Movies Til Dawn

By popular demand, here are Julianna Margulies and Steven Strait going at it in a car, parked in the Orchard Beach parking lot just outside of City Island. Something screws up halfway into the scene (seems like a sound problem) which breaks the so-called "mood" and causes Julianna to crack up. In answer to a couple of comments concerning how actors feel about doing love scenes, I think I can safely answer that they all hate it, find it degrading and embarrassing but have never (in my experience) put up a fuss: it's all part of the game and the best way to do it is quickly and professionally. Most actors who I've done stuff like this with like to plan it out very carefully (I think the clinical nature of doing so makes them feel better about the intimacy that they're faking) and then like to do it quickly, usually with somewhat fewer crew personnel around than usual. Both Julianna and Steven were totally professional about this whole scene--though after one take th...

Yes, dear readers, I've heard you loud and clear. The make out session is on its way. But first... I thought, while I had your attention, I'd attempt to interest a few of the newer readers of this modest blog who joined us once production commenced on "City Island" to the blog's original intention--the celebration of my twin obsessions, old movies and jazz, as purveyed clip by clip on the wondrous thing known as youtube. (Jesus that's a long sentance. Anyone still reading?) The vehicle for this would not be un-"City Island" related, however; I've found a quite amusing montage that a youtuber named Nicoley132 built revolving around the pre-code era and, among other things, people making out in old movies. Briefly, the Production Code was established circa 1933 in order to rid movies of salacious behavior and improve the country's low impression of Hollywood's notoriously low morals. But before the code anything went, short of pornography. ...

I'm back with a longish clip that I don't believe has been posted before. This is the climax of the movie, a family argument played out at night in the middle of the street. The scene itself runs considerably longer than this clip, so no spoilers are possible. The page count of the scene was eleven pages. On a normal day we would shoot an average of four pages of script--which is considered quite a bit if you're a fifty million dollar movie, but if your shooting a 28 day schedule is just about right.(Do the math--28 times 4 equals 112 which is roughly the page count of my script). This eleven page scene, however, was shot all in one night--a considerable feat of energy for the actors as well as the crew. Why? Because it just seemed to be one of those unstoppable scenes, a huge verbal slugfest, that would be better caught in one long go than in breaking it up over a series of nights. I knew it was a risk scheduling it for only one night--by committing to the idea we effecti...

Today's thrilling clip provides a view of your writer-director friend Raymond De Felitta (yes, we are officially in the dregs of the clip bin) acting confused. I stand somewhere outside the prison (this was that unpleasant day) staring at absolutely nothing as my a.d. Eric calls for sound to roll and patiently waits for me to say "action". But I don't. Instead I stare ahead weirdly, scratch my neck, fold my arms and in general act about as focused and authoritative as a goldfish. Was I unaware that we were rolling? Could I truly have been this out to lunch? Or perhaps there was some problem off screen that I was perfectly well aware of and so I simply was not yelling action and was instead patiently waiting for the problem to resolve itself. Unlikely. I think I was just spacing out. So as not to make this entry entirely about my own ineptitude (and in honor of the generous--neverending is more like it--season that professional baseball allows itself), I'm adding a...

Here's a clip shot late one night on 10th Avenue in New York's "Hell's Kitchen" district--so named for its past history as a slum environment but now home to numerous high rises, lofts, theaters, restaurants that won't seat you, etc. In it, Andy Garcia and Emily Mortimer begin a scene and promptly stop as the camera fails to be in the right place. Emily is a tad upset and voices her disapproval by saying, quite rightly, that she was told to step wide of her mark--and now she's being blamed for not hitting her mark. As I recall, this was the night that we had a strange, out of control Police Officer (the film commission assigns an officer to every shoot) yelling at us about what time we had to stop. His deeply unpleasant manner (this wasn't our first encounter with him) rattled everyone. I believe a letter was eventually written, by our producers, to the NYPD suggesting that in terms of public relations between film crews shooting in New York and the P...

I've been deep in edit hell, trying to achieve picture lock by late this week (we won't make it). Thus the paucity of posts. But more clips will be back tomorrow. In the meantime... Pause with me a moment to remember the work of Neal Hefti, who passed away last weekend at the age of 86. Hefti was a jazz giant--a composer/arranger who wrote two of the most played jazz tunes of the past fifty years, "Lil Darlin'" and "Cute" as well as two of the most beloved (and listened too) TV themes of the past fifty years. Both "Batman" and "The Odd Couple" are, as shows and cultural artifacts, inseperable from Hefti's irresistable themes. Hefti began his career in big bands, writing for Woody Herman, Count Basie and eventually arranged one of my favorite Sinatra albums, "Sinatra and Swingin' Brass". He also composed music for movies--my favorite being "Lord Love A Duck". Click here for a quite comprehensive Wikipedia b...

Yes, it's come to this. Clips of the crew wandering around the set. As I begin to run low with these precious clips, I have to find new ways to make even the least fascinating material relatively interesting. And so I come to the subject of burning film--those strange moments when the camera is left rolling for unknown reasons when a take is not even close to being contemplated. These tidbits are actually not entirely worthless as they show in action what I was describing the other day--that leisurely disorganized vibe that permeates every movie set (in between explosions of temper, of course) which make every day civilians wonder how the hell a movie ever gets finished. The first clip is outside an office building on Lexington Avenue and 57th St. and features cameo appearences by, among others, my producer, our hair stylist, several pa's, a member of the art department and, at the very end, two members of the camera crew--who presumably were responsible for having turned the c...

Sorry for the unexpected hiatus--I returned home to LA after sixteen weeks in New York this past weekend and found myself far more exhausted than I expected to be. The past four months of filmmaking have been essentially riding a wild bull--starting with our prep period in late May/early June, our shoot beginning a scant five weeks later in mid July, and jumping right into the editing after our pre Labor Day weekend wrap. We've screened the movie a few times now for invited guests to get a feeling of how it plays with audiences. It's quite amazing (and sobering) what you learn from sitting in a room watching your movie with a group...somehow things that you thought were perfectly timed are horrifically slow, and things that long ago you gave up on as hopeless seem to work wonderfully well. Robert Altman was a big believer in screening cuts of his films for invited audiences--rather than ask for specific comments, however, he would simply tell his guests: "Don't worry a...

Forgive the shameless self-promotion (to say nothing of the unattractive need to point out positive things about myself), but click here to read an excellent review of my last film, a documentary soon to be released on DVD called "Tis Autumn; The Search For Jackie Paris". The film is rolling out theatrically around the USA and Canada on the art-house circuit and this review is from Winnipeg. The man who wrote it is a genius. You have to think that of someone who calls your film "one of the finest music documentaries ever made"... Now back to City Island for a moment. My property master, Dan Fisher, sent me a blog entry he'd written over the summer which never got posted. It has to do with a part of the story which I always referred to as "The Denise Thing"--a sub-plot that was quite bizarre and relatively controversial, which I'd regularly been asked to drop from the script but which I think is an important element of the movie. Without any ...