October 6th, 1999

Shivers in action

It's funny to read this log entry. To think, the movie was LONGER? You mean I cut shit out and the movie's first edit was like 3.5 hours long?

Honestly, my biggest regret in the whole thing was not having another month to go through the script--I'm sure I would have fixed a lot of the things that ended up being problematic.

But had I waited another month then we would have had to push the shoot back another year since we would have been shooting in the winter months, which brings problems that can be unfixable. (Snow one day, no snow next day--that's an unfixable continuity problem, not to mention if your actors can't GET to the set because of snow it could shut your movie down...)

That's why I don't shoot any movies in the winter.

Oct 6

Back to the theater again. Doing Jeff’s death scene.

Mark was late getting to my brother’s, so we sat around waiting for him for a while. Shot some stuff when he arrived. We were running behind—again.

Did Jeff’s death scene. His wig cracked us all up. It really didn't look right--he looked like a Beatle or something. It amazed Jacky that it looked okay in the shot though.

Wow, they're like twins...

Jeff was a trooper though—throwing himself on the ground with no pads or anything.

After that, though, we were real behind.

So I rewrote part of the script right there. It’s nice having the writer on set to do on-the-spot changes. Had to omit stuff. We just don’t have the time and I can’t make any more pickups. We’re running out of days to finish this. So I’ve shortened stuff.

We moved to an upstairs scene that I was really looking forward to, and had seen in my mind very vividly--the scene where Shivers corners Tuck and Lynn at the door.

Of course, it was about 4:30am at the point we started shooting. We just didn’t have time to light it right, so we could only shoot from certain angles, and you can bet those weren’t the angles I was imagining when I did the shooting script.

Little disappointed about that. I really wanted that scene to turn out awesome. We shot until 7:15am, then packed up. Home by 8am. It’s 8:33am right now.

I’d go to bed but we blew two lights tonight. The only two that I don’t have replacements for. Gotta try to locate some replacements or we’re in trouble.

Fuck it, I’m going to bed. I just ordered them overnight from someplace on the web. We’ll have to do without them for one day. It's 9:14am.