In four days, I’ll be sitting in a car park somewhere in Santa Monica, outside a post-production facility, waiting for the courage to go inside.
In other words, in four days I’ll be screening the rough cut of my latest television pilot.
I've spent the past week or so in New York shooting a pilot, or "test" episode of a series I'm proposing to a large cable network. It was a long shoot – and, as the network reminds me as often as they can, an expensive one – and somewhere between the opening shots and the final call of "that's a wrap!" I lost track of whether what was being captured on film was any good at all.
Production is like that. You get so enmeshed in the day-to-day, shot-for-shot moments that you lose the big picture. It’s like raising children. Or so I’m told. The trick is to hold onto the thread of the story and not fight battles – creative battles, budget battles, turf battles – over things that, in the end, won’t make any difference.
For instance, we shot up a car. The show tells the story of three young men trying to live a bolder, more consequential life, and part of their journey involves one of them – the married guy, the guy who suffers under the thumb of his domineering wife – realising that all of this meekness and lack of courage is wrapped up in the car his wife made him buy. It’s an electric car, which he hates – electric cars don’t emit a throaty, manful roar when you hit the accelerator, so what normal guy likes them? – and so, egged on by his friends, he takes a bat to it. And then shoots at it.
Every film location in a city – and New York is maybe the most filmed city in the world – needs to have a special permit approved by some bureaucrat somewhere deep in city hall. New York is actually a remarkably easy place to shoot a show – the permits process is streamlined and sane – but still: we’re asking local residents to allow us to make a lot of noise deep into the night, well into the early hours of the morning when most normal people with rational jobs are asleep.
The way you film a sequence like that is dizzying: you get a bunch of angles of the guys pulling out the guns and pointing at the car. And then you rig the car’s side panels and passenger window with tiny explosives, which will make it look like the blank rounds being fired by the actors are penetrating the metal, when in fact they’re doing no such thing.
What can’t happen, obviously, is for the special effects team – which, because of budget constraints, wasn’t really a “team” in the professional sense, but a guy from Queens and his not-so-bright son – to mistime the tiny explosions on the side of the car and have the whole thing go off before the director had called “action”. What happened, unfortunately, was exactly that.
Now we have some terrific footage of the guys getting the guns and aiming them, and some hilarious sequences of the guys looking at the peppered car after they’ve fired at it, but we’re missing the crucial bullets-hitting-the-car footage.
That’s one of the reasons why, in four days, I’ll be steeling myself in the car park.
But then, that’s always the problem with the first cut of anything. Rough cuts, which are the first all-in assembly of the project cut together by the editor, are invariably disasters. Things that went perfectly in production suddenly look, in the cold light of the editing screen, drab and uninteresting. The picture drags, the actors aren’t good, the dialogue stinks – for some reason, every rough cut fills me with a sickening lump of dread in my stomach. “This is awful,” I always say to myself. “Why didn’t I see it before?”
But then you do what you do in life, when things aren’t going right: you start to cut stuff out. Trims here and there, some scenes cut and rearranged, and suddenly it’s shorter. Faster. More sprightly and funny. And after six or seven revisions, the final version emerges, and it doesn’t make me sick at all. More often than not, I’m elated.
So four days from now, sitting like a coward in the car park, I’ll try to remind myself that while the rough cut will look awful, the finished product will look terrific. “It’s all in there,” I’ll tell myself. “This is just like life,” I’ll say. “It seems bad, but stick with it and take a deep breath every now and then, and chop out what’s slow or boring or unsatisfying, and it’ll be great.”
Except for the car scene. That one is really going to stink.
Some things, you can’t fix. Like life.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
