Chapter 8

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

A Page-One Rewrite of the Script
Lloyd’s been obsessively asking every stranger he runs into to read Gabe’s script, and give advice. On a regular basis, he shows up with ideas for new endings, or new plot twists, given to him by a 17-year-old kid (who worked in a Hardee’s last summer) or a taxi driver (who didn’t speak English). Of course, this infuriates Gabe. Lloyd’s putting more trust in strangers than he is in the screenwriter or himself. (I hate to admit this, and apologies, Gabe. My first day on the job, LK asked me to pen extensive script notes for revisions. I did, and he then gave them to you, demanding all those changes be made asap. Tho I still think they were excellent changes. ;-)

Today, though, Lloyd took it further. We’re just a few weeks from filming, and he emailed me a new script. Rewritten by some TA from Notre Dame. Girl called Devy. A friend of LK’s, apparently. He asked me to read it before sending it to Gabe.

I only had to open the cover to see it was a page-one-rewrite. I’m not even sure she read the original script. Arbie and Wendy were there, but so were dozens of new characters, new locations, new subplots, a new plot!!!, and a dog that knows kung-fu. (WHAT??!??!?!?)

It was terrible! Mangled, unfunny, a terrible fucking mess. Who is this chick??? We’re weeks from shooting??? At best, this was a shitty ripoff of Better Off Dead. At worst, it was going to ruin everything. And here Lloyd was, seriously suggesting we try to use it, or at least combine it with Gabe’s script. What is he thinking? What part of his body is thinking???

I spent 10 minutes on a skim before calling him and leaving a short and simple message. “You. have. got. to. be. kidding.”

The awful thing is… I don’t think he was.

Actors
Jamie got another rejection from a Native American auditioning for the role of Chief.

“Thank you for the offer of the audition but at this point i would like to decline the opportunity.”

Who would have thought we’d have so much trouble finding an Indian to play the role of a blind-drunk, stuttering, vomiting, whisky-swigging, pants-peeing, washed-up Chief, in a feather headdress, a Willie Nelson shirt, and bluejeans, with only eight words of dialogue?

Now since Charlton Heston played a Mexican in Touch of Evil, maybe Ron Jeremy could play Chief.

Stress
During dinner, I though it would be a laugh to throw on a Troma behind-the-scenes DVD, so stuck Farts of Darkness on the TV. Holy fuck. That was a stupid damn idea.

As I watched the incompetence, the idiocy, the brain-dead fools working on that film, all I could think was…. they were so much more prepared than us! My stomach clenched up as I saw Lloyd screaming. I found it hard to breathe. I wasn’t sure whether to run screaming, or to just slash my own wrists.

“Movie night is cancelled! Department head meeting! NOW!!!”

The one consolation is that at least we’re able to see where the others failed. Now we just have to make sure we don’t end up with a heaven set made out of $10 worth of cotton wool.

Strippers
I asked Anna, one of our sleazier Buffalo ladies, how she might recruit strippers for the film. She thought about it, then sent me the following email….

Andy - I will find out what I can on the strippers tomorrow and will let Jamie know at the protester rehearsal tomorrow night. I am more than willing to dance around topless. I have a good rack and remember I’m Swedish, they’re all half naked all the time anyway.

This is my FX coordinator. This is a coworker. This didn’t happen in the dotcom world!!! I don’t know what to do with this email. (Do they teach you this shit in film school?)

Waiting
It’s 1:20am. Lloyd gets here in about 32 hours. The department heads are still getting ready preparing for tonight’s department update meeting. Everyone wants to go to bed, myself included, but this can’t wait until tomorrow. I’m not sure when the last time Doug or Alyssa got more than 5 hours of sleep. They both live in town, but they’ve both taken to sleeping at the church to get an hour more sleep each night.

