Dead Harvey TV: Episode One (Day One)

I'm so f'ing lazy... I'm writing this after we've already shot the episode. But whatever, I just wanted to admit to it.

Moving on, I wasn't really sure how day one was going to pan out and I was nervous before we started. The other thing that was shitty was getting up early. I hate getting out of bed before the sun rises, but it was a necessary evil because if you don't get started by seven or eight am, the risk of finishing on time is much higher. Especially when shooting nine pages, as we had planned.

The day started out rocky, with an outside scene that we had planned to only take half an hour. We scheduled that scene at 7:30 with one of the actors and had the others arrive at 8:00. That's when Murphy's Law stepped up to the plate and started cornholing us. Every car behind the actor moved and new ones kept taking their places. A garbage truck pulled up next to us and starting dumping a large pile of s into a new construction site. A-holes kept walking through the shot and staring at the camera. The list goes on. Thank God the rest of the s we had to shoot that day was in the apartment.

Due to every a-hole on the street f'ing up our shoot, the rest of the actors arrived and had to wait until we finished an hour and a half late. That sucked because I hate making people wait and it's makes us look like unprofessional douche-bags.

Fortunately, everyone was cool and got along famously. The actors started boozing, but no one got of out control. Everyone was friendly and professional and I can honestly say that this was the best group of actors we've ever had. There were no divas. There was no bullshit. It was a comfortable environment and everyone was having fun.

Then the neighbors upstairs started making noise. Loud, irritating, banging and clanging noises. I flashed back to a couple days before, when the wife came over and introduced herself.

"Hi, we're your new neighbors from upstairs", she said. "Over the next couple weeks it may be a little loud. We're going to be doing a lot of work up there so just let us know if things get to be too much".

"Motherfucker", I thought to myself, quickly followed by, "And I bet they'll start on the day of the shoot".

They did.

Flash forward back to the day of the shoot with the loud ass neighbors. "Fuck it", we decided. We'll just write it into the script. And our fearless team kept going.

Fortunately the noise decreased after a bit and we reached the point where we could actually hear the actor's dialogue.

The last scene involved me on the toilet and, for some reason, the d.p., Joe, started laughing his ass off. The look in his eyes was one of a small child who's just discovered candy. Pure, unadulterated glee. We wrapped and he added that that was officially his favorite scene so far. I have no idea why he enjoyed filming me on the toilet so much but I was glad he was happy because it was a long day and the last memory of the day tends to stick out in your mind the most. It's like when you watch a movie and it's all shitty but the last twenty minutes is good and it kind of makes you forget about how shitty the other hour and ten minutes was.

Anyway, we finished between eight and nine pm. A good, twelve hour shoot. Long but not torturous by any means. We shot an s ton of coverage and completed everything we had scheduled that day. Then we hung out for a bit, had some beers and shot the s. You know it's a good shoot when everyone wants to stick around and hang out when the day is done.

I went to bed happy, looking forward to the next day.

Day two post to follow just as soon as I can muster off the strength to get off my lazy ass again and get some more work done. Hopefully, i'll be able to finish all the posts for this thing before the screening. Until then, take care my friends and thank you for reading.