PREMIERE!

So we had the premiere on Thursday, April 26th--if you didn't come, what's the matter with you? :)

Other than a small snafu where the theater wanted us to start promptly at 7:15, it went well. The picture looked great, everybody seemed to have a good time, and we had a great turnout. Thanks to everybody who came out, and I only wish I had more time to talk to each and every person...

We got interviewed by Click On This, a local show, and when they put up that footage I'll post the link. Here's some pictures from the premiere!

Tickets. Half sold out.

Just saying. If you were thinking about waiting to buy them the night of the premiere, I wouldn't hold your breath. :)

BUY YOUR TICKET HERE

Das Ist?

Here it is, the trailer for GOH...

Hi Def Version is HERE

Low def streams below. 


Garden of Hedon Trailer

The Actual GOH diary, Day 4

Couple of notes: First, this is not a spoiler, as Lauren's character isn't established before her scene.

Second, this entire part became a deleted scene that you can see online right here. It all takes place before the main events in the movie, so I feel okay putting it up.


Also I apologize but I seem to curse an awful lot in my diary...

Day 4(11/10/2010): Holy Shit, we made a day

First scene where Lauren Lakis gets dragged through a room is like a Jebadiah reunion. Jessy Danner, Danielle, and Lauren. Runs late. It's only five fuckin’ shots.

My wife is in the background cooking lasagna for the cast/crew in the shots. It’s not out of place, so I figured we’d just leave her there like she’s someone at the House.

We move to Lauren Lakis' suicide in the bathtub. Ziegler does the blood. We’ve got like 100 candles, and we have to make sure Lauren doesn’t get near one and, you know, catch on fire.

Looks good, runs long. Fuck. Dinner’s ready while we shoot, so we’re having people eat in shifts. The critical people don’t get a shift until we’re done the scene(me, Zig, Jared and Lauren are the criticals in this case).


This sucks, because I know how good my wife's lasagna is.

We keep falling behind, we push through. Supposed to end at 2am. We actually end at 7am but we DID make it(short of a couple of shots). We would have finished if the Red didn’t keep shutting down. Not sure why. Hopefully won’t be a problem tomorrow.

Even though we were behind, everyone wanted to take a shot at throwing the badge on the floor and having it land perfectly in front of the camera. No one could get it perfect, but we got close.

Lot of innuendo flying around.

Also of note, we had a featured extra role we had not cast. We simply could not find a girl who resembled Danielle(kind of waifish) and who looked younger than she is.

Well, a boyfriend/girlfriend came out tonight to be extras and the girl looked perfect. We pulled her aside--her name's Lauren-- and said, "Hey, you want an upgrade?"

It was a little dicey because the scene we needed her for later involved her wearing a very small bathing suit(we needed her to appear naked without actually BEING naked), and since we'd just met her we didn't want to come off like we wanted her to star in a porn.

She was all for it though. We took a pic of her for a prop we needed(the pic below), and made sure she could show up for the other scene where she's featured.

Then we still used her as a regular extra by having her kiss her boyfriend in the background so you couldn't see her face. A stroke of luck that night.

Lauren Russell plays Owen's daughter

The actual GOH diary, Day 3

Day 3 (11/9/2010): Will this Agony never end?

These are frame captures from the wide shots of night 3

Featuring  Leanna Chamish, Kimberly Kerr, Rodger Schultz, Robert Haag, Mitch Klein and Richard Cutting.  

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Okay, how do I say this? We fell behind again.


I’m not sure how it fuckin’ gets out of hand. Really, I don’t. We were set to shoot 4 scenes in the foyer. Sure, there’s a little complicated stuff but it’s less than three fuckin’ pages. Somehow it takes us like six hours to do that...


One hot, big busted extra showed up and lightened the spirits momentarily.


The fuckin’ Red doesn’t help. It keeps resetting itself. It’s bulky and heavy.


We move up to shoot the wine room and we’re already way behind. Fall more behind. I try to streamline, but it’s ugly and I’m guessing on shots(revising the shooting script while people are asking me questions, telling me how much time we have—this is not fun filmmaking), so I bet I missed some. I gotta hope I can digitally push in on some shots(I’ve been told you can do it on the Red quite easily, but we’ll see).


We got one shot I liked. Rest is pretty much dogshit, but we had some really nice looking extras/cast tonight. No nudity yet though.


To top it off we got out a little late, and the Cloisters staffers are starting to get annoyed(rightfully so)—and then I get out and one of the extras, a college buddy of mine, has a dead truck. We spend a half hour(at 6am) trying to make it go. No dice.


It almost comes to me driving them the 45 minutes home—luckily we get Noah to do it. I tell him to come in late the next day so he can get some sleep.


