Chapter Ten
July 12-17, 2005

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Lead actors
We start shooting in 14 days, and the star of the film (scheduled to join us in Buffalo tomorrow, and start rehearsals) just called and begged for a week’s delay. Something’s up.

Ten minutes ago, Kiel was pacing outside, shouting into his cellphone, trying to convince the star to come to town. Now, Kiel is frantically calling the second and third-choices for the role. Just. in. case.

Girls
Lloyd’s become preoccupied with the shortage of strong male production assistants in the house ("they’re all so skinny and small… you need big strapping boys!"), but he’s also calling me up repeatedly about how we need more attractive women as well. To keep the men "happy and working hard."

[Occasionally I edit out some emails and quotes from this blog. Too harmful to the speakers or the people-being-spoken-about. Here I chopped out two quotes from Lloyd about specific PAs. Don’t you wonder who, and what was said?]

Budget
I’ve unexpectedly found myself entirely in charge of the finances of the film. Erp. I’d originally drawn up a quick budget — just to get it done. I’d made educated guesses at most of the figures, but the entire thing was informed by the fact that we had $200k to produce the film. While Lloyd kept saying he’d study it, he never did. In fact, neither he, or Kiel, or Gabe, ever even looked at it.

Somehow, against all normal standard business-operating-procedures, my quick rough draft, churned out in two hours, has turned into our final budget.

So far, under my cruel rule, we’re keeping well within it.

Creating
I’m not sure what I’ve done today. I barely slept last night, and have been running around all day, but am not entirely sure what’s been done. Pep-talks to depressed people, serious sit-downs with lazy or clumsy people, and a bunch of running around.

Gabe and Caleb spent most of today at the Chicken Bunker, blocking and rehearsing Paco Bell’s death-scene. (While jacking off into a giant meat grinder, Paco’s shoved in by a demon chicken. Blood, guts, and turkey-basters fly everywhere.)

Ron Jeremy has finally been given a role: "Crazy Guy."

And I just want to sleep.

KabukiCar
Back in the early 90s, Lloyd invested a decent amount of cash into a scene for Sgt Kabukiman NYPD, where a 1979 green Thunderbird flips into the air and then explodes. To make up for this investment, he’s reused this footage for every film he’s shot since. Some character always climbs into a green car, and you know the car is going to somehow somewhere sometime explode. Of course, Poultrygeist will reuse this same footage.

The only problem is: first I have to find a 1979 green Thunderbird!

Every other recent Troma producer has faced the same dilemma. 1979 Thunderbirds are rare. (This becomes more true with each passing year.) And, after some research, it turns out that green ones were the least popular color!

On Terror Firmer, the producers bought a broken-down Thunderbird from a junkyard, spray-painted it green, and paid a mechanic $50 to get it running for one block. On Citizen Toxie, they just used a blue 70s Buick.

PAs have been scouring junkyards and calling mechanics, to no avail.

The Lead Actor and The Landlady
The lead actor is finally coming to town… he’s booked on a 6:45am flight for tomorrow. Please make it! The PA reserved him the worst seat on the plane.

And, a week later, the landlady has reappeared. (Remember the calls and vague threats of legal action?) After days and days of the silent treatment (no pickups, no returned calls) she stopped by unexpectedly. She claims she was worried about all the construction going on in the church basement; that someone might get hurt and sue. I still maintain she saw something she didn’t want to see. But hell — at least we’re not getting evicted. Yet.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

FX
This film, as Lloyd often says, is about two things: beautiful young people and effects.

The beautiful young people, aka the actresses, just arrived.

The effects, however, are now so far behind schedule it’s frightening. Dave and Melissa are working through the night, every night, to get the opening scene’s effects to look acceptable.

