Our Grass is Ass

We’re doing re-shoots tomorrow. It took us a few days to process the notes from last week’s screening. A big part of that was dealing with the disappointment of feeling like we were done, then realizing we were not. That was a big mental obstacle to overcome.

But after talking it over, we realized our audience was right – we do need to tweak some things. So we’re re-cutting this week, in order to make the first act play better, and delay a major emotional reveal until later in the third act.

To make this last part happen, we have to re-shoot a couple lines, and we're filming a whole new scene. It’s always a little bit hair-raising, trying to re-create something you did six months before. You worry if the actors’ hair will match, if you can find all the costume bits, if you can rustle up all the props you need.

But that’s not the biggest problem. One of the recurring things I seem to notice about making movies is that the biggest problem is the one you never see coming. And in our case, our biggest problem is grass.

We’re re-doing the first shot of the movie, in which Charlotte enters the yard and looks up at the house. When we shot it in February, there had been a month of rain and the grass was long and lush. It is now September, the hottest month of the year in Los Angeles, and the grass in our location’s front yard is long gone. As Barbara the owner/director says: “It’s basically a pile of brown dirt.”

So tomorrow morning, our ever-resourceful production designer Juliane is driving all the way out to Northridge to purchase 40 square feet of sod grass. We’re literally putting a jacket over the yard. It’s a simple solution, but one that will be dirty and expensive and hopefully not too hot to lay down tomorrow.

This whole situation once again brings home to me what a weird thing it is to make movies. So many times, you find yourself in situations that no normal person would ever contemplate. And it’s all so you can create an illusion with the very modest ambition of entertaining people. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, the amount of work is worth it.