b. A police officer pulled up when he saw a couple of the actor detectives sneaking around a motel location and stopped them for questioning, unaware that they had real concealed weapons.
c. The lead actress announced that she would be unavailable after only a third of the film had been shot.
d. All of the above.
Well, what do you think? Hey, we’re talking ultra low-budget, independent movie-making here; of course, it’s “d.” And a lot more.
There was also the use-a-location, lose-a-location problem. We shot at a laundromat until the wee hours of the morning after I had gone through a lot of trouble getting permission to use the place. When we were done, it was left in as good a shape as we’d found it. Still, when we went back the next day, the owner abruptly said his business was unavailable, even after we’d done everything to accommodate him. It’s a good thing we had completed at least one of the three scenes planned for that location. After a quick rewrite, all we had to do was find another laundromat and shoot it on the outside. A time-consuming hurdle but not insurmountable.
Then there was the your-location-or-your-life problem. The bookstore setting was great, but the neighborhood was one of the worst in the city with prostitutes and druggies on every corner. We didn’t really want to be there after dark, but had no choice because the owner wasn’t going to limit business hours on our account. When we got there, even the police patrolling the seedy neighborhood warned us to be careful. After hastily shooting the exteriors, we locked ourselves in the bookstore, did our work, and left as quickly as possible.
And who can forget the sheriff incident? He came out to question what we were doing while shooting the scene where the killer has his victim gagged in his car. Apparently a good Samaritan with a clear view of the hillside where we were shooting had spotted one of our production assistants waving her hands wildly and jumping up and down on the roadside and then diving into the bushes to hide just outside of camera sight. After a few retakes, the witness to this strange behavior thought the assistant was in trouble so had called the sheriff. We sure could have used a set of walkie-talkies on that day. Then the assistant could have communicated with the driver of the car coming around the bend as well as the director of photography over the hill without using all that unnecessary body language. How did I get us out of that predicament? I told the sheriff we were working on a school project; he laughed it off and we lucked out.
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