went to breakfast at the local BK.
Heidi's call time was not 'til 5:30pm so she could get caught up on some sleep. Jaqueline Martini and Conrad Osborne who play Lily and Jack would be doing their scenes 'til then. Our crew for the shoot was me, Bill M, Boom gal Brandi, Production Manager Zach, and Sting acting as PA for the day. Wayne was there to shoot everything in sight. This in spite of his part as the preacher not being shot until Sunday. We can thank him for some really excellent photos that chronicled the weekends events. William Stine joined us Saturday and Sunday night to assist with FX. So get this, we had Bill Mulligan, Bill Drake, Bill Cain, and William Stine!
The day's shoot was pretty straight forward. Lily and Jack come back into town after a night time trek through the woods. They're exhausted, and since the town now seems to be deserted they decide to run up to Lily's bedroom and catch a quick nap. We had a lot of fun with this as you can imagine. We had two cameras for the shoot. My regular GL2 and an XL1. I mainly wanted to have the XL1 as backup in case my GL2 gave me more trouble. Turns out the GL2 did fine. The XL1 on the other hand was useless at night. The GL2 does a much better job shooting in low light.
Both Jaqueline and Conrad did an excellent job in their parts. This in spite of me surprising them with an alternate ending to one of their scenes.
Zach and Bill ran both cameras and from what I've seen so far got everything we needed. Zach is shaping up to be quite a good camera man. Sting got to do boom after Brandi showed him the ropes. He picked it up with no problem and we were happy to have his assistance throughout the day.
We broke for lunch around 2pm and got a call from Heidi at the hotel. She was hungry! We put together some food, probably more than she could eat, and sent Wayne to the hotel to deliver it. I had put out a call to everyone to bring something to share with everyone for the weekend. I didn't expect so much though! We had more than enough food for everyone that whole weekend. People brought breakfast food, sandwich fixin's, dinner food, snacks, drinks, cups, plastic ware, plates, napkins. I was extremely grateful! It was an expensive weekend and I was a little worried about how I was going to feed everyone. Thanks to cast, crew and extras that was one less thing I had to worry about.
It was nice to just sit for a while 'til our next 5:30 call time. Extras started trickling in around 5 or so. Paul Cardullo brought an amazing sandwich ring. I didn't get any but as fast as it went it must have been good. GG, Too Tall, Ed, Andy and the gang showed up for the night's shoot. Of all the photos taken that weekend the vast majority are of laughing smiling faces. That's the way it was that weekend. We had a great time, worked hard, and enjoyed making our movie.
Things really got going around 5:30. I'd sent Wayne to go pick up Heidi. This it turns out was a BIG mistake. About half an hour later I was getting concerned. The hotel was just about 5 minutes away. I called Wayne. "Heidi's pissed off" he said. "I can't get her to come out of her room." "What???!" I said, "What's wrong? Did she say anything?" "I banged on the door."he said "She opened it, gave me this strange look, said something about a cat, then slammed the door. I kept knocking but she wouldn't open it!" I think I just said "shit" at that point. All I could think was, she seemed so normal? What the hell happened? Did she take something to help her sleep? A million and one thoughts were going through my head. "Should I call her?" I asked Wayne. "No," he said. "Don't do that, I'll take care of it, don't worry, I'll get her there."
I confided all this to Bill and Brandi. They were equally alarmed. Not 5 minutes later I stepped outside to find Wayne and Heidi walking up as if nothing had happened. "You guys sure got here quick!" I said surprised. I was busy staring at Heidi who seemed neither wacked out or "pissed." That's when they both started laughing and knew I'd been had. If you ever want to pull a prank on me it's incredibly easy because I'm incredibly gullible and will believe just about anything you tell me if you're someone I trust. Wayne is no longer on my "trust" list.
We all settled in for one long cold night of shooting. Everyone got some dinner. GG brought some burgers for the grill which went FAST. Heidi looked perfect as Daisy in her saloon girl outfit.
Thanks to Jaquline's grandmother Patricia for getting that to us so quick, complete with feathers, boa, shoes, petticoat, everything she would need. Unfortunately it wasn't a very warm outfit. Our first scene was in front of the church where some of the towns people were demanding to be let in. Everyone really got into their parts. It was very convincing and we got some excellent footage!
Next was the scene at the saloon. This was a bit more difficult due to the size of the saloon and getting it lit just right. Trying to use two cameras is hard in such a small space especially when you don't want to get the other guy in your shot. Bill and I shot this since Zach was busy over acting in his part as Willy. I was extremely impressed with all the performances and was even more happy that I'd picked Heidi to play Daisy. There couldn't have been anyone more perfect to play that part. GG was over the top as the old prospector. Everyone had a hell of time keeping a straight face when he delivered his line.
After spending a couple of hours huddled in the saloon we finally got all the shots we needed. We went back to the other saloon where there was heat, got some food and waited while our FX guys finished making up zombies for the next series of shots.
About midnight we had everyone ready. I really felt sorry for the horses at this point. They'd been sitting there all day waiting for their big shot. We turned out all the lights in the town and used our big lights with various colored gels and attempted to fill the streets with our fog machine on loan from Ed. It looked suitably creepy!
William, Bill, and Brandi had done a great job making up all the zombies. Daisy/Heidi was also a zombie. We shot until about 1:30am. I think it's some of the best zombie footage we've gotten. Everyone was great, even at the 1:30am their enthusiasm didn't diminish.
