Sunday June 28, 2009. The day off! I slept in, which felt awesome after five exhausting days. Even with all that sleep, though, I was tired all day and knew I wouldn’t really recover until after the shoot was over.

The first thing I did that day was to hammer out a new version of the script, cutting out the street scene and resetting the ending to the bowling alley. It turned out to be surprisingly painless. The biggest change was that I had to add a little scene where Karen pulls up and Owen thanks her for coming to pick him up. I also had to change a few lines of dialogue between the original end of the bowling alley scene and the final scene so it made sense that they were still in the alley.

I read it over, and decided that there were actually some advantages to doing it this way. It made the movie more intimate and focused it more strongly on Owen and Karen’s relationship. And while some of my favorite comedy was in the street scene, it did feel like it came from a much bigger movie. So maybe everything would be all right. I called Nathan, and we agreed that this was the way to go. We’d need to meet with James and Becca to figure out how to proceed.

As I rung off, a wave of relief hit me. Whatever I’d had to sacrifice, the most important thing was that if we got through the next two days of shooting, we’d have a complete movie in the can.

I had a late lunch with Kate, who had to head back to Massachusetts that night. She’d been a huge help on the set, and as a director I was sorry to lose her. On a personal level, it had meant a lot to me to have her there, even though we’d hardly had a chance to talk the entire week. So it was nice to get a chance to just relax for an hour or so.

Then I had to head over to James’ place for a meeting with Nathan, James and Becca. Nathan and I told them that we thought we should cut the two locations and finish the movie on Tuesday. Neither of them was thrilled about it (and, of course, Nathan and I weren’t either), but I think everyone was as relieved as I was that we’d be guaranteed to have a movie at the end of it.

Everyone was exhausted, but before we could adjourn, we had to work out the schedule for the next day. Becca pointed out that with the resetting of the final scene into the bowling alley, we suddenly had to shoot an extra page and a half in that location, without any extra time. To make matters worse, we couldn’t go into overtime if we fell behind because the bowling alley had a party booked at 5:30 p.m. So we had what’s known as a “hard out.” We’d have to be packed up and entirely clear of the bowling alley by 5 p.m.

We went through the shot list setup by setup, and we simplified and cut as much as we could. In the end, we had a shot list that (taking into account loading in, loading out, lunch and breaks) would allow us to make it as long as we could average a little more than a setup an hour. James was confident we could do it, but Becca wasn’t so sure. She didn’t think she had enough people to manage it.

I suggested we call Mike Venezia. He’d been planning to work with us this week anyway, trying to secure the street and hilltop locations. Why not bring him to set to work with Becca? We called him, and he agreed to do it.

I talked with Johnathan on my way home. I’d sent him the revised script, and he had some ideas, which we talked over. We ended up incorporating many of them into the script.

I knew the next day was going to be long and tiring, so once I had the final version of the script sent out to Becca, I went to bed.