I did mention the wind, right. It’s interesting how easy it becomes to tell everyone apart despite their face being hidden beneath goggles & bandana. While the lunches sat getting cold the crew scrambled in the blowing dirt to rig and prepare for what, in reality, is the biggest stunt of the show so far. So there we are. Hungry. Hot, squinting and spitting at the dirt. I’m contemplating the date and our solidarity on International Worker’s Day. My blood sugar has dropped to dangerous levels. Tempers flair. Stupidity reigns. Suddenly, the music playback for the scene blares (and I mean blares) the Star Spangled Banner. That just took the cake. The humanity!

In the end, a minor miscommunication ruined the shot (apparently) so it all was for not. Serves them right. Of course, I’d rather they have gotten it. The crew will be the ones picking up the slack in the end.

Waiting on weather. Not that it is raining. Though it is threatening to. We actually got rained out two days last week. The desert just doesn’t have the ability to absorb heavy amounts of rain quickly. And, remote as we are, in the middle of a big hunk of nowhere, it just got plain ol’ silly and maybe even dangerous. So, on a show off 128 days with only 2 days off our biggest break may have been due to rain. Oh well, they don’t seem too worried about it.

Hard to muster up good humor on the first day back after a holiday weekend. Ho-hum. Wednesday we head to Arizona. Monument Valley & Cayon de Chelle. Should be pretty anyway.

Ended up trying for the shot several times over the course of the next 4 hours, as the sun played hide and seek on the edge of a giant dark cloud. Finally, the futility of the situation won out.

Posting this now or else it may never make it.

Very different show (in many ways). I am actually a ‘cable guy’ as in wrangling and humping a significant ammount of cable around all day. Whereas I was previously trained in a post-cable (“hard line”) era this is like a throwback to the classic time. There’s a technique to wrapping cable (“over-under”) and it is essential.

There are other differences to this show (an espresso machine at craft service, shooting one scene over the course of two days & actually appreciating what is being shot) but It is still too early to know much of what is yet to come.

Other interesting accounts:

A photo shoot. To officially capture T.L.R & T in all their glory, on horses in front of a blue screen & with a boom operator swinging a long pole over them…wait, what? That’s right, the genius of corporate Dismay decided they needed to lock down the image of our heroes to be sure no one else stole a shot of them first. The boom? Isn’t it obvious? Anyway, we were asked to loan out a spare pole/zeppelin setup for the shoot. I prepped it (and even combed out the furry sock). First we were told the picture boom op was to be our resident cowboy advisor for the movie, a really nice guy who, without exception, blesses his lunch with his hat over his heart every day. He was nixed. Then it was to be our ‘heavyset ranger’ stand-in. He got nixed. Then they gave it to Jeff, our boom op. this seemed best and I thought increased the chance of it getting shluffed off on me. T’was not to be. In nearly the last minute (and each time the news of the change reached us ‘did you hear about the change for the boom op?’. Finally, (for ‘paperwork reasons’) they went with J.D.’s sound guy, Keenen. In an utterly surreal moment, I was briefly the stand-in for the boom op for the photo shoot.

If you don’t appreciate the subtlety of that humorous situation perhaps this other ditty will get you. The justification for all this hard-wiring is the quality over wireless (“man!”). It’s like a vinyl over digital argument to me. But hey, I collect records & 8tracks so how can I argue. Anyway, late in the day yesterday we were getting close to finishing so I had begun to wrap the boom cable back (in hopes of the last shot being MOS). Well, we ended up needing to roll on it and Jeff, in an act of utter pity for me) suggested we just fly with the wireless for this shot. Great, I thought. I’ll wrap the cable back to the cart(100′). So we finish that shot and find that the last shot of the day (the ‘martini’ as its called) was a shot of piss in a bucket (literally). Well, Lee & Jeff decide this requires a level of fidelity not possible via wireless. So back out goes the hard line for one shot of piss in a pail. Man, did it sound good!

Here are a few more pix from my final days on ‘code name: geronimo’. Lots of interesting structures around the old prison. Not sure which are original and which were added over the last ten years of movie production.

Days later we are in the old prison in Santa Fe, for the duration of the show. Lots of gunfire. Be it known that blanks are loud & very dangerous. This prison is the site of the worst prison riot in US history. meanwhile, the news reported this horrific prison fire in Hondurus.
I haven’t had much free time on this show as I’ve been busy booming but I did take some pictures. Hopefully they tell the story.

Snow was in the forecast but most of the day passed mildly. It wasn’t until just before evening that giant flakes began to fall. And fall. And fall. It wasn’t as cold as day one but it was a blizzard. Our location, near the fly fishing spot, is up a winding valley along route 63 north of Pecos. By wrap the snow had begun to stick and it the roads were getting icy. My precarious parking job from the morning left me with little other option than to abandon it for the night and catch a ride.

Day 4 was an easier day (I’ve begun to detect a pattern (bad day, good day, bad day, good day) with most of the work inside an old rustic cabin. The weather was sunny, at least while the sun’s trajectory crossed the small window of the valley, slipping away by 3 o’clock. The transo guys got my car free while I scurried around doing my regiment of 2 peoples work. The motions are getting smoother as Bayard (the mixer) and I fall into a groove. Battery, jam, wire. Point stick, suck up sound.

Today (noon call time – I’m writing this at a cafe before I go in), if my pattern is correct might be a rough day. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

What crazed adventures stole me from my narrative duty? In a word, “life”. Mostly in the form of a small humanoid creature. Oddly though, work as well. Yes, meanwhile(as they say) I have been gainfully employed (mostly) on a feature film in Santa Fe. I say mostly in reference to the 3 weeks when the show was shut down because the funding necessary for us to shoot apparently “disappeared”. How does that happen? The mind reels. In the interim we were promised a return to work no less than 8 times. Needless to say, the previously upbeat mood of the crew on what had been up to that point a dream of a show took something of a hit. Alas, ‘never trust a producer’ is the prime directive of film work.

So here we are, the final two weeks of this funny little, slightly cursed picture. Shooting in the shell of an abandoned mall in ‘slightly less quaint than Santa Fe’ Albuquerque. At least it beats the heat. Perhaps something interesting will happen worth documenting (or perhaps my cozy little blog will insulate us from the assaults of reality and wrap us in obscurity).

But New Mexico is a long way from Peru. We’re four out of five days in on a shoot in nw nm filming in the alien landscape of the Bisti Badlands. Millions of years have eroded this once underwater dinosaur graveyard into the anomalous forms called ‘hoodoos’. Stunning and (cough, cough) dusty. Giant dust devils spontaneously appear and disappear, leaving destruction in their wake. Amazing and absurd, this process of movie making. Hard to imagine the place surviving our impact.