Alright, last night was a weird, weird perverted Hollywood-esque experience.
It's a long, juicy read, but I need to get this off my chest. This is probably the first real tl;dr post I've ever done, but holy ****. Again, this is a long read.
I've never carried a weapon on my person before, I'm 6'5 and 250 and no one ever really picks a fight with me - which is fine because I don't go out looking for fights - but last night has changed my mind completely on the subject. I know how to defend myself, but last night I accompanied my girlfriend to shooting an independent film (she's an actress). I knew a little about the film, she was the main character - and she gets beaten up by her ex in a flashback and eventually she gets stabbed to death in the shower. Whatever, I didn't care much at the time.
I showed up and hung out for a bit and mingled with the cast. I didn't know half of these guys and neither did she (which was stupid on her part, I only showed up because they needed extras and I was bored Saturday night, I don't want to think what would've happened if I hadn't) and while all the actors were good guys (they didn't know anyone either) there were some telltale signs that the director was a little odd and so was the crew he brought with him. They were really wirey looking antisocial kids and the director himself was about 5'10 and looked like he could be on To Catch a Predator. He seemed really socially awkward and was the worst director I've ever seen. We were supposed to wrap up at 1am, and we didn't end until 8am.
The actors on the other hand were all good people. We rented out a building on a college campus for the night and were up until 7am shooting. Things started to get weird when there were scenes (that I knew about in advance) where my girlfriend's character gets abused and punched by her ex-boyfriend. Typical dramatic "muh emoshions" trite, so whatever. But as the night went on and the scene got closer, I started to get a really weird feeling about the crew. Something was just off. Of course the story was pretty cut and dry and normal, but they started putting weird emphasis on certain things that didn't need to be there.
I had a feeling things might escalate so throughout the morning hours before the scene I carefully pulled the actors aside one at a time and vocalized my thoughts on the scene and if it was a little weird and if they noticed anything seemed a little weird about the whole thing. They all agreed with me, but said that he was the director and they didn't know what to do (young actors are easily manipulated and conditioned to just follow the director). Multiple times where the director himself came up to me in a friendly way and said "Hey man, we're all finished up here and its getting late, you can go home if you want" to which I told him politely that I didn't mind staying.
So we get to this scene, and the ex-boyfriend of hers in the movie is supposed to hit her (but its shown through a shadow silhouette) and the director told him to just try and connect lightly with the tips of your fingers to make it look real. Warning flags started going off, but I still didn't want to cause a scene and turn everything dramatic, so I stepped in and jokingly said that wouldn't work and that this dude isn't slapping my girlfriend and came up with the idea of having her position her hand in front of her face in the silhouette so he can slap that instead. After like 5 takes of this - which was painful for me to watch, even if I knew she wasn't actually getting hurt - now apparently there's a scene where the ex-boyfriend starts kicking her on the ground, and this is where things get really weird because it goes against the rest of his character (he shows up to try and save her later and was regretful that he snapped and slapped her). We spent a ****ing LONG time on this scene, trying to get it "just right". Like I said earlier, the film itself didn't ever seem anything like this if you read it over - it just seems like a generic lovestory tragedy bull**** film - but when we were shooting it the emphasis was clearly on these more violent and parts that made the women in it very vulnerable and helpless.
I stood up again (and once again, I was the only one because amateur actors are usually not confident enough to go against the director, etc, etc.) and looked to my girlfriend and the ex-boyfriend actor. Neither of them said anything, which I knew the guy probably wouldn't anyway. But my girlfriend is a really strong willed girl that had no problem telling the director earlier that night that she wasn't going to read the lines he wrote (something about calling her ex-boyfriend's unborn fetus a C**t-Dumpling. I'm serious.) and although he argued she put her foot down and he changed it. Going on that logic I assumed that she must be okay with this and thinks it benefits the "integrity" of the scene, and I decided to defer to her on this because its her project and I'm just observing.
I got up begrudgingly and said that the only way we're doing this is if we would need something for him to kick in front of her to absorb the impact, the director wanted the guy actor to just pretend kick her - which I knew would never look convincing and ran the risk of actually kicking her. I found sandbags to use and sat down again to observe the scene.
Then my worst suspicions started coming true. It was extremely.. for lack of a better word.. glorified in a really weird way. Like you know how Quentin Tarintino has a thing for women's feet? It was like that, but much worse. He wanted to get more shots of her lying on the ground looking up at the camera as she was getting abused, and then another shot from behind her looking up at him getting kicked. It was humiliating to see her like that, on the ground in a despondent position while a bunch of weird dudes filming as another actor pretends to kick her repeatedly.