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Only on a Troma Film…
I woke up, and went downstairs to check out the set for Denny’s office, which PAs spent all night painting. Under the aegis of Doug, the set designer, it had been painted bright yellow, sky blue, a bold red, and hot pink. It looks like shit. Doug’s explanation, in all seriousness, was to reveal that he’s actually color blind. For real.

This is just absurd.

Long days
My days are getting longer — nineteen hours or more on a regular basis. Every night, without fail, I have nightmares. Often, I wake up in a panic, convinced something terrible is happening in my room: a huge spider scurrying across the ceiling, Nick being crushed by his bed, a man hiding behind the curtain.

The pressure and the stress are probably key contributors, but I’m sure the chemicals don’t help. To stay awake, I drink wild amounts of caffeine from morning to midnight. Then, to fall asleep, I suck down a string of beers. A daily cycle of elevation medication. I’m sure my mom is proud.

Lloyd arrives in less than 16 hours.

An email from Kiel…
is there a Buffalo taxidermist that will rent or sell us a stuff chicken? and/or someone that has a chicken we can gently toss toward a fast food restaurant window? i think the idea is that the chicken sees its reflection and flies into the window. obviously we would edit this together so that we wouldn’t hurt the poor bird.

then, later on, the zombies start to do the same thing. (we’ve taken out the boarding up the windows scene, so we need an excuse for why they can’t get in the restaurant.)

Has Lloyd forgotten that PETA is sponsoring this film???

Friday, July 08, 2005

Longer days
Lloyd has arrived.

Today was spent entirely at his side, and also with DP Brendan, checking out sets, costumes, FX, and props. Fortunately, Kiel also finally arrived in Buffalo. For the first time, I don’t feel so abandoned.

Lloyd wasn’t upset at anything. So far so good.

Brendan, however, wanted to pick apart everything he could, especially if there were cute girls present. Even though we’d sent him sketches, and then photos, of the costumes over the last few weeks, he ripped them apart as if he’d never seen them before. “You have to understand how to make a movie, Andy. You can’t just choose a few random colors and throw them together… you have to think of how I’ll see them, and how the film feels as a whole… I’m not just a cameraman, Andy, I have to think as the director, the writer, the editor, the gaffer, the producer… I’m the piece that holds it all together.” Huh? Shit, the costumes are the best part of the film so far.

Brendan
I keep getting the feeling that Brendan hasn’t read the script, but he’s still eager to pick apart whatever he can. It’s weird. He also keep disappearing… I’m hoping this doesn’t continue when we start filming.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

Smoking & Naps
This past week was so stressful, I began to be pulled in by the lure of cigarettes for the first time in my life. I’ve also managed to perfect the 15-minute nap: two minutes of pre-nap, ten minutes of deep sleep, and three minutes of recovery. Since Lloyd’s been in town, I make sure to ride in a separate car, so that I can swing these every chance I got.

The Church
The landlady, Dinah, made an unannounced stop at the church yesterday. She grew up in this church. Her father was the pastor. She’s a good, proper, hat-wearing church-lady. Not knowing she was coming by, we cleaned up nothing.

She let herself in. She walked into the basement. And she saw something.

I don’t know what she saw. I really don’t. All I know is she called Nick, very upset, and wants to meet us at her lawyer’s office to discuss the lease. She won’t pick up the phone. I’ve tried calling half a dozen times so far.

The realtor, crazy hunchbacked bachelor Tom, thinks it might have been “a pile of power tools.” I don’t believe him. Not for a second.

Instead, I suspect it was one of the following. (All of which I just found within the route she apparently walked.):
- several dozen zombie arms
- fake gravestones with obscene, racist, and offensive names on them
- a complete fake graveyard built next to her church
- a large hairy ass prosthetic, with a large opening for a hand to enter the anus
- a fake, erect, penis prosthetic
- a fake, flaccid, penis prosthetic
- a life-sized crucifix
- a protest sign reading “kill all jews”, featuring a large swastika drawn on it.
a cardboard cut-out of another swastika

Or perhaps all of the above.

