LIBRARY artefact #031
ON THE 1st DAY OF XMAS…
Welcome to the first of 12 bite-sized advent calendar style offerings coming your way every day from now until Jesus’ birthday!
Who knows what might turn up?
As we fold back the first tab, today’s equivalent of a tiny picture of a Christmas cracker, trumpet, pudding, ice skate, shepherd, or robin redbreast, can be found in the following extracts from a ‘production diary’ I kept during the filming of the pilot episode for Syfy’s adaption of Happy! – my Image comic series with artist Darick Robertson.
Unlike many of my peers, who prefer to option their IP then trust others to develop it for the screen, I wanted to stay involved in every aspect of Happy! This led to me exec producing, co-writing the pilot episode and finale with Brian Taylor, attending every day of the shoot to get a feel for the scale and scope of TV production, hanging out with everyone from the ‘transpo’ drivers, crew and catering staff to line producers, showrunners, actors and doubles, execs and studio top brass, and when the pilot led to a season order, spending six weeks in the LA writer’s room where I worked with masters of their craft to break and reset the story. For me, it was a rapid, exhilarating crash course education in a whole new medium. I enjoyed it so much, I did it again with Happy! Season 2 and Brave New World.
In early 2017, writer/director Brian Taylor was given 4 weeks to shoot the Happy! pilot on location in New York and the Boroughs. The story is set at Christmas, which was recreated in January and February with the assistance of cunning prop teams and obligingly genuine freezing temperatures with snow (when it came to filming the rest of the episodes for Season 1, the shoots were in August and the Fall, necessitating much post-production work to make sweltering New York summer look like midwinter).
The following part one of two selected excerpts takes a look at a night shoot on location and a studio set-up – as you’ll see, I struggled with the bizarre, ever-changing hours of shooting schedules where overnight shifts give way to daytime work and back again, playing havoc with already jet-lagged Circadian rhythms. The arrival of a murderous snuffling cold did nothing to make life easier.
Otherwise, it’s the passage of time and the desirability of ‘lunch’ and bed that sadly tends to preoccupy me in this unflinching look at the grim realities of showbiz…
GALLERY artefact #028
New York, February 2017
Friday December 3rd 2017
Still only slept 6 or 7 hours and woke feeling a little odd. When I called Kristan, I could barely get words out. I got a message to say I was being picked up at 12.45, which seemed excessively early for a night shoot. The sense of unstoppable juggernaut horror this provoked brought me to weary tears until I received a second message explaining that 12.45 was a mistake, It was 2.45 after all!
Spoke to Kristan, confessing that I didn’t think I could do this again. I look fucked in the mirror. Started the week with people telling me I didn’t look a day over 40, ended with Bryan Crow convinced I was 60.
Shook myself out, settled in the van, on the way to City Hall Park.
When we got there it was all decked out like Christmas – Sonny Shine logos and giant Wishee standees. By this time, feeling a bit better and as night came in and the lights came on, I began to feel a mildly euphoric sense of excitement.
Real kids, (including, in another moment of synchronicity, a little girl wearing a UNICORN hat) were asking their moms to take them to the Sonny Shine show in the park. The hallucinatory sense of having invaded reality - something from my head manifesting itself on this scale, in the real world, in the heart of Manhattan.
So all happed up in my layers and long johns, thermals, jumper, hoodie, coat, hat, I entered the slipstream – astonishing. True magic. The world made MINE.
The hyper-real overload continued as the lights came on, the Wishees filled the screen behind the big stage and Sonny Shine, Sonny fucking Shine, the new face of evil, rose up from under the boards like a glittering clown sent from Hell in a cloud of dry ice and brimstone.
Christopher Fitzgerald, who plays Sonny, is yet another gift to this production. Actors who are so brilliant you only have to press a button and they generate whole routines, IN CHARACTER. He was outrageous, incredible, improvising his scene in front of a cheering crowd of kids yelling 3 WISHES!
This little slice of real-world New York dragooned into concretizing my imagination. This Tony award winning song and dance man, spinning and pirouetting with a wheelchair-bound kid. What a world! The cold is brutal but I’m okay. The kids love Sonny.
They even love Joe (Reitmann) in his monstrous Santa costume, talking to him as if he’s the real thing, while parents provided incredibly imaginative responses to their kids’ questions about our ghastly pervert Santa (‘Why doesn’t he have a long beard?’ – ‘Well, Santa shaves after Christmas and it takes a whole year to grow his beard back…’??!! ‘Why does he have all those toys and things hanging off his suit?’ – ‘Well, he takes them off the tree and pins them to his coat until next Christmas…’)
GALLERY artefact #029
New York, February 2017
The whole thing has a searing, lysergic quality. This has to be one of the most magical nights of my life in the true sense. Insubstantial thought translated to solid materiality. The imaginary pinned down, grounded, embodied. The setting, with soaring, claustrophobic New York vertical lines, crowded together skyscrapers overlooking the well where our stage is sunk, a thousand eyed audience of towering deities.
As I write, it’s only 9pm. Probably another 8 hours of this and we’ll still be at it when the kids playing Sonny’s audience are compelled by law to leave at 12.30 am. Hard to imagine a moment that will top the glittering, transcendent overload when Sonny first appeared.
I’m looking forward to the weekend when I can get time to rest and recuperate and be myself, but this is mind-boggling. Here in the video village tent watching the monitors, warming myself at a burner.
3.15 am -3° and it’s becoming a real drag. Everything is taking forever. Giant eyes of Wishees on screen following Happy into the creepy enchanted forest. Sonny’s back. Something’s happening at last. Jesus, it’s cold. My nose went numb for a while; even covered with scarf and beanie and hood like some jihadi baddie in his desert tent.
