“Do you have any free time?”
Logan was asking me to help him on his 310. I was stuck dead north on the 110 into downtown – USC was playing the first home game this Saturday and traffic was a clogged toilet shit storm.
“As soon as I get out of this shit, I’m coming over there,” I told him.
310, as a reminder, is a class where we shoot a short film on 16mm film. We use 310 to also refer to the films we’re making. Most kids, myself included, go the artsy-fartsy dramatic route. Logan, too, toyed briefly with that idea, based on a script he sent me this past summer. A day later, I had an email telling me he had another script he liked better. He eventually eschewed the artsy drama and went full tilt into Night of the Swordfish, which was in my opinion, 100% unadulterated J.L. Olson.
Logan told me Miami Vice was basically Michael Mann vomiting onto film and printing it as a movie. Night of the Swordfish is to Logan as Miami Vice is to Mann, basically. There’s strippers, blood, broadswords, shotguns, ass slaps, and popsicles, and all this in five and one half minutes.
Tired as I was from my shoot, I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss out on that.
The Zemeckis Building smelled air smelled like dead fish. At first, I assumed the worst: Logan’s movie was called “Night of the Swordfish,” and I idly wondered if Logan was taking the title a little too far. The smell disappated, to my extreme relief, as I pushed the heavy, soundproof door in to Stage A, where Logan, Sam, and their crew had converted the space into a dingy strip joint.
“Logan,” I asked, “Why does it smell like hot sweaty anus out here?”
“Fucked if I know,” he said, taking off his sweaty Dragonforce cap and running his fingers through his hair.
The Zemeckis sound stages aren’t much to look at. They have soundproofing on the walls, and that’s about it. I had to weave my way around tall drapes to reach the set. They had set up a pretty convincing strip club interior, complete with pole (for dancing purposes, which for those who know me, I made sure to keep far away from) and bar complete with booze bottles, dingy couches, and stage lights. Logan had, in essence, traded in favors with production folks he had worked with over the summer, to help him with the set, and it looked fairly spectacular.
While I strapped on the trusty Production Assistant Utility Belt (contents: compressed air, light meter, measuring tape, pens, 8 kinds and colors of tape, lens cleaner and cloth, and maglite), Logan asked me to stand in as an extra cheering on the leading lady as she pole danced. Good start, I thought, as I sat down.
Later on, Sam was setting up for their next shot – the money shot of the main character at the bar, getting up, and walking to a massive swordfish mounted on the wall, which he would use shortly as a weapon.
“Isn’t that… a little big for a swordfish?” I asked. “It’s actually a marlin,” he told me, “but don’t worry – we’ve figured out how to fix it – as he goes up to take it off the wall, we’ll have a sound of someone yelling from offscreen ‘Hey that’s a marlin!’”
I pushed the dolly as the main character stood, pounded down his beer, and strode to the wall mounted marlin. The first take, he knocked off a glass from the bar, where it shattered onto the floor. “Fuck it,” Logan shouted over the whirr of the camera, “Keep going!”
Logan had a certain style of directing. Before a take, he shouts while pointing right at the person he’s addressing, “YOU FUCKING READY? YOU FUCKING READY? CAMERA READY? FUCKING LET’S DO IT! ROLL CAMERA! ACTION!” This energy, he theorized, translates directly into performance.
He would also talk the actor’s through their performances. On an extreme closeup of the main character he shouted “You hear the music. You KNOW what’s going on back there!” Logan then would assume the voice of a character in the background, “Yeah baby give me some of that sweet ass!” Then, back to the in-the-head voice “You hear a slap. That does it. Someone’s gonna DIE. Get up and let’s rock some faces!”
He would also give directions like “No! No! More just ROCKING and less RAAAGGH RAAAAAARRRGGH! Basically more Gene Simmons and less the one he worships!” The actor paused at the Gene Simmons direction, and asked “Logan what are you talking about?” Logan responded with more gutteral sound effects.
The money shot of the night called for an actor to get stabbed with that swordfish. We spent a good hour and a half rigging blood tubes and clothing. The actor would lay down flat on his stomache elevated on a table, head pushed through holes in the back of a few shirts that hung over the edge. Swordfish nose goes through, blood shoots out, screaming etc. The blood tubes were in place, and I rigged up a foot pump from a plastic inflatable chair. Logan called the camera to roll and the fish just went. Blood exploded out and everything – I think it looked pretty good, but with film, we have to wait until Wednesday to see it. People were flipping out on set though, so I can only assume it was rocking. I was too busy furiously depressing the blood pump.
Afterwards, even though everyone was tired as fuck, I went to his apartment where we tried to make a latex cast out of Kevin’s arm (result: utter failure and tears from ammonia in the liquid latex) and watched Road House on DVD.
Some kids studied all weekend for a midterm and partied a little. I was up 20 hours a day working on movies and rigging someone to get stabbed with a swordfish. This is basically how film school works.
-fw.
310 is balls time consuming. I need to start eating more. Need to call actors for callbacks and find our fucking locations.
I’m taking notes. There’ll definitely be a retrospective on this semester.
shiiiiiiit
I just came back from a midnight screening of Crank. I don’t blog about anything, much less movies, but here I am.
Crank is the most rocking movie I have ever seen. I left the theater speechless. There is more rocking in that movie than an entire Slayer discography being catapulted straight into the sun.
Everything is downhill from here on out, folks.