Why the fuck does this have to happen NOW? When Lloyd is here, when everything was going so smoothly. “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong,” as Lloyd tries to inculcate into our skulls. Half of this shit isn’t even in the movie!!!

We’re squeezing far more tenants into the church than she was led to believe. (I told her “15,” meant 50, and it’s beginning to look like it’ll be closer to 100.) We’re planning to shoot three scenes (all with topless action) in the church basement. We’ve been using the sunday school rooms as our costume sweat-shop, our FX room, our FX lab, our kitchen, our rehearsal space, and sleeping quarters. So if we get kicked out, we’re basically fucked. At least it would make things very very difficult.

I was tempted to hide all of this from Lloyd, but I’ve learned. If he discovers a problem *after* its escalated, he’s far more furious. So I told him. He was calm. I smoked 3 cigarettes in a row.

Other than this small debacle, Lloyd’s impressed. He was wowed by a dress rehearsal at the Chicken Bunker. Doug and Alyssa put up signs, posters, had cammo buckets, and the costume team had a bunch of PAs dressed in the costumes. And the sets we’ve built at the house left him awed. All of the work we’ve accomplished in the past week left him feeling confident.

The one problem was the toilet set. He didn’t think Joe would be able to manage the 18 stairs to the basement. Instead, we’re going to try to squeeze into the actual McDonald’s toilet. It’ll be tight with a man of Joe’s stature, but hopefully we can make it work.

As Lloyd left, I nervously asked him how this all compared to Citizen Toxie, at the same point in pre-production. “Far better… I’m feeling far better than I did about that one….” He looked me in the eye. “I have to hand it to you, Andy, you’ve really become a producer.” If I wasn’t so sleep-deprived (down to 5 hours a night), undernourished (two granola bars), overcaffeinated (so much coffee), and stressed out (my back feels like a slab of concrete), I would have been pretty psyched. As it was, I was simply relieved.

Musical Numbers
As a child, I loved musicals, I still do. Rocky Horror defined my childhood. My life’s goal is to shoot a gay version of Miss Saigon in drag. (Me and the characters in drag.)

At the age of twelve, I penned a zombie-musical based on Romeo & Juliet. A year ago, I commissioned the song for a zombie-musical short, based on a single shot from Return of the Living Dead. Neither of these were ever filmed.

So it’s natural, in a fucked up way, that I would now be producing a feature-length zombie-musical. On 35mm. Directed by a childhood hero.

In the production office, we’re obsessively playing the Poultrygeist musical numbers on repeat. They are so fucking good. Elements of Aladdin, Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair… all the greats. But this one has 400lb/7XL Joe Fleishaker being pulled into a toilet, guts-first.

If we don’t screw this up, this film really will be a cult classic.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

As Lloyd Left…
As Lloyd left, yesterday, he seemed nervous. He knew the time was short. He had to get to the airport, but he also wanted to use the last minutes to pass on as much knowledge as he could. He ran through a confused mental checklist of things we’d gone over… rehearse the actors, draw up call sheets for every day, make sure to schedule rain dates for exterior locations, clean up the trash, call regularly. Just like a dad leaving the kids at home for the first time.

Next week, while we’ll still be slaving around the clock, Lloyd and Michael are disappearing to Club Med in Cancun for a week’s vacation. We start filming in two weeks.

LK Postscript
Kiel revealed to me that over the last few weeks, Lloyd’s been insisting I’m up north, eating sushi, sitting with my feet up on a desk, getting backrubs and blowjobs from the PAs. Ech. What does he think this is, a Joe Eszterhaus set?

Next week: Troma Team Buffalo gets mad drunk. Then realizes that we start shooting in 14 days. At the same time, the star of the film gets cold feet, and we start rehearsing Kiel for the role of Arbie. All in the Poultrygeist production journals. Then, see pictures and find out more about your favorite GOD contender on Poultrygeist producer Andy Deemer’s website.