Writing, watching and making movies

Friday at First Line we spent all day reading, critiquing and fixing 'Belle'- going word by word thru the script. After a couple hours of reading it silently to ourselves and taking notes Chelsea, a new girl, and I read the first 50-odd pages outloud, made notes and debated how to fix things that popped up along the way.

I was at the office till about 7pm before dashing over to Film Forum to catch 'Food Inc.' on its opening night. It was an ok documentary, not groundbreaking and nothing that I haven't heard already; but it was good to see over a hundred people waiting on a line out the door for a documentary like this. After the movie the least significant other and I wandered around the village aimlessly for a while till we found a decent restaurant in Little Italy where we ate the most unimpressive Italian food I've ever had. I would think you could at least get good pasta in Little Italy, but I 'spose I was wrong.

Saturday was a lazy day that involved nothing more than sleeping till noon then a bit of work on a couple short stories I've been writing, but mostly it was a cold, dark, rainy, lazy day used to recharge the batteries a bit before they (and I) died.

Sunday I spent in Brooklyn again filming, eating pizza and talking with Christina. She's really interesting and fun to talk to. I can't wait till the two of us are able to work on a project worthy of our capacities, rather than something with Ken which may not be as good as we can do with some more talented help.

We were filming a fight scene on the streets of Brooklyn in an empty, industrial area, yet that didn't stop everybody who drove by from watching us and trying to stick their nose into things. The cops showed, thanks to some nosey women who, they thought, were just trying to help a poor boy that was getting the snot kicked out of him. Little did they know (or care) that there was a camera and boom mic across the street filming Ken being beaten up by Tim. The most obnoxious of the two women was complaining that we had 'traumatized' her 'baby' daughter, who it turned out was TEN YEARS OLD! If your daughter is ten years old and not capable of telling the difference between real and make believe, then maybe that's your bad parenting and your fault, not our problem. Why do we and the cops have to be dragged into this?

Anyway, the cop was a pretty decent type and after getting this hysterical lady to calm down and hearing our side of the story he let us get on with our day. When we really stopped to think about it and got over the initial shock of being annoyed, bothered and kept from working it really was quite a comical situation. And it was encouraging that our fight scene looked real enough to passersby that they felt it necessary to scream at Tim all kinds of horrible names and offer to take Ken to the hospital. All in all, it was at least a slightly productive day of filming and I got to spend some time with the warm sun on my face and talking to a really cool girl.