Cross-Country Part 2

And now we have part 2 of our adventure. The obsession with Michelob Ultra has to do with a time I was at Wal-Mart with my mom and she bought a six-pack of that crap. My character's lines in that first scene are basically what I said to my mom verbatim when she put it in the cart. The in-car scenes were pretty easy to write and instead of some elaborate camera rig I just put down the seats in the back of my car and had Carter lay in the back and hold onto the tripod to make sure it didn't fall over. It's a primitive setup, but it worked.

The nighttime stuff was tough to shoot because we picked the worst possible time to do it. During the shoot a motorcycle crash happened literally less than a block away. You can actually see during one of my close-ups the lights of a squad car turning on. That was when police first arrived on the scene. Traffic had to be rerouted away from the block and toward the corner where we were shooting, so headlights would show up and mess up the shot approximately every minute.

However, that's pretty minor to what the real problem was: editing this scene was possibly the most unpleasant experience of my life. You see, on the original tape you can clearly hear the motorcycle rev up, then you can hear it crash into a house, and then you can hear the rider screaming in horrible agony and begging his friends to call an ambulance. At the time we were filming I was focused on getting the shot so I didn't even notice any of that, and when I was editing as far as I knew we were the closest people there. The guy eventually died, and as far as I knew he died because I was too focused on my stupid comedy video to pay attention to what was going on around me and call 9-1-1. In my emotional devastation I grabbed a bottle of vodka, got completely hammered, destroyed furniture and sent some extremely mean-spirited text messages (if you're reading this, you know who you are, and I'm very sorry). I later found out that he crashed because he was doing a wheelie to impress his friends, so there was a half-dozen people or so who were closer than I was and immediately called an ambulance, so while I don't feel like I killed the guy, I still feel pretty awful whenever I think about it.

The campfire scene was completely miserable too, but for different reasons. We wanted to build a fire in a hurry, and we didn't have enough sticks and logs and shit to keep it going long enough for filming, so we had the brilliant idea to just fill a gas can and use gas to start the fire and keep it going. It worked at first and we got most of the Crazy Drifter's lines shot, but a mistake in applying gas to the fire resulted in an explosion that turned the entire set into a hazard site. After the gas fire finally burned out, we were out of fire and still had to film two thirds of the scene, so I just pointed a light at myself and Boyer, the other actor, and tinted the scene orange in post so it looks kinda like they're at a campfire. It doesn't look perfect, but I think it was close enough.

In addition, there were also about eight people hanging around and drinking that didn't need to be there who felt the need to talk and crack jokes BETWEEN EVERY FUCKING TAKE. There are dozens of takes of people fucking up takes by talking, dozens more of people fucking up the next take by saying, "you don't have to be mean about it" in response to me telling them to shut the fuck up, more than a few ruined by phones ringing, and about 10 ruined by the sound of one of the guys on set constantly spitting chewing tobacco into a can. For future reference, when I say, "If you don't need to be here, go away," I'm not making a joke. I'm very seriously telling you to fuck off.

Suffice to say, these scenes didn't represent the most fun shoots I've ever had.