Photos from Day 1 of the shoot:

It has been damn near a month since I’ve written anything substantive on this blog,and the pictures below will tell the story of why.  I have undertaken the most ambitious, and most foolish endeavor of my writing/video career – I have written, produced and am directing the short film/pilot "Trash" based on the story of The Great Flying One-Handed Trash Nab pulled off by Roger Hitts and me back in 1991.

This is from the shoot on Saturday, the hottest day in the history of the State of California.  Luckily, we were inside.  Not-so-luckily, the second we flipped on the big 1k floods, the temperature started climbing.  On the left is Ted, playing the maniacal tabloid bureau chief, and on the right is Gina, the mousy, ditzy assistant (with a secret).

This was all shot on HD, by my Director of Photography/Camera operator Jon Bickford, using the brand-new Canon H1 camera.  I can’t wait to see what the footage looks like – and when I get some dailies, I’ll post some of the better clips.  The little back-and-forth between Ted and Gina (real name: Joey Jalalian) was absolutely hilarious.

Somehow, it actually looks like I know what I’m doing in this shot … hey, I’m holding a script and an actor is looking at me as though I were actually saying something that made a modicum of sense.  Which seems unlikely, as I was in a complete stress/adrenaline daze the whole day, feeling like I was babbling like a loon and should probably just have been sedated, swathed in bubble wrap, and dropped off on the loading dock of Cedars-Sinai for a 72-hour psych hold.

I know I made all sorts of mistakes, and I know that despite my best efforts at rationalizing them, they are going to dance and swirl around my head like the tweeting birds in a Tom & Jerry cartoon.

I look at this and I see that I had mostly a blank, featureless wall behind Ted for most of the shots from Gina’s POV and I just frickin’ cringe.  Still, there there was only so much that I could do, seeing as how I was the Writer, Director, Producer, Art Director, Set Dresser, PA and Transportation Coordinator.