I had this weird dream the other night:

I was at Troublemaker Studios in Austin, which is owned and operated by director Robert Rodriguez. He and Quentin Taratino are good friends. In the dream, they had asked me to direct a film for them. I think they were going to produce it, so I was the one holding the reins. This is a massive-budget movie. I mean there’re grips, PAs, DPs, actors… the whole sha-bang. Millions of dollars on the line.

So, I’m sitting there directing the scenes, and all I can hear is Robert yelling “keep the shots real!” from about thirty feet behind me. I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about – maybe it’s that he doesn’t want anything to seem contrived, but I’m not sure. Of course, there’s this little voice in the back of my head that’s like “man, just go with it and hope you’re doing what he wants.” I’m trying to both concentrate on the shots and make sure we have the appropriate coverage, and I’m thinking about what the fuck Robert is talking about, repeating that phrase every three or four minutes.

I’m nervous that I’ll mess it up and they’ll never want to work with me again and I’ll be a laughing-stock in the industry. But, I trudge on. Then Quentin starts in. He’s this hyper guy who, as Fiona Apple once said, is like a six-year-old in that he speaks his mind and doesn’t care what other people think, he just blurts it out. That’s not to say what he says isn’t intelligent, but, because of his excited nature, he pushes out sentences and will sometimes stumble and use one dollar words just to get the point across.

He also is profane and talks about some sick shit. Just like me.

So, Quentin’s back there next to Robert and he’s doing his nervous/excited thing and he blurts out, after I cut a scene, “I can’t wait for the fucking cum-shot!”.

Now, to clarify things, I was not shooting a prono. This phrase Quentin uses frequently in real–life and he is simply stating that he can’t wait for the “pay off” or the “really cool scene”. The climax of the shooting, if you will. So, he says that and then he just stands there with his arms outstretched to his sides like he wants to hug someone, but he doesn’t, and he speaks no more.

So now I’m doubly nervous that HE won’t like what I’m doing either. At one point, while I’m sweating and thinking and directing, I hear my PA say that there’s a naked man at the gate of the studio out front and he wants to talk to me, and says he’s the “marble from the bag” which I take to mean he’s the actor we’ve been waiting on, who’s now like an hour late.

I get up and hand the camera man, who looks a lot like Elvis Costello, this book I’ve been holding that has all the storyboards in it. Evidently, the passing of the book to the camera man is equal in power to Captain Kirk telling Spock “you have conn”. I leave my ship and head to front gates, leaving Elvis to continue to shoot my scenes.

As I’m trying to get to the gate, I have to pass through a building that houses the mixing and sound stages. I get lost in it and end up in a room full of Ethernet cables. The room is about 10 feet by ten feet and there’s nothing in the room except Ethernet cables connecting jacks in the north wall to the jacks in the south wall. There’s thousands of cables. I get really mad because I realize this is a “pass-through room” and that the idiot who engineered it decided to A.) randomly connect the north wall’s jack to the south wall’s jack instead of connecting the north wall’s jack “A” to the south wall’s jack “A”, and B.) he didn’t use all the same colored cables.

Finally, I push my way through/under the cables and make it to the door on the opposite wall from me. I open it and I’m in the break room and Robert, Quentin, and the naked guy are all sitting at this crappy round table like you’d fine in an office’s break room, and they’re eating lunch. Elvis walks up to me and hands the book back to me and then joins them. I can tell they’re all upset at me for not “doing my job”. Robert stands up with a mouthful of tuna-salad sandwich and tells me that I have another chance to make it up to him, and that it hurt that I took advantage of such an amazing opportunity that he’d presented to me.

— End fucked-up, stressful dream. —

In the real world, I’ve been working on getting my third render finished. As always, I’m being totally anal about it and it’s taking longer than I hoped. I’m happy to say that I’m actually doing the final render. 216 frames, 2m1s to render one frame. After it’s all rendered out, then it’s time to composite and then edit.

Devin and I talked about hot dogs today. We bantered back and forth about how the chili-cheese dogs from 7-11 are awesome. I told him that the RaceTrac that just opened up near my office had dogs that were on par. We then discussed how it’s a shame that you NEED a bun for the chili-cheese dogs, since all that did was take up space in your belly that should be used for chili/cheese/weenies. He then said that it would be awesome if they had little bowls that you could dump pre-cut-up hot dogs into (ala the weenies in Spaghetti-Os) and then you could just walk to the cheese and chili dispenser and top the meat. Brilliant fucking idea. He then told me that he looked inside the dispenser once and saw how the big sack of chili has this tube hanging from the bottom with a nipple on it and how the machine milked the nipple/shaft to get the chili out.

There’s nothing else you need to know.

Goodbye.

Sick Thought of the Day: Paper bag on the chicken-wing that hangs between your legs.