It's the first day of our shoot. Everything seemed to be falling into place. We had a 8:00 am call for the cast on location at a local crafts store. The crew arrived at 7:00 am and started setting up. The store owners had agreed to let us shoot there for one morning only.
It was now 9:30 am and our professional "face" actor, who had agreed to play the store owner, was nowhere in sight. I called his home only to find out that he'd taken ill (not bothering to have anyone call us).
Everything was ready to roll except for one of our key actors in the scene. What were we to do? Call it a day and regroup later after finding another place to shoot and wait for our "Pro" actor to recoup? We could have done that and run the risk of having the whole thing fall apart. Instead I decided to convince one of the real store owners to step into the role and basically play himself. Alright, he wasn't an experienced actor with the presence of our absent pro, but he was there. I figured he was already going to be an extra anyway. Now he just had a few lines to worry about. We shot everything in short takes and all was fine.
Here's another great example of how quick thinking saved a day of production on another film. We were shooting on location at a high school where a teacher had agreed to let us use her classroom and students. The problem was the script called for all the students to be Caucasian except for our lead female (a real actress) who was Latino. How was the director going to deal with all the Asian-American & African-American members of the class? He could have had them sit outside and run the risk of upsetting the teacher (who had the power to throw us out) as well as the excluded teens. Instead he came up with one of the most brilliant saves I've ever seen on a set. He simply made each of them assistants to different film crew members. One student helped set up lights, another helped hold the boom, etc. Now they weren't excluded, they were made to feel special (in a good way). The sad thing is we couldn't have done this on a union set. Please understand I'm not anti-union, it's just that the rules would have gotten in the way this time.
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