I got enough shit to do. I have to stop this derailing train, and fast...I think we’ve got 6 pickup scenes now in 3 days...

The actual GOH diary, Day 2

Hey, if you like reading raw, brutally-honest diaries then you might like the new "Bounty" blog I've begun recently! Check it out if you like reading about misery in filmmaking!

Day 2(11/8/10): If you thought Day One was bad...

At the Cloister’s Castle.


Knew it was gonna be a bad day when I couldn’t remember Jared(the D.P.’s) name when I opened my phone to call him. I mean, I’ve only worked with him on two films...but my brain ain’t firing.


Should have been pretty easy. Showed up early. There’s an extra there already who got called too early. Also a guy named Habib who’s coming out to help a couple of nights.


We set up—the rooms we were shooting in were right next to each other, so it should have been easy.


But we fell behind. Not massively, but by about an hour.


An internet bud and horror host Rob Dimension drives all the way up from New Jersey to be a featured extra, and brings a friend, which is cool. Getting extras can be a problem(and HAS in the past for me)...


Wrangling them is okay, but a couple of them leave after like two hours. So we don’t have many to choose from. Then we get a call mid-shoot that Lauren Lakis, the actress playing one of the roles in the next scenes, was in a car accident. Car totalled.


They say she’s fine and is willing to come out. Not sure whether that will be okay, but it works out. We shoot the stair sequence and then another sequence with her character and she's great.


We’re like 3 hours behind now though.


Quick break and we move to setup outside and everything goes BAD. The Red camera stops connecting to the hard drive. Jared can’t make it work. Calls the guy who owns it—he didn’t include the firmware update. We try to download it—we get it after like an hour, because they only have dial-up internet at the Castle.


We install it but it’s a different build than we already recorded, so we can’t record to that hard drive unless we erase what we shot. So we can only shoot on CF cards, of which we have 2 four gig cards—8 total minutes of film.


By this time it’s like 3:30am—we need to be out of there at 5am(per the Castle's rules). Luckily we can leave shit there. We try to shoot some outside stuff but we can’t tell focus that well and the Red keeps shutting off—it’s a disaster. We finally just call it at 4:45am after getting some dogshit.


Jared freaks. He’s yelling. Calls the douche who owns it and tries to find another Red.


I’m beat. Demoralized. Get home, back up some stills, back in bed by 7am.

The actual GOH diary, Day 1

 Some of the extras, which in this case is 1 extra, the writer/producer(Luke), 

half of the FX team(Kaleigh, the prettier half), and a grip. (Habib!)

So I don't normally do this. I wait until WAY after a movie is past to begin posting diary entries. Hell, the Bounty diary still hasn't seen the light of day...

That's for various reasons. From simply not wanting to revisit the misery so soon to not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings.

But what you have to understand is that these are simply my thoughts in the heat of the moment. I don't dislike anybody in the cast/crew except that one person and they know who they are...(that's a joke, I don't dislike any of them, really!)

With that said, here is the agony of Day 1...

You do NOT want to know what Sharif was doing here...

Day 1 GOH 11-7-10

Started on time. Somehow fell behind—setting up the crane and getting people organized went bad. Literally didn’t shoot our first shot until an hour and a half after we were supposed to start shooting THE SCENE.

The crane does not go out as far as I had envisioned it, which kind of makes one of my cools shots not as cool. We move to the next crane shots.

Not a big fan of the shots. Seemed very low budget. Not a lot of extras, and some of them were told they were only going to be needed for an hour(?).

Andrew, The Servant, was technically supposed to be wrapped pretty early, but we ran late and I figured it was no big deal since he was crashing at Luke’s house. Turns out, he works the next day in Philly, so nope. We still had him until about 2am, so we had to go downstairs, shoot him out there, and then go BACK on the deck to finish the original shots.

Freezing cold outside. No actual craft service set up. I didn’t get any dinner. No time. Not much to drink.

Continued to fall behind. Everything is taking a while and focus is tough on a Red. The lenses we're using give some great shots by the depth of field is like from the front of her nose to your ear...

Some of the shots after the 1st start looking good.

The batteries aren’t recharging, so we’re having to run power to the Red for every shot. Not fun.

At the end it gets too late—we miss much of one scene. A pickup on the first day, a VERY easy scheduled day. I don’t know why first days have to suck SO MUCH but they do.

We wrapped, and by the time we cleaned up and packed up, it was 7am. Worked from 3pm-7am. Congrats on your 14 hour day.

Luke is insanely worried about his mom and how she’s going to react to the fact that people are in her house(and it looks that way). I mean, not much we can do. Hopefully she doesn’t ban us from coming back.

At this point she just needs to suck it up and figure after it’s over she can fix whatever got broke or dirty.