day five: One Scene, Twelve Hours

This is what I get for slacking so much on these updates.

It's been five days since "day five" and a lot of what actually happened has faded into the gray aether of my terrible memory. I'll do my best to put together the story but it's like a chronic drinker trying to describe what he did last Thursday... after the two Jaegerbombs, it all gets a little fuzzy.

I remember a name, though. It was "Blood" or "Crud" or something like that-- and people were shouting it all morning. Actually no, I'm pretty sure it was "Stud". That must have been it.

Check out days one, two, three and four if you need a refresher. Hint: It's always best to start at the beginning.

(And welcome to you if you're visiting for the first time-- here's a link to my very first post, explaining what this mad blog is all about. Plus, this update won't make much sense unless you read the other days' posts too. Feel free to leave comments and hang around!)

Okay, let's give this a shot.

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Call time was 6:30am, and I showed up at 6:10. Hey, not bad, I thought. I'm twenty minutes early and nobody's paying me to be here.

Then I walked into the production trailer with a couple other PAs, and Cosa Nostra's favorite production coordinator casually tossed this off: "Hey PAs, let's try to arrive ten minutes before six, not ten minutes after." Oops.

Most people are pretty friendly on set-- surprisingly so, given all the horror stories I've heard about working in Hollywood-- but there's definitely some passive aggression.

I remember my first day at work, I was standing next to the script supervisor on set (a Hungarian woman who seems to wear red clothes every single day) when she was called on to feed lines off-camera to the actors. I wanted to make casual conversation, so I said "You get lines... Lucky." Harmless comment, right?

She didn't even look up from her clipboard. She waved a hand in my face and said "Please don't."

Seriously. "Please don't"?

That's cold, man.

Speaking of temperature, another thing I remember from this day is that it got hot. Really hot. The first four days of work were bitingly, stingingly, hair-raisingly, nipple-hardeningly cold. It was so cold, in fact, that I had to invent a new word ("nipple-hardeningly") to describe it. But on day five, the inside of the house where we were shooting was absolutely sweltering.

My job for the first hour of the afternoon that day was to turn on a fan and point it at the actors and head honchos. As Key PA wisely told me, a cooler director was a happier director. Yep, another hugely important job for Flood.

But being inside the house with Key PA meant I could watch the action up close, and it also meant I could jump on things and try to impress him with my "work ethic".

I remember one time where the call came over the radio: "Anyone have eyes on [Lead Actor]"? Key PA heard it and started looking for him; I did too. I found him in the kitchen, watching a take on the monitor.

"Yeah he's in the kitchen," I replied into my headset's mic. I turned around and Key PA was standing right behind me. A grin broke out on his face and he clapped me on the back. "Alright Flood! That's what I'm talking about. Way to jump on that."

There were a lot of hours spent in the house that day. Only two scenes were scheduled for filming: a family gathering with ten(!) characters in the same room, and a gossip scene with three of the women, which was to be filmed entirely in Korean. We only got through the first scene that day. To keep the lighting consistent, grips had set up massive spotlights outside, pouring 80,000 watts of "daylight" through the windows. It was a really strange effect; when the hours started to pile up and the sky grew dark, it still looked like daytime inside. Pretty cool.


You could feel the heat from the lights all throughout the house. It was like being inside an Easy-Bake Oven. If only there'd been people around whose special job it was to point a fan at the PA interns.

After the shoot was finally over (around 6:30 pm), we started to pull up all the layout board that we'd laid on the floor of the house to prevent damage. That was a long process. But it was interrupted when the locations crew came in with deathly grave looks on their faces.

Apparently, the old Asian woman whose house we were completely owning-- tracking dirt, moving furniture, and shuttling almost a hundred people through constantly-- had been so afraid of getting in our way, she'd stayed locked in her bedroom all day. She hadn't eaten, drank, or even gone to the bathroom in twelve hours. Ohhh shit.

When the rest of her family got home that night, they were, uh... a little pissed. They'd all piled into a car and taken off with the old woman, without saying a word to any of us. The locations people had tried calling them, but they weren't answering their phones. And we still had another full day to shoot at the house.

Would they even let us in the next morning? Or would we be, as they say in Korea, completely and utterly 성교하는?

Tune in next time to find out! Same Iggy-time, same Iggy-channel!