This would go on for about an hour, but about twenty minutes in I stood up and told the guy actor to come talk with me outside. A huge hush fell over the room, and the crew thought I was about to beat the **** out of him. We walked out and I talked with him and asked him if I was just sleep deprieved (my grandmother died earlier this week and I had been traveling across the country on 12 hours of sleep over the past four days) and being overprotective or did this seem off to him. He agreed with me and said it didn't make sense for the character and felt uncomfortable.
We came back in and did two more takes of the scene, with one of them accidentally stepping on her knee (not badly, he just stumbled trying to fake the kick). It was around 6am at this point. The director says that we're finally done shooting and the last thing we need to do is to have my girlfriend do some screams (allegedly for when she gets killed later in the movie) for the sound guy. He said he needed everyone out of the room for the silence and jokingly said that this was the only place we could do it (instead of the other shooting location later this month) where we wouldn't be "arrested". The other actors and I walk out of the room and by this point I had rallied the troops and we were all posted right outside the door and they knew what was up. We could hear her scream a few times normally, and suddenly the screams started to sound less like stabbing screams and had more weird sexual undertones to them. Not like overt sex screams or anything, but like I dunno how to describe it. I would later find out talking to her that after the first two screams she did, he started to "direct" her on how he wanted her to scream. As we all heard this outside the other actors turned to me and I could practically feel my face turning red and my pupils dialating. I'm a nice guy and I rarely get mad, but this was the breaking point. I moved in and burst open the door, telling her that we're wrapping (i.e. leaving).
She looks at me confused, and she can be pretty innocent sometimes and has a tendency to get focused in her work and immerse herself in acting that she really drowns everything else out and didn't really fully realize what the underlying implications of what was going on here. The director tells me we aren't done yet and I reply that we were supposed to wrap up 7 hours ago, that it's 8am, you've exhausted your actors and you're not paying them by the hour, and I'm not a dumbass of what's going on here.
He demands that I get the **** off his set and that I can see my girlfriend after, and I told him I'm taking her and leaving. Two of these lanky crew members (the boom guy and cameraman) come up to me and tell me all macho-like that I need to leave. I told them if either of them laid a finger on me that they'd be ****ing gone and they hesitated. The other two crew members started moving towards me and I knew that if it came to a fight, I could probably take two of these guys (they all weighed like 150, tops), and that I would just have to count on adrenaline to somehow pull this off - and believe me, I had enough of it at that point coursing through my veins. Then I saw one of the guys approaching had a knife in his front pocket, I dunno if he was planning on using it.
It's a long, juicy read, but I need to get this off my chest. This is probably the first real tl;dr post I've ever done, but holy ****. Again, this is a long read.
I've never carried a weapon on my person before, I'm 6'5 and 250 and no one ever really picks a fight with me - which is fine because I don't go out looking for fights - but last night has changed my mind completely on the subject. I know how to defend myself, but last night I accompanied my girlfriend to shooting an independent film (she's an actress). I knew a little about the film, she was the main character - and she gets beaten up by her ex in a flashback and eventually she gets stabbed to death in the shower. Whatever, I didn't care much at the time.
I showed up and hung out for a bit and mingled with the cast. I didn't know half of these guys and neither did she (which was stupid on her part, I only showed up because they needed extras and I was bored Saturday night, I don't want to think what would've happened if I hadn't) and while all the actors were good guys (they didn't know anyone either) there were some telltale signs that the director was a little odd and so was the crew he brought with him. They were really wirey looking antisocial kids and the director himself was about 5'10 and looked like he could be on To Catch a Predator. He seemed really socially awkward and was the worst director I've ever seen. We were supposed to wrap up at 1am, and we didn't end until 8am.
The actors on the other hand were all good people. We rented out a building on a college campus for the night and were up until 7am shooting. Things started to get weird when there were scenes (that I knew about in advance) where my girlfriend's character gets abused and punched by her ex-boyfriend. Typical dramatic "muh emoshions" trite, so whatever. But as the night went on and the scene got closer, I started to get a really weird feeling about the crew. Something was just off. Of course the story was pretty cut and dry and normal, but they started putting weird emphasis on certain things that didn't need to be there.
I had a feeling things might escalate so throughout the morning hours before the scene I carefully pulled the actors aside one at a time and vocalized my thoughts on the scene and if it was a little weird and if they noticed anything seemed a little weird about the whole thing. They all agreed with me, but said that he was the director and they didn't know what to do (young actors are easily manipulated and conditioned to just follow the director). Multiple times where the director himself came up to me in a friendly way and said "Hey man, we're all finished up here and its getting late, you can go home if you want" to which I told him politely that I didn't mind staying.
So we get to this scene, and the ex-boyfriend of hers in the movie is supposed to hit her (but its shown through a shadow silhouette) and the director told him to just try and connect lightly with the tips of your fingers to make it look real. Warning flags started going off, but I still didn't want to cause a scene and turn everything dramatic, so I stepped in and jokingly said that wouldn't work and that this dude isn't slapping my girlfriend and came up with the idea of having her position her hand in front of her face in the silhouette so he can slap that instead. After like 5 takes of this - which was painful for me to watch, even if I knew she wasn't actually getting hurt - now apparently there's a scene where the ex-boyfriend starts kicking her on the ground, and this is where things get really weird because it goes against the rest of his character (he shows up to try and save her later and was regretful that he snapped and slapped her). We spent a ****ing LONG time on this scene, trying to get it "just right". Like I said earlier, the film itself didn't ever seem anything like this if you read it over - it just seems like a generic lovestory tragedy bull**** film - but when we were shooting it the emphasis was clearly on these more violent and parts that made the women in it very vulnerable and helpless.
I stood up again (and once again, I was the only one because amateur actors are usually not confident enough to go against the director, etc, etc.) and looked to my girlfriend and the ex-boyfriend actor. Neither of them said anything, which I knew the guy probably wouldn't anyway. But my girlfriend is a really strong willed girl that had no problem telling the director earlier that night that she wasn't going to read the lines he wrote (something about calling her ex-boyfriend's unborn fetus a C**t-Dumpling. I'm serious.) and although he argued she put her foot down and he changed it. Going on that logic I assumed that she must be okay with this and thinks it benefits the "integrity" of the scene, and I decided to defer to her on this because its her project and I'm just observing.
I got up begrudgingly and said that the only way we're doing this is if we would need something for him to kick in front of her to absorb the impact, the director wanted the guy actor to just pretend kick her - which I knew would never look convincing and ran the risk of actually kicking her. I found sandbags to use and sat down again to observe the scene.
Then my worst suspicions started coming true. It was extremely.. for lack of a better word.. glorified in a really weird way. Like you know how Quentin Tarintino has a thing for women's feet? It was like that, but much worse. He wanted to get more shots of her lying on the ground looking up at the camera as she was getting abused, and then another shot from behind her looking up at him getting kicked. It was humiliating to see her like that, on the ground in a despondent position while a bunch of weird dudes filming as another actor pretends to kick her repeatedly.
This would go on for about an hour, but about twenty minutes in I stood up and told the guy actor to come talk with me outside. A huge hush fell over the room, and the crew thought I was about to beat the **** out of him. We walked out and I talked with him and asked him if I was just sleep deprieved (my grandmother died earlier this week and I had been traveling across the country on 12 hours of sleep over the past four days) and being overprotective or did this seem off to him. He agreed with me and said it didn't make sense for the character and felt uncomfortable.
We came back in and did two more takes of the scene, with one of them accidentally stepping on her knee (not badly, he just stumbled trying to fake the kick). It was around 6am at this point. The director says that we're finally done shooting and the last thing we need to do is to have my girlfriend do some screams (allegedly for when she gets killed later in the movie) for the sound guy. He said he needed everyone out of the room for the silence and jokingly said that this was the only place we could do it (instead of the other shooting location later this month) where we wouldn't be "arrested". The other actors and I walk out of the room and by this point I had rallied the troops and we were all posted right outside the door and they knew what was up. We could hear her scream a few times normally, and suddenly the screams started to sound less like stabbing screams and had more weird sexual undertones to them. Not like overt sex screams or anything, but like I dunno how to describe it. I would later find out talking to her that after the first two screams she did, he started to "direct" her on how he wanted her to scream. As we all heard this outside the other actors turned to me and I could practically feel my face turning red and my pupils dialating. I'm a nice guy and I rarely get mad, but this was the breaking point. I moved in and burst open the door, telling her that we're wrapping (i.e. leaving).
She looks at me confused, and she can be pretty innocent sometimes and has a tendency to get focused in her work and immerse herself in acting that she really drowns everything else out and didn't really fully realize what the underlying implications of what was going on here. The director tells me we aren't done yet and I reply that we were supposed to wrap up 7 hours ago, that it's 8am, you've exhausted your actors and you're not paying them by the hour, and I'm not a dumbass of what's going on here.
He demands that I get the **** off his set and that I can see my girlfriend after, and I told him I'm taking her and leaving. Two of these lanky crew members (the boom guy and cameraman) come up to me and tell me all macho-like that I need to leave. I told them if either of them laid a finger on me that they'd be ****ing gone and they hesitated. The other two crew members started moving towards me and I knew that if it came to a fight, I could probably take two of these guys (they all weighed like 150, tops), and that I would just have to count on adrenaline to somehow pull this off - and believe me, I had enough of it at that point coursing through my veins. Then I saw one of the guys approaching had a knife in his front pocket, I dunno if he was planning on using it.
