I've been putting off actually giving everyone somewhat amusing production stories from DIE & LET LIVE since before our big zombie extra night. But I just discovered that my 10:30am class was cancelled (which I knew, but promptly forgot), so I thought I'd use my hour off to sit down here at the WVU library and share what's been happening with the movie since August 4th.
First off, our zombie extra night was overwhelmingly successful, which was surprising, since I was almost positive that dealing with 30 extras and getting them all in makeup would be both time consuming and incredibly difficult. Luckily, Zane enlisted the help of the staff of The Illusive Skull, Fairmont and Morgantown's infamous Halloween costume and makeup shop, which made getting our extras into makeup go much faster. They also donated full-face prosthetics from their own collections. My sister, Tammy, and her fiancee, Nino Mancino (whom you might remember as Sex Offender Marty from Raising The Stakes) came with a van full of Nino's family members, most of whom ended up with those prosthetics glued on to their face.
Once they started putting on the prosthetics, Tammy came up to me and asked if she could avoid having one put on. I told her that I wasn't even planning to use them, so it was just something extra the makeup team were doing and that it wasn't required. About ten minutes later, I came in the house at the kennel where the makeup was being applied to find her having a full-face prosthetic applied. Apparently the prosthetic fit her face better than any one else who came, so she unfortunately had to be a trooper and be forced to have foam latex glued to her face with medical adhesive. I can't count how many times I heard her say "you owe me" or "look what I do for my siblings" and other varients.
About the same time, I was figuring out lighting with Eddie Mahalick (director of the upcoming film Hatchet Jack, the honorable mayor Rivesville, and the guy who helped light on our first day of shooting as well), I saw Josh Lively's car come down the driveway. I had been aware that Josh and Jordan were planning to go to a party before the shoot, but didn't really think much of it, as long as they showed up on time. But when I saw Jordan's cousin Jakob carrying Jordan, who appeared to be barely conscious, out of the car and then promptly dropping him on the pavement and leaving him there, where he laid for at least 20 minutes, I knew we were in for a bit of a problem.
Apparently, Jordan had gotten completely trashed at the party, despite the warnings of Josh who was staying sober for the drive and the shoot. They got him up and carried him up to the porch, where he passed atop a stack of empty pizza boxes. The top pizza box was wide open and Jordan's head rested in a large grease stain for a couple hours, much to the enjoyment of the extras waiting to either be put in makeup or for me to get all the technical stuff ready to shoot.
I remember telling everyone, "Yeah, I think it's hilarious right now, but when the sun goes down, it'll probably stop being funny."
It was already dark and I needed to start shooting something as soon as possible, so I ran in to check how much longer makeup would be. Zane gave me the horrible line "Uh.... I don't know" so I just decided to go ahead and start shooting the scenes where zombies start to approach, since we didn't need the whole crowd. We needed to get them a bit more bloody, so I grabbed the bottle of spray blood and Nips and I went to town making our first extras as bloody as possible. When the bottle was empty, we soon discovered that we had just used the entire night's spray blood supply on about 10 zombies. Oops. We still had enough karo syrup, though, so things worked out okay.
Even though I thought working with that many people would be a tedious task, it turned out to be probably one of the easiest shoots we've ever had. Everyone was very cooperative and I actually had a crew, as opposed to just me running camera, Zane doing makeup, and someone holding the boom pole (up until our beat up used Sennheiser met it's maker after getting lost and then found in the bushes outside after several days of rain). We got some great footage of the zombies outside of the gate and then it was time to shoot the remaining deaths of the main characters.
Of course, that required waking up Jordan from his alcoholic slumber. When he woke up, he was still drunk and was so confused that he thought he was still in Morgantown at first and couldn't remember how he ended up in Fairmont, yet alone that he had to be in the movie. What made this even worse was that he had lines of dialogue, had to be thrown into the pool, and then had to be killed by a zombie in the pool.
Even though it took longer to shoot than any sequence of the film, my previous claims that Jordan's drunken stupor would stop being funny once we needed him on set ended up being completely untrue. If anything, it was funnier. The bystanding extras got to be entertained by us trying to get a decent line delivery and Jordan's continuing incompetence. I'd start rolling camera, shout "action", and he'd promptly say "Wait... what am I doing again?" Another hold up was when his life jacket came undone and he was unable to get it latched again, resulting in makeup artist Brian West having to help him ("Hold on... my life vest is coming off. I can't do it. Can I just have it coming off? Is that okay? Oh wait... hold on... this guy's got it. He's better at it than me.").
After we were done with our extras, it was down to the dirtiest part of the shoot. Despite my intentions of not using any animal parts for effects in this movie (for the simple reason that they smell bad and I didn't want to ask anyone to touch them), Zane went ahead and got a whole cooler full of various cow parts from a butcher for a scene where zombies rip open one of the party guests' stomach. Apparently, he had to dig through three large barrels of cow entrails in the 100 degree heat to get the parts. Since I still stood by the latter of my concerns for the cast, I made him find the people that were going to be handling the rancid animal intestines. It ended up being him in a prosthetic and much to both of our surprises, Latisha Kriston. In fact, I'm still in awe that she volunteered to help out that effect.
But I gotta agree with Zane, it added a shitload of production value.
From there, we've just been doing small pickup shoots to get the movie done as soon as possible, the highlight of which is the Vietnam flashback that Smalls has when remembering how far back he and Benny go. Trust me, it'll all make sense.
August 11th-13th, we traveled to Hunt Valley, MD to help get the word out about the movie at Horrorfind Weekend, my personal favorite horror con. We distributed about 300 fliers at the convention, which lead to my personal favorite shameless promotion stunt of my guerilla promotion career. The Hunt Valley Marriot puts out large coolers of water for the convention, so for a gag, I taped one of our fliers to a cooler and then put a piece of masking tape above it which read "FREE WATER COMPLIMENTS OF:" Amazingly, the flier stayed up for all of Saturday, the busiest day of the convention, even after several refills from the hotel staff.
Also on Saturday, we were lucky enough to get our trailer screened on the big screen TV at the Lionsgate booth. Please take note that this DOES NOT mean that Lionsgate has anything to do with Die & Let Live, we just got lucky and talked to the right people.
And, if you haven't already done so, check out THE OFFICIAL DIE & LET LIVE MYSPACE, which has the aforementioned trailer: http://www.myspace.com/dieandletlive. The trailer's been covered on Fangoria.com and Troma posted a news bulletin about it. It pretty accurately represents the teen romance satire moments of the movie, as well as provides a nice reel of some of the best gory moments, so be sure to czech it out.
As of now, we're VERY close to being finished with the film. We have about two or three pickup shoots left and then I have to finish post-production work. Considering the fact I just started college at WVU and got a job working at the Warner Theater on High Street in Morgantown, it may be a slight bit longer than expected, but I'm hoping to have the film done sometime this month and hopefully have a premiere in October. Keep your eyes peeled, bitches.
Now, I have class in about 25 minutes, so I'm out.