I'd gotten a hotel room at the HoJo for the night along with some of our other cast and crew. It didn't make sense to drive all the way back to Sanford when we had to be there at 10am the next morning. And I was NOT going to spend the night in my car again. So we all headed to the HoJo. I don't remember one thing after my head hit the pillow. I was gone.
I'd suggested to Heidi that we get breakfast at the Waffle House the next morning. Just give me 10 minutes to get ready she said. I can't even get ready in 10 minutes. It kills me that she can do that and look as great as she does. I called around to the various rooms to see if anyone would join us that morning. Bill Cain said Sting was still fast asleep. They were heading out that morning so he wanted to let him sleep in. He thanked me again for letting them help out at the shoot, and I thanked him for making it happen. Wayne said he would join us. I couldn't get hold of Bill and Shonna. When we got to the Waffle House we figured out why. They were already there.
Heidi had never heard of the Waffle House before, so she was excited to have her first Waffle House experience. We'd heard the night before that just a few nights before that, someone had gotten their finger bitten off there. Exciting! Heidi on the other hand was more excited that she could buy Waffle House hunting gear, and took down the web address so she could order some.
I had a huge breakfast. This was good because it ended up being the only meal I got that day. Of course we were late getting to the town but we had a good excuse. We probably could have rushed through breakfast but it was nice to just sit and chat for a bit. I knew the rest of the day would not be as relaxed.
That days shoot was wonderful. I was still worn out from the night before, a lot of us were. We were shooting Daisy and the Sheriff's scenes and their first scene was a flash back. We shot at the church and the area we were shooting was very limited. Bill and Zach were on camera and Zach was having trouble getting the shot I needed. I think I said something like "give me the camera, I'll shoot it if you can't get it". Poor Zach, he'd unintentionally incurred the wrath of bitchy Christine. It was a difficult shot and Zach is a perfectionist when it comes to composing his shots. This is definitely a good thing be-cause I don't have to worry about his shots being sloppy. I did apologize to him after-ward. Hopefully he's forgiven me by now.
Both Heidi/Daisy and Darrell/Sheriff were excellent by the way. They played off of each other well. Their next scene in the saloon went equally well and we were done shooting at Shadow Hawk for the weekend.
The most difficult task was next. Packing up all our stuff and heading to Caroline's where we would be shooting our stable scene that night. We'd staged most of our stuff at the General Store. It looked like a small bomb had gone off there. There were costumes everywhere, make up, etc. Shonna's brother and sister-in-law (Mike and Debbie) were nice enough to get most of it in some kind of order while Brandi and I cleaned up the saloon where we had all our meals. We had quite a bit of food left over but I was sure that before the night was over most of it would be gone.
About an hour later we had crammed every bit of stuff we could into our vehicles. My new SUV was coming in very handy. Bill no longer had to carry the majority of the gear which I'm sure he was happy about as was his wife Shonna who drove the van that carried it. Apparently after our little trek to Erie she was attacked for about a week by fruit flies before she found a rotting banana skin in a bag that had been left behind.
Poor Heidi was fading fast and I promised her we would not be shooting until 1:30am that night. She'd only gotten about an hour's sleep on the flight over and was still trying to catch up. She never complained though and was always one hundred percent for every scene. She'd put up with a lot that weekend from freezing temperatures to randy old drunks making crude remarks. Lord you'd think they'd never seen a woman in a saloon girl outfit before! Makes you wonder what the real saloon girls had to go through.
We arrived at Caroline's and took a break to get some food. Caroline had made a pot of chili which went fast! I went out to my car to get the costumes for everyone so we could get started. That was a task in itself. Digging through all those bins, trying to find all the bits and pieces. We had a panic moment when we thought we'd left Ed's hat back at the town but we soon found it in one of the boxes. I pulled out everything I thought we would need for the night including my two cameras.
I told someone to go ahead and take the lights down to the stables. Somehow though, my camera ended up down there too. More on that later. We got everyone in costume. Wayne was more than ready for his big scene. He'd been waiting all weekend for his big moment.
The stables was perfectly lit, the horses were friendly and Wayne got along with them well. I was pretty pissed when I found my camera there. It had been sitting there in freezing temperatures for at least an hour or two. It turned on and worked, so initially I thought we were okay. We shot some beautiful stuff. Unfortunately about 90 percent of it is ruined. When I played back the tape later on, one side of the video was extremely pixelated. Frames were dropped, audio came in and out. It was a mess. I hope to god I can salvage enough of Heidi's stuff to use but the rest will have to be re-shot. I definitely have enough good audio of her that I can plug in to what shots I can salvage. The time code was also missing so it couldn't be dumped to the computer. I fixed this by making a dupe and have successfully dumped it thank god.
We had taken a break to go and do Heidi's make up and get her ready for her finale. During that time we also did our podcast which you can check out here. In that time the camera had time to warm up and recover so the last part of the tape and Daisy's death was perfect. Thank god for that! That also leads me to believe that my camera is not permanently damaged. I'd love to get hold of the person responsible and just....! I can't imagine what idiot would think you could leave an expensive camera like that out in freezing temperatures and not ruin it! If it had been ruined I'd be taking the cost out of their hide. That is if I knew who it was because no one will own up to it.
Anyway...we finished up about 10pm not too late. I got Heidi to her hotel, the Microtel this time since it was closer to the airport, and I headed home, exhausted, happy, and wishing I didn't have to go to work the next day!
Check out our podcast from this shoot here!All photos courtesy of Wayne Bates