1998 – Going Solo
My cell phone rang, the minutes nearly drained. It was Hernando.
“Hey Hernando, what’s up?”
“Hey Dave, how’s it going?”
“Good,” we had 8 scenes in the bag with him and I was bracing for the worst.
“Yeah. Say I just wanted to let you know I’m selling my car.”
Pause. Okay, not the worst, but almost.
“But we have some more scenes left to shoot with it.”
“Sorry Dave, but the thing is on its last legs and I need the cash.”
We already shot 3 scenes with that car and I had at least that many more planned.
“How much are you selling it for?”
“Three Hundred Dollars.”
Pause.
“Dave, you there?”
“Do you need all that up front?”
Steve lost his job at a post-production facility (NW Video Works) after it went belly up. A few months later he was offered an editing job at CNN, in Atlanta. Unemployed and without Steve, I felt very alone and hopeless. I began thinking about giving up on the whole business. There was still a lot more scenes to shoot and even though I had Steve’s camera with me, I had no money to rent equipment.
Finally in June, I found an analyst job for a tech firm. It contained the same temporary dull grey walls from my last job. Only these were slightly taller, providing each cube a closed off/disconnected feel. The work was dry and uninspiring much like my old insurance job. This company focused on the logistics of how to best deliver mail from X to Y on the East Coast. What caught my interest, however, was the old warehouse turned parking garage next door. That would be a cool shooting location.
During the summer I was able to muster just enough cash to rent equipment for a weekend here and there. The snail pace stressed me a lot. Who knew how long I would be able to afford this project. Remembering my lesbian actresses, who knew how long I would be able to keep this new set of actors before they stopped answering my calls. So I marched forward, eager to mark more scenes off my list. I could have saved my money and perhaps waited for more consecutive shooting days and more help. But my new job didn’t give me than many days off this first year and help..
On a no-budget movie it is easy to find actors, but crew is always hard because it’s real work, and the initial excitement of work on a movie quickly fades, especially when you can’t afford to pay them a token amount. Some days found me as the only crew, operating a camera with a C-Stand holding a microphone near the actors. Sometimes the help proved otherwise.
Steve returned to Portland in September for a job with an internet start-up, a social site involving pigs (before the internet bubble burst, people were trying everything). I could tell he wasn’t excited about returning to my project, but I didn’t care. I gladly handed over the camera.
It was a Saturday morning in December and we were about to lay siege to old town Gresham. It was Scene 42: The Grand Chase Scene: we had Hernando running and shooting his .45 at three bad guys through streets of Hawthorne, NW 21st, a roof in Goose Hollow, and now more streets in Gresham. I didn’t know exactly how cold it was, but I could see Hernando’s breathe as he complained bitterly about the light shirt he had to wear. It seemed a good wardrobe choice when we began shooting this scene in August of the previous year.
On this particular day we applied blood to both sides of Hernando’s left shoulder. He hated the blood and we had to literally chase him around the parking lot to put it on. His character had been shot early in the scene and fortunately, the cold weather gave his normal expression a slight pained look which helped sell his fake injury. Today he was to run from street to building to street dodging fire and returning fire.
We had real guns loaded with blanks. I notified the local police of our activity in advance, but they didn’t seem to take too much interest. Our small crew of two and two actors would guarantee some interesting reactions from people but for some reason I didn’t anticipate some to react so severely. After all, the presence of our camera would surely explain everything that was going on.
I guess it was because we were across the street from a small local bank, which helped make the bloodied up Hernando look more than conspicuous. And on top of that, he was running wielding a .45, shooting it somewhere behind him willy-nilly. This is what the woman saw just before she dived in front of her two young daughters. Many say they would gladly die for their loved ones, but when the moment comes, how many reinforce that sentiment with action? She ought to be proud of that moment.
We managed to soothe over that misunderstanding, however, we soon heard approaching sirens. I called it a wrap and we quickly dispersed to our respective cars. We didn’t want any trouble, because we had to return at some point to shoot the part involving Hernando being chased down by a SUV.
Later, in a warm café, Hernando admonished, “Come on Dave. We’ve shot a lot of *uckin’ stuff; we should have a movie by now.”
I nodded, “Almost there, almost there.” I pulled out my master scene list and stared at it. Scenes or parts of scenes were being marked off, but lack of money and peoples schedules made the going incredibly slow.