Details
Lloyd is so obsessed with certain details, and so fueled by tics and paranoia’s, he has me following in his footsteps. A month ago, he freaked out when I didn’t pick up a heads-up penny we saw on the pavement. I was trying to discuss the budget, and he started ranting about this penny. "You’ve got to pick it up! It’s heads up! Pick the damn thing up!!!" He became more and more incensed, and started screaming at me on New York’s 9th Avenue. "Pick up the fucking penny!!!" Ever since, I’ve obsessively collected every heads-up penny I’ve passed. Obsessively.

Friday, July 15, 2005

PAs
As we near production, PAs have started swarming into the house. Thirty to forty people now live here, sharing one shower. (Every night, there’s a 4-5 person queue for the bathroom.) While the FX team works through the night on the basement stage, PAs sleep feet away, t-shirts draped over their faces to feign darkness.

I’ve come to be seen as the Enforcer. ("Don’t do that — Andy might see you and get mad.") Among the producers, I usually end up playing the bad cop role. Gabe refuses to bring up issues with anyone, always coming to me, begging me to handle a situation, tell someone off, sort something out. Kiel mostly doesn’t really care. And with the lack of sleep, too much coffee, and being the most-frequent-victim of Lloyd’s explosions, I’m fine with being the bad guy. I’m honest, curt, and sometimes brutal with people who aren’t working. Already, I’ve had a couple of "if you don’t shape up in the next 24 hours, I’m sending you home" talks.

Meanwhile, some of the PAs aren’t ready for the conditions here. While I told every PA to be prepared to sleep on the floor and eat cheese sandwiches and defecate in a paper bag, some seem to expect the high life and the royal treatment. Quick example: when the actresses arrived yesterday, I asked PA Holly Y to move out of the bedroom and into the TV room or the auditorium. (There’s very limited space, and the stars get the least-brutal housing.)She’s now furious, scathingly so, and has been walking around cursing my name and threatening to go home. Yawn.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Sheets
After his initial reluctance to ship anything up here, even the FX, today Lloyd sent up two large boxes full of sheets for PAs to use. Evidently he didn’t really look through them before boxing them up. Among the stacks of useless bedskirts, baby-cot-sized sheets, baby-pillows, and so on, there was one single fitted sheet, and one twin-sized sheet with ghost-eyes cut into it.

Since we don’t have the budget to buy new sheets for Lloyd, and none of these will work, Ace-PA Kent called his parents, and asked them to ship his childhood Alf, Superman, and Batman sheets for Lloyd to use.

Weird.

PAs
Some of the people who show up are amazing: hard-working, creative, relentless, aggressively pursuing the making of a cult classic. These people I adore.

Others are weird, nerdy Troma fans — slightly obsessive trenchcoat-wearing 18-year-olds who’ve never traveled beyond their small town in Arkansas, in awe of being on a Troma production. These people are fine. We’ll see.

There are a handful of beautiful young women who don’t really do much at all, except walk around alone and stand near work that’s being done. (I wrote about Lloyd’s thoughts on this earlier.) [Okay, I edited them out. But they were telling.]

And now there’s the new arrival: Francis. A near-obese, lecherous young man, he’s the spitting image of PeeWee’s nemesis. Hence the necessary pseudonym. Upon arrival, he regally announced that he was planning to be Assistant Director, then demanded to be handed the script. He’s been here less than 10 minutes, and I’m already looking for a tangible reason to send him home.

With all this insanity here, I really need a break. I’m constantly walking around scowling and making sour comments today. Smoking and drinking coffee. Sneaking away for unhelpful 10 minute sleep breaks. At the entire NY team’s urging, and since they were unable to do it in NY, I just fired John S over the phone. He’s a PA from the NY office, who was supposed to move out here tomorrow. He’s been an unreliable flake since Day One. But then I felt incredibly guilty — he’s a really nice guy — so I told him to come up if he really wanted to, but to expect to be fired for real if he didn’t shape up.

M and I are stealing away to stay in a hotel tonight, and finally get some sleep.

PAs II
With the arrival of Francis, every other PA has risen to striking new highs in my book. Everything that was wretched is now so much better. His shirt pulled up over his chest, he started making bold pronouncements and criticisms of the script to Gabe. While he was only on Page 4. I warned him "Avoid making comments like that when you’re near me, or Gabe, or any of the producers," and he shot back, proudly, "Yes, I supposed Michelangelo wouldn’t be too happy when the Pope criticized him!" I can’t wait to fire this man.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Today
After a single night in a hotel, with seven-and-a-half hours of sleep, I am a changed man. I shaved. I picked up a latte. I’m actually in a good mood. The arrogance of Francis actually gives me joy. (While I was mid-sentence, explaining a job to him, he yawned broadly and then turned around to depart!) The only problem now is the sweat. The terrible dank heat and dank air…. it’s 11am and I’m already drenched.

We still haven’t found the KabukiCar, but today happens to be the annual Buffalo Thunderbird show. Verena and John Karyus are there, trying to find an owner, right now.

Outside, too many PAs were smoking and chatting leisurely, so I arranged for an all-day intensive Chicken Bunker-cleaning.

Downstairs they’re rehearsing Wendy’s Fantasy Bedroom, with nine topless girls dancing and writhing.

Chris, the newest addition to the FX team, showed up yesterday. Arrogant, chatty, and disrespectful, he makes grand claims, but I have yet to see anything he’s done. I suspect he’s going to piss off everyone in his department before long, but he’s also one of our few hopes of making any progress.

Two random kids, Zack and Richard, have been assigned the jobs of "blood boys". I’m not sure why, but Gabe decided they should be the blood team. They have to make this film the bloodiest in history. So their primary focus is using hudson sprayers and air compressors and sump pumps to make blood fly thru the skies. Right now, I’m sure they’re counting themselves the luckiest kids on the set.

Missing
Lloyd has been absent all week. First he was in Cancun, staying at Club Med, unreachable "except in an emergency." Now he’s in San Diego at a comic book convention. He hasn’t been in touch with any of us, or returned any of our calls. The only contact we’ve had with him was a message he left for me last night, drunk at a bar, about how he’d just met some amazing FX wizard who was going to send us props for Poultrygeist.

Meanwhile, writer Gabe is shooting and editing the entire film on video, with stand-ins for the characters we haven’t yet cast. (A week away from filming.) It’s supposed to be so that we can see where the problems with the film are before the 35mm film arrives, but with Lloyd’s apparent interest in the film, it could turn out to be the final thing.

Tension
I walked into FX, and found the manager of the dept being yelled at by the bratty newest arrival. I took the new kid outside to cool him off, and found that — on only his second day — he’s already whining about how horrible this all is. "I’m not going through this just to line Lloyd’s pockets with more money!!!"

Crappy food, long hours, miserable living situation, no money — is it worth it? Depends who you are. He just has to get off his high horse and suck it up. Apparently, he told Melissa "if anyone on this production yells at me, I’m out of here!" (I’d warned him about Lloyd for the last few months in advance of him coming up here. Maybe he’s only just now realizing I wasn’t joking. Or maybe he’s just a prima donna.)

I think he’ll quit in the next few days. It sucks — we need him. I also think he’ll take his ex-girlfriend and their new compatriot, who still curses me for moving her out of a bedroom, "just for the actresses — they’re not better than me!")

On a lighter note, Francis is walking around the block, spelling the word "g-a-r-b-a-g-e" out loud to himself, and then repeating "garbage" over and over again. I do keep asking him to do the garbage. When I asked him to make a fresh pot of coffee, he said "okay", and then walked off down the street aimlessly.

Next week: We start filming in 8 days, and just as we track down Lloyd, he decides to fly to Canada. One of the 18 Art Directors scours Andy’s computer, finds this blog, and finds out some things about herself. And one of the New York team sends me a furious email: "The Troma building smells like ass, and I am sure that I will be yelled at because of it. I am very pissed off. Fuck Z and fuck Gabe for bringing this fucker into my life!"