Production Diary, Day 3: Up on the Overpass

Today the whole company parked at a neighborhood park and walked to work under a highway.

Gerald and Trixie's spot, one of the emotional home bases of this film, got staged where the Express Bus material lives: up at the overpass off North Pleasant Valley, on the east side. Crew park was the Rosewood Neighborhood Park lot on Rosewood Avenue, and from there everyone walked in, gear and all. There is something honest about a location you cannot drive to. This is a film about a man who crosses Austin on foot, and today the crew got a small taste of the commute.

And there was a lot of work. This was the heaviest page load of the first week on the board, seven and five eighths pages, the kind of day that in prep gets circled in red. Kristen Prince joined us as Trixie, and Mathew Mitchell was back for his second day as Gerald, so the spot had its full population. Dean Stanfield, as ever, was in everything.

On the bus material itself I will keep the details thin. Some of what we shot today sits close to the middle of the movie, and the movie deserves to keep a few of its secrets until you are sitting in a theater with it.

What a walk-in location buys you

Here is a thing nobody tells you about independent film until you are standing inside one: some days there is no basecamp sprawl, no trucks nosed up against the set, just a staging area in a public park and a crew carrying what it needs. It strips a day down to its essentials, and the material up under that overpass wanted exactly that kind of bareness.

I am writing this one a little shorter than usual. It was a long day, the pages were dense, and the honest truth is my own notes from today are thinner than the crew's. The people whose notes actually matter, our script supervisor Melisa and her continuity sheets, were scribbling from call to wrap.

Three days down. Tomorrow we drive out toward the lake, and a real pawn shop is expecting us.