GALLERY artefact #030
New York, February 2017
Hopefully we’re near the end for the night. Seems like things are going a bit south up there. All stops and starts.
Dinner, or lunch, midnight lunch, was nice. I’ve been eating well on the production which is not what I expected. Tons of salad and soup. Hardly any carbs.
This has been a long, long night but the opening scenes should look amazing, with two of the best designed characters – Sonny and Santa – making their appearance.
Feeling weary and irritated. How Chris keeps his energy up is beyond me, and the little kid Bryce is amazing for a child kept awake and concentrating so long. Exasperated voices over my headphones. Monitor screen gone dead again. The wind is howling and swirling among the artificial canyons and mesas – minus fucking 10! But the results will be worth it all – that last haunting shot of Santa pissing, lifting his creepy glove puppet and the cut to black as he opens his coat…
Monday February 6th
Today is a studio shoot. The ambulance scene. So we’re on a daytime schedule, working until 1am this time, which should be a little easier to handle than the all-nighters that lie ahead. Slept a lot. Woke up feeling groggy and grungy (the loveable toad pals..).
A big hollow hangar is today’s set with a wooden box containing an ambulance interior. Action scenes in a very tight space, requiring meticulous choreography.
Feeling a bit lazy today. Need to get back into the rhythm of these long, long days. Bad news is I seem to have lost my hat somewhere on the way home on Friday night. It’s not a problem today but will be for the next night shoot. Maybe dropped it in the van.
The space fills up with cranes, video monitors, costumes, props, people – grips, electricians, actors, assistants.
First rehearsal in costume. The ambulance rocks and rolls on its gimbals.
All of this is like the games we used to play as kid – ‘Make it you do this…make it you do that…’
I could never be a director, but I think I’d enjoy being an actor.
3.13 pm. 10 hours to go!
These tight, interior worlds where I have no idea where to sit or where to find food are much harder than the other set-ups. Friday night, for all its rigour and cold was the most rewarding experience so far.
They’ve set up a little video village here, so at least I have my comfy director chair but there’s an element of tedium creeping in already. The actors in the ambulance lack the deluxe quality of Meloni and the other regulars
Shiny balls turn – making sure the lighting is right for the Happy CGI.
17.45 and we’re almost halfway through. This is much easier. Usually it gets to this time and we have 12 hours to go.
Just been in to see Prawn Man in his costume – it’s fucked-up, monstrous.
‘I’m nothing like this character…’ the actor tells me. No shit. Nobody is like this character. We talked about auctioning the suit off at the end and alerting the police to anyone who buys it.
Waiting now to get the overhead shot as the roof is lifted off the frighteningly convincing ambulance set.
‘It’s a different culture,’ says Brian of the TV crew. He can’t get them to loosen up and go bold but what I’ve seen so far looks great.
Elise arrived to take over from Bryan Crow for a day or two. The changing of the guard. Saw some previs stuff for Happy which looked pretty great and suddenly it all seems like it can come together.
Probably another hour doing this scene then lunch. Then green screen car.
‘Crafty’ is what they call the little food table that follows the production around supplying me with eggs, fruit, nuts and soup.
18.55. Things getting a little sticky now. Must be near lunchtime and the ambulance scene where Happy first appears. Brian needs a lens change. Meloni’s playing Nick Sax on morphine, laughing and wheezing as Happy makes his delirious debut.
Amazing what a difference the lens makes. More clarity.
This is quite a complex sequence. Getting it just right is an intricate business.
19.14. This pivotal scene us going a little wayward but I’m sure Brian will nail it. Probably want to do it soon though.
Joe Reitmann just turned up. Didn’t think he had anything to do today so maybe he’s just here for the hang. I think this is definitely going to go on way past 1am…
Aah…lunch complete – some nice salmon, roast potatoes, and a ton of salad.
10pm. Brian’s doing some half speed trippy shots of Sax passing out in slo-mo while the medics zip around double speed. It’s hard to imagine fitting this and the green screen car and bike shots into the next 3 hours but I suppose it’s worked out every other night. Feeling a bit gassy and weary right now, waiting for wind and 2nd wind both. Talking universe as simulation with the crew as they arrange the scaffolding to simulate passing streetlights reflected on the windows.
Crazy speeded-up paramedics and slo Nick complete. It’s midnight – one hour to get the rest of the shot.
Nico showed me this amazing 3-D capture of the ambulance interior on ‘1-2-3D catch’ – it looked like a view from the 5th dimension – an interior space completely modelled, capable of rotation and zoom. Amazing.
What’s interesting is how all of this done with great efficiency and NO DRAMA except what appears on the screen, although the arsing around and resetting can be quite irritating at times. Chris Meloni is clearly getting fed up with the amount of fussing around and using up precious shooting time with a lot of bitsy activity.
We’re so close to the finish now. He’s still totally on it, absolutely great but there’s a sense of stickiness, people bustling around as if they’d all the time in the world. I can hear him saying, ‘Let’s just DO it!’
So apparently, they’re still trying to fit in the short Sonny Shine shot. I haven’t even seen Chris Fitzgerald all day but presumably he’s here somewhere, resplendent in his Shine suit.
12.47. Looks like the motorbike shot is being dropped today.
That went on a little beyond tolerable levels. Interminable waiting, relived and redeemed by the appearance of Sonny Shine. That guy is AMAZING. He had us in hysterics, ending on a riotous upbeat note.
I do enjoy being surrounded by the team.
I’m very excited you got some first hand experience at production. Trying to explain it to someone who doesn’t have any is damn near impossible. I hope, it helps in your journey to get The Invisibles crafted for the small screen.