Rooftop Drinking

Thursday night Erin (my new best friend) and I were knocking back some Guinnesses and white Russians in a little place on 27th called Jake's. We made a new friend when the guy on the stool next to Erin started talking to us. His name is Fred and he's from France and very nice. Erin's boyfriend joined us a few drinks into the night and Fred invited the three of us to his place to continue drinking. We sat on his balcony and kept drinking till Freddy had to call it a night. Erin, her boyfriend (Keith) and I rambled to a rooftop bar on Fifth Ave where I broke out one of my Cuban cigars and we sipped down wayyyy overpriced martinis. Keith's a decent guy and the three of us had a fun time. Who knew actors could be fun to hang out with?

Laboring for Film

Labor day is usually a day off for people who work hard for a living. But not us filmmakers. Our only holiday is the day we wrap our projects. I arrived at Hunter College around 10am and met up with my cast and crew (Justin Bennett, Christina Raia, Andrew Bradley and Betty Kaplan) to start filming the most important scene of our movie. Then we found out that the doors of the school were all locked. Fu*k! We had started filming in a wonderful location we accidentally stumbled on inside of the school the day before, only to run out of battery power and realize that I had forgotten the back-up battery at home. Not good. But luckily everybody had off from work today and we could meet up again. Great luck, so we thought. Instead we rented a studio for three hours and picked back up where we had left off। The footage we got was amazing. Betty and Justin were fantastic. The scene revolved around Betty's character (Carrie) first arriving at Justin's safehouse/hideout and the two of them getting to know each other. We spent a couple hours running through the scripted material, then I told them to improv and just got out of the way. Like I said, the end result looked fantastic. We finished around 2 and split up, planning to reconvene in Long Island around 6 to put the finishing touches on Christina's short that night.
Arms loaded with gear, it took me a lot longer than necessary to make the 7 block walk to Penn Station, but finally I made it. I took a nap on a park bench on Long Island while waiting to work on "Do Over" again. We reshot a couple scenes that didn't turn out exactly how we would have liked, some in the office building Christina got for us and some in a house belonging to one of her relatives. Aizzah (our star) was running late and after much standing around and waiting we got much better footage the second time around.