cake
i had a fine weekend, being that it was "robot birthday weekend 2002". we had some fun times and food and spirits, and i got quite a bit of robot related gifts, which is always good. my birthday is almost the same as happyrobot.net's birthday, so happy late birthday website! (the domain was bought 26-Jan-1999... the site was around a year before that, so we are celebrating year number four.... wtf.)
it's supposed to snow today.
A Walk to Remember: the crew review
This 'walk to remember' movie keeps coming up in my life. wtf. maybe i should pay lawton to go review it for fun.
we mentionned this movie to a friend of mine who works in the biz (as the kids call it), and it turns out, spookily, that he worked on this movie. he sent us a nice little story and is allowing me to reprint it as long as i pull his name and stuff...
A Walk to Remember: an anonymous but deeply disturbed crew member
We all suffered through it... I should say SUFFERED through it.
Next week, when this movie comes out on video, I'd love to do the commentary track on the DVD. I would speak in my best NPR voice, and it would go something like this: (camera guy) Alan developed a liking for pain killers during production and started falling asleep at work. Once he fell asleep pulling focus, WHILE walking beside the dolly as it was going in for a real big emotional moment. The dolly RAN OVER his foot. He frequently showed up about 3 hours late, and then at one point he stopped coming all together, and they still wouldn't fire him, they didn't even get a replacement. Someone from production had to go over and "wake" him up after three days. He literally didn't know what day it was, and was so confused at how he lost two days.
Our stedicam operator, a real nice guy from Florida, was a great operator (only does big Hollywood stuff normally) but he had a real bad lazy eye. So he would be looking through the viewfinder with his "good" eye and the other would just wander all over the set. And the when the director asked him how the shot was, he would look up with one eye going one way and the other going another way, and say with a straight face, "It looked great."
He hated our D.P. , In fact EVERYONE hated our D.P. so much so that it became a real fun joke. On our last night of shooting the Operator got fed up, walked off the set and went to the truck, where he encouraged Dan (who was there, being paid, just in case Alan "fell asleep" again) to start drinking before wrap. which we did, and proceeded to completely trash the camera truck. Then we took poloroids of the carnage, laughing till tears came. At wrap no one cared about the state of the truck because they were all so happy it was over. Later that night the D.P. came up to me and Matt, all drunk and high, and told us that we would be "blown fucking away" by his "ballsy" photography, and that we would be proud to tell everyone that we worked for him on this movie.
i was a teenage beauty pageant photographer
continuing my 'beauty pageant thread:
this just in... a great article rach sent me about a documentary about pageants.
also, one of my running jokes is keeping a list of the common pageant girl names (they all seem to have the same names).
these i remember:
kayla
britney
paige
crystal
Dakota
Lindsay
Logan
Ashley
john lawton
if you checked out that article above, they mention parents entering toddlers, which i saw too many times. these moms would walk out holding their few months old baby, and the announcer would say something like, "Kayla is 9 months old and enjoys playing with her bub-bub and her little sister, Paige. Her favorite foods include formula and cereal".
i swear i heard that once... that her favorite food was her formula. i also heard many times that her favorite person was her 'mama'. no shit. she's less than a year old.
the toddler thing was always creepy. and ironic because it's pretty hard to judge a f*cking baby from 20 feet away.
"well, bob, she didn't drool too much on her little ballerina outfit"
probably my most cringe inducing experiences was shooting a 'boys' pageant, which i totally don't understand. i mean, how the hell do you talk your son into this? and what does he tell his friends? totally creepy.
it was pretty straight forward... formal wear: i think they wore a suit.. athletic wear: they wore a baseball or soccer outfit. they had toddlers to guys in highschool and college (but only like 2 or 3 per age group).
the talent section was the best though. most of the kids came out and dribbled a basketball or bopped a soccer ball on their head, except for this one kid.
this one high school age kid who was... i think, gay. and his talent was singing.
he had a nice voice, and could obviously sing, but totally spooked the pageant crowd by singing 'killing me softly' and not changing the pronouns.
i have this sound of him singing burned into my head now... "killing me softly with HIS song..." and hearing old ladies behind me saying, "what did he just say?"
the announcer was like, "um, and that was, um, Stanley singing, er, um, killing me softly"
he totally did not win. i ended up shooting him at a fashion show a year later. he seemed to of recovered from the loss.
the guy who won was a mid-twenties marine. wtf.
"ted, what did you do this weekend?"
"well, i was crowned Mr. Pender County at a beauty pageant"
