Monday, June 29, 2009. I was up at 4 a.m. and drove down to Montrose Party Bowl, am amazing retro-looking bowling alley on a really cool stretch of Honolulu Avenue in Glendale. By the time I arrived at 4:30, a few people were already there.

We started loading equipment onto the sidewalk and wondered if Bob, our contact from the bowling alley, would actually show up at 5 a.m. A few minutes before 5, he did and let us in.

The first thing I did was to walk through and try to find a room we could use as a dressing room for the actors. There weren’t any suitable spaces in the place, so Becca started making arrangements, and within a couple of hours we had an RV parked out front, courtesy of the amazing Zander Villayne and his company, Z-Ville Productions.

By this time, David Douglas, who would be playing the bowling alley attendant, had arrived, too. We chose a costume for him, and I showed him to where he’d be doing his scenes. As Johnathan, Amy and David were getting into costume and makeup, we started scouting the lanes to find the best spot to set the crucial scene where Owen tries to collapse the black hole with a bowling ball. Meanwhile, James’ crew was setting up lights for the entrance scene where Owen and Karen rush in and are stopped by the attendant.

Eventually our seven extras showed up, and we got them into position so the alley wouldn’t look abandoned. I had to bite my tongue several times to avoid giving them direction. Apparently the rules of the Screen Actors Guild state that once an extra is given direction by the director, that extra becomes an actor, which means we have to pay them more and put them in the cast list. So all direction for the extras had to go through Becca.

I had time to scarf down a little breakfast as we got ready for the first shot, and then it was time to roll. Everyone knew we were on a very tight deadline today, and we were also now a pretty-well-oiled machine. The result was that this was probably our fastest turnaround from arrival to rolling cameras. We knocked out the entrance scene in one setup and a couple of takes.

Then it was time to move on to the big central scene—shrinking the black hole. James got us set up for our first shot in record time, and we started on a wide shot. Everyone had our hard out in mind, and with Becca and Mike Venezia keeping us clipping along, we got the shots off pretty crisply.

As we were shooting the section of the scene where Owen reaches into the black hole, Johnathan and I had our biggest conflict of the entire shoot. I wasn’t seeing what I wanted in his performance, but I couldn’t come up with the right way to express what I was looking for. All I could think to tell him were emotional states (e.g., “more urgent,” “more serious”), which are often very difficult for an actor to play honestly. Johnathan called me on it, and admitted that he didn’t know why Owen would be saying what he was saying at that point. We argued over it while the crew waited for us. Finally, without resolving anything, I told him we just had to try it again. Sometimes just the act of arguing over it can change the next take.

In this case, it didn’t work. He still wasn’t connecting with it, and I couldn’t figure out how to communicate with him. Then I suddenly realized what was wrong, and it had to do with the fact that he wasn’t connecting. I asked him to describe exactly what he was feeling physically as he put his arm into the black hole. He shrugged. He didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like. So we talked it through, and I told him what I thought it would feel like: how much heat, how much pressure, how uncomfortable it would be.

We went again, and it was infinitely better. We rolled on, and by lunchtime we were actually running a little bit ahead of schedule.

Jim Breeden, our set photographer (and my uncle), was snapping pictures as he had been throughout the shoot when we realized that we needed the picture car again and there was nobody available to go pick it up. He volunteered, and drove off to the North Hollywood rental lot. When he returned, he looked a bit pale. He told us the car really wasn’t street-worthy. He’d barely been able to get it to 40 miles per hour, which made for a harrowing drive on the freeway. On top of that, the turn signal stalk had broken off and was hanging from a wire. It would have been funny if we weren’t all going to have to drive the car around with camera attached to it the next day . . .

After lunch, things went a little slower. That was when we had to shoot some of the big shots with lots of extras running around. Those proved to be a bit tricky. Trying to get the extras to react properly to the black hole wasn’t easy, nor was choreographing them so that it didn’t look like a big herd of people running in unison. And it was all made more complicated by the fact that all my direction had to go through an intermediary.

We got through it without too much trouble, but as the afternoon wore on, we found ourselves once again racing the clock as we got ready to film the crucial final scene of the movie. This scene was now even more important than ever. It was no longer set against a big outdoor backdrop, so the relationship and performances would really have to carry it.

We got a couple of takes of it from wider angles and then moved in for closer coverage. The scene gets very emotionally intense, so the actors and I agreed that we would limit the number of takes. Becca and James communicated this to their people, and we made sure that we were all doing everything we could to get it right within the first tries.

It was going great until we got to one of the last angles. In the middle of the take, just as it reaches its most intense point, a crew member coughed. There was a pause, and then the actors were about to press ahead when there was another cough. And then another. This poor crew member was having a serious coughing fit. We cut and the crew member went outside, still coughing uncontrollably. I shrugged. It was kind of funny, actually, though I think the crew member felt really bad about it.

We took a short break so the cast could get their concentration back, and then we did it again. It went perfectly, and the scene was in the can.

Now all we had left were inserts of the bucket, which would later have the black hole digitally added into them. We were really running out of time, so most of the crew started wrapping us out of the bowling alley as we set up and shot the inserts. By the time we got them done, we were in danger of not getting all our equipment out of the alley before 5 p.m.

We wrapped out as quickly as possible, every single person grabbing whatever they could and getting it out onto the sidewalk. We missed the deadline by about 10 minutes. As Bob swept up for the party he had coming in next, I apologized for being late. He said we’d call it square if we emptied the trash cans, which were overflowing with our garbage. I grabbed both liners and hefted them out to the dumpster in the back.

And then we were clear of the bowling alley. The remaining crew hung out on the sidewalk in front as we got stuff cleaned up and loaded onto the trucks. I suddenly realized that we’d made our day, and that the most important scenes in the movie were now in the can. It was a huge relief. All we had the next day was the scene at the park, the very brief new scene I’d written on Sunday, and the remaining angles of the driving scene.

Eventually everything was loaded out and the last few of us packed up and headed home. For the first time since we started shooting, I felt like we had a movie.

pictures from day 7 »