I had this weird dream the other night:<\/p>\n
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\u2019re grips, PAs, DPs, actors\u2026 the whole sha-bang. Millions of dollars on the line.<\/p>\n
So, I\u2019m sitting there directing the scenes, and all I can hear is Robert yelling \u201ckeep the shots real!\u201d from about thirty feet behind me. I have no fucking idea what he\u2019s talking about \u2013 maybe it\u2019s that he doesn\u2019t want anything to seem contrived, but I\u2019m not sure. Of course, there\u2019s this little voice in the back of my head that\u2019s like \u201cman, just go with it and hope you\u2019re doing what he wants.\u201d I\u2019m trying to both concentrate on the shots and make sure we have the appropriate coverage, and I\u2019m thinking about what the fuck Robert is talking about, repeating that phrase every three or four minutes.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m nervous that I\u2019ll mess it up and they\u2019ll never want to work with me again and I\u2019ll be a laughing-stock in the industry. But, I trudge on. Then Quentin starts in. He\u2019s this hyper guy who, as Fiona Apple once said, is like a six-year-old in that he speaks his mind and doesn\u2019t care what other people think, he just blurts it out. That\u2019s not to say what he says isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
He also is profane and talks about some sick shit. Just like me.<\/p>\n
So, Quentin\u2019s back there next to Robert and he\u2019s doing his nervous\/excited thing and he blurts out, after I cut a scene, \u201cI can\u2019t wait for the fucking cum-shot!\u201d.<\/p>\n
Now, to clarify things, I was not shooting a prono. This phrase Quentin uses frequently in real\u2013life and he is simply stating that he can\u2019t wait for the \u201cpay off\u201d or the \u201creally cool scene\u201d. 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\u2019t, and he speaks no more.<\/p>\n
So now I\u2019m doubly nervous that HE won\u2019t like what I\u2019m doing either. At one point, while I\u2019m sweating and thinking and directing, I hear my PA say that there\u2019s a naked man at the gate of the studio out front and he wants to talk to me, and says he\u2019s the \u201cmarble from the bag\u201d which I take to mean he\u2019s the actor we\u2019ve been waiting on, who\u2019s now like an hour late.<\/p>\n
I get up and hand the camera man, who looks a lot like Elvis Costello, this book I\u2019ve 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 \u201cyou have conn\u201d. I leave my ship and head to front gates, leaving Elvis to continue to shoot my scenes.<\/p>\n
As I\u2019m 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\u2019s nothing in the room except Ethernet cables connecting jacks in the north wall to the jacks in the south wall. There\u2019s thousands of cables. I get really mad because I realize this is a \u201cpass-through room\u201d and that the idiot who engineered it decided to A.) randomly connect the north wall\u2019s jack to the south wall\u2019s jack instead of connecting the north wall\u2019s jack \u201cA\u201d to the south wall\u2019s jack \u201cA\u201d, and B.) he didn\u2019t use all the same colored cables.<\/p>\n
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\u2019m in the break room and Robert, Quentin, and the naked guy are all sitting at this crappy round table like you\u2019d fine in an office\u2019s break room, and they\u2019re eating lunch. Elvis walks up to me and hands the book back to me and then joins them. I can tell they\u2019re all upset at me for not \u201cdoing my job\u201d. 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\u2019d presented to me.<\/p>\n
— End fucked-up, stressful dream. —<\/p>\n
In the real world, I\u2019ve been working on getting my third render finished. As always, I\u2019m being totally anal about it and it\u2019s taking longer than I hoped. I\u2019m happy to say that I\u2019m actually doing the final render. 216 frames, 2m1s to render one frame. After it\u2019s all rendered out, then it\u2019s time to composite and then edit.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s nothing else you need to know.<\/p>\n
Goodbye.<\/p>\n
Sick Thought of the Day: Paper bag on the chicken-wing that hangs between your legs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-movies","category-studio"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317,"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions\/317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chewbode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}