Our Day 39 happened on a hot and humid Tuesday afternoon, and I have to again give huge thanks to Lou's friend Sue for hooking us up with a terrific (and wonderfully air-conditioned) location.  It was our second and final night in the basement, and we were moving like a well-oiled machine.  There was a lot of preproduction and planning, and yes the master chunk board and post-it storyboards were there, to make sure everything went like clockwork: which it most certainly did.

Stacey & I met up with Lou at the wrong gas station in Hopkington, and made our way over to the location.  We quickly brought everything downstairs and began setting up, and who showed up almost immediately but...Rajah?!!!  I was very happy.  This was great news for us because the four of us were able to light the room appropriately, block the positions out, and even begin shooting some of the opening shots (for Scene 2 in the movie), where we see the whole expanse of the room, and insert shots of the pool table, the bar, the entertainment center, etc.  Rajah was angry with the daylight, but Lou's suggestion of lining up the liquor right by the window, seemed to satisfy Rajah at least a little bit.  He was also very excited about using both more basic, flatter lighting for the shoot, and a second camera to shoot everything in video which meant we got double the footage (or took half the time, depending on how you enjoy doing math).  Essentially Rajah was gearing up for his trip to Israel in 16 hours, and my theory is that that's why he was so quick and happy and scarily positive about everything.  I'm going to plan a trip to Israel for him after each shoot.  :)

Mark and Maura arrived, and we had already finished all of our shots that didn't involve actors--unless you consider liquor an actor, which I do to a degree because tequila keeps telling me it's my best friend.  It wasn't even call time for cast yet, and we were ready to shoot Suzanne's extreme close-ups which will be some of the first shots you see in the movie.  It went really well, and as we were completing those, our first additional cast member, Susan Wornick showed up and was camera ready in about five minutes; no delays.  We went and got her out of her trailer (a bench near the pool table), and immediately started in with her reaction shots.  Reactions shots are just about the dumbest thing to shoot when you haven't yet seen what you're reacting to, but she did a great job running the gamut of what we'll need to cutaway to, and it was very exciting that we were already speeding through things and getting great footage!

Then Tony the Diva showed up and, as you know, that meant we all had to pay tons of attention to him.  I can't be sure but I think he insisted that nobody address him while he was getting into character, or look him in the eye, and Stacey, Susan and I gamely complied.  Man, he's pretentious.  Also not only did he not wear his fantastic pants, but he decided to dress wearing what I like to call "crazy shorts," which thankfully were not in the shot.  He did have enough sense to ask "what his frame was," so that was really helpful.

Then we were ready to begin the second half of the scene (easy to jump ahead when you've got the chunk board and the storypost-its!) where Maxine swoops in and tries to diffuse the situation where Suzanne hates her room--though Paul absolutely loves it. This was a VERY fun scene to shoot.  We had the wonderful combination of the blooper twins (Stacey & Tony), coupled with Susan who had a series of lines that weren't really in response to anything, making it really difficult to remember their progression.  However, all three of them did an excellent job, exactly as I would have expected.  Maura and Rajah shot with both cameras, so that the scene can play out in the beginning of the film and during the viewing party, and Mark had his hands full logging every timecode on two cameras and slating perfectly for later sound-syncing purposes.  Young Loubert sat at the top of the stairs and made sure a stationary light didn't move.  I got made fun of, as is the norm. 

Quite honestly, though, I am so happy with how this scene turned out, and I absolutely loved the dynamic between the three actors--Stacey was great at showing her utter disdain for the room (with some very funny lines), Tony showed huge enthusiasm for the new sportsbar that he loves, and Susan did a perfect job of making Maxine responsive to their polarized reactions, and was very convincing as a host who is genuinely trying to coax a more positive response from her guests.  I am really looking forward to editing this one, because it is really entertaining.

From there we moved onto a very quick sequence where Maxine asks a question of Dina for the taped segments of the show.  It would come as a surprise to nobody that both that and the next four voiceover segments that we had Susan read were spot-on--exactly as we wanted them.  The only problem was that somebody, and I won't say who, left her cell phone on and ruined take after take with the incessant ringing to which I threw down my headphones and said, "Listen, [anonymous news anchor], the rest of us are trying to shoot a movie here, so could we please try to be professional?!"  To which the unnamed news anchor denied that there even was a ringing phone, so I had to believe her since she is a trusted source of information, unlike Rajah and Lou who are just complete liars.

And with that, we were done with Susan for the day. It was really great fun working with her, she did an excellent job, and we're all excited to have her back for her second day.  She really made the scenes feel authentic, and I hope she had as good a time as we did.  After she left we had enough time before Sari arrived to shoot the first part of the scene, with Paul & Suzanne's initial reactions to the room, which were so much fun to watch, as usual.  What can I say--I really enjoy seeing Tony play ridiculously happy, standing right next to Stacey playing seethingly angry, and the two of them did a great job in what is essentially page 1 of the script.  Kudos to them.  Also, I'm almost positive they laughed a lot at each other--just like real spouses do!

In the meantime, Sari arrived, got dressed as Dina--the very hands-off Southern designer--and was ready to go with her response to Maxine's question about how she liked working with Mitch & Ally.  A quick note of thanks here too to Rajah, who moved like lightning and was very excited to be shooting in a fun reality-show way, to Maura for manning the main camera and sound and helping us move quickly throughout the night, to Mark for the aforementioned thankless task of logging twice as much stuff, to Lou who as usual seems absent until you need him and then he's right there to quickly help the very next set-up happen instantaneously, and to Stacey who jumps from one side of the camera to the other effortlessly, and did so throughout the night.  I do feel the need to single all of them out now, because when a night goes as smoothly and (ahead!) of schedule like it did, it's because everyone is going above and beyond.

We got Sari into position, and she gave her response to the question great--with the right mix of joy and exuberance (how many times can I use that word in one blog) that makes Dina so great.  We settled on the right version of Southern accent for her to do--somewhere in the middle of the range she described as Scarlett O'Hara to Forrest Gump.  It worked really well, as did the next scene we did, which is going to be cut with the couch-moving scene we did with Jim & Amy a week ago.  As they're struggling to lift and move, Dina stands their describing her vision, and I thought Sari did a great job with this.  It's going to be very funny when we put the two together.  And then we were done with Sari, again, ahead of schedule and were all VERY pleased with everything we'd already accomplished for the night.

Our remaining bits were to be lit dramatically, like our previous basement shoot, and again it was achieved largely with a very yellow light and shadows.  Super cool looking.  Stacey envisioned the lamb shank shot to be a close-up of the plate as she walked with it, and then Rajah tilted up to her face as she said her lines.  It was excellent and I must say I love the version Stacey did when I had her kind of whisper her lines.  I am really impressed by how Stacey, Maura, and Rajah were able to make this basement look so stylistically haunting last week, and then match it so well for this shoot.  We then did the same thing for a shot of Suzanne descending the stairs to do laundry, which took a very long time to set up and get right, but I think it absolutely achieved what we wanted.  And our final shot scheduled was Suzanne at the bar, that from the look of it will be equally great, sad, full of meaning, in no small part due to the actress and to the shot and lighting which just enhanced it all.

We thought we were done but Diva #2 suggested an additional shot with a more lit Suzanne on the stairs to make up for a shot in one of the montages that I had confused.  It was not only the right choice to do it, but her performance in that simple shot was amazing, and the reverse shot that Rajah and I both wanted to do is a perfect lead-in to it.  I have no doubt we will be using this in the film and, as I feel after most last-minute additions, I almost can't imagine the movie without it now.

So we all packed up as quickly as we always do, and headed outside into the cool 90 degree night, where we "thanked each other for tonight," as we always do, and headed our separate ways--some to the North Shore, some to Israel, some to get lost somewhere in between.  It was a great afternoon/night shoot, and again I have to give big thanks to the talent (Susan, Stacey, Tony & Sari) and the talented crew (Rajah, Maura, Lou, Mark, & Stacey) and to our location, and to aspirin--